The first casualty of the Ukrainian counteroffensive was wishful thinking. Any hope that Russian troops would abandon their trenches and flee has now been left far behind on the battlefield.
The occupying forces held firm and have mostly kept their discipline in the first seven weeks, absorbing one attack after another, often counterattacking to recover lost ground, and mounting offensives of their own in Luhansk and other spots on the frontline where they sensed weakness.
Initial Ukrainian assaults got mired in dense, overlapping minefields. For all the focus on the delivery of Leopards and other western tanks in the run-up to the launch of the offensive on 4 June, Ukrainian armour failed to provide the clenched fist needed to breach the lines.
Tanks, as the military experts had warned, were not a solution on their own. Without air superiority in the skies above and overwhelming artillery support, they were vulnerable to Russian anti-tank missiles fired from the trenches and from gunships able to strike them over the horizon.
The Ukrainians had mine-clearing vehicles but not enough. They were priority targets for the Russians, who learned to stack anti-tank mines on top of each other to hobble them.
“You just can’t overstate the role that these Russian minefields are playing,” Matt Dimmick, a retired US colonel and former national security council director for Russia, said. “The stories that we’re hearing from the frontlines is Ukrainian units come up against these defences where mines in some places are every metre or every two metres … and it requires the Ukrainians to stop, dismount and push soldiers forward to clear those minefields and create lanes.”
The Ukrainians adapted their tactics, switching to platoon-sized infantry units, often at night, to pick their way through the minefields. But that has meant that progress has been slow, at walking speed, with frequent halts and withdrawals. Pathways cleared through minefields have been quickly reseeded remotely by Russian drones or artillery.
The hot and rainy weather this summer has made the ground boggy and pushed up lush undergrowth in which the Russians can conceal themselves.
While Russian commanders have routinely driven convicts and conscripts in mass attacks over minefields and into machine gun fire, especially in the battle for the northern Donetsk town of Bakhmut, Ukrainian officers generally value the lives of their soldiers, so such human wave assaults are not an option.
They are relying more on a battle of attrition, using the superior accuracy of their artillery to unpick Russian defences, and cut off supply lines.
So far at least, there has been no sign of a dramatic feint or major deception. In modern warfare that involves extensive aerial and electronic surveillance, it is almost impossible to spring a surprise. The Ukrainians are still pushing ahead on the three main axes of advance with which they began the counteroffensive.
In northern Donetsk, they are seeking to outflank the Russian troops and mercenaries hunkered down in the ruins of Bakhmut, which they captured at huge human cost in May, their only significant gain since last summer. Because of this symbolic importance to Moscow, the Ukrainians are counting on the likelihood that Bakhmut’s Russian defenders will not be allowed to cede it in a tactical withdrawal, so pressing on the front has the effect of fixing large numbers of enemy forces in place and prevents them reinforcing emerging weak points on the thousand-kilometre front.
On the southern front, where the Donetsk region meets Zaporizhzhia, the Ukrainians have been gradually advancing south from the town of Velyka Novosilka, one hard-won hamlet at a time, celebrating the capture of the latest, Staromaiorske, late last week, less than 8km from Ukrainian starting positions in June.
The third prong of the counteroffensive, and so far the apparent priority, is in western Zaporizhzhia region, on the left bank of the Dnipro, where the Ukrainians are trying to break through south of the settlement of Orikhiv, and have now reached the village of Robotyne, about 15km to the south.
On all these three axes of attack, the Ukrainians are still battling through the Russians’ forward defences. They have not even reached the major fortified lines that lie ahead of them.
Last Saturday, after seven gruelling weeks, the Ukrainian commander, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, deployed troops from his 10th Corps on the Orikhiv front. It had been held back as a second-echelon force, to take up the offensive when the first wave, mostly from the 9th Corps, reached the Russians’ main defensive line. Instead, the 10th had to be sent in to try to finish the work of the 9th.
