Ukrainian counteroffensive is not action movie Analysis by The Atlantic

The Atlantic has published an analysis arguing that although the summer of drones and trenches drags on, hopeful signs are emerging. Caliber.Az reprints the report.

Attacking an entrenched force, as the Ukrainians are doing now, is the stuff of military nightmares. The enemy knows you’re coming, they’ve prepared for your attacks, and their objective is to cede back as little ground as possible while making you pay in blood for every inch.

Offensive operations, such as the initial Russian invasion into Ukraine, are different: They are predicated on shock, speed, and mobility, especially if they begin with at least some modicum of surprise.

The American military, with its focus on operational excellence, executes such offensives very well. In its wars over the past 30 years, the US has had almost every edge over its battlefield enemies, including superior firepower, complete control of the skies, advanced technology, and a superbly trained force.

The Ukrainians have almost none of these advantages. Their weaponry, including tanks and air defences, has been getting better, but not fast enough. They are outnumbered by an enemy that uses untrained troops dredged from prisons as bullet sponges. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians must carefully conserve their best-trained forces to protect them from being wasted in engagement with soldiers who are in effect walking dead men.

Worse, even to get to those doomed Russian forces, the Ukrainians have to spend time—and lives—clearing the so-called Surovikin Line, named for the general who designed Russia’s defensive position in Ukraine (and who is now apparently under some sort of detention—a  Moscow official has said he is “resting”—because of his apparent involvement with the mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin).

As The Bulwark senior editor Benjamin Parker pointed out on July 31, this is not really a line but “a series of zones, sometimes miles deep, of minefields, tank traps, trenches, booby traps, and other fortifications,” and the Ukrainians lack the kind of reconnaissance and firepower that Western militaries would normally use to overcome such obstacles.

Nonetheless, there are some hopeful signs. For one thing, the fact that the Ukrainians are on the offensive at all is something of a miracle. Americans, as my friend and fellow Russia-watcher Nick Gvosdev pointed out to me recently, tend to think of military conflicts as having the same narrative arc as action movies: The good guys take an initial ass-kicking at the beginning, go through a Rocky-like training-and-recovery montage, and then crush the bad guys. That’s not reality; as I warned earlier this summer, the dramatic blowing of a whistle and a charge from the trenches was never going to happen.

But Ukraine survives and is taking the fight to the enemy, both on the battlefield and in Russia’s capital city. The original Russian plan, more than a year and a half ago, was to erase Ukraine as a state in a matter of days. Instead, the Russians are complaining about repeated Ukrainian drone strikes in the heart of Moscow, while President Vladimir Putin’s forces, however slowly, are ceding back occupied territory.

These drone attacks have been small and ineffective—so small, in fact, that my first guess about their origin this past spring was that they were a Russian false-flag operation. But they have had an outsize psychological impact on Putin’s regime. Back in 2022, Putin’s implicit bargain with his citizens was that the war would be glorious, short, and kept far from Russia.

The latest drone in Moscow struck a skyscraper housing some government agencies. It produced no casualties but broke a lot of glass; apparently, it also broke the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, who compared the attack to 9/11. Zakharova knows better, as do I, because I was in Moscow just weeks after the actual 9/11.

The atmosphere in the Russian capital back then was sombre—and, to an American visitor, sympathetic. The Russians knew the magnitude of 9/11, and for Putin’s stooges to now invoke the attack shows both their cynicism and their humiliation. After all, the Ukrainians by this point were supposed to have been building schools named for Putin, not rattling the nerves of Kremlin flacks with late-night explosions.

Ukrainian forces have also recaptured the village of Staromaiorske as part of a move to the south that could imperil Russian supply lines. There are reports of accelerating attacks in the Zaporizhzhia region, where the Russians have dug in and mined the area around Europe’s largest nuclear plant. (The Russians, for their part, claim that the Ukrainians launched a “massive” attack toward Zaporizhzhia, but remember that it is in the Russian interest to inflate the size of every Ukrainian attack: If Russian defences hold, they have repelled an onslaught, but if they fall, it was to a “massive” attack.)

Another potential sign of Russian desperation: The Poles have reported that roughly 100 men from Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, the mercenaries who have been effective fighters in Ukraine and who nearly marched to Moscow in June, might be approaching the Polish border from their new home in neighbouring Belarus. (Poland has also accused Belarus of violating Polish airspace.)

Belarus’s president and Putin’s fellow dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, has been taunting the Poles, saying that Warsaw should thank him for keeping Wagner forces in check, but it’s hard to know exactly what Putin or Prigozhin think they’re doing by rattling this tiny sabre at a NATO nation. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said on July 31 that attacks by Wagner mercenaries would be viewed by the United States “as an attack by the Russian Government,” and if Putin thinks that trying to rattle the Poles will somehow weaken NATO support for Ukraine, then he still does not understand the nature of the disaster he’s created.

I am not overly worried about Wagner’s Potemkin pantomiming, nor do I think the Russians really believe they are living through a new 9/11. But I am concerned that Americans and others in the West do not understand the immensity of the task before the Ukrainians, who must recapture territory that has been turned into a hellscape of death traps.

The United States and its allies should speed up aid at this crucial moment. As my colleague David Frum implored more than a year ago: “If there’s anything that Ukraine can use in any NATO warehouse from Vancouver to Vilnius, that’s a scandal. Empty every inventory.”

In The Guardian this morning, an unnamed Western intelligence official summarised both the hope and the danger in the current battle: “There is no reason why the Ukrainians cannot break through the Russian main defensive line,” the official said. “It’s not going to be easy, so we shouldn’t shy away from that.”

In the meantime, the summer of drones and trenches will drag on—as it must.