West rethinking plan to root for Ukrainian counteroffensive
3 Min Read
It seems as though the West needs to go back to the drawing board for Spring, in case success does not happen.
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A Ukrainian soldier watches a Grad multiple launch rocket system firing near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, August 13, 2023. (AP)
While Ukrainian officials blame the West's over-positive hopes for the counteroffensive against Russia, Ukraine is also to blame for its failing retaliation - as Politico says.
Chief of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence Kyrylo Budanov, alongside other officials, continue to talk about the coming “decisive battle” while he continues to brush off requests from Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ease on having high hopes.
President Volodymyr Zelensky was quick to jump the gun to keep Western arms and cash flowing, while building expectations.
Andrey Illarionov, a former senior Kremlin policy advisor who abandoned the Putin administration in 2005, expressed, “The problem is that we believe our own military propaganda". Illarionov is now expressing more fear of a prolonged war unless the West decides to armor up more.
Ukraine's failure can also be attributed to its failure to understand that the Russian army was correcting course by learning from its blunders fast. Weeks before the counteroffensive, Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, two of the war’s strong military analysts from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), issued a warning about potential mistakes by detailing evidence of Russia’s learning curve, its tactics and improved artillery targeting. They also highlighted the “speed with which Russian infantry dig, and the scale at which they improve their fighting positions.”
Read next: Ukraine's counteroffensive was doomed from the start and the US knew
The authors stated that another common tactic “is for the Russians to withdraw from a position that is being assaulted and then saturate it with fire once Ukrainian troops attempt to occupy it.” This tactic is posing an impediment to Ukraine's encroachment.
Can't complain if you don't help solve
The launch of the counteroffensive witnessed massive losses in terms of Western-supplied weapons, and the second phase hasn't seen any significant success either.
Frontline soldiers claim that morale remains high, especially among those fully deployed and Western-trained 10th corps, who were supposed to be deployed once the main defensive lines were crossed, but were sent out sooner than expected.
Many of them displayed anger at the West's complaints regarding their slow development, such as the criticism in last month’s leaked battlefield assessment by Germany’s Bundeswehr, which criticized the Ukrainian military for not fully implementing its NATO-given training.
Some in Kiev are blaming the military weakness on a lack of air assistance, citing Western partners' unwillingness to supply F-16 fighters (though Britain has already promised to train pilots).
It seems as though the West needs to trace back to the drawing board for Spring, in case success does not happen, and yet pilots being trained on F-16s won’t even be ready until Spring, after which the US would have given up on its want to supply longer-range missiles.
Read more: US against two difficult options in Ukraine: Both are grim
But with the US presidential elections coming up, attention is due to be diverted from Ukraine and thus making it harder for Congress to approve on sending more weapons and cash to Ukraine.
As Luttwak says, “Ukraine need not win a great victory to exit the war an independent nation, only persistence.”
