‘It’s a Very Russian War’: Why Ukraine Is Struggling to Gain Back Ground

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

 

London — If you want to prepare for travels around southeastern Europe, you can’t get off to a better start than by picking the brains of two smart guys who know the region well.

 

Smart guy number one is David Knowles, who hosts and produces the Daily Telegraph’s podcast Ukraine: The Latest, which is still, two years into the war, that publication’s most popular podcast.

 

Smart guy number two is national-security researcher and analyst Kyle Orton, who writes the perfectly titled Substack, It Can Always Get Worse.

 

In a noisy coffee shop in London, I absorbed a grim assessment of how the difficulties for Ukraine are stacking up as the war goes into its third year.

 

Knowles began by telling me he was at Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s press conference a few weeks ago, and one government minister after another took the stage and presented good news:

 

Their messaging was, “Look at how much we’re doing, we’re doing so well, shell production is up 9 percent.” And every journalist was picking up on that, like, “Okay, you’re pretty positive, can your internal production compensate for the lack of European and American support?” And the answer is, of course, no. . . . One source put it to me, “Even if the U.S., Europe, gave all the shells, all the tanks we need, what you cannot give and what nobody else can give is men. Manpower.”

 

Earlier this week, Slovakian defense minister Robert Kaliňák suggested that NATO allies should spur Ukrainian men of military-draft age to return home and join the country’s army. The Ukrainian parliament is considering legislation that would lower the conscription age from 27 to 25.

 

Those ages may seem surprisingly old to those who can remember the U.S. military drafting those who turned 18. But apparently, the Ukrainian philosophy was to draft those in their mid 20s or older, so that other young men would be around to help with the rebuilding of the country, and to have children and ensure there’s another generation of Ukrainians to raise.

 

“The [Ukrainian] infantry are suffering really catastrophic losses,” Knowles concluded. In that press conference, Zelensky said that 31,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in this war. Knowles and Orton agreed that Ukrainians widely believe that is an underestimate.

 

“I spoke to a commander who said, ‘The Russians have better kit, there are more of them, and it’s like fighting a mirror,” Knowles said. “Every single time we innovate, we take a step, a few months later, they’re just as good.”

 

Outmanned and outgunned, and with no sign of additional U.S. aid being approved by Congress, it is not hard to envision the Ukrainian army spending much of the coming year forced into tactical retreats.

 

Knowles said, “I said to one commander, ‘What happens if you don’t get the shells, what happens if you don’t get support?’ And he answered, basically, ‘We’ll probably be forced to retreat to about the Dnipro [river]’ — which effectively bisects western and eastern Ukraine, as well as bisecting the capital city of Kyiv. ‘That would be about where we could turn around and fight.’ So that’s, I think, what we’re looking at over the next couple months. It’s just gradual, gradual, gradual retreat, still inflicting huge losses, but also taking quite a lot.”

 

“It’s a very Russian war,” Orton summarized succinctly. “It started catastrophically badly. Nothing worked at the start, but then, over time, the Russians did improve. They found what didn’t work, and stopped doing so much of that, and more to the point, through artillery, and a willingness to bear unimaginable human sacrifices, they’ve turned it around. They can’t win in a sense that they can’t take Kyiv. But they can grind down Ukraine to accepting something that really is unacceptable.”

 

Ukrainians can point to victories and signs of progress — shooting down a lot of Russian Air Force planes, particularly the A-50U/M radar planes, which require a large crew and cost $300 million each, and striking the A-50 manufacturing facility with a drone. And the Black Sea remains unsafe for Russia’s ships: “Russia appears to have sacked its top naval commander after a series of humiliating setbacks in the Black Sea, where its warships have been pounded by Ukrainian drones and missiles.”

 

But by and large, this has been a land war, and the Ukrainians have struggled to win back the roughly 18 percent of their country occupied by Russian forces.

 

The last time I was in Ukraine in August, the counteroffensive had barely started, and the founder of Wagner private mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had attempted his bizarre short-lived coup in Russia about a month earlier. It suggested real cracks in the foundation of the Russian war machine. No one whom I talked to in Ukraine said anything suggesting that they believed victory was imminent, but there was a sense that the Russian onslaught must have some limit, and it was approaching it.

 

A lot can change in six months.