IT IS NOW two months since Ukraine launched its counter-offensive against Russian lines that stretch across 1,000km of occupied territory. It is just over a week since the campaign appeared to be entering a distinct second phase.

The first phase got off to a bad start when an overambitious thrust by newly formed mechanised units swiftly became bogged down. It was subsequently marked by concerted attempts to use Ukraine’s advantage in long-range firepower to disrupt Russian supply lines and destroy its logistical hubs and command centres. The aim is to reduce the ability of Russian forces to respond to Ukraine’s “probing” operations, which are seeking out gaps and weaknesses. (The tactics are similar to the “bite and hold” approach used by both sides in the first world war.)

These operations have recently been supplemented by small-scale drone strikes on Moscow and a series of attacks by Ukraine’s developing fleet of naval drones on Russian patrol vessels in the Black Sea. The Moscow drones have more psychological than military value. They are intended to drive home the message to Muscovites that they are not immune from the conflict, and that the Kremlin has struggled to stave off cross-border threats.

Ukraine’s backers thought a decisive shift might have begun last week with the commitment on July 26th of the army’s new 10th Corps, which includes three brigades equipped with Western kit. But although progress is being made along the three main axes of attack, it is still a grindingly hard attritional slog.

Russian sources quoted by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) report that Ukrainian forces are continuing to attack both to the north-west and south-west of Bakhmut, as well as in the area that borders western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia, and in western Zaporizhia (see map). On July 31st Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar, announced that over the previous week Ukrainian forces had liberated an additional two square kilometres of territory around Bakhmut, and 12.6 square kilometres towards Berdiansk and Melitopol. This made a total of some 200 square kilometres retaken since the start of the counter-offensive.

That suggests that as yet there has been no great change in tempo, and that the arrival of the 10th may in fact have been designed primarily to provide some relief to the 9th Corps—which had borne the brunt of the fighting since early June—rather than initiate a distinctive new phase in operations.

Britain’s chief of the defence staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, has described Ukraine’s operational strategy as “starve, stretch and strike”. The starve (attacks on logistics hubs) and stretch (probes and feints across multiple axes) phases are running concurrently. At some point General Valery Zaluzhny, the commander of Ukrainian armed forces, will have to decide when and how to conduct the strike phase, which will involve the deployment of fresh brigades to force their way through minefields towards the main Russian defensive line before punching through it. That does not appear to have happened yet.

Ukraine’s tight operational security means that it is far from clear which of the three axes is likely to be chosen by General Zaluzhny for the main thrust when it comes. As happened last year when the focus suddenly switched from Kherson to Kharkiv, the decision will be opportunistic, and fraught with risk and cost.

Driving south from Zaporizhzia via Tokmak down to Melitopol and the Sea of Azov, a distance of 200km, would offer Ukraine the greatest strategic reward. It would split Russian forces, cut their land bridge to Crimea and put much of that peninsula within range of artillery shells and missiles. But it would also involve breaching not just the first heavily fortified Russian lines, but pushing on through the most densely defended area of the entire front.

As the Ukrainians discovered in early June large armoured formations, which cannot hide from the fleets of patrolling Russian drones, become extremely vulnerable to air attack when held up by minefields and other obstacles. The limited success the Ukrainians are currently enjoying is mostly the result of actions carried out by units at the platoon and company level, using tree-lines and small settlements for cover.

An alternative might be to capitalise on weaker Russian defences in the east around the destroyed town of Bakhmut, and then head south into Donbas. That would be politically damaging for the Russians, who have invested so much blood and effort in the region, but less strategically advantageous for the Ukrainians than reaching the coast. However, by focusing on Bakhmut now, Ukraine is pulling some Russian forces away from the south, and thus possibly opening up other gaps.

When the strike does come, much will depend on whether the Russians manage to withdraw from exposed positions in an orderly way, retreating to more defensible lines, or if their troops, hollowed out by months of combat without relief, crack because of exhaustion, failing morale, poor leadership and shortages of munitions. This will be both the measure of the effectiveness of Ukrainian attrition since mid-June, and a test for a Russian command that has not recovered from the fissures exposed by the antics of Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Even then Sir Lawrence Freedman, a military strategist, warns against expecting a sudden switch into the “dash and drama” of highly mobile warfare. He argues that in the 1980s Western armed forces, particularly the Americans, became so enamoured of the potential for knitting together advanced equipment that defeating an enemy rapidly by swift, audacious moves became almost standard operating procedure. After being put into practice in the first Gulf war, the obsession with an updated version of blitzkrieg took even tighter hold. Hence the widespread frustration that the Ukrainians, despite their new NATO kit, have not managed something similar.

But as Sir Lawrence suggests, this is an unfair criticism. In their wars the Americans were able to bring overwhelming firepower and air supremacy to the battlefield, neither of which has been available to the Ukrainians. Nor have the Ukrainians had decades to master combined-arms warfare. And Russia has been able to rely on huge numbers of drones to boost its defences, with an impact similar to that of the machine gun in the first world war.

The Ukrainians must achieve some degree of success before autumn mud further hampers offensive options. They need it for the morale of their own soldiers and civilians; they need it to maintain the confidence of allies that they can eventually prevail; and they need it to convince the man in the Kremlin that his options are only going to get worse.

But how should Ukrainian success be measured? As Michael Kofman and Franz-Stefan Gady, analysts who have made frequent visits to the front, argued recently in The Economist, Ukraine should be helped to “fight the way it fights best”, not encouraged to ape Western best practice. And that, as Sir Lawrence concludes, means accepting the logic of attrition. ■