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Ukraine’s counteroffensive: Prospects for success, unity, and peace
I haven’t written about the war in Ukraine in a while, largely because not much has changed since my last dispatch on the subject 10 weeks ago. But now that we’re seeing signs that the start of the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive is nearing, it’s time for me to tell you how I think it’s going to go and what it’ll mean for the trajectory of the war.
I’m modestly optimistic about Ukraine’s odds. In part, this is because of how all-in the US and its NATO allies are on Kyiv’s success, having provided everything short of fighter jets and boots on the ground. And in part, it’s because of how patient the Ukrainians have proven to be in building up new units and incorporating Western weapons and ammunition – and how competently they’ve defended against Russia’s failed winter offensive.
I expect that Ukraine will be able to recapture a sizeable amount of land, especially in the south, but will fail to break the land bridge between Russia and Crimea and threaten Russian control of the peninsula. Russia, which has about 350,000 troops dug in heavily armed defensive positions across the front lines and especially in the Zaporizhzhia region, will suffer significant losses but maintain overall cohesion. Having spent the last several months building up significant defensive capabilities in anticipation of a Ukrainian advance against the land bridge, they won’t get routed.
Rather than react with a major escalation of the war, such as by using tactical nukes in Ukraine, Russia’s response to the limited losses will be closer to business-as-usual (aka brutal but not existentially so).
Ukraine’s Western partners will see this outcome of limited gains and minimal escalation as a win, ensuring that political and military support for Kyiv will remain robust through 2024 despite growing Republican resistance and European war weariness.
Diplomatic efforts to bring about a truce will fall flat, as Ukrainian gains will dampen Kyiv’s already minimal desire to compromise and Russian losses won’t be large enough to force Moscow to the negotiating table. That includes the peace push by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who last week spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the first time since the war began and offered economic support for Ukraine’s reconstruction in exchange for a ceasefire (for more on Xi’s role as peace broker, watch my latest QuickTake).
In this “goldilocks” scenario – my base case – Ukraine’s counteroffensive will yield just enough gains to maintain strong Western political and military support while minimizing the risk of major Russian escalation.
But of course, this isn’t the only possible scenario. In fact, there are two other ways this could go that I see as plausible (if less so).
The next most likely scenario is that Ukraine’s counteroffensive makes too little progress, failing to retake meaningful swathes of land and leaving the front lines roughly unchanged. This could happen if Ukrainian forces prove unable to execute combined arms operations effectively, fail to adjust to the multiple new weapons systems they’ve received from NATO, or run out of ammunition before they’ve managed to overcome well dug-in Russian defensive lines.
Disappointment with Ukraine’s counteroffensive and the prospect of a prolonged stalemate would lead Western and especially American political support for Kyiv to start to falter. With US presidential elections around the corner and a more than even chance that Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, Congress would start openly questioning the end goal of US involvement in Ukraine. Military aid would be scaled back, and calls for negotiations from many Republicans and most Europeans would get louder.
At this point, Xi’s recent peace offer will start to look more attractive – not so much to the Ukrainians, who’ll remain extremely reluctant to make concessions, but certainly to significant pieces of the Western coalition. Under pressure from their allies, Kyiv and Moscow may or may not reluctantly agree to talk. But what’s certain is that the gap between the Russian and Ukrainian positions will remain unbridgeable, keeping a durable peace out of reach.
Less likely but still plausible is the possibility that the counteroffensive makes more dramatic progress, and Ukraine manages to cut off the land bridge and threaten Russia’s hold of Crimea. As I said, this is quite a long shot but not inconceivable. If the new Western armored infantry vehicles, artillery, and rocket systems allow the Ukrainians to break Russian defenses around Tokmak, they could potentially advance relatively quickly toward Melitopol.
Moscow would respond to this massive strategic loss by significantly escalating destructive asymmetric attacks against NATO states, possibly with cyber and physical sabotage of US and European critical infrastructure. While many analysts believe Crimea is a “red line” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in their view would consider using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine in response, I find it very unlikely that he’d doom his regime and risk mutually assured destruction over the peninsula.
What Russia might do in this scenario, however, is request direct military assistance from its “friend without limits,” China. Yet China has thus far shown very little willingness to back up its “friendship” with Russia with anything more than words. It’s likely Xi would only heed Putin’s request if Russia was on the verge of “losing” the war, to prevent a Russian collapse and the instability that would ensue. And even then, the bar for direct lethal aid is very high, as Xi knows it would trigger US sanctions on Beijing, threaten China’s relationship with its second-largest trading partner (Europe), tarnish its standing with the Global South, and dramatically escalate the US-China confrontation.
