Ukraine's Spring Counteroffensive Falters

As of June 11,

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to have confirmed that his country's long-awaited counter-offensive against Russia has started.

"Counter-offensive and defensive actions are taking place," he said.

But he added that he would not talk in detail about which stage or state the counter-offensive was in.

The comments come after an escalation of fighting in the south and east of Ukraine and speculation about progress of the widely anticipated push.

But as oif June 18, only a week after that announcement, The Institute for the Study of War reported,

Ukrainian forces may be temporarily pausing counteroffensive operations to reevaluate their tactics for future operations. Head of the Estonian Defense Forces Intelligence Center Colonel Margo Grosberg stated on June 16 that he assesses "we won't see an offensive over the next seven days.” The Wall Street Journal similarly reported on June 17 that Ukrainian forces “have mostly paused their advances in recent days” as Ukrainian command reexamines tactics.

A month ago, I noted that an expected Ukrainian spring counteroffensive was being steadily delayed despite predictions that it would take place first in April, then in May. Now, with just days left in spring, it sounds like the spring counteroffensive won't take place at all, at least this spring.

The ISW hedged its report farther down:

ISW has previously noted that Ukraine has not yet committed the majority of its available forces to counteroffensive operations and has not yet launched its main effort. Operational pauses are a common feature of major offensive undertakings, and this pause does not signify the end of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

But the neoconservatives behind ISW are precisely the same people who brought us the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, amid a dozen years and more of happy talk about progress. The ISW as of yesterday resumed the narrative as though its report of June 18 never happened:

Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in at least three sectors of the frontline and made gains on June 19. A Russian milblogger reported that Ukrainian troops continued attacks northwest, northeast, and southwest of Bakhmut on June 19 and claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced near Krasnopolivka (about 12km northeast of Bakhmut).

The problem I see is that these reports haven't changed qualitatively since last November, when Russian forces left the city of Kherson. That was the last tangible progress for Ukraine in the war. The latest English-language video from Col Markus Reisner of the Austrian military academy sums up the current situation at the top of this post. As of last year, I'd begun to lose patience with Col Reisner, as I thought he was too pro-Russian in the face of last year's Ukrainian military successes. Apparently I wasn't alone, as he begins his presentation:

Before we start, I would like to say thank you for all the feedback we are getting for our videos. I would like to state very clearly that it is obvious who is the aggressor and who is the defender. But I would like to stay as neutral and objective as it is possible. Therefore we need a clear picture of the situation along the front lines. It doesn't help to underestimate the Russians and to overestimate the Ukrainians, especially it is not helpful to the Ukrainian armed forces.

My takeaway from his overall assessment is that the Ukrainians are likely to try to recapture Crimea as their main priority for the year, but this strategy will demand both a second destruction of the Kerch bridge and a severing of the Russian land connection north of the Azov Sea. This is a tall order.

But he also switches to what he calls the "information space" of the war, which I would actually, and I think more accurately reflecting his meaning, call the propaganda war. He says,

The West will only support Ukraine as long as the West believes it is important to support the war against Russia, and the West believes the Ukrainian forces are winning. On the other side, we have the center of gravity of Russia, and this is the Russian people, who are close to the regime and who are willing to assist with all the needs the regime considers necessary to fight a long war against Ukraine. And here it is the aim to make the Russians believe that they are fighting a wrong war and that they are losing.

He concludes with an assessment that

the American strategy obviously is called "boiling the frog", that means the Ukrainians will get what they need, but not more. And the question is why is that the case? Well, it looks like the Americans want to avoid to corner the Russians and escalate the conflict.

I'm not sure if Col Reisner fully understands the English-language analogy of boiling the frog:

The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.

I suppose Col Reisner means that the American strategy is to lull the Russians into fighting a long war, but gradual but imperceptible Western escalation will somehow kill the Russians slowly without their noticing. The problem I see is that time isn't on the Western, or Ukrainian, side. If the neoconservatives have their way, well, yes, by 2025 or whenever, we'll have supplied the Ukrainians with F-16s and Abrams tanks, but the Russians won't notice, and we'll have chased them out of Ukraine by 2028 at the latest.

The problem is going to be that there's an election campaign under way, and Trump, the current front runner in both the primary and potential general matchups, is advocating a settlement. Even if Trump's prospects decrease, other Republicans, and potentially even Democrat challengers, will advocate settling the war as opposed to years of further struggle. This is an aspect of the "information space" that Col Reisner gives too little attention. He does assess, though, that the West will only support the war as long as it believes Ukraine is winning.

Ukraine basically has until fall of this year to make that case, or a Republican will force a settlement on both parties. This has been a flaw in the Western strategy that's bothered me since the middle of last year: there's no clear end state, especially in the Biden-Blinken strategy on the war. Boiling the frog is not a strategy, it's an attempt to pretend something isn't happening.