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A member of a Ukrainian air defense unit in the forests north of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday.
© Alice Martins/The Washington Post
Ukraine's armed forces are exhausted after two years of war.
Expelling Russian troops from Ukrainian territory seems utopian.
Kiev – The desperation in the corridors of Ukrainian power is hard to miss.
Almost two years after the start of the Russian invasion, the authorities in Kiev are sticking to their long-standing request to their Western partners: Give us more weapons, more aid, more political commitments.
President Volodymyr Zelensky toured Western capitals late last year, pleading for support at a time when international fatigue over the conflict was growing and the U.S. Congress stalled on the issue of new additional funding for Kiev.
Around the same time, its top general, Valery Zalushny, lamented the “standstill” that had occurred after the Ukrainian counteroffensive expected in 2023 failed to make strategic progress against deep Russian defenses.
Ukraine's armed forces are exhausted after two years of war
As my colleagues reported over the weekend, U.S. officials and their Western counterparts are anticipating a lean year in which increasingly depleted Ukrainian forces will focus more on consolidating their defenses than breaking through Russia's land grab.
The Kremlin controls about a fifth of internationally recognized Ukrainian territory - including Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014, and much of southeastern Ukraine.
The US view of the course of the conflict undermines Zelensky's stated goal of ousting Russia by October this year.
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Last week, Pentagon officials arrived at a monthly 50-nation coordination meeting for Ukraine empty-handed, as future U.S. funding for weapons and aid is blocked by domestic politics.
At the front, supplies of ammunition and artillery shells for many Ukrainian units are reportedly running low.
“We are asked what our plan is, but we need to know what resources we will have,” Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko told my colleagues.
“At the moment everything indicates that we will have less available than last year when we tried a counter-offensive and it didn't work.
... If we have even less, then it's clear what the plan will be.
It will be the defense.”
Putin is waiting for Trump to return to the White House
The political drama in Washington is far from the battlefield.
Republicans in the House of Representatives have already blocked the final tranche of funding that President Biden wants to provide for Kiev.
Analysts believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is awaiting a possible return of former President Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee for November's election.
Trump could scale back his support for Ukraine and take a kinder view of the Kremlin's security concerns in Eastern Europe.
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As my colleagues reported, the Biden administration and European allies are working on a longer-term, multilateral plan to avert this scenario and future-proof support for Ukraine.
These include pledges of economic and security support that extend over the next decade and could pave the way for Ukraine to integrate into Western blocs such as the European Union and NATO.
Biden will present the American part of this strategy in the spring.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meets with President Biden in the Oval Office on December 12.
© Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post
“This policy carries risks, including political ones, if Ukrainians begin to blame their government for the stagnation on the front,” my colleagues write.
“Western capitals are also aware that citizens' patience for financing the war in Ukraine is not infinite.
Amid the planning, “Washington also appears to be preparing to argue that even if Ukraine will not retake all of its territory in the near future, it will need significant ongoing support to be able to defend itself and become an integral part of the West.”
Deficits on the front lines and disunity in Washington could seal Ukraine's fate
In the short term, however, both the shortcomings on the Ukrainian front and the disunity in Washington could seal the fate of the war.
“While control over Ukrainian territory is expected to change little in the first half of 2024, the material, personnel training and casualties suffered by each side over the next few months will determine the long-term course of the conflict,” wrote Jack Watling, a senior researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.
“The West now faces a crucial choice: either support Ukraine so that its leadership can defend its territory and prepare for an offensive in 2025, or cede an irretrievable advantage to Russia.”
The West may have already lost its best chance of enabling Ukraine to fully liberate its territory.
In his new book, Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence, Wall Street Journal international correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov describes how Western governments stopped military support for Ukraine out of fear of possible nuclear escalation with Russia put on the back burner.
The United States and its allies have provided unprecedented aid to Ukraine, but critics say the overly cautious calibration of that support has undermined Ukraine's war effort.
“The United States and its partners held back from supplying Ukraine with Western weapons at a time when they would have had the greatest impact, and they prohibited Kiev from using Western weapons to attack military targets on Russian soil,” wrote Trofimov in an excerpt from his book published in the Washington Post.
“By the time many of these Western systems arrived in the second year of the war, Russia had already built up its defenses, mobilized hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and converted its industries to wartime operations.
The best window of opportunity for a clear and quick Ukrainian victory had passed.”
Too little help for Ukraine from the West
Other experts are not so sure and believe that the Biden administration bore responsibility for avoiding a worsening confrontation with Russia.
“More aid, sooner, would have been better — but there is no guarantee it would have delivered a decisive Ukrainian victory,” wrote Bloomberg columnist Hal Brands.
“The best guarantee of such an outcome would have been the threat of direct military intervention, a strategy that virtually no one wanted to pursue because the risks were so obvious and potentially so serious.
Indeed, this would have required Biden to cross Russia's red lines more aggressively at a time when uncertainty about Putin's response was greatest.
Instead, Ukrainians and their supporters lament what might have been after Ukrainian forces surprised virtually everyone by repelling Russia's first offensive on Kiev and defiantly standing their ground in the early months of the war.
“He opened his mouth like a python and thought we were just another rabbit,” Zelensky said in a 2022 interview with Trofimov, referring to Putin.
"But we're not a rabbit, and it turns out he can't swallow us - and is actually in danger of being torn apart himself."
However, Russia has also stood its ground, defied international sanctions and is preparing for new offensives in Ukraine, in addition to its incessant, indiscriminate rocket fire on Ukrainian cities.
Kiev knows its resilience depends on foreign support.
“We wouldn’t survive without US support, that’s a fact,” Zelensky said in a television interview this month.
To the author
Ishaan Tharoor
is a foreign policy columnist at The Washington Post, where he writes the Today's WorldView newsletter and column.
In 2021, he was awarded the Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary by the American Academy of Diplomacy.
Previously, he was a senior editor and correspondent at Time Magazine, first in Hong Kong and later in New York.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on January 29, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.