The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
On Sept. 10, the great breakthrough was underway. “The Ukrainians went forward again,” breathless reports from the front lines said. “The Ukrainian Armed Forces are moving west of Novoprokopovka, east of Verbovo and between Novoprokopovka and Verbovo, expanding the breakthrough zone.”
Fifty days later, those obscure villages are still being mentioned every day as the location of ongoing clashes between Ukrainian and Russian forces. The “big push” has stalled and the Russian lines have held. Both sides are making local attacks along the length of the 560-mile-long front, but nobody is going anywhere fast.
This matters much more for the Ukrainians, for three reasons. First, if it really has become a war of attrition, Russia’s population is more than three times higher and its economy (thanks to oil and gas) is 10 times bigger. Without a lot of foreign help with money and military supplies, Ukraine cannot possibly win.
Second, that help must come from countries that are sympathetic, but whose vital interests are not at stake in the war. To keep them committed, Ukraine has to demonstrate on a regular basis that it is winning — or at least has a good chance of winning.
Third, the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas in the Middle East, while a much smaller event with almost no risk of escalation to the nuclear level, is far more resonant emotionally for the big Western powers. For Americans, in particular, the Russia-Ukraine war has already fallen off the news agenda.
Even if there were a rapid resolution to the Gaza conflict — possible, but not likely — the Ukrainians are stuck in a military stalemate unless they can figure out what went wrong with their great offensive and fix it. Figuring it out is the easy part.
Without air superiority, the Ukrainians cannot do NATO-style deep penetrations by fast-moving armored forces. They have to rely on the more plodding approach of the Russian army, which has long experience of fighting without complete control of the skies.
Such tactics can succeed, but the Russian doctrine relies on dividing your force into two echelons: first-line units to make the breakthrough, and operational reserve units to develop it.
The first-line units do the lengthy, costly, exhausting business of chewing their way through deep enemy defenses. Then, if and when they have opened up a breach, the reserve units race through to exploit it while the worn-out first-line troops just hold the shoulders of the breach open.
But what if the first-line units struggle to make that initial breakthrough? Maybe there are just too many mines, enemy drones everywhere directing artillery that protects those minefields, and movement is possible only at night.
Then you have to commit some of your reserve units to help the initial breakthrough attempt. Do too much of that, however, and you may not have enough reserves left to exploit the breakthrough when you finally achieve it.
That is clearly what happened to the great Ukrainian offensive. They finally got through most of the minefields and the “dragon’s teeth” by early September, but they ran out of reserves. They have just been bouncing back and forth between Verbovo and Novoprokopovka for the past seven weeks.
The Ukrainians don’t have the numbers, and they probably won’t have the numbers. On the other hand, the Russians continue to demonstrate that they may have the numbers, but they don’t have the skill or the will to break through themselves.
So it becomes a waiting game now, with no clear path to victory for either side. If we can think of this situation as World War I in miniature, then 20 months into the war brings us to early 1916.
What followed in 1917 were more offensives, of course, but much more importantly huge mutinies in the French, Italian and Russian armies as the stalemate lengthened, the casualties mounted ever higher, and the sheer futility of the whole enterprise struck home.
So which army’s morale is worse, the Ukrainian or the Russian? Which leader looks more insecure, Volodomyr Zelenskyy or Vladimir Putin? A second presidential term for Donald Trump would confound everybody’s calculations, but the odds still favor Ukraine.
