Ukraine is already planning its biggest counteroffensive with NATO armored vehicles

Ukraine and Russia are immersed in a race against time to prepare their spring offensives, a few months that both Armies consider decisive for the future of the war.

Whoever hits first will have the advantage of altering the rival's plans.

The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valeri Zaluzhni, is designing a counteroffensive that, according to his own words, must serve to recover all the territory lost since the start of the invasion, last February.

His plans go through receiving the NATO tanks.

There is a fundamental difference with respect to the successful Ukrainian offensives of the past summer and autumn on the Kharkov front -in the east of the country- and on the Kherson front -in the south-: since then, the Russian defense lines have been fortified in an extension and resources not seen in Europe since World War II.

Several lines of hundreds of kilometers, with concrete structures, pits for defensive tank positions, barriers against armor, machine gun nests and trenches with shelters carefully built to resist artillery.

If Ukraine wants to advance with its infantry, it needs an armored strike force that it does not have now.

His NATO allies have stepped in to guarantee him whatever resources they can.

Since last December there have been announcements to multiply the shipment of light armored attack vehicles and infantry transport, especially by the United States —its Bradleys, Humvees and Strykers—, Germany —with the Marders— and France — with the AMX-10.

Zaluzhni calculated that he needed 700 more of these vehicles, and for now, according to this newspaper's count, 600 units may arrive in the coming weeks.

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Similar vehicles were key in the offensive last September that drove the Russians out of Kharkov province.

But the positions in Moscow were weaker at that time and rapid action platoons of 12 soldiers shielded by these light armored vehicles and supported by artillery were enough to launch the tactical attacks that broke the enemy lines.

The situation is now more complex and the Ukrainian advance will require heavy tanks.

Zaluzhni quantified last December at 300 heavy tanks from the West that would be optimal to recover the territory lost since February.

Ukraine would now have around 600 tanks, according to estimates for 2022 based on data from the British defense think tank RUSI and the Oryx analysis group, up from 1,200 last March.

These combat tanks are Soviet models, especially the T-72 and T-64, most of them in poor condition due to the harshness of the current conflict since they have been in use since the war in Donbas, which began in 2014. Ukraine is also has done with about 450 tanks captured from the Russians.

But of these, according to soldiers consulted in mid-January by this newspaper on the Lugansk front,

only no more than a third —less than 150— would have recovered for combat;

the rest are scrapped and the parts are used for repairs.

Russia, on the other hand, would have about 1,500 operatives.

Some, like the T-90, the T-80 BVM and the T-64 BV, are at the level of Western armor.

Colonel Alkut, commander of the 3rd Separate Mechanized Brigade, one of the soldiers with the most combat experience in Ukraine, told EL PAÍS on January 15 that a Western heavy tank is equivalent to two or three Soviet tanks used by their companies. —especially the T-72, old and common models in the war.

Oleksiy Melnik, co-director of the kyiv-based Razumkov defense think tank, believes the lead is closer to three than two.

Ukrainian soldiers climb into their tanks near the city of Bakhmut, on the eastern front, on January 13.

STRINGER (REUTERS)

Melnik warns that tanks are not the ultimate solution for Ukraine, and is of the opinion that every time kyiv's allies concede in donating some kind of weapons, the same diplomatic conflicts and also the same high hopes have been unleashed for years: “It already happened with the Patriots [US anti-aircraft defenses], who told us that it was unthinkable to receive them, and we already have them.

Now it is with the tanks and tomorrow it will be with the planes”.

Ukraine has a minuscule air force compared to Russia's, but the invader cannot take advantage of this superiority either because Ukraine's mobile air defense systems have proven highly effective.

Advance from Zaporizhia

According to the information that Melnik receives from the military and senior administration officials, NATO armored vehicles would be concentrating on a counteroffensive in a specific sector of the front, presumably in the province of Zaporizhia.

The North American chain CNN published an information on Tuesday in which several voices of the Atlantic Alliance demanded that Ukraine give in its Numantine defense of Bakhmut, in the province of Donetsk.

The battle for Bakhmut is bleeding both sides and the sources quoted by CNN recommended that Zaluzhny focus on a counter-offensive in Zaporizhia because it is the way to cut the connection between the Russian border, the occupied territories in the Azov Sea and in Kherson, and stand at the gates of the Crimea.