Whether or not China decides to enter the fray, there’d be no path for peace talks in this scenario. The Russians would be extremely reluctant to negotiate from a position of such weakness, while the Ukrainians would want to try to seize even more land before sitting down with someone they consider a war criminal.
In fact, the biggest “hope” (if you can call it that) for a ceasefire sooner than later lies with a fourth, most remote scenario in which the counteroffensive not only fails, but Russia makes meaningful gains of its own.
Should Russia successfully repel Ukraine’s attacks and capture significant new territory in the Donbas or elsewhere, fear of further losses could push Zelensky toward diplomacy. Both sides would have an incentive to de-escalate, but talks would have little chance of achieving a lasting – let alone just – peace given the fundamentally irreconcilable differences between the Russian and Ukrainian positions.
Notably, to the extent that we’re likely to see any negotiations (however futile) between the Russians and the Ukrainians under any scenario, it’s the Chinese rather than the Americans or the Europeans who’ll be best positioned to broker them.
While a long-term, sustainable settlement is probably many, many years away, Xi’s unique leverage over Putin gives him the best chance of anyone to give it a shot. Coming on the back of the Iran-Saudi Arabia rapprochement recently brokered by Beijing and China’s offer to mediate Israel/Palestine talks last week, even an unsuccessful peace push will bolster Xi’s narrative that China is ready to take on a constructive role as a diplomatic superpower capable of challenging the US for global influence.- Ukrainian offensive tests Russian defenses - GZERO Media ›
- Russia's exit from Black Sea grain deal will drive up food prices - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: Is Ukraine's counteroffensive failing, or is the tide about to turn? - GZERO Media ›
- Why Ukraine's strategy is "stretch, starve, strike" - GZERO Media ›
- Ukraine's counteroffensive on the brink - GZERO Media ›
Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in St. Petersburg.
Russian revenge vs. Ukrainian resolve
Vladimir Putin responded on Monday to Kyiv's (alleged) involvement in blowing up part of the only bridge connecting Crimea to Russia by unleashing fire and fury against Ukrainian cities.
Although some feared that attacking Crimea would push Putin to go nuclear, his retaliation was swift but conventional — and somewhat measured in terms of the actual damage done by an aggressor capable of wanton bloodshed. Also, Russia’s president blamed the blast on Ukrainian "terrorism," not the West, which means he doesn’t want to pick a direct fight with NATO.
How did we get here? Will it be a turning point in the war? And what might Putin do next?
The symbolic and strategic importance of the Kerch Strait Bridge cannot be overstated — on both sides. For Russia, it was an engineering feat that solidified its control over the peninsula Moscow annexed in 2014 and is crucial for keeping military supply lines open between Crimea and the Russian mainland. For Ukraine, it was a painful reminder of that occupation and, above all, a legitimate military target.
Indeed, even only partial damage to the rail lines on the bridge might hurt Russia's ability to move troops and equipment back and forth. The only alternative is the hard-to-traverse "land bridge" through four Ukrainian regions recently annexed by the Kremlin, which could well become the next objective for Kyiv.
Still, the airstrikes are likely a one-off tactical response to a strategic setback. Putin’s domestic audience demanded a strong retaliation to the bridge blast, says Alex Brideau, Eurasia Group's lead Russia analyst. But beyond that, he adds, the Russians need to be practical: they're running low on precision weapons and can't sustain a prolonged airstrike campaign.
Putin is signaling two things with his response. First, “that he has the situation under control, which is important for him at a time when more people in Russia are questioning that," says Brideau. Second, he’s warning the Ukrainians that he's willing to escalate further. But what that means is unclear.
"He's being ambiguous about it. He's not giving the Ukrainians something specific to to think that they shouldn't try a particular thing because Putin would respond with something even more aggressive the next time around."
Putin, Brideau adds, has spent the last few weeks scrambling to demonstrate that whatever happens in Ukraine, he knows what to do next.
"The problem is that it's not clear just how much everybody still trusts him. They're not going to overthrow him or anything. But he has more convincing that he has to do now compared to before."
