Ukraine not losing, Russia advancing at just 1.5-4.5 km per month: General

By Marc Champion

 

Over the past week, Ukraine’s top military commander has given his most detailed assessment yet of the fight to halt Russia’s invasion. This wasn’t prompted by any sudden battlefield reversal. It reflects, rather, a deep and justifiable alarm that Kyiv has lost control of the war’s narrative, just as the US tries to force it into a terrible ceasefire deal. 

General Oleksandr Syrskyi is an old-school, Soviet-trained officer and by all accounts little loved by his troops. He has to be cajoled by his communications team to speak in public at all. So, when he gives major interviews to both Ukrainian domestic media and German public TV in the space of a week, it’s worth paying attention.

 

 

The main point he tried to get across was that, yes, the situation at the front is bad, because Russia is bigger. It has a much larger population and economy and cares less about casualties. But not since the first days of his invasion has President Vladimir Putin been able to translate that advantage into a successful ground offensive of the kind that Ukrainian troops mounted, twice, in the late summer and fall of 2022. Russia continues to move forward at a rate of just 1.5-4.5 kilometers (0.9-2.8 miles) per month, at enormous cost.

 

So you could feel Syrskyi’s exasperation as he complained to Germany’s ZDF TV that “even Russian military manuals say breaking through fortified defenses should develop at a rate of 1.5-3 kilometers per day. Instead, they achieve 1.5 kilometers per month. So, the question is: Can this honestly be considered a successful offensive?”

 

Semantics matter in this case. After its initial hubris and failures, Moscow’s plan now is to turn small tactical gains into large strategic ones by persuading the world — and in particular the men surrounding US President Donald Trump — that the only course left for Kyiv is to cede the victory that Russian troops have been unable to secure by force.

 

Moreover, it’s evident from the Kremlin’s statements of its war aims, as well as the recent 28-point Russian-US “peace” proposal, that any terms should leave Ukraine militarily weakened, providing the option to resume the invasion from a better position at a later date. Plus the deal should be so humiliating as to turn Ukrainians against their government and the Western allies who let it happen.

 

None of this would matter if Trump weren’t so eager to reset US relations with Russia that he’s willing to do it at Ukraine’s expense. When he tells President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine has “no cards” to play, that’s mainly because Trump keeps taking them away.

 

Since returning to power the US president has: ceded the principle that Ukraine should never be able to join Nato, a key Russian demand; stopped almost all US financial and military aid to Ukraine; and, in March, suspended intelligence sharing and communications support long enough for Moscow to recapture Russian territory around Kursk. Ukrainian troops had held on there since a lightning offensive aimed precisely at acquiring a territorial card to play at the negotiating table.

 

All of this should have been traded for Russian concessions but was given away instead. So there was something especially galling about the dire warning Trump’s Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll took to Kyiv in November, telling stunned Ukrainians they must accept that 28-point deal, because they were losing hard on the battlefield and it could only get worse.

 

War isn’t fair. Ukraine is the weaker party, so it will have to make concessions to end Russia’s invasion: Zelenskyy himself has proposed a ceasefire on current lines and said he was ready to put the question of territorial control in the country’s east to a referendum, Bloomberg News has reported. Yet somehow Moscow has managed to dominate the telling of just how much weaker Ukraine is, and therefore how large its concessions must be. That’s what makes Syrskyi’s interventions so interesting.

 

First, he gave an in-depth description of how the nature of war has changed on Ukraine’s drone-dominated battlefields, implying that people making decisions based on his country’s position may not know what they’re talking about.

 

He then pushed back against Russia’s repeated claims to have taken the small eastern-front city of Pokrovsk. After more than a year of Russian efforts and a concentration of as many of 170,000 troops, Syrskyi said his own forces hold 13 of the city’s 29 square kilometers. His defenders were not, he said, cut off or encircled in a neighboring town, as the Russians have been claiming.

 

Syrskyi’s word isn’t gospel either. He’s trying to win a war, not report on it. But even if — as is likely — Pokrovsk should finally fall in the coming weeks, that misses the point, which is how long this has taken Russia even with its overwhelming advantages.

 

Cities make for natural defenses because they force urban warfare. Pokrovsk had a prewar population of about 65,000, which matters only as an indication of how many buildings defenders can use for cover. The remaining 20 per cent or so of Donetsk province that Putin wants in exchange for a ceasefire includes the so-called fortress belt of cities that his forces have been trying to reach since 2014. These include Kramatorsk, with a 2013 population of about 165,000; Slovyansk, 138,000; Kostyantynivka, 77,000; and Pokrovsk-sized Druzhkivka.

 

Past performance is no guarantee of the future. But at its current pace Russia would have to fight on for years to take what Putin wants gifted to him.

 

There would be a massive cost to forcing Ukraine into a bad deal based on a false narrative of imminent military collapse, and one that would legitimize the Kremlin’s invasion by fulfilling part of Putin’s illegal annexation claims. The sense of betrayal in Kyiv would resonate along the eastern borders of Nato and the European Union for years to come. The Kremlin would draw its own conclusions about what more is possible.

 

This is the moment for a deal. But US negotiators need to stop parroting the Russians and work with whatever amendments to the US-Russian plan Kyiv just sent back by pressing Putin over his own economic and demographic vulnerabilities. The goal should be a ceasefire that recognizes Ukraine is too weak to seize that land back, but doesn’t further reward Putin for his aggression, or tee up his forces for a more successful invasion later.

 

If Trump’s team can do that, they may just be able to broker a peace that lasts. If they don’t, they’ll be abetting the Kremlin in a war of conquest that it’s all but certain to resume.  (Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper)