In Ukraine’s Counteroffensive, What Counts as Success?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 22, 2023

 

In contrast with the dynamism and fluidity that characterized the battlefields of Ukraine in 2022, the front lines in Russia’s war of conquest remained largely static in 2023.

 

Russian forces retreated from the city of Kherson — the only major regional capital to be briefly occupied by Russian forces — in November of last year, retrenching across the Dnipro River just north of the Crimean Peninsula. Then Russian forces fortified their positions south and east of the Dnipro to Donetsk and north of that city to the Russian border. Through the winter and much of the spring, Ukrainians mounted a valuable but ultimately doomed defense of the town of Bakhmut, not far from the so-called breakaway regions that have been functionally occupied by Russian forces since 2014. Russian progress had stalled, but so, too, had Ukraine’s.

 

Russia’s halting offensives there and elsewhere along this line of contact cost the aggressor dearly, but the relative stability of the Ukrainian defensive line began to look to outside observers like a durable battlefield equilibrium. This observation led to the conclusion that the war had settled into a “stalemate,” and the natural corollary followed: Maybe Ukraine’s Western backers should cut their losses.

 

“A war of attrition has set in,” New York magazine’s Eric Levitz declared in March. Prudence dictated that the West envision “how a relatively just and timely peace can be achieved” if Ukraine falters. “Against this backdrop, calls for a diplomatic end to the conflict are understandably growing,” Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass observed in April. The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall agreed. “Absent a deal,” he wrote, the likeliest outcome “is a bloody, costly, low-intensity stalemate, dragging on for years.” This fatalism was bipartisan. Russia had “ground the war down to a stalemate,” the Hudson Institute’s Arthur Herman wrote for National Review Online in February. “The U.S. and NATO need to press the participants to move toward a negotiated settlement,” he added, with promises to reintegrate Vladimir Putin’s Russia into the global economy.

 

This creeping sense of resignation was fueled by a general failure to comprehend what the cessation of hostilities at this stage of the conflict would mean both for Ukraine and the West. The logic of a cease-fire, even as Ukraine held much of its firepower and many of its forces in reserve, rested on the presumption that Russia might still escalate in unforeseeable ways, though its prosecution of the conflict was already the closest thing to total war Europe had witnessed since 1945. The proposal for a cease-fire also overestimated the extent to which the West’s exhausted observers of the war could cajole the nations on NATO’s frontier — Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states — to acquiesce to Ukraine’s dismemberment. A cease-fire now would render Ukraine a rump state. Severed from its most productive industrial regions and cut off from access to the Sea of Azov and many of its Black Sea ports, Ukraine would face bleak post-war prospects. Worst of all, a cease-fire would ratify the largest “frozen conflict” in the former Soviet Union, making it one of many such conflicts that Russia thaws at times of its choosing, to bloody and destabilizing effect.

 

For Europe, these conditions would be far from optimal. A premature cessation of hostilities would have equally grave implications for American national security.

 

From Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Transdniestria and Crimea — indeed, from the Donbas to the whole of Ukraine — Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin has shown that it cannot be appeased. The conclusion Western officials should draw from that realization is that a premature cease-fire would only benefit Moscow. It would be a matter of time before Russia regrouped, rearmed, and re-engaged in the effort to consume Ukraine. Western states would be compelled to deter that outcome not just through the indefinite provision of security assistance to Ukraine but by the forward positioning of NATO forces — at the expense of other equally vital priorities around the globe. The most efficient way in which the West might avoid these undesirable outcomes would be for Ukraine to mete out a debilitating setback to Russia on the battlefield.

 

These were the high stakes in early June when Kyiv announced the start of a long-anticipated counteroffensive. Despite its achievements in 2022 — beating back the Russian advance on Kyiv, pushing Moscow’s forces back across the Russian border from Kharkiv, and recapturing Kherson — Ukraine had much to prove, not just to its detractors but also to its supporters. For them, demonstrating a tangible return on their investments in Ukrainian sovereignty had become a domestic political imperative.

 

As the “fighting reconnaissance stage” of the counteroffensive gives way to what observers expect will be a combined, mechanized assault on defensive fortifications that Russia has had six months to prepare, the outset of Ukraine’s offensive will be bloody and hard-fought. “Russian fortifications in Ukraine are the most extensive defensive works in Europe since World War II,” read a June report authored by a group of military analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Russia’s layered defensive lines consist of “trenches, minefields, dragon’s teeth, and other barriers” designed to frustrate the Ukrainian advance. It would be unreasonable to expect major advances into Russian-occupied territory within the first few weeks of offensive operations. But the past performance of Ukraine’s armed forces and Western material support have combined to create a set of expectations for the summer’s offensive that Kyiv will have to meet.

 

So what are the reasonable expectations for a successful counteroffensive that would enable Kyiv to silence, if not satisfy, its critics?

 

First, Ukraine will need to demonstrate the capacity to retake territory presently occupied by Russian forces. No small task, for which the West has provided only so many tools, and reluctantly at that. What’s more, a push south from the city of Kherson, across the Dnipro and toward Crimea, with the aim of cutting the peninsula off from the land bridge that Russia established in 2022 has been forestalled by the deliberate destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam and the downriver flooding it unleashed. This act of ecological devastation has temporarily closed off a potential axis of the Ukrainian advance.