For Kyiv, the attack on the bridge was certainly worth the risk. "The Ukrainian perspective about the war has really hardened, especially after Putin's recent decision to annex four Ukrainian regions," Brideau says. "They don't have a lot to lose in being very forward that their attitude is to retake territory."
That explains why Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has gone from asking for direct talks with Putin to last week signing a decree ruling out direct negotiations with him. In other words, Zelensky knows that talking to Putin is a fool's errand: the Russian leader will not accept peace without taking territory or a stable security relationship with a sovereign Ukraine.
Russia's retaliation will give Ukrainians anything but pause in their resolve to win the war, says Brideau. Don't be surprised if there’s another attack on the bridge.
Putin is mistaken if he thinks he can scare Ukraine into capitulation, says Brideau. The airstrikes are "more likely to harden the public resolve that the war needs to be won on Ukrainian terms because people are going to blame Putin long before they're going to blame Zelensky for their problems."
They might also strengthen the Western resolve to support Ukraine and stand up to Russia. Images of Russian missile attacks on civilians in Ukrainian cities will hardly encourage the Europeans to push Ukraine to sue for peace.
For Brideau, further raids will only “solidify some of the trends that have been evident throughout the war: increasing Ukrainian unity domestically and this unity that we've seen between Europe and the US and other Western countries on what to do about it."
Finally, are we now closer to what US President Joe Biden would call Armageddon or to Putin asking for an off-ramp? There's nothing to indicate that the Russian leader is now more likely to use a tactical nuclear weapon than before. If anything, Putin's language referring to the bridge blast as terrorism likely means he leans more toward conventional responses than nukes.
"The chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon remains very low,” Brideau says. “The risk is not zero, but it is very low."
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Cars burn after a Russian military strike in central Kyiv.
What We’re Watching: Terror in Kyiv, World Bank/IMF meetings
Putin lashed out after Crimea bridge blast
On Monday, Russia unleashed a barrage of air strikes against major Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa. Lviv, which had been considered a safe haven for those fleeing the fighting in eastern Ukraine, was also hit. Although we don't have a death toll yet, it'll be high because the attacks occurred during rush hour and targeted civilian areas. The missiles also destroyed critical infrastructure, knocked out power, and sent civilians into bomb shelters for the first time in months.
It's a steep military escalation by the Kremlin following Saturday's explosion on the bridge linking Crimea to Russia, which Vladimir Putin blamed on Ukrainian "terrorists." Putin ordered the strikes before meeting his national security council, presumably to come up with a response to the blast. No official word from the Kremlin, but Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, a hardliner and staunch Putin ally, voiced his support for the reprisal, saying that he’s finally 100% satisfied with the way the “special military operation” in Ukraine is being carried out. Kadyrov and far-right commentators had been calling for Moscow to take revenge by hitting Ukraine’s key infrastructure.
The ferocity of Monday's offensive highlights how much the Kerch Strait Bridge means to Russia ... and to Putin. The only physical connection Russia has with the peninsula it seized eight years ago was opened with much fanfare in 2018 by Putin himself to solidify the annexation. Apart from that symbolism, it also has great strategic value as an essential supply link to Russian forces fighting in southern Ukraine. The Russians got it partially up and running by Sunday, but the damage on the bridge will likely restrict Russian military movements, forcing Moscow to rely on maritime ferries for troop and equipment logistics as well as the hard-to-traverse “land bridge” through the four Ukrainian regions the Kremlin recently annexed.
Doom & gloom at World Bank/IMF meetings
On Monday, the World Bank and the IMF kick off their annual autumn meetings in Washington, DC. The gathering comes at a gloomy time for the global economy, battered by inflation, higher borrowing costs, and persistent supply chain disruptions. The IMF is expected to lower its 2023 growth forecast and estimates that countries accounting for at least one-third of the global economy will enter a technical recession — two consecutive quarters of GDP decline — over the next year. Why? Europe is reeling from an energy crunch linked to Russia's war in Ukraine, while China's economy is in the doldrums thanks to the fallout from zero-COVID and a property market slump. Meanwhile, the US is trying to tame inflation with shock therapy in the form of higher interest rates that might solve the problem at home but will make it harder for developing nations to pay off their debt (and a strong US dollar won't help anyone either). What can the IMF do to ease the pain? Offer financial support to countries deep in the red — if they commit to the reforms that'll allow them to pay back the money. But that’s what they’re supposed to do anyway, right?This article comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.