Ukraine’s Big Counteroffensive Gets Underway

For weeks, Ukrainian officials have had a one-word answer for journalists and Western counterparts to the nagging question of when their spring offensive into Russian lines would begin: Hush. Just days before Ukraine began sending U.S.-provided Bradley infantry-fighting vehicles toward Russian-occupied territory, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry put out a video of troops staged along the nearly 700-mile front line, clad in masks, instructing viewers to hush. 

But in a war that has played out almost in real time for more than a year on social media, the evidence of what appears to be the opening stages of Ukraine’s long-awaited attack began to spill into the open this week, signaling at long last that troops were going over the top. 

Strikes in Kherson appeared to knock out a Russian command post that Russian President Vladimir Putin once visited. A handful of Ukraine’s newly acquired Leopard tanks and Bradleys were seen damaged along the roadside in heavily defended Zaporizhzhia oblast, where Kyiv is hoping to reconquer one of Europe’s largest nuclear power plants and put Crimea in range of its recently acquired long-range British cruise missiles.

Unlike last fall’s lightning Ukrainian offensive south and east, which caught Russia off guard and reclaimed huge chunks of territory, the start of the spring battle appears to consist of probing attacks to fix Russian forces in place. But given the sheer size and scope of Russian fortified positions, Ukrainian troops have a tough nut to crack before they can take another bite of occupied territory. Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, said that the initial attacks could be an effort to get the Russians to bite and commit limited reserves, setting the conditions for the larger battles to come on Ukrainian terms. 

While Russia has apparently very strong fortified lines, it also has a lot of them—and few trained troops to man them. That gives Ukraine the chance to feint and punch where it pleases—in theory.

“With their operations, the Ukrainians seek to play this shell game, this three-card Monte game, where they’re trying to use surprise and deception to get the Russians to commit to decisively defending certain parts of the theater at the expense of others,” said George Barros, the geospatial intelligence team lead and an analyst on the Russia and Ukraine portfolio at the Institute for the Study of War. “The actual intended main Ukrainian effort is going to attack something else.”

The options for an axis of attack are a bit more limited as of this week, though. By all accounts, Russia blew up the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River northeast of Kherson earlier this week, flooding thousands of people out of their homes and water-logging one potential avenue of advance for Ukrainian forces. (Russian forces then shelled the rescue teams trying to succor stranded Ukrainian civilians.)

Major Ukrainian units like the 47th Artillery Brigade and the 47th Mechanized Brigade are already partially or fully committed to the fight, experts that FP spoke to observed. But by the end of the week, Ukraine had yet to commit the bulk of its recently Western-trained units to the fight, a hint to experts that the attacks were more about probing—instead of actually trying to breach—Russian lines that have been backed up with trench works, dragon’s teeth, and artillery kill zones. 

“This isn’t something you judge based on a few days of fighting,” tweeted Michael Kofman, the director of the Russia studies research program at the CNA think tank. 

It’s not going to be a walk in the park, though, unlike on the eastern front in Kharkiv last fall, when Russian units melted away amid a ferocious, if disorganized, Ukrainian military advance. “Very brutal battles are taking place, but we are seeing results,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video Thursday. The fog of war continued to obscure much of the battlefield. This week, the Ukrainians insisted they had made gains around Bakhmut; the Russian side denied the claim. 

The early going appears difficult. Oryx, a Dutch open-source intelligence website, said on Friday that Ukraine had lost three Leopard tanks, 10 Bradleys, and had abandoned an armored personnel carrier and a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle, basically an entire mobile column. And the Kremlin was quick to pounce on the possibility of a propaganda victory: Putin said Friday that the offensive did not reach Ukraine’s aims “in any area.”

Though experts doubted that Russia had enough troops to fill the gaps along the whole of Ukraine’s eastern and southern fronts, in many areas, troops had constructed multi-echelon defenses using shovels, barbed wire, steel, and concrete. A British defense intelligence report called Russia’s defenses some of the most extensive seen in the world for decades, extending far beyond the front lines. (Open-source sleuths watching satellite imagery have mapped more than 1,000 Russian fortification lines being put up in Zaporizhzhia oblast alone.) 

And the United States, Ukraine’s biggest supplier of military aid, is mostly tapped out on money and guns. On Friday, the Biden administration announced a $2.1 billion military aid package to provide Ukraine with more air defense munitions for the Patriot and Hawk systems, as well as artillery rounds for towed and self-propelled batteries, but the weapons, provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, need to be ordered from industry and may not end up in Ukrainian hands for months. With the Biden administration near the end of weapons it can provide Ukraine off Pentagon shelves, it is set for a fight with Congress later this year to restock its supplies. 

With or without more foreign support, the Ukrainians are going to hit a point where they have to commit to breaching Russian lines, not just probing them. The margin for error is high. Ukraine doesn’t have air superiority, even if it has held the once-vaunted Russian Air Force largely at bay so far and has U.S.-made jets on the way in months to come. Ukraine also has a hodgepodge of advanced equipment from different countries, meaning different Ukrainian units are operating with different tactics and supply lines.

Still, those are problems that plague Russian forces even worse. Russian forces have already taken an estimated 200,000 casualties in 15 months of fighting and are now scything their way through a first call-up of even lower-quality conscripts. Even their mercenaries and convicts have suffered heavy losses. Russian logistics have worked exactly as expected. 

“If the muscle moves work and you can displace the Russians from anywhere in the line, they are very vulnerable because they do not cooperate well with each other,” Watling said. “Russian units don’t play nicely across boundaries. They don’t help each other out.”