The War Is Not Going Well for Ukraine
If the United States does nothing, the coming seasons will be even bleaker—and not just in Kyiv.
Kyiv is, as ever, a lovely city, made more so by a brisk, sunny April. The church domes gleam, the cafés are open if not bustling, the streets are swept clean, the parks are trimmed, and the Dnipro flows majestically past the city to which it gave birth. But in the various memorials in public places, thousands of blue-and-yellow flags with the names of the fallen flutter. At Taras Shevchenko University, half of the students in the auditorium to hear a panel discussion I appear in about the war are cadets in uniform. Their young faces are grave in a way the parents of American teenagers would not recognize. Senior officials whom I have met before are drawn and on edge; when they smile, they rarely do so with their eyes. And on the train, as I leave the city for the long trip to Poland, hard-faced officers check and recheck passports to make sure that no draft-eligible men are leaving the country.
At the beginning of its third year, the war is not going well for Ukraine. The war is, in fact, at one of what Winston Churchill called the “climacterics,” or inflection points, that characterize all great conflicts. At hideous cost to themselves—measured in tens of thousands of killed, wounded, or missing men a month—Russian armies are advancing slowly. Every night Russian drones distract, expose, and deplete Ukrainian air defenses, and then the cruise and ballistic missiles rain down. Their targets are primarily the electric grid and civilian buildings. Kyiv, for the time being, is well defended, but Kharkiv, which is close to the Russian border, is taking a pummeling. On the front lines, the shell shortage is acute; the Ukrainians are ceding ground not because they are unwilling to fight, but because they lack the high explosives necessary to do so.
Worse is to come. Russia has managed, by putting its economy on a war footing, to restore its forces and then some. It has secured supplies of weapons and ammunition from North Korea and Iran, and, surreptitiously, much nonlethal gear from China. This coalition of the malevolent is cooperating ever more closely. After a groggy 18 months following the defeat of its initial invasion and the spectacular Ukrainian attacks that drove the Russians back from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson, the Russian military machine is adapting. It has introduced large numbers of first-person-view drones, manufactured long-range glide bombs of ever-increasing weight, and recovered much of its previously squandered talent at electronic warfare. Having squashed dissent at home, it is mobilizing some 300,000 troops. A new offensive looms this summer.
There are limits to Russian achievement. Its Black Sea fleet has been defeated and largely driven from its Crimean bases. It has proved incapable of fielding a new generation of tanks and other systems. The shattering losses in officers and senior enlisted ranks mean that its ground forces continue to depend heavily on brutal, and often tactically primitive, means. But it feels the tide of battle turning in its favor.
As it does so, Russia has upped the psychological ante. Per Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, this is no longer a “special military operation” but a real war—not because of the Ukrainians, but because of the West. Not just any war either. The Russian Orthodox Church, a sinister tool of the Russian state, recently declared that “from a spiritual and moral point of view, the special military operation is a Holy War.” The Kremlin has made clear that it disdains negotiations with Kyiv. In this respect it is brutally honest: It intends to extirpate the Ukrainian state, returning it to a subjugated province of a restored Russian empire. Failing that, it will depopulate Ukraine’s cities, poison its fields with land mines, and deprive its remaining citizens of power, light, and heat.
The Ukrainian war effort is both strengthened and weakened by the nature of Ukrainian society. As I heard one senior official observe, “Doing things ‘horizontally’ is our national character, our national problem, and our national superpower.” This remains true. Aerorozvidka, an organization created in 2014 by a band of enthusiasts from widely varying backgrounds to make drones for Ukraine, remains a major contributor to the war. Its Delta system of command and control—a system that has been described as Uber for artillery support, though it is much more than that—has enabled Ukrainian forces to be far more agile than their centralized foe. Ukrainian entrepreneurs are building more and bigger drones, and in a uniquely anarchic way, supporting the military by going around a Ministry of Defense that is still too slow for a bunch of crowdfunded engineers, investment bankers, and enthusiasts.
But this innovative and democratic spirit, although it has yielded some remarkable successes, and promises to deliver more, is at odds with the disciplined planning systems that modern war requires. Press Ukrainian officials for a view of the war that looks more than a few months ahead, and you do not get very much. Ask what the theory of victory is—the sequence of events that will lead to the shattering of Russian armies and the liberation of Ukrainian territory—and there you do not get much more. Even structurally, the Ukrainian military, with scores of independent brigades but very little by way of coherent structures like divisions or corps above them, seems too decentralized to work effectively.
For Ukraine, the immediate concern is procuring enough ammunition to feed the hungry artillery pieces that can annihilate Russia’s human-wave assaults and supply the anti-aircraft systems that fend off the severe nightly attacks on its cities and infrastructure.
The crucial question is what the U.S. House of Representatives will do, and whether a purblind minority of Republicans can be outwitted by their hesitant leadership, so that the House can deliver aid to Ukraine. Astonishingly, the GOP chairmen of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees have asserted that some of their colleagues have succumbed to Russian propaganda. The shame and disgrace that this implies cannot be expunged. It will stain the holdouts against aid permanently, and justly so.
But the Biden administration has its own responsibility for this situation, a responsibility that is nearly as heavy. It, too, has no theory of victory and has not attempted to work with Ukraine to devise one. The administration’s promises to be with Ukraine as long as it takes are vapid. It repeatedly hesitated to supply Ukraine with advanced weapons in the numbers and with the speed needed, thereby frittering away the great opportunity of Ukraine’s first counteroffensive in the summer and fall of 2022. It has not sent a military mission to Kyiv to work closely with Ukrainian planners and trainers. Its representatives have, in ways that are at best strategically illiterate, declared their tepid opposition to Ukrainian deep attacks inside Russia. At the top, the president has not, after two years, summoned the rhetorical force to explain to the American people, in a way that Franklin Roosevelt did, and that John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan would have, why this faraway war means so much for the American future.
Ukraine has reported intensifying Russian uses of chemical weapons, beginning with irritants, but with the potential for the more lethal kinds of attacks that characterized the Syrian war. Anxious allied governments, including Sweden and the United Kingdom, have publicly discussed the possibility of war between a conquest-intoxicated Russia and NATO within years. They may be right.
This does not have to be, and it will not be if the United States acts. The prompt passage of aid for Ukraine is but one step. Others include sending a military mission to Ukraine, helping that country build the training and rotation infrastructure that it needs to sustain itself, and accelerating the growth of Ukraine’s already remarkable arms industry, which now produces drones that can strike more than 1,000 kilometers into Russian territory, as well as advanced cruise missiles and artillery pieces.
Above all, the Biden administration has to tell the American people that this war threatens us because it threatens European peace, has to explain the values as well as interests in play, and has to conceive its goal not as a mixture of supporting Ukraine just enough and nagging it with fantastic fears of escalation, but as ensuring victory.
That can be achieved. Russia’s own strains—revealed in the abortive Prigozhin putsch, its shocking vulnerability to terrorist attack, and the outpouring of grief for the murdered Alexei Navalny—are numerous. Its supposed growth in GDP is an artifact of military spending that is not sustainable. Sanctions are taking a toll but can be intensified. Its army, though operationally adaptable, remains tactically crude and susceptible to being bled out. The Putin regime’s ferocious clampdown on dissent reveals weakness, not strength. The job of the Biden administration is to judge those weaknesses correctly, exploit them ruthlessly, and, with its allies, help Ukraine defeat an enemy as cruel and malignant as any in history. Unless the administration rises to the occasion, a dark spring could bring much bleaker seasons to follow.