This key moment may also require a difficult decision for Western governments, which have so far offered support to Ukraine at an ever-increasing cost to their own economies and national arms reserves.
“I think you are about to get to the point where one or the other country will be successful,” said a senior NATO official. “Either the Russians will reach Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, or the Ukrainians will stop them here. And if the Ukrainians manage to hold the line here, in the face of this number of forces, it will matter. ”
Three potential results
Western officials are closely monitoring three possible scenarios that they believe could develop:
Russia can continue to make additional profits in two key eastern provinces. Or the battle lines may harden in a stalemate that drags on for months or years, leading to huge casualties on both sides and a slow-moving crisis that will continue to drain the world economy.
Then there is what officials consider the least likely possibility: Russia can redefine its military goals, declare victory and try to create close to battle. For now, the scenario appears to be nothing more than wishful thinking, sources said.
If Russia manages to consolidate some of its profits in the east, US officials increasingly fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin may eventually use the area as a platform to push further into Ukraine. “I am sure that if Ukraine is not strong enough, they will go further,” Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky warned on Tuesday in a bid to urge the West to send more weapons faster. “We showed them our strength. And it is important that this power is demonstrated with us and by our Western partners. ”
Western military aid, he said, “must come faster” if Ukraine’s allies want to stop Russia’s territorial ambitions.
Western officials generally believe that Russia is in a more favorable position in the east, based solely on mass. Still, “Russia’s progress is not a predestined outcome,” said a senior Biden administration official.
As the front lines of the conflict turned into a war of attrition built around artillery fire back and forth, both sides suffered heavy casualties and now face a potential shortage of manpower. Russia has also lost about a third of its ground forces, and US intelligence officials have said publicly that Russia will struggle to make some serious gains without full mobilization, a politically dangerous move that Putin has so far refused to make.
So far, the fighting is concentrated in two sister cities on opposite sides of the Seversky Donets River, Severodonetsk and Lisichansk. Ukrainian fighters are almost completely surrounded near Severodonetsk.
Although Western analysts believe that Ukraine has a better chance of defending Lisichansk, which is in a high place, there are already alarming signs that the Russians are trying to cut off the city’s supply lines by advancing from the southeast.
“In many ways, the fate of our Donbass is being decided around these two cities,” Zelensky said last week.
Preference for Soviet systems
US officials insist that Western weapons are still moving to the front lines of the battle. But local reports of a shortage of weapons – and frustrated requests from Ukrainian front-line officials – have raised questions about how efficient the supply lines are. Ukraine is asking not only for heavy artillery, but also for even more basic supplies, such as ammunition.
Part of the problem, sources say, is that even as Ukraine runs out of old Soviet munitions that fit into existing systems, there are also obstacles to its fighters moving to Western, NATO-compatible systems. On the one hand, training soldiers in these systems takes time – and takes the necessary fighters away from the battlefield.
In some cases, according to a source familiar with US intelligence, Ukraine has simply decided not to use unfamiliar Western systems. For example, although they receive hundreds of Switchblade drones, some units prefer to use commercial drones equipped with explosives that are more convenient to use.
The Biden administration announced a new aid package earlier this month that included a highly mobile artillery missile systemor HiMARS, which is able to fire a bite of missiles and which Ukraine has urgently requested for weeks. But although a small group of Ukrainian soldiers began training on the system almost immediately after the package was announced, it required three weeks of training and has not yet entered the battle. The senior defense official would only say that the system will enter Ukraine “soon”.
Meanwhile, there are a limited number of Soviet-era munitions that still exist elsewhere in the world that can be sent to Ukraine. The United States is urging nations with older supplies to understand what they can give Ukraine, but the punitive artillery battle “wipes Soviet things off the face of the earth” for Ukraine and its allies, according to a US official.
Although the United States has a clear idea of the losses on Russian battlefields, it has struggled from the outset to assess Ukraine’s military strength. Officials acknowledged that the United States does not have a clear picture of where Western weapons go or how effectively they are used after crossing the border with Ukraine – making intelligence predictions of difficult battles and political decisions on how and when to supply Ukraine equally complex.
A senior Biden administration official told CNN that the United States was trying to “better understand its [the Ukrainians’] level of consumption and operational pace “, on the question specifically whether Ukraine lacks ammunition and weapons.” It is difficult to know, “said this man. k. much of it is moved in and out of the country for repair.
This blind spot is partly because Ukraine is not saying everything to the West, Western officials say. And because the fighting is concentrated in such a small area, relatively close to Russia, Western intelligence does not have the same visibility as elsewhere.
“When you get down to a tactical level, especially where most of the fighting is taking place, it’s farther from us, closer to Russia, and the forces are more densely concentrated, very close together.” said a senior NATO official. “So it’s difficult to get a good detailed picture of the state of the fighting from time to time in the East.”
It is also difficult to predict how the Ukrainian military will perform at this crucial time, as the number of casualties in the battle increases, with rapidly trained civilian volunteers being sent, a NATO official added. Their execution under fire is an unknown amount.
“It’s one thing to have people at your disposal, but the question is, are they ready for battle? I think you’ll see that as a factor,” the official said.
Predicting Putin’s next move
Meanwhile, U.S. and other Western officials have seen no sign that Putin’s commitment to pursuing the costly war has waned.
“With regard to the strategic goals that we believe Putin has with regard to Ukraine, I do not see any signs that they have changed,” the NATO official said. “Putin still believes that in the end he will be successful and will either have physical control or a form of political control over Ukraine in large part or ideally in full.”
But even if Putin’s commitment remains ironclad, it is becoming increasingly clear that the West’s commitment may not be.
As the fighting dragged on, the cost to Western governments continued to rise. Some Western governments – including the United States – are worried that the flow of donated weapons to Ukraine has depleted national reserves, which are crucial to their own defense.
“This is a legitimate concern” for the United States, the senior administration official acknowledged.
Then, of course, there is the sting of high energy prices and high inflation. As these costs begin to affect ordinary citizens in the United States and Europe, and as media attention begins to shift from the daily bluntness of the fighting, some officials fear that Western support for Ukraine may weaken.
A spokesman for the International Legion of the Ukrainian Military on Monday scoffed at the “sense of complacency” among Ukraine’s military patrons, saying the country needed much more support if it wanted to defeat Russia’s invasion.
“There is a sense of complacency that seems to have fallen to our Western partners that the arms supplies that Ukraine has already secured are somehow enough to win the war,” said Damien Magru, a spokesman for the International Defense Legion. of Ukraine. , during a press conference.
“They are not! They are not close to anything that would allow us to defeat the Russians on the battlefield. “
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