Melnik does not rule out that the preparations for an attack in Zaporizhia could also serve as a diversionary maneuver to progress on another front by surprise, as happened last September, when the Ukrainian Armed Forces insisted that the objective was to liberate the city of Kherson and launched the offensive in the Kharkiv province.

The southern front, between the province of Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk, is at a standstill because the two Armies are separated by one of the mightiest rivers in Europe, the Dnieper.

A landing would require a huge number of troops, artillery and amphibious vehicles for Ukraine.

The alternative for kyiv is Zaporizhia, a province that also crosses the Dnieper and where it still controls part of the eastern bank.

The terrain in Zaporizhia, flat and without large urban concentrations, is ideal for the advance of armored vehicles, according to Thibault Fouillet, a French soldier and analyst at the Foundation for Strategic Research.

Fouillet also believes that Ukraine will bet on concentrating the hundred tanks that it can receive from NATO in a major counteroffensive at a specific point on the front: “We must take into account the Ukrainian way of waging war from the beginning of the conflict;

each offensive was built on a massive concentration of deep [artillery] fire, the progress of mechanized infantry and tanks.”

Fouillet believes that both the front between Kharkov and Lugansk and the Zaporizhia front are geographically optimal for this offensive, although he also concludes that the Zaporizhia option would be more decisive for the future of the war.

100 tanks for spring

Fouillet estimates that 100 tanks are precisely what Ukraine can get from its allies in the spring, especially different models of the Leopard 2, the American Abrams and the British Challenger 2 – French President Emmanuel Macron has also shown himself willing to donate French Leclerc―.

Some 300 tanks, according to Fouillet, are still a distant goal, but certainly, in his opinion, enough for new, perhaps decisive, counter-offensives.

Melnik, on the other hand, intuits that Zaluzhni wanted the 300 tanks for the same counteroffensive.

Jacek Tarocinski, a defense expert at the Center for Eastern Studies (Warsaw), is skeptical about the possibility of NATO ever sending 300 tanks: “To be honest, there are not many heavy tanks available in Western Europe.

Ukraine has already lost and gained more tanks in this war than many European countries have, and it still needs more."

The experts consulted for this article agree that the different tanks that Ukraine receives should be concentrated in a few regiments to streamline the supply chains of components, fuel, and ammunition from Poland.

This would be easier if these supply lines were also directed to the same geographical area.

For the long-awaited spring counteroffensive —this objective has been set by the Pentagon itself, but also made public this January by the commander of the Ukrainian Defense intelligence services, Kirilo Budanov—, Ukraine will also have a hundred anti-mine caterpillars Germany and the United States, apart from 70 new modern self-propelled artillery guns from American, British, Swedish and French artillery.

These would be added to the nearly 240 cannons already received in 2022, according to the count of the Institute for the World Economy in Kiel (Germany).

A Ukrainian soldier prepares to fire a shell in the Zaporizhia region.

REUTERS

That Zaporizhia may be the new hot spot of the war would be demonstrated by the fact that Russia began a series of small-scale offensives in the province this January that have allowed it to advance a few kilometers.

If Ukraine were to make progress on this sector of the front, the Russian supply lines on the Azov and Black Sea coasts would be even closer to Himars rocket range, the most powerful artillery in this war, with a radius of action of 80 kilometres.

Ukrainian diplomacy calls on Washington to deliver longer-range missiles, but the White House has ruled it out for fear that they will be used to hit Russian soil and even Crimea itself, a red line for Moscow.

Time is running out against Ukraine, which has already missed the window of winter to attack.

The coldest months, with frozen ground, are the best for tank movement.

On the other hand, in spring, the terrain is a quagmire and the caterpillars work more slowly.

Another issue is how long it can take for NATO tanks to be operational in Ukraine.

The United States has announced that it will transfer 31 of its Abrams tanks to Ukraine despite the fact that officially, until last week, it argued that it was not a suitable weapon because it is more technically complex, consumes a lot of fuel and is more difficult to learn to drive. compared to the German Leopards.

published this Wednesday that the Abrams may take months to be ready to fight.

If Russia were to start its counteroffensive earlier – Ukrainian intelligence services expect it to be in Donetsk – and force Zaluzhni to change his plans, Tarocinski points out that these tanks are also optimal for defense tasks.

What is certain, General Robert B. Abrams – whose father gives their name to these American armored vehicles – affirmed to

, “is that these tanks will destroy” most Soviet models: “They will put a hole in everything they want".

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