The US is at a “key decision point” in its involvement with Ukraine’s war in Russia, experts are cautioning, as Kyiv’s long-awaited summer offensive has sputtered to a halt and foreign aid is dwindling.
About 96% percent of the roughly $110 billion the US has allocated to Ukraine since the start of the war in 2022 has been spent, the White House National Security Council announced last week, leaving the nation’s ability to continue its fight against Russia in jeopardy without further support.
“We have two options,” George Barros, an analyst with the non-partisan Institute for the Study of War, told The Post. “Number one, [the US] can have an honest to goodness, introspective after-action review of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and use it to study and realize what worked, what didn’t work… and make our approach better as we give the Ukrainians what they need.”
“The other option, is we say the Ukrainian counteroffensive this summer failed… And they’re not capable of doing this, regardless of how much aid we send, and therefore we should cut our losses while we’re still ahead as much as possible and try to push for some sort of negotiation,” Barros said.
“I hope we go for the former, because the latter is not going to bring any form of long-term lasting peace,” he added.
After repelling Russia from Kyiv and its northern region in a stunning summer 2022 offensive, Ukraine and its allies hinged their hopes on repeating the performance this year in a major attack on Russian forces occupying eastern and southern territories.
But following negligible gains since the second offensive was launched in June, Ukrainian Commander in Chief Valery Zaluzhny this month compared the increasingly fortified frontlines to the “positional warfare” of World War I.
“The war at the present stage is gradually moving to a positional form, a way out of which in the historical retrospect has always been difficult for both the Armed Forces and the state as a whole,” Zaluzhny wrote in an extensive essay published by the Economist.
Among the obstacles Ukrainian forces faced in this summer’s offensive have been swaths of Russian minefields, artillery consolidated behind thick forests, and modern surveillance that all but eliminates tactical surprise and concealment.
“The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing,” Zaluzhny said, describing the state of fighting as a “technological stalemate.”
Without foreign aid from countries like the US, Zaluzhny argued, Ukraine doesn’t stand a chance at repelling Russia — which has a population more than three times larger than Ukraine’s and a more robust economy.
“It’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life. And for us … the most expensive thing we have is our people,” Zaluzhny said in an accompanying article, explaining Ukraine would inevitably be worn thin by Russia without outside help.
Matthew Wallin, chief operating officer of the non-partisan think tank American Security Project, said such pronouncements about the need of foreign aid were to be expected from wartime leaders – but that in the case of Ukraine they are “likely true.”
“They’re stuck in that position where they are facing a well-resourced Russian military, with what seems like an almost inexhaustible number of forces to throw into the fire,” Wallin told The Post. “That’s sort of traditional Russian Soviet strategy – just keep throwing men and women at it until you eventually overwhelm your adversary.”
“Even if they’re trading forces at a one-to-one rate, Ukrainians will run out of people first. So, the Ukrainians have to outperform the Russians” he said.
Russia’s strategy has been effective. As of October, only about 500 square miles have changed hands since the start of 2023, according to the New York Times, and while the fighting was considerably bloody on both sides the toll was much greater for Ukraine.
The disappointing results were not entirely the fault of Ukrainian forces – many analysts have blamed the US’ politicians “waffling” over whether and when to send substantial supplies like tanks, de-mining machines, and fighter jets.
“It looks like a lot of money when you look at it in total,” Wallin said of US aid. “But the way we slow rolled these supplies in has not allowed the Ukrainians a lot of combined power at the same moment to actually make a significant push.”
US-made Abrams tanks only arrived in Ukraine in mid-September – well after the counteroffensive started – and Ukrainian pilots have only recently begun training in American F-16 fighter planes.
“If the political decisions to send these things a little bit sooner had been made earlier, then the systems could have been employed at the beginning of the operation, not at the tail end or somewhere in the middle where there wouldn’t have been as effective,” Barros said.
In October, President Biden asked congress for an additional $61.4 billion in aid for Ukraine. Largely Republican opponents have been resistant as the House debates 2024 budgets, arguing those billions are needed at home.
On Wednesday night, a short-term spending bill was passed to avoid a government shutdown, according to the Associated Press, but it did not include further funding for Ukraine.
As congress quibbles on, Ukraine’s counteroffensive grinds ahead into the deepening cold.
President Volodymyr Zelensky reported in a Telegram post Tuesday that Russia had been increasing attacks in the Donetsk region at the heart of the counteroffensive’s objectives.
The same day, Ukraine said it’s troops had crossed the River Dnipro in the Kherson region bordering Crimea, but the Russian installed governor Vladimir Salo vowed they were walking into “fiery hell,” and that a Ukrainian soldier’s life expectancy in the warzone there was about two days, Reuters reported.
The war between Israel and Hamas which broke out on October 7 has complicated the situation by dividing the attention of American lawmakers and the public alike.
In addition to the Ukraine funding, Biden’s aid package included $14.3 billion in defense spending for Israel, along with $7 billion for mitigating Chinese influence around Taiwan. Though the Israel portion of the bill passed the Republican-controlled House in early November, it faces gridlock in the Democrat-led Senate and was also not included in the short-term budget agreement.
Though people have a tendency to “superimpose this false dichotomy” that the US must pick and choose which allies it supports, Barros argued that now is the one of the most vital moments since the end of the Cold War for the US to support its allies.
Barros cited China becoming increasingly aggressive towards Taiwan, Iran backing Hamas’ war against Israel, North Korea’s continued missile tests, and Russian attempts to chip away at NATO influence with its invasion of Ukraine.
“There’s sort of like this axis of dictators, and they’re all aligned in unseating the United States and all of the democratic allies,” Barros said.
“I think this is really a time for choosing for the West. For those that want to see the United States and our allies continue to be the ones that maintain this global order.”