“I’m going to tell you the truth,” says Vanya, a Ukrainian soldier serving in a reconnaissance unit fighting alongside marines on the east bank of the Dnipro river in southern Ukraine. “The situation is deplorable.”
His damning assessment follows months of daring raids into enemy territory by Ukrainian forces last autumn to establish a tenuous bridgehead deep in the southern Kherson region. Under the cover of darkness, troops zipped across the river to inflict damage on Russian units and provide one of few bright spots since Ukraine’s much-vaunted summer counteroffensive ended in failure.
But the unit’s grip on the Dnipro foothold, near the village of Krynky, is slipping. Their positions on marshy terrain and in old enemy trenches are shallow and prone to flooding or filled with the rotting corpses of Russian fighters. Freezing cold temperatures also bite, slowing down operations and making it impossible to rest.
Ukrainian troops are suffering heavy casualties here, laments Vanya, declining to give specifics, citing military secrecy. The Russians, he adds, have an advantage of at least four or five soldiers to every one Ukrainian.
Part of the problem is logistical. Because the Ukrainians must cross the river in small vessels to remain undetected and more nimble, they are not able to transport larger, more deadly weapons. “Everything we take is what we can carry ourselves,” Vanya says. “There are at most some types of grenade launchers. In a very rare case, I saw one heavy machine gun brought across.”
The end goal was to create a position from which the Ukrainian army could launch new attacks deeper into Russian-controlled territory. That is looking less likely by the day, Vanya says. In recent weeks, Russian military bloggers and western analysts say that Russian forces have retaken some of the positions on the eastern bank.
Asked whether Ukraine can hold its base there long-term, Vanya was blunt. “Of course not,” he says. “The fact is that the Marine Corps was unable to maintain the pace of the offensive and for sure lost the initiative a long time ago.”
Vanya now expects the troops to fall back to defensive positions on the Dnipro’s west bank — or risk suffering heavy losses among its strongest units.
But to what extent it should adopt a more secure defensive position in anticipation of a difficult third year of war is no longer a question just for those stationed on the Dnipro river, but for Ukraine’s entire military and its commander-in-chief.
As the second anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion nears on February 24, Ukraine’s military prospects appear to be dimming. It has abandoned hopes of a swift victory and is instead girding itself for a drawn-out war. One western official working on Ukraine policy believes there is “little prospect of an operational breakthrough by either side in 2024” let alone in the next few months.
This reality has been acknowledged in Kyiv, where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared in early December that “a new phase” has set in. After his troops failed to recapture large areas of the south as planned, he ordered the army to build new fortifications along key segments of its 1,000km front line, signalling a shift from an offensive to a defensive posture.
The western official says that a strategy of “active defence” — holding defensive lines but probing for weak spots to exploit coupled with long-range air strikes — would allow Ukraine to “build out its forces” this year and prepare for 2025, when a counteroffensive would have a better chance.
But several factors are likely to determine Ukraine’s fortunes. Chief among them is the uncertainty surrounding western military assistance, including munitions, which Ukraine is burning through. There are open questions about the west’s resolve and whether it can and will continue backing Ukraine in its fight — and, if it does, to what extent.
The biggest concern lies with Washington, where the White House announced the final drawdown of weapons and military equipment for Ukraine on December 27. Though European nations, including the UK and Germany, are providing some financial support, the US is Ukraine’s biggest supplier of military aid. But right-wing Republicans in the US Congress are holding up tens of billions of dollars in future military funding for Kyiv. Until Congress acts, there will be no more…
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