A year has passed since Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive and, while the picture on the ground may be mixed, its legacy is clear. The Russians are emboldened; Ukraine is once again on the defensive.
To succeed in pushing the Russians out of Ukraine, Kyiv’s strategists needed to do two things: sever the land bridge (and supply lines) that linked Russia and Crimea, and regain control of important infrastructure such as the Zaporizhzhia Power Plant. It failed on both counts. From early June to mid-September, the Ukrainians only captured 305 square kilometres of territory. To put that in perspective, at that pace, it would take Kyiv over 50 years to push Russian forces back to the pre-2014 invasion borders. Added to this, during the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, as much as 20% of the weaponry Kyiv sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed.
This was a failure of both tactics and logistics. Kyiv’s lack of offensive operations in the preceding months allowed the Russians to build heavily fortified lines across the front, particularly in Zaporizhzhya. They worked on a principle of layers: of static defence of barriers, ditches, military positions and, above all, vast swathes of minefields. The Ukrainians used Western-donated heavy mine clearance vehicles to try get around these, but they could not escape the Russian surveillance drone units, which would call in their location to artillery and attack helicopters. Once these vehicles were destroyed, Ukrainian columns behind them were unable to move without triggering more mines. It quickly became a “kill zone” for Russian artillery.
Then there was the issue of strategy. Western, particularly American, advisors urged Kyiv to focus its offensive solely on the Zaporizhzhya axis to sever the vital Russian supply line. Instead, Kyiv distributed its forces across the front to try to break through in multiple areas — a diffusion of attack that meant they were unable to penetrate anywhere. The result is that, last month, the Russians were able to launch a counteroffensive of their own in the Kharkiv region; there has been hard fighting in the village of Lyptsi and town of Vovchansk ever since.
Sat roughly 19 miles from the Russian border, Kharkiv itself is now on the receiving end of almost everything Moscow has to offer. The latest are glide bombs: essentially conventional bombs that can be launched remotely instead of directly over the target. This means they can be fired from planes 60-70km away from the intended target — so from Russia — and out of the range of the Ukrainian air defences. During the initial phase of the Kharkiv offensive, Russia dropped 20 glide bombs on Vovchansk in one day alone. The Russians are pounding the city with them daily. On a street near the centre, I see an apartment building that was recently struck. Window-shaped squares are filled with plywood; the building facade is pockmarked with shrapnel holes. I drive past several buildings — all civilian — that have suffered the same fate. The Ukrainians had no way of defending against these new weapons until they were finally given permission to use US weapons on Russian territory.
If glide bombs are an innovation, century-old weapons are just as effective. In a park in Vovchansk, I meet Leonid, a captain in the Pioneers platoon, which lays and removes mines.
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