How far can Ukraine take its counter-offensives?
Eighty years ago the second Battle of Kharkov was raging in what was then the western Soviet Union. The Red Army had heroically driven the Nazi
Wehrmacht back from the gates of Moscow. It gathered in a bulge west of Izyum, a town to the south of Kharkov, as Ukraine’s second city was then known. The subsequent Soviet offensive, launched on May 12th, was a disaster. Soviet armies were driven back and encircled. Over 170,000 Soviet troops were killed. Nikita Khrushchev later focused on the battle when denouncing his predecessor as Soviet leader, Stalin. “This is Stalin’s military ‘genius’,” he sneered, citing the crude tactics of frontal assault. “This is what it cost us.”
The Russian army is once again gathered around Izyum. And once more it is on the retreat from Kharkiv, as the city is now called, after another underwhelming campaign. It has been a month since Russia, having abandoned its assault on Kyiv, launched a
fresh offensive in the eastern
Donbas region. The idea was to encircle Ukrainian troops in a large salient stretching from Izyum in the north to the city of Donetsk in the south, in part by driving south from Izyum.
There have been minor successes. Russia has taken almost all of Luhansk province—it held only the southern part before the war—bar a salient around the well-defended city of Severodonetsk. It has also pushed south of Izyum, taking villages towards Barvinkove, an important rail junction, and the industrial cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. Yet progress has been achingly slow—one or two kilometres a day—and casualties heavy. The war is now dominated by
grinding artillery duels, rather than swift mechanised offensives. Much of Donetsk province is still in Ukrainian hands.
That is no surprise. Conventional military theory says that attackers need a three-to-one advantage over defenders to break through defensive lines. Russia is far short of that. On May 15th British defence intelligence said that the Russian armed forces had lost a third of the combat power originally committed to the invasion of Ukraine. Russian units are operating below their full strength, some severely so, despite efforts to coax ex-servicemen back into action with big pay packets. Even if Russian forces get as far as Severodonetsk, Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, the heavy casualties from urban warfare are likely to sap their capacity to fight yet further.
“The Russians continue to make seemingly the same tactical errors in how they are approaching the fight,” says a Western official. One example of that came from Bilohorivka, a settlement south-east of Izyum, where the bank of the Siverskyi Donets river lies littered with the carcasses of dozens of Russian armoured vehicles after Ukrainian artillery destroyed a pontoon bridge and foiled a crossing a week ago. “The Russians clearly intended to invest in this axis and throw a lot of combat power down it,” says Major General Mick Ryan, a retired Australian officer. “This is a significant setback for them.”
Victories like that have buoyed the Ukrainians. Though much of Donbas is lost, Ukrainian troops have held the line in Severodonetsk, despite its vulnerable position, and imposed a heavy cost on their opponents. Ukrainian counter-attacks to the north and east of Kharkiv have forced the Russians back tens of kilometres, out of artillery range of the city and, in places, back to the border. A video published on May 15th by Illia Ponomarenko of the Kyiv Independent showed the 127th territorial defence brigade placing a border post back into the ground and gathering around it, triumphantly (see image above). Those counter-attacks may eventually allow Ukraine to threaten Russian supply lines through Vovenchansk, which lies on the road between the Russian city of Belgorod and the frontlines around Izyum, and perhaps even to strike Russian rear areas around Belgorod itself, says Konrad Muzyka of Rochan Consulting, which tracks the war.
There have been other morale-boosters, too. Ukrainian warplanes are active over Donbas, including Izyum itself, despite the proximity to Russian air-defence systems over the border to the east. In the past two weeks, Ukrainian drones and jets have also repeatedly struck Russian helicopters, landing craft and surface-to-air missiles on and around Snake Island, a tiny outcrop in the north-western corner of the Black Sea, near Odessa. And while Russia is struggling to replenish its forces, Western arms—including heavy artillery—are now flowing into Ukraine.
On May 11th America’s House of Representatives approved a $40bn aid package for Ukraine which, if approved by the Senate, would bring the cumulative total for American support to $54bn—equivalent to 7% of the Biden’s administration’s proposed defence budget. “Time is working in Ukraine’s favour,” argues Mr Muzyka. “Unless Russia conducts mobilisation…its armed forces will not only stall over the next few weeks, but the influx of Western weaponry and Ukrainian personnel will allow Kyiv to start pushing Russian units back along a much broader front.”
Some Ukrainian generals are heady with success. “The breaking point will be in the second part of August,” declared Major General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, in an interview with Sky News on May 14th. “Most of the active combat actions will have finished by the end of this year,” he promised. “As a result, we will renew Ukrainian power in all our territories that we have lost including Donbas and the Crimea.” But in private, many Ukrainian officials are more sombre about their prospects.
Russia has found it hard going in Donbas in part because this region has been an active warzone for eight years, since Russia first fomented, and backed, an armed insurgency against Ukraine in 2014. The soldiers of the Joint Forces Operation, as the Ukrainian units in Donbas are called, are battle-hardened and well equipped. But they are also dug into defensive positions, such as trenches. That shields them well from the relentless artillery barrages that have turned parts of Donbas into a pocked moonscape in recent weeks. But it also makes them less mobile, and thus less able to counter-attack.
Ukrainian forces are capable of “tactical manoeuvres”, like the operations around Kharkiv, says the Western official. But scaling this up along a front which stretches hundreds of kilometres in Donbas alone, and 1,300km in total—in other words, turning counter-attacks into a full-blown counter-offensive—will be a challenge. Russia’s woes in Ukraine have served as a reminder that war tends to favour the defender. If Ukraine were to attack dug-in Russian positions, it would find it harder going. For exactly that reason, Russian forces in Kherson, Mykolaiv and Zaporizhia provinces in southern Ukraine, have been digging trenches and building concrete fortifications, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a think-tank.
“Overall, the battle is finely balanced,” says the official. “Ukrainian personnel are highly motivated and highly experienced, and [deployed] in sufficient numbers to hold a defensive line—but perhaps don’t have the capabilities they might need.” Western weaponry has been abundant, but not decisive, so far at least. Russian forces, despite their heavy losses and tactical shortcomings, still “significantly overmatch the Ukrainians in terms of their overall capability”. That assessment was echoed on May 10th by Lieutenant-General Scott Berrier, the head of America’s Defence Intelligence Agency. “The Russians aren’t winning and the Ukrainians aren’t winning,” he said. “We’re at a bit of a stalemate here.” Ukrainians receive such pronouncements with scepticism. They have been underestimated before.
How far can Ukraine take its counter-offensives?