Six months later, Ukraine changes its strategy to try to break Russia

To a historian like Michel Goya, the war in Ukraine reminds him of the immovable trenches of the First World War.

This retired colonel of the French Army, a researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research, indicates in an essay published this summer that the conflict, which is now active for half a year, is stalled on a 1,300-kilometer front that barely moves.

Goya continues that to get out of the current blockade "there is no other solution than to break the balance with the massive incorporation of new resources, and with innovation".

To try to unbalance the balance, kyiv wants to go from a defensive position to bet everything on the confrontation with the invader.

More information

Last minute of the war in Ukraine, live

"After a dynamic initial phase in which the Russians benefited from the advantage of thrust and surprise, operations have stabilized on a rigid front, in the manner of the fighting in Belgium and France in 1914," writes Goya.

With no sign that the two contenders want to give up their demands to negotiate peace, Ukraine and the world are headed for a long-term crisis.

On paper, Moscow would still be in the second phase of the supposed "liberation" of the Donbas region, on the eastern fringe of the country.

On the other side of the trench, kyiv proclaims that the only way out of the war would be the reconquest of all the land lost since 2014, that is, the Crimean peninsula and Donbas included.

In a still very provisional balance, the United Nations estimates that more than 5,500 civilians have died since the morning of February 24,

The Ukrainian change towards more belligerent positions is the most significant fact after six months of conflict.

In an interview given to various Russian media at the end of March, President Volodymyr Zelensky stated: “I understand that it is impossible to force Russia to completely liberate the territory, it would lead to World War III.

I understand everything perfectly and I am aware.”

And he continued: “That's why I say [to Russia]: it's a compromise.

Go back to where it all started, and there we will try to solve the Donbas problem."

At that time, delegations from the two countries met in the Turkish city of Istanbul to talk.

On the table was the rejection of Ukraine's accession to NATO;

negotiating the situation in Crimea for a period of 15 years, and the possibility of a meeting between Zelensky and Putin,

in which the status of Donbas would be discussed.

Everything was left in borage water.

The death of civilians in the massacres in the kyiv region (Bucha, Irpin, Borodianka), as well as in the shelling of train stations (Kramatorsk), shopping centers (Kremenchuk) and residential areas (Vinnitsia), in addition to the sieges of targets such as the cities of Jersón, Mariupol or Járkov, are the arguments of the Zelenski Executive to close the door to negotiate with the aggressor.

Both the president and his ministers and advisers have lavished themselves over the last month to defend that there is only one way: to win the war.

Just as important to the Ukrainian authorities, the future of an independent Ukraine is at stake.

Emergency personnel evacuating a pregnant woman after Russian forces attacked a maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9. Evgeniy Maloletka (AP)

Zelensky's leadership

No one in the Ukrainian political and social sphere questions anymore that the country should be in the European Union, and even in the Atlantic Alliance.

There are also few at the moment who question Zelensky's management.

“In 2019, when he was elected president, many wondered what kind of politician a person they only knew as a comedian would be,” Sergii Rudenko, a Ukrainian political commentator and author of the Zelensky essay, told EL PAÍS

available as an audiobook on Storytel from August 22).

"The image of Zelensky in Ukraine is very different from the one he has abroad," he continues.

“I could compare him to Mikhail Gorbachev, who was very popular outside the Soviet Union.

Many Westerners see him as a hero, but here he is simply seen as a man who is doing what he should, the only thing he could do, which is to resist the Russian invasion”.

The Russian offensive continues to drive thousands of people from their homes, although the routes of flight have also changed in recent months.

The location of hostilities in the east and part of the south of the country has caused many of the displaced to seek refuge in the western provinces and not cross the borders en masse into Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Moldova, as in the first weeks of war.

According to figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 6.6 million Ukrainians have left their country for other European countries.

The latest report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) puts another 6.6 million citizens spread across the Ukrainian territory who had to leave their homes.

Around five million people have returned to the country,

More difficult to know are the real numbers of deaths, civilians and military.

Russia does not provide data.

Ukraine does its own counting of Russian casualties, currently above 44,000, according to its estimate - US intelligence services lower the figure to less than half, according to

.

The casualties of Ukrainian soldiers are between 100 and 200 dead per day, according to their Government.

The UN Human Rights office had recorded, as of August 15, 5,514 civilian deaths and 7,698 injuries.

Of the fatalities, 356 were minors.

The organization ensures that it is reviewing these numbers and considers it likely that the statistic is higher.

Russian failure

The trickle of deaths continues above all because Russia is careful in indiscriminate bombing.

The vast majority of military analysts agree on the strategic failure of Putin's army, numerically far superior to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Reference Western organizations in monitoring the conflict, from the Institute for the Study of War to the British Ministry of Defense, periodically offer examples of the lack of adaptation of the Russian divisions to modern combat, especially urban combat, and of the terrible state maintenance of their vehicles.

Something that has broken the schemes of the United States military leadership is the poor effectiveness of the enormous Russian air superiority, nullified by the Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses.

Equally surprising has been how the invader has not been able to break the Ukrainian telecommunications system outside the occupied territories, and how Ukraine has managed to block the naval invasion of the powerful Russian fleet.

This has been thanks to state-of-the-art long-range anti-ship missiles, such as the Neptune cruise missiles.

With one Neptune the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, the

, was sunk .

