After entering 2024 in a sorry state, Ukraine has notched up a series of notable achievements since the start of the year, giving fresh impetus to its fight back against Russia.
Western allies have let it use some of the missile systems they’ve supplied to hit targets inside Russia, with notable caveats, giving it a better chance to defend itself against incoming Russian attacks.
And it also regained the initiative with its surprise incursion into the Russian region of Kursk in August, even while gradually losing ground in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine remains locked in a ground fight with a Russian army that’s absorbing heavy losses and continuing to swell as it eyes a grinding victory. The greatest danger is this pressure collapses part of Ukraine’s defenses in the east.
“What Ukraine has done in the past month, starting with Kursk, is not going to turn around the war by any means,” Abishur Prakash, the founder of The Geopolitical Business, Inc., a strategy advisory firm in Toronto, told BI.
“But it’s definitely changed the war,” he added.
Getting F-16s and long-awaited weapons
Delays in getting Western equipment have long been a source of frustration for Ukraine.
In May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the West always seems to provide weapons a year after it needs them.
“Every decision to which we, then later everyone together, comes to is late by around one year,” Zelenskyy told Reuters.
But some long-awaited Western weapons have started to arrive.
These include US-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, in April, and F-16 fighter jets last month.
According to Mark Temnycky, a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, F-16s will not immediately give Ukraine air superiority in the conflict — something neither side has managed to accomplish — but they will bolster Ukraine’s ability to shoot down missiles and drones from the skies.
“Aside from the military capabilities of these aircraft, the arrival of these jets will provide a morale boost to Ukrainian soldiers and civilians,” he said.
But it’s not all good news for Ukraine: Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, said recently that some vital military equipment that had been pledged to Ukraine wouldn’t arrive until 2027.
Striking inside Russia
From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, allies, including the US, barred Ukraine from using advanced weapons they’d supplied to strike targets inside Russia like the air bases and resupply lines critical to its invasion.
A Ukrainian commander operating in the Kharkiv region near the Russian border told The Times of London in May that his unit watched as Russia amassed a huge force but had to wait for the troops to cross the border into Ukraine to hit them.
Western allies lifted some restrictions in May, allowing Ukraine to strike Russian troops building up at its borders.
But Ukraine is still not allowed to use Western weapons to carry out deep strikes within Russia, despite the pleas of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
There are 245 military targets in Russia within range of the ATACMS missiles Ukraine now has on hand, according to a map released last month by the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.
Taking the war inside Russia
The biggest change this year is that Ukraine altered the dynamics of the conflict by launching a surprise attack on Russia’s Kursk region.
The incursion — the first foreign military operation on Russian soil since World War II — caught Russia and the West off guard.
In just two weeks, starting on August 6, Ukraine claims its forces took more territory in Kursk than Russia had since the beginning of 2024.
Russia, meanwhile, has struggled to respond quickly and effectively, partly due to its complex military structures, a lack of contingency plans, and poor command and control.
According to Mark Cancian, a retired US Marine Corps colonel and defense strategy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, what Ukraine has done is show that it can shift to the attack.
This is important “after eight months on the defensive and last year’s failed counteroffensive,” he told BI.
However, “Ukraine is still in a precarious military situation,” he said.
Creating a winning strategy
According to an update from the Institute for the Study of War, the Kursk incursion has likely failed to change Putin’s strategic thinking.
Putin still believes Russia can slowly and indefinitely take over Ukraine through grinding advances and accomplish its objectives by fighting a war of attrition and outlasting Western support, it said. Ukraine’s emphasis on regaining territory and reluctance to mobilize more soldiers may have complicated its defenses.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is hoping its incursion will help it to achieve victory.
During a press conference in Kyiv last month, Zelenskyy said Kursk was the first step in a four-part plan for victory, which he would present to President Joe Biden this month.
The other steps include Ukraine’s strategic place in the world’s security infrastructure and a powerful package of diplomatic and economic pressures on Russia to end the war, per CNN.
Ukrainian officials seem focused on retaining the territory they hold and threatening more, which could affect the war’s course or negotiations for its end. However, it’s increasingly possible that the battle for Kursk fails to alter the difficult battle for the Donbas.
Ukraine is “losing territory and may suffer a breakthrough,” Benjamin Friedman, policy director at the Defense Priorities think tank, told BI.
“They need manpower most of all,” he added.
The Kursk offensive “has shifted the formerly gloomy narrative, at least for the moment, about the negative trajectory of the war,” wrote Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Rob Lee, a senior policy fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, in Foreign Affairs last week.
But they added: “But Kyiv must decide what to make of its initial win.”
“Kyiv will have to choose whether to hold what it has or to invest more scarce resources into the operation in an effort to force a much larger Russian effort to counter it,” they wrote.
However, this comes with risks, they said.
In the worst-case scenario, this could mean losing substantial areas of land in its east and not holding territory in Kursk that could be used as leverage in peace negotiations.
Ultimately, Ukraine may have to make some big decisions about its available resources.
Prakash, the founder of The Geopolitical Business, Inc., asked, pointedly, what the next steps are for Kyiv, “because what happens if Ukrainian forces in Kursk are pushed back, and what happens if Russia starts making a big push in eastern Ukraine?”
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