The Premature Declaration That the Ukrainian Counteroffensive Failed

You don’t have to look too hard to find commentators outside of Ukraine declaring that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed or is failing.

Russia still occupies a whole big chunk of Ukrainian territory, so the counteroffensive — now starting its fifth month — clearly hasn’t accomplished its objectives yet. And while it’s clear that Ukraine couldn’t have waited another year, by launching the counteroffensive this summer, they did so with considerable disadvantages. The Ukrainians are outmanned, outgunned, and their air force doesn’t have control of the skies. Kyiv had to start the offensive before all of that aid from NATO arrived; those Abrams tanks that the U.S. promised in January didn’t arrive until September 25.

But take a look at what’s happened since the counteroffensive started:

• As Noah observes below, Russia is withdrawing the Black Sea fleet from its main naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea, to other ports in Russia and Crimea that offer better protection. In recent weeks, the Ukrainians hit the Russian navy dry docks in Sevastopol with missiles, damaging a Russian submarine and a large landing ship, as well as blowing up the Russian Black Sea fleet headquarters building.
• Ukraine has landed commando teams on the Crimean peninsula for hit-and-run attacks.
• Commercial vessels have resumed using Ukraine’s main port of Odesa, likely as a result of the Russian navy’s difficulties operating in the Black Sea. You may call during my visit to Ukraine in late August, there wasn’t a single boat in the water in any direction along the Odesa waterfront.
• Ukrainian drones and missiles have taken out three S-400 air-defense systems, the most advanced air-defense system in the Russian arsenal. The most recent hit was on a system called “Triumph” near the city of Belgorod. (A Ukrainian intelligence source told the U.K. Daily Telegraph, “The SBU advises the Russians to think about a new name for this complex.”)
• In late August, Ukrainian forces penetrated the main Russian defensive line and entrenched Russian positions on the edge of the village of Verbove. Ukrainian forces retook the village of Robotyne.
• In late August and early September, a Russian counter-counteroffensive to retake the village of Kupyansk failed, inflicting large casualties on the Russians.
• In mid September, “Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade said its troops had surrounded the village of Andriivka and inflicted heavy losses on Russia’s 72nd Separate Motor Rifle Brigade over two days, killing four senior officers.”
• By the third week of September, analysts at the Institute for the Study of War concluded, “Ukrainian armored vehicles were operating beyond the final line of the Russian defensive layer in western Zaporizhia Oblast.”
• An aerial fleet of thousands of $300 drones has given the Ukrainians an ability to spot just about any Russian movement nearly instantaneously, with “integrated battle-management systems that provide imaging and locations in real time all the way down to the platoon and squad levels.” Technological innovation and the fierce determination to not be absorbed into a brutal autocracy may be the only real advantages that the Ukrainians have.

Considering all that, it’s not that plausible to contend the counteroffensive has failed. Has it kicked all the Russians out of the country? No, but these are the intermediate steps Ukraine must take to  accomplish that objective.

Ukraine isn’t losing; it’s more accurate to say Ukraine is on pace to win at a painfully slow rate, with an enormous cost in blood and treasure. This is still not a great situation for the Ukrainians; they can’t afford to lose men at the same pace that Russia does.

But even if you see no value or merit in standing with a people who are fighting against a foe that’s talking up the need for concentration camps and reeducation of the Ukrainian populace, the Ukrainians are still doing all of the dying and the bleeding and the fighting in a war that has destroyed thousands upon thousands of Russian armored vehicles, tanks, personnel carriers, artillery, mobile missile launchers, helicopters and planes, and ships and submarines. The U.S. and NATO have effectively outsourced a job to the Ukrainians, the job of destroying a Russian war machine that has been a threat to Europe since the beginning of the Cold War. All the Ukrainians are asking is that we keep giving them the tools to fight the war — and as I’ve noted, they will continue to fight what they see as an existential fight with or without our help. The only question is whether we prefer for the Ukrainians to fight this war with weapons we can spare, or to try to fight off the Russians with whatever they can scrounge from the rest of the world.