At a press conference after talks with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, this afternoon, Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg sounded like a man determined to take a “glass half full” attitude when he said that “every metre that Ukrainian forces regain is a metre that Russia loses”.
His statement, if a bit obvious, showed commendable optimism. Reports from the frontlines in Ukraine have been mixed over the past few months, with nothing like the lightning-fast territorial gains made by Ukraine in its late summer offensive last year, when it liberated vast swathes of territory occupied by Russia. Some of this was retaken only days after it had been declared part of the motherland by Vladimir Putin, who annexed four regions in the east and south on September 30 – only to hear that quite a lot of these regions were now Ukrainian soil once again.
This year, Kyiv’s planned counteroffensive was late coming, partly due to the slow delivery of western military aid. This gave Russia ample time to build imposing defensive fortifications. The sort of swift manoeuvring responsible for last year’s successful counterpunches have been nigh on impossible this year.