 

Thus, the fiercest fighting has so far been confined to the line of contact in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk Oblasts, with some offensive operations ongoing near Bakhmut and outside Lysychansk in Luhansk Oblast. It’s impossible to say at this stage which of these attacks, if any, are designed to penetrate Russian-held territory and which are designed only to divert and hold Russian forces in place ahead of a broader offensive. If the Russian lines are broken, Moscow’s forces may be compelled to perform hasty retrograde operations in a retreat to more-defensible terrain. Doubtless, Ukraine’s objective on the southern front will be to drive to the Azov coast, encircle Russian forces, and put pressure on the occupied coastal cities of Melitopol, Mariupol, and Berdiansk. If it sets its sights on the east, Kyiv may attempt to lay siege to and recapture the city of Donetsk after nearly a decade of Russian occupation.

 

A wildly successful offensive would see the cities in its sights fall to Ukrainian forces. In the south, that would mean cutting off Russian access to Crimea at all points but the Kerch Strait Bridge — an artery Ukrainian forces have demonstrated the capacity to attack and disable in the past. A slightly less successful offensive would dislodge Russian forces from the positions they occupy, and possibly be accompanied by encirclements and surrender. That moderately successful advance would retake midsize cities under Russian occupation and compel Moscow to regroup around the major metros on the coasts — a humiliating retreat from prizes Russia won last year after prolonged and bloody sieges. This mixed victory would also see the nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia restored to Ukrainian hands, neutralizing the threat that the Russian forces occupying it could use it to blackmail Europe with the prospect of a radiological disaster. An entirely unsuccessful counteroffensive would dash itself against the impenetrable fixed positions Russia has erected across vast swaths of southeastern Ukraine.

 

It will be quite some time before outside observers can make an informed assessment about the relative effectiveness of the Ukrainian offensive. The good news is that the outcome will not be ambiguous. Either Ukraine will break the Russian lines or it won’t. If Russia manages to hold on to its territorial gain, Kyiv’s boosters in the West will try to shape the narrative in Ukraine’s favor by highlighting Russia’s battlefield casualties, the number of vehicles Ukraine disabled, or the parts of the country that Ukrainian resistance has spared from Russian domination. But that face-saving effort would only underscore the expectations Kyiv could not meet.

 

Beyond its strategic goals on the battlefield, however, Kyiv also hopes to secure political victories. Those will be far harder to measure. Indeed, it may not be possible to determine the success of the campaign for Western hearts and minds for months after these counteroffensive operations have drawn to a close.

 

The narrative arc Ukraine hopes to impart to Western chroniclers of this war is not independent of its battlefield successes, but it will be distinct in important ways. Can Ukraine execute a combined-arms offensive that incorporates NATO tactics, which would accelerate Ukraine’s already partial integration into the NATO command structure? Can it demonstrate the capacity to conduct complex, large-scale maneuvers using advanced-weapons platforms in concert with insurgent tactics behind enemy lines to beat back the full might of one of the world’s most powerful armies? Has Ukrainian resistance eroded the morale of both Russian troops and ruling political elites enough to stay the hands of other irredentist powers set on overturning the U.S.-led world order? These questions may be answerable only months or even years from now, if they can be answered at all. But, as second-order effects of a successful counteroffensive, these results would be crucial to determining that we could look back on Ukraine’s operations this summer as a victory.

 

As the primary successor state to the Soviet Union, and one led by a regime possessed of an unhealthy nostalgia for one-party communist rule, Russia has avoided confronting the consequences of the incontestable fact that Moscow lost a world war. That psychological evasion was aided by the generous terms of the post–Cold War peace. Indeed, by the time George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met on a ship off the coast of Malta in 1990, mutual assurances had already established that the West would create as much of a soft landing for former Soviet protectorates as it could if Moscow would not use force to preserve the integrity of the Warsaw Pact (and, by unspoken extension, the Soviet Union itself). As Bush’s secretary of state Jim Baker later observed, a consequence of this commitment was that “a country should be free to choose its own alliances.”

 

Vladimir Putin did not accept those terms. Russia’s war in Ukraine represents the full flowering of the Kremlin’s rejection of the post–Cold War peace. Putin’s latest adventure was designed to crush not just Ukrainian independence but the very idea of a distinct Ukrainian national identity. And yet, as his expansive grievances suggest, Putin’s ambitions are not limited to Ukraine. It is just one front in a highly ideological campaign dedicated to turning the clock back to a time before American hegemony in Europe.

 

Moscow managed to avoid battlefield losses on the Cold War’s dormant front lines in Europe — a blessing Putin’s Kremlin seems to resent and seeks to rectify with his bloody wars in Russia’s “near abroad.” Ukraine’s failure and subjugation would set the stage for more violent expressions of Moscow’s defiant inferiority complex. An unambiguous Russian defeat in Ukraine would pair the political defeat Russia absorbed after the collapse of the USSR with terrible costs in lives and prestige. Awful as it may be, that is the outcome we must hope for. The preservation of a relative global peace the likes of which the world did not know before 1991 depends on it.