Zelenskiy says Ukraine needs more time to launch counteroffensive

Ukraine has lifted its foot off the accelerator of the major counteroffensive it has been announcing for months to try to regain territory occupied by Russian forces and break lines that have been stalled since last year. Carrying out such a military operation at this time would pay a high price in human lives, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday. "We have to wait, we need a little more time," he said, to launch what is expected to be the largest movement of his army since Russia began the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Zelensky understands, in a BBC interview, that his soldiers are ready in terms of numbers and motivation, but that they do not have all the weapons they need and that, according to him, the allies promised.

His words once again call on the Allies to send more vehicles and ammunition with which to fight the invasion. At the same time, it is possible that the presidential announcement is a strategy to play the game, since Ukrainian military sources recognize that everything is ready to launch the attack. At the end of the day, the Russian Defense Ministry denied that Ukrainian forces had managed to break its defensive lines, after several Russian military bloggers alleged on their Telegram channels that Kiev troops had advanced north and south of the city of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine. Some even suggested that the Ukrainian counteroffensive had already begun, according to Reuters.

"In terms of equipment, not everything has arrived yet," insisted Zelenskiy, who is scheduled to meet the pope in Rome on Saturday, according to Vatican sources. He referred more specifically to armored vehicles that will "protect" his units. "We can move forward with what we have and I think we can succeed, but we will lose a lot of people and I think that's unacceptable," the president said at his Kiev headquarters.

Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba tried this week to lower expectations about the military operation. "Don't consider this counteroffensive the last, because we don't know what will come out of it," he said in an interview with German newspaper Bild. The head of Ukrainian diplomacy took advantage, as almost all those responsible for the Kiev government usually do when they intervene in foreign media, to demand from Berlin more weapons and ammunition of all kinds.

Last September, Ukraine struck a surprise axe to the positions of the Russian army in the province of Kharkiv. That counteroffensive allowed to win in a few days dozens of localities that had been occupied for half a year. The Ukrainians forced the invading troops to retreat to the margins of the neighboring Luhansk region. Now, the Kiev authorities have been commenting publicly on the counteroffensive for so many months that they are preparing that the element of surprise is hardly going to be significant as on that occasion.

The timing of the Ukrainian counteroffensive is determined by two variables: on the one hand, the availability of weapons provided by its NATO allies; On the other hand, meteorology. In the first case, a spokeswoman for the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces assured EL PAÍS last week that the Leopard tanks were already located at the front. Military sources in the eastern region of Donetsk have assured this newspaper that everything is ready on all front lines to launch the attack, and that there is a strategy underway of confusion of the enemy.

This newspaper has been able to confirm that tankers formed in combat with Leopard are already on the front lines of the southern region of Zaporizhia. However, in Donetsk, the hottest of the war, officers of an armored brigade explained this week that their military were still abroad training in the use of these German-made armored vehicles. Ukraine's partners have pledged to contribute 150 Leopard units.

The other condition for starting the offensive is time. Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine's defense minister, has reiterated in the past month that rain would determine when in May the military campaign to break through Russian defenses would begin. This May is being of little rainfall in Ukraine, which would facilitate the movement of armor, both heavy tanks and infantry transport vehicles. The forecast is that Kiev will receive for the counteroffensive about 700 of these armored vehicles to move troops.

Mikola Bielieskov, one of the most prominent experts at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, an agency under the Ukrainian presidency, explained last March that the scope of what his army is planning is so great that the counteroffensive was most likely in June or even July.

Zelenski's words are framed in the complexity of an offensive operation of these dimensions, in a line of war that extends for about 1,200 kilometers and in which the sieges of municipalities turned into bastions by the Russians will be inevitable. In addition, Ukraine has against that much of its most experienced troops are exhausted after more than a year fighting with a low rotation.

According to military theory, an attacking army must have at least a three-to-one superiority over the defender. General Sergei Melnik, head of the province of Kharkiv, said on April 24 in an interview with EL PAÍS that this spring's counteroffensive would require an even greater superiority, from four to six. Russia has been reinforcing its defensive lines for eight months, and has built 800 kilometers of fortifications not seen in Europe since World War II.

Ukraine is also preparing for a possible landing on the southern front, crossing the Dnieper River. This operation, extremely difficult due to the width of the river, requires a large support of artillery, aerial fire and a large number of amphibious vehicles.

Yuri Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, warned last March that without the supply of US F-16 fighter jets, the success of the counteroffensive was not guaranteed. Washington has so far refused to provide these aircraft to Kiev because of the difficulty of preparing pilots and the supply chain for the fighters, but also to avoid an escalation in tension with Moscow. Poland and Slovakia have delivered more than 20 MiG-29s (two squadrons), Soviet-made aircraft known to the Ukrainian Air Force, this year.

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