What's Up In Ukraine?

The YouTube video above is from the Hindustan Times, one of the few media outlets that's essentially repeating a New York Times story that's behind a paywall. The Gateway Pundit has an excerpt:

“Equipped with advanced American weapons and heralded as the vanguard of a major assault, the troops became bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships. Units got lost. One unit delayed a nighttime attack until dawn, losing its advantage. Another fared so badly that commanders yanked it off the battlefield altogether.

[…] Now the Western-trained Ukrainian brigades are trying to turn things around, U.S. officials and independent analysts say. Ukrainian military commanders have changed tactics, focusing on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire. A troop surge is underway in the country’s south, with a second wave of Western-trained forces launching mostly small-scale attacks to punch through Russian lines.”

“Ukraine’s decision to change tactics is a clear signal that NATO’s hopes for large advances made by Ukrainian formations armed with new weapons, new training and an injection of artillery ammunition have failed to materialize, at least for now.”

I went to https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/ and found no mention of the New York Times piece, but that page is heavily pro-Ukraine and pro-Western involvement. The neoconservative Institute for the Study of War, possibly responding indirectly to the Times story, would only say "Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder stated that Ukraine independently decides when and where to employ its significant combat capabilities."

The most objective analysis I've seen of the Russo-Ukraine War's progress continues to be the YouTube presentations of Col Markus Reisner of the Austrian military academy. The date of this presentation is January 13 of this year, but it was released only a day or two ago. What's significant is that so little has changed over the past seven months. My German is pretty good, but Col Reisner's English is far better than my German, so I'm grateful that he releases his presentations in an English-language version:

At 12:35, he cites estimates as of early 2023 from Ukrainian, US, and Estonian/NATO sources on the progress of the war and concludes that major additional resources from both sides will be needed to bring about a clear outcome, but so far, both sides have already expended major resources with neither gaining a clear advantage. The result has been World War I-style artillery standoffs, something nobody expected before the war.

At about 16:00, he asks a more significant set of questions, which is why the US and the West have been so slow to deliver weapons that would tip the balance. Although the US has delivered HIMARS, they haven't been in quantities that would prove significant, while F-16 fighters, while they were finally approved, will not arrive for effective use this year. Promised deliveries of modern armored vehicles from the West are in quantities far below what Ukraine has said they need.

What we've begun to see in recent days has been a shift in strategy by Ukraine, as the Times story implies, to emphasize the use of drone attacks, including a second attack on the Kerch bridge on July 17, and now a drone attack on the Olenengorsky Gornyak, a landing ship that had reportedly been used to ferry vehicles across the Kerch Strait to bypass the new damage to the bridge. My impression is that with the ground war largely stalemated, Ukraine is shifting to a strategy that can produce visible victories after many monhs when its propaganda war has also been stalled.

There are also new reports this morning of other explosions near the Kerch Bridge, which whether successful or not, are also aimed at giving an impression of progress in the war, something that's been missing so far all this year.

What I find intriguing, though, is that as a practical matter, as Col Reisner has pointed out, US support for Ukraine hasn't been at a level that would allow significant progress in the counteroffensive by the end of this year, something that it's been generally recognized that Ukraine needs to show if in fact it wants to regain all the occupied territories that are its stated objective in the war. At the same time, there's been no change in the stated US objective, most recently outlined by Sec Blinken in London on June 21:

As President Biden has said since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.

But in that case, why is it taking so long? Delays in approving Abrams tanks and F-16 fighters have resulted in equivalent delays in deliveries and training, to the point that they probably can't be used this year. So we're back to my favorite question, what problem are we trying to solve? It's been generally understood that Ukraine needs to have the war wrapped up before the 2024 election, when Republicans, especially if Trump is the nominee, will make it an issue.

At this point, that's unlikely to happen. Do Joe Biden and Sec Blinken have a Plan B? The big focus in recent weeks has been on Hunter and Trump's indictments, but it's hard not to think Ukraine will return as an issue at some point, except Biden and Blinken will have had no progress to report when it does.

And this could easily lead to more people asking the questions I began to notice last Monday that were raised by Seymour Hersh and Holman Jenkins: what's led to this policy of fruitless stalemate? Is it a bug or a feature? Who benefits? Why, after all, does the answer to so many questions that shouldn't involve it at all turn out to be Ukraine?