A major Ukrainian energy company with power plants near the front line sustained its ninth bombardment by Russia's forces “in the last two months,” according to a Dec. 20 announcement that points to the harshness of Ukraine’s second winter of full-scale war.
“Over, like, the next six months or so, you know, this is really gonna be their Valley Forge moment,” a Pentagon strategist told the Washington Examiner. “If they can get past this and be able to regroup and survive the punches that Russia will surely task for them, then there's reason to hope that '25 will be better for them.”
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For students of American history, an allusion to the Continental army’s hard winter outside occupied Philadelphia in 1777 might seem far too optimistic. Ukraine’s vaunted summer counteroffensive foundered on Russia’s defensive lines, after all, and a border security dispute has raised the likelihood of a lapse in the provision of U.S. military equipment for Ukraine. Yet Ukrainian officials are trying to develop a series of overlapping measures they hope will enable them to weather the coming Russian storms.
“There have been serious discussions with partners and the quantity, I won’t say exactly how many, for new Patriot systems to come to Ukraine to defend our country,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Dec. 20, according to a Ukrainian media outlet. “This is a very important result, [but] I promised not to make public the quantity that will come to defend us.”
As U.S. officials scramble to fortify Ukraine against the bruising bombardments sustained last winter, when Russia tried to target the Ukrainian electric grid, Ukrainian strategists are rationing artillery rounds while debating how to ensure they have enough manpower to sustain the war.
“The biggest challenge to us is to find [how] to strike a balance between the needs of manpower, on the front, on the battlefield, on the one hand, and the need to keep the economy running and to keep business running, to keep the flow of taxes and the military budget,” Ukrainian foreign affairs committee chairman Oleksandr Merezhko told the Washington Examiner. “This is the biggest major challenge for us right now.”
Russia faces a similar problem, analysts believe, amid a surge in complaints from Russian women outraged that their loved ones have not been permitted to return home.
“Russia was able to alleviate the deficit of manpower with mobilization [in the fall of 2022], and they can recruit enough men per month to compensate for their losses,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow Michael Kofman, a military analyst who has traveled extensively in Ukraine since the outbreak of the war, said during a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies event. "But they don't have men to rotate the people they initially mobilized, the 300,000 people they mobilized. And so they've been staying at the front, and they've been at the front since last fall.”
Russian forces have sustained 315,000 casualties since the beginning of the full-scale war, according to a recent U.S. intelligence assessment that circulated in the media. Many of those Russian troops died in “meat assaults,” reckless attacks that evoked memories of World War I. The NATO allies most vulnerable to Russia believe Ukraine has a path to victory, but it depends on continuing to inflict that level of carnage.
“The Russian training system can be put under pressure and disrupted by inflicting sustained and increased attrition on Russian units in Ukraine, forcing the newly mobilized personnel to be deployed to the theater prematurely,” the Estonian Defense Ministry wrote in a white paper circulated in mid-December. “The objective therefore should be to inflict a sustained rate of attrition of at least 50,000 killed and severely wounded Russian troops per six months to consistently degrade the quality of Russian force, preventing Russia from regenerating offensive combat power — which Ukraine has so far successfully achieved.”
Still, the strain is more easily documented on the Ukrainian side, where middle-aged servicemen have become a common sight in the infantry. In city centers further from the occupied territories, journalists have encountered Ukrainian civilians attesting to the corruption of recruitment officials who take bribes from draft dodgers and pressgang into service the men who cannot pay.
“The first wave of those who became volunteers is over,” Merezhko said. “Some people get tired, of course, after two years, and we need to substitute them, but the problem is that it takes time to train people. Those people who are continually fighting, they’re experienced. And we need to substitute them, to bring fresh forces.”
Ukrainian military leaders want to mobilize almost half a million new servicemen, according to Zelensky, who said the process must include “demobilization processes … with specifics and with great respect for the warriors.” Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that “there is a force of 617,000 deployed in the combat zone,” reinforced over the last year by a “partial mobilization” of 300,000 troops and an even larger supply of 486,000 “volunteer fighters” for the war. “There is no need for a new mobilization,” Putin insisted.
Putin faces an “inherent dilemma” not unlike the one Merezhko and his colleagues in the Ukrainian parliament must manage.
“If you mobilize people, then other people will leave the country, right? Russians will flee,” Kofman explained. “But you also need those people for your defense industry as well. You need people with skills, right? So they're clearly balancing their own dilemma.”
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Ukraine’s ability to exploit such a dilemma depends in part on factors beyond Kyiv’s control, such as the continuation of Western military support. And even the best-case scenario, as U.S. officials acknowledge, will require Ukraine to endure more hardship.
“2024 is not going to be a gentle year for Ukraine,” the Pentagon strategist said. “It's gonna be messy. It's going to be demoralizing, even if the U.S. figures out how to get more support over to Ukraine. It’s still not going to be an easy year for them.”