The units now being sent into battle are mostly drawn from brigades that have been hastily trained and equipped in Nato countries over the past few months. Such units had deployed piecemeal before but this represented a major infusion.
So far, and it is very early to make definitive judgments, their arrival has not transformed the battlefield. US officials initially briefed journalists that the 10th Corps’ deployment signalled the start of the “main thrust” of the counteroffensive, but back-pedalled days later.
One emerging trend of the counteroffensive is that the newly created western-armed Ukrainian brigades have not performed as well as more experienced but less well-equipped units, like the 3rd Assault Brigade, which have been part of the most successful Ukrainian advance so far, into the town of Klishchiivka, south of Bakhmut.
Arguably the most optimistic case of wishful thinking was the expectation that Ukrainian troops trained for a few months in Nato states and armed with Nato equipment, would instantly be able to fight the Nato way. They were being asked to advance without two of the prerequisites a Nato commander would take for granted: complete air superiority and overwhelming artillery firepower, all tightly coordinated together.
The newly minted Ukrainian officers have generally been able to reproduce what they have learned at company level, but not at the much larger scale necessary to quickly overwhelm Russian fixed positions.
“I think it is very fair to have been sceptical that, with so little training, you could create cohesive units that can perform in combat for the first time against such well-prepared defences,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
While there is no question that the counteroffensive has not lived up to general expectations in western capitals and is way behind the more optimistic schedules, most military experts argue it is far too early to declare it a failure.
They note that some major offensives in history now seen as brilliant successes, had to persevere through a phase of near deadlock.
“In the invasion of Normandy, once the Allies reached the beachhead, they also went through a six-to-eight-week period where they were slowly trying to work through German defences through the hedgerow country and they progressed all of about 19 miles from the beachheads within six to eight weeks of the D-Day landings,” Dimmick pointed out.
While Ukrainian forces had to claw back Russian-held territory 100 metres at a time, and their advances look almost negligible on a map of the whole front, territory is not the only measure of success. The impact of attrition on Russians forces may not be immediately apparent but it could be equally significant in the longer term.
Frontline units have been hollowed out, many with less than a third or a quarter of their full numbers. US-donated Himars rockets and British and French Storm Shadow missiles have wrought havoc in Russian rear lines, destroying ammunition depots and supply hubs.
“The Russians are pretty fixed,” a western intelligence official said. “They are still fighting against three axes, and they’re not showing signs that they’re able to significantly reinforce either of those axes against sustained Ukrainian attack.”
Russian military bloggers have painted dire pictures of damage to Russian forces and their morale, issues that came to the surface when Gen Ivan Popov, the commander of the Russian 58th Combined Arms Army, fighting in Zaporizhzhia region, claimed last month that he had been fired for complaining about Moscow’s mismanagement of the war.
On the other side of the equation, the delivery of US cluster munitions, widely criticised for the lingering threat they pose to civilians, will allow the Ukrainian military leadership to keep up the counteroffensive for a few more months.
The efforts to minimise Ukrainian casualties and the protection offered by western armoured vehicles, even when knocked out of action, have meant that most assault units are not as depleted as they had been expected to be. Almost all the Leopard tanks damaged in battle have been repaired in Polish workshops.
Zaluzhny and his top officers knew they did not have the tools they really needed when they launched the counteroffensive but felt time pressure, as the Russians deepened their trenches, and signs of impatience and donor fatigue appeared in the west.
After the Nato summit in Vilnius, which did not offer a clear path to membership but guaranteed arms supplies well into next year, Kyiv will now feel it has breathing space. In the absence of a dramatic breach of Russian lines, it can hope that the relentless pressure eventually triggers an implosion in the ranks of the beleaguered Russian ranks.
“There is no reason why the Ukrainians cannot break through the Russian main defensive line,” a western intelligence official said. “It’s not going to be easy, so we shouldn’t shy away from that.”
But, the official added: “This is not over yet.”
