Is Ukraine on the Cusp of a Breakout?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 25, 2023

 

For weeks, the Biden administration has signaled its growing dissatisfaction with the way Ukraine has conducted the counteroffensive operations against Russian forces that began in June. Washington has reportedly communicated its “serious frustration” to Volodymyr Zelensky over the distribution of Ukrainian forces across the front lines and the focus of its efforts. In some quarters, the “grim” assessment is that Ukraine’s effort to retake its occupied territory is already a failure.

 

It’s not even entirely clear that the Biden administration’s advice to Kyiv is well intended. As Politico reported this week, the “remarkably similar details and specific scenes” of Ukrainian disarray reported in various U.S. media outlets suggest a campaign of leaks designed to undermine the Zelensky government. “Some people, somewhere in the bowels of government, want to pin Ukraine’s battlefield woes on Kyiv and deflect blame aimed at Washington,” the dispatch determined.

 

After several weeks of grinding fighting and little in the way of forward momentum to show for it, however, Ukraine has recently made progress on the battlefield that could expose the Biden White House’s hand-wringing as premature.

 

A distinct bulge has developed along the front lines in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine. Kyiv has built on the slow but steady progress it has made in a variety of sectors over the summer, but it has recently achieved what the Institute for the Study of War deemed “tactically significant” advances just north of the city of Tokmak. “The Armed Forces crossed the main first line of defense of the Russians,” chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said of what is generally acknowledged to be Russia’s most formidable line of defense. If Ukrainian forces continue to penetrate the Russian lines, the Ukrainian advance is capable of “widening the Ukrainian breach of Russian defensive lines in the area and threatening Russian secondary lines of defense,” ISW’s analysis maintained.

 

Unconfirmed reports from the ground indicate that Ukrainian forces recaptured the town of Robotyne after a long and difficult fight, but similar reports indicate that Ukrainian forces encountered much less resistance in the effort to establish a foothold in the neighboring town of Novoprokopivka. This sequence of events could indicate that Russian forces are falling back to a secondary line of defense. If the Russian military’s past performance is indicative of future results, Moscow’s retrograde operations won’t end there. Ukrainian forces can still engineer a breakthrough of the Russian lines that contributes to this campaign’s ultimate objective: driving to the Azov coast and severing Russia’s land bridge to the Crimean Peninsula.

 

In a Washington Post op-ed co-authored by American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Frederick Kagan and retired Army general David Petraeus, the two scholars of military history sounded an optimistic note about Ukraine’s prospects. They note that the offensive operations Ukraine is attempting would be a struggle for any modern military, much less one that doesn’t have the advantage of air superiority. Nevertheless, “Ukraine is applying pressure on their opponent until something breaks.” Meanwhile, Russian units are “likely tired, if not exhausted,” and Moscow’s mobile reserves are reportedly in short supply. A breach in Russia’s secondary lines could sow “panic among Russian forces” and create the conditions for a route like what Ukraine engineered in Kherson and around Kharkiv in 2022.

 

Penetrating the Russian lines and compelling Moscow to retreat into the Donbas and Crimea would be a seismic development in Moscow’s war of territorial conquest, but a spectacular victory like that is not necessary to assess the Ukrainian counteroffensive as a success. From the liberated village of Robotyne, “the Ukrainians need to advance by a further 10–15 km (7–10 miles), in order to range their guns on Russia’s east-west transport routes that are critical to the ability of its army and armed forces to fight,” an analysis by United States Military Academy professor Jan Kallberg read. “If Ukraine can interdict these road and rail links, it’s very hard to see how the Russian army can continue to fight.”

 

Indeed, at least one major rail hub — the town of Polohy — is already within striking distance of advancing Ukrainian forces. It would prove an invaluable logistical tool in future offensives aimed at major cities like Berdyansk and Mariupol. But that’s a campaign for another day. In the near term, breaking the Russian land bridge and forcing Moscow to rely on its bridge over the Kerch Strait to supply Crimea — already a daunting prospect, and one Ukraine has demonstrated the capacity to interrupt — would cripple Moscow’s logistics inside Ukraine.

 

Back in the United States, there is a live debate primarily within the Republican Party about the value of continued material support for Ukraine’s sovereignty. Support for that project among GOP voters is volatile; it is heavily dependent on question-wording in polling on the issue and the facts on the ground in Ukraine. There is, however, an observable link between Ukraine’s battlefield victories and the number of Americans willing to provide support for its continued independence.

 

To judge by the Biden White House’s leaks, the Democratic administration is just as wary of aligning itself too closely with a cause that looked like it was producing diminishing returns. A Ukrainian breakthrough is likely to have a measurable effect on both how Republican voters view this project and the Biden White House’s eagerness to see the mission through. At the very least, undeniable Ukrainian momentum would impose some caution on American observers who too eagerly declared Ukraine’s war of self-preservation unwinnable. That is, assuming Ukraine’s reflexive detractors are capable of caution.