Ukraine's impending counteroffensive against Russia will likely influence how long the United States and its allies continue to support Kyiv, according to senior Ukrainian officials.
“If Ukraine fails, they say, that would mean it is impossible to win by military means, and it should make concessions then,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Tuesday. "This is a fight against narratives that at some point Ukraine will have to surrender.”
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Kuleba and other Ukrainian officials have cautioned against overestimating the “expectations of success” in the planned counteroffensive after a winter campaign that saw Ukrainian troops blunt Russia’s attack around Bakhmut while acquiring an influx of Western battle tanks and other heavy armor. Yet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team is also conscious that NATO leaders, their pledges to aid Ukraine “as long as it takes” notwithstanding, want to back a winner.
“Of course, they are all politicians and are backed by parliaments that agree or disagree on certain things. And behind the parliaments are the voters,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told a Ukrainian media outlet. “Therefore, it will be easier for them to advocate for new assistance packages to Ukraine if there are cases of success.”
The U.S. and its allies have combined to equip Ukraine with “more than nine new Ukrainian armored brigades,” as NATO officials have said. Yet President Joe Biden has declined to authorize the provision of long-range artillery and other advanced systems out of an apparent concern that Russian President Vladimir Putin might retaliate or escalate the conflict through the use of nuclear weapons. And some U.S. officials have walked a delicate line between touting the quality and utility of Western aid and questioning whether Ukraine is equipped to reclaim all the territory occupied by Russian forces.
"It’s fair to say, if there were an offensive, that there’s a possibility of a variety of outcomes,” Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Foreign Affairs. “Clearly one of those outcomes could achieve significant success and collapse the Russian frontline across the board . . . I do think, though, that the probability of either side achieving their political objectives — war is about politics through the sole use of military means — I think that’s going to be very difficult, very challenging. And frankly, I don’t think the probability of that is likely in this year.”
Russian officials, for their part, are trying to project confidence. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu boasted Tuesday that “a sufficient amount of ammunition has been delivered to the Armed Forces for inflicting effective damage on the enemy by firepower.” And Putin ventured to preside over a meeting about “the resumption of tram service in Mariupol” — a city razed by Russian forces in the opening months of the full-scale invasion last year — as he promised to “ensure that life in the cities and towns of” of four regions that Russia annexed last fall “returns to normal” in the coming months.
“I would like to thank all the Russian regions that are supporting the new constituent entities,” the Kremlin chief said. “It is important to clearly determine the targets and deadlines of this program so that the public can see specific prospects.”
The trouble for Putin is that Russia does not control the entirety of those four regions, and never has during the war. In fact, Russian forces already have been forced to surrender some of the annexed territory — a development that has emboldened Ukrainian officials to hope that Moscow can be induced even to withdraw from Crimea, the peninsula where the war started in 2014.
“The enemy must be cut off from Crimea, to make sure that Russia cannot use the temporarily occupied peninsula for military purposes and, finally, implement the so-called ‘Crimean goodwill gesture,’” Ukrainian defense intelligence representative Andriy Cherniak said Tuesday, using a sardonic euphemism for Russia’s retreat, before advising Russian civilians in Crimea to flee. “Kilometre-long traffic jams on the illegally built bridge from Kerch to Russia is the right reaction. The Main Intelligence Agency of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry strongly recommends leaving the occupied Crimea while there is still such an option.”
Putin’s show of confidence may be belied somewhat by the extent of Russian fortifications across occupied Ukraine and even “well inside internationally recognized Russian territory including in the Belgorod and Kursk regions,” as the British Defense Ministry noted on Twitter. And Russian officials have acknowledged the threat of “acts of sabotage and terrorist attacks on Russian territory,” as state media put it, by Ukrainian forces.
"All our special services have been doing everything that is necessary to ensure security. Intensive and concerted work is underway,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday. “And, most importantly, a special military operation is being conducted with the aim to eliminate threats to our country.”
Reznikov, the Ukrainian defense chief, ventured to hope that Putin might use “a serious catastrophic type, man-made, on the territory of Russia” to create a face-saving off-ramp from the war.
“Let's say something happens to a power plant, hydroelectric power plant, nuclear power plant, there will be risks for the population, and this will require the immediate attention of the government, the accumulation of resources, including soldiers,” he said. "And so they supposedly will be able to explain to people why they are ending active hostilities in Ukraine. That is, they will have to voice a 'goodwill gesture' under the guise of some kind of man-made disaster on the territory of Russia.”
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Any such hope will depend on Ukraine’s ability to fight effectively, in this offensive and beyond.
“The decisive battle will be the one that will lead to the liberation of all Ukrainian territories,” Kuleba said. “If we solve this problem during this counteroffensive, then in the end, and not in the beginning, we will say that it was the decisive battle. However, it may not be the decisive battle. Then we might need another counteroffensive.”