A Ukrainian offensive designed to break through layers of Russian defenses should prove dramatic enough for jaded Western observers.
Has Ukraine’s long-forecast counteroffensive begun in earnest? Who knows.
Ukrainian officials broke the silence they maintain for the purpose of preserving operational security to confirm for reporters on Monday that their forces are shifting to “offensive actions.” What those actions are have not yet been confirmed in Western media outlets. But the “shaping operations” that took place both along and behind the frontlines in Ukraine and inside the Russian Federation with the support of Ukraine-backed Russian insurgents suggest Ukrainian forces could advance along any number of axes. The volume of forces Ukraine could bring to bear in this effort, or how well trained and equipped those forces are, remains unclear.
But the stakes of the coming fight are extremely high, not just on the ground in Ukraine but in Western capitals. The New York Times made that clear enough.
“Failure,” its reporters wrote of the coming offensive, “or a lack of dramatic quick progress, could complicate Ukraine’s ability to get further assistance from the West and make Kyiv’s push for additional security guarantees at the NATO summit this summer more difficult.”
Failure is an objective metric that we could all gauge — the inability to dislodge Russian forces from the positions inside Ukraine that they presently occupy, for example. A “lack of dramatic quick progress” is far more subjective. Indeed, it’s the sort of metric that is designed to be subject to interpretation.
Barring sufficient drama on the battlefield, Ukraine’s Western backers reserve the right to be unimpressed and, therefore, to impose on Ukraine an ignominious peace that consigns its citizens behind Russian lines to the campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing that has been well documented.
The Times has made this contention before. While Ukraine’s stated objective is to break Russian lines, “American officials have assessed that it is unlikely the offensive will result in a dramatic shift in momentum in Ukraine’s favor,” the paper reported in late April. Ukraine will need to make a “dramatic show” of its capacity to beat back Russian forces even though “big gains are not guaranteed, or even necessarily likely.”
Despite the furious tempo at which Russian military bloggers are presently speculating about the nature of Ukrainian offensives — speculation that fuels much of the Western reporting on a subject about which we know little — the desperate pursuit of drama on the battlefields of Ukraine is self-defeating. The expression of Western apprehension about Ukraine’s prospects conveys nothing so much as the conditionality of the West’s support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, and its only effect would be to strengthen the Kremlin’s resolve to wait for the U.S. and Europe to get bored or queasy and bug out. That is, after all, a reliable pattern of Western behavior.
A dispatch in the Economist suggests that the desire for drama from Ukraine’s armed forces stems from a desire to goad Kyiv into courting risk:
American and European military officials advising Ukraine say that Russia’s defensive lines could be more fragile than thought, and that a fast, violent assault is the best way to minimize casualties on the Ukrainian sides and deny Russian forces the opportunity to reinforce the site of any breakthrough. They suspect that Ukraine has been too cautious in the past, notably during last year’s offensive in Kherson province, where its troops, despite the eventual liberation of Kherson city, allowed thousands of Russian forces to escape with their equipment.
That’s easy to say from the safety and remove of London, Paris, or Washington, D.C. Nevertheless, Ukraine has spent the last six months training and supplying at least nine brigades ahead of what observers expect will be a mechanized, combined-arms offensive designed to break through layers of deep Russian defenses. That should prove dramatic enough for even the most jaded Western observers.