Ukrainian attacks on military positions in Crimea, a peninsula illegally annexed by Russia and the base of its fleet in the Black Sea, have further limited Russian operations in the area, which is limited above all to firing Kalibr long-range missiles.

The Ukrainian coup in Crimea, with its repeated long-range attacks and sabotage missions, has caused stupor among the Russian high ranks, according to documents obtained by the kyiv intelligence services.

Coinciding with this Saturday's drone attack on the Russian fleet headquarters in Sevastopol, the occupying authorities have implemented a package of emergency measures prohibiting the arrival of non-residents on the peninsula or the dissemination of information about the facts,

Russia's mistakes predate the invasion, confirms to EL PAÍS Anthony H. Cordesman, emeritus academic at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

This retired senior US Administration official establishes three decisive factors for Ukraine to have survived Putin's onslaught.

The first factor is that the Russian president did not expect to encounter such a strong Ukrainian civil, political and military resistance.

“His armies of him were neither prepared nor designed for this resistance,” says Cordesman.

The second factor is that the Russian autocrat could not imagine such a strong reaction of support for Ukraine from the West, not only because of the sanctions against it, but also because of the express incorporation into NATO of Sweden and Finland.

The third factor, Cordesman concludes,

The US provides 60% of global military aid to Ukraine.

Without this, and without the enormous military information that kyiv receives from Washington, Ukraine would have lost the war “in three days”.

This was stated this week by Zelensky himself to

.

This newspaper revealed last Tuesday that the Ukrainian president was being warned since autumn 2021 by the US government of Putin's plans to invade Ukraine.

Zelensky confirmed it to the American media and justified it in this way: "If we had communicated it, we would be losing 7,000 million dollars a month since October, and at the moment the Russians attacked, they would have conquered us in three days."

Russian action has focused since April, when the withdrawal from kyiv took place, on a war of attrition with massive use of artillery.

Putin's General Staff has made up for its lack of adaptation to the clash in urban areas with a strategy of conquest by siege and destruction.

The most dramatic case was the fall of the city of Mariupol, on the coast of the Sea of ​​Azov.

Another example is Kharkov, the country's second largest city, where Ukraine has been able to displace the enemy 40 kilometers towards the Russian border, but whose urban center is the target of bombing every day.

Formally, the Russian priority objective is to conquer Donbas, but after the full occupation of Lugansk province, the front remains fixed on Donetsk, where kyiv still controls 40% of its territory.

The invader is now redirecting battalions south, to set up defensive positions in the occupied Kherson and Zaporizhia territories.

Russia wants to unilaterally annex these regions in the fall, which is why it has initiated a forced assimilation of the population and its administrative structure.

A woman and a girl walked through a park while Russian soldiers patrolled on May 20 in Skadovsk, Kherson province. OLGA MALTSEVA (AFP)

difficult counteroffensive

Until now, Ukraine has mostly maintained a defensive position.

In the last two months, it is also carrying out an intense action to destroy the Russian weapons supply network and transport infrastructure in the rear thanks to the 16 Himars long-range artillery multi-launchers that the United States has contributed.

kyiv wants to rewrite the war script with a counteroffensive that recaptures the Kherson region, its worst defeat in the war.

This province is the westernmost point where Russia advances today, giving it a free pass to the gates of Odessa from the Russian border.

Zelensky ordered troops last June to seize the city of Kherson, the enemy's only stronghold on the west bank of the Dnieper River.

But military theory indicates that it is easier to defend than to attack, and for the counteroffensive to be possible, as numerous military sources on the front told EL PAÍS last July, it is necessary to exponentially multiply the supply of weapons, armor and duly trained soldiers. .

Putin has assured that his Army has only shown a small part of its potential.

In fact, Russia has not declared war, according to the Kremlin, it is only "a special operation".

Saint Andrews University professor Marc De Vore leads a report published in the August issue of

—the magazine of the United States Army—in which they assure that time is ticking in favor of Ukraine: “The longer the war, the more likely it is that the economic impact of the sanctions will combine with Russian national discontent and soldier casualties, convincing Putin that continuing the war is too politically dangerous."

Zelensky reiterated on Thursday that he would not sit down to negotiate peace until the last enemy soldier had left the occupied territories.

Oleksii Melnik, co-director of the Razumkov Center for Studies in International Relations and Security Policy, says that the president has no choice because the Ukrainian political class and public opinion do not want another temporary ceasefire, like those that followed the war in Ukraine. 2014: "Any agreement implies territorial concessions from Ukraine, and if there is a ceasefire now, Russia will prepare for the next war, when the West will have already forgotten about Ukraine."

Melnik also believes that time is on Ukraine's side, but only if the support of international allies is maintained.

Without these, his country only awaits disappearance.

NATO and the EU have given support to Zelensky's obstinacy, but Melnik concedes that, with a global economic crisis underway, there will be increasing pressure to pursue a diplomatic path involving territorial losses for Ukraine.

Few military analysts believe that expelling Russia entirely from Ukraine is possible.

"Despite the heroic resistance of the government and its troops, a complete victory for Ukraine is impossible," De Vore concludes in

.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the UN secretary general, António Guterres, are the main supporters of the diplomatic solution to the conflict.

His great fathom is the pact of the grain.

The two enemy countries agreed on July 23 with Turkey and the UN on a roadmap to resume the maritime transport of cereals through the Black Sea, blocked by the Russian fleet, a vital milestone for the supply of the international food market, the only news for hope in six months of war.

Follow all the international information on

50% off

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber