There’s a dark mood in Kyiv as the war enters its third year, but despite its creeping gains, Moscow is still showing a technical weakness
21 February 2024 •
As Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine enters a third year this weekend, a poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations highlights the gloom which has overtaken the continent about Kyiv’s chances.
While the majority of Europeans are “desperate to avoid a Russian victory”, only one-in-10 believe Ukraine can ultimately defeat its invader.
Twice as many think Moscow will prevail – and such pessimism mirrors a darker mood in Kyiv itself.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has changed his military leadership amid disputes over the conscription of new soldiers and battlefield strategy.
His troops are running low on ammunition and weapons, and political bickering in Western capitals, particularly in Washington, is holding up deliveries and aid.
Last year’s counter-offensive failed to take ground and this year Russia has made creeping gains of territory, seizing Avdiivka last week, albeit at a terrible cost.
Russia is now expected to try to gain momentum after Avdiivka, possibly redeploying troops to other parts of the front line, including Robotyne on the Zaporizhzhia front.
Russia is already reported to have retaken some fortifications lost in Robotyne to Ukraine last summer and it has intensified attacks in the past week.
As many as 30,000 to 40,000 Russian troops are reported to have massed around Robotyne and Moscow’s forces have the advantage of the higher ground.
Overall, “the mood music is pretty bad”, admits Mike Martin, a visiting fellow at the war studies department of Kings College London and author of How To Fight A War.
Yet Putin’s forces will still struggle to make significant breakthroughs, he predicts.
They may have used overwhelming firepower and numbers to grind out gains over small distances, but remain unable to coordinate more sweeping offensives.
“To attack is much harder than to defend and particularly to do a big breakthrough like Ukraine did in Kharkiv or Kherson requires a bunch of skills that Russia demonstrated in 2022 that it doesn’t have,” he says.
still rely heavily on Western supplies, particularly artillery shells.
With £49bn ($61bn) in US aid held up in Washington, Ukraine is heavily outgunned with Russian artillery currently estimated to be firing at five times the rate of Ukrainian guns.
Michael Kofman, a senior fellow and Russian military specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think-tank, says Ukraine “is not getting a sufficient amount of artillery ammunition to meet its minimum defensive needs”.
That he says “is not a sustainable situation moving forward”.
With the full support of the Russian people, putler intends to take all Ukraine and turn it into a slave colony full of torture chambers and rape rooms. He and is successors intend to achieve this AT ANY COST. The war will continue at varying levels of intensity indefinitely. Without a 500% increase in help for Ukraine, there can only be one outcome. Russia is on the advance and will eventually have the capability to put 1.5 million orcs on Ukrainian territory.
The US is now only a defacto ally of Ukraine and that won’t change unless Haley is nominated, which currently looks impossible.
Europe alone has the financial and military resources to defeat putler. A coalition of Germany, France and the U.K. would win, provided it sent ground troops with air support. But there is little or no likelihood of that. Staunch ally Poland amazingly has allowed itself to be infiltrated by putinaZis and is now an unreliable ally.
Should the kremlin asset Wilders take power, all Netherlands aid will stop.
Selected comments from DT readers :
Norm Browne
Read your history. Historical Russia and the Russia of WW2 were not concerned about casualties. Victory was all that mattered. The only way to defeat them is comprehensively in the field but alas today’s ‘West’ is not up to it.
Martin Mills
Canada is ready to pay for the delivery of 800,000 shells that the Czech Republic found for Ukraine , – CBC News
The AFU have published the claimed Russian losses for yesterday; 1160 soldiers killed, the daily number has not dropped below 1,000 for the last seven days. Putin must really want another village or two for his election campaign…
Yesterday afternoon another gathering of Russian troops was hit by GMLRS missiles, the commanders seemingly having learned nothing from the day before.
Russian blogger on the second attack;
Firstly, according to updated data, 62 military personnel were killed, including seven officers. About 30 people were injured.
Secondly, the blow was struck against the soldiers who were being prepared for assault operations in Krynki (unfortunately, we have not captured it yet, no matter what Sergei Shoigu told the president). They had a formation before the arrival of the “high authorities”, during which the enemy struck.
Thirdly, there are rumors that Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky, commander of the Dnepr group of troops, was supposed to personally come to the formation.
“Teplinsky missed the blow by 10 minutes. He could have died,” said one of our interlocutors at the General Staff. He believes that the blow could have been an attempt on the general’s life, and the information about his arrival at the training ground was “leaked” to the enemy by Mikhail Yuryevich’s ill-wishers.
Inter Alia
The long and the short of this is that if Russia succeeds in Ukraine, all of Europe is gone with it, including the UK.
We can no longer wait on America to come to our rescue; even if Biden wants to do that, Trump and the Republicans won’t let him. We can count the USA out. But we – the UK along with every other nation in Europe – must get together, and now, and take Russia on and finish this war off.
foo manchu
Critical threats has a great summary.
Ukraine is doing well, strategically. It is also still winter.
https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-20-2024
Pressure will mount on Biden and the democrats to halt their plan to leverage illegal migration to preserve their district advantage in the house as they become increasingly certain to lose the presidency.
And then the resources will come.
Notice that Russia has not really budged the line in 2 years. That is in contrast to the doom and gloom reported.
Notice also the critical threats website has picked up China/Taiwan and the slow motion battle for the Pacific. That is an important and disconcerting development.
Apparently, there is some US drone technology that will be deployed in a year or so which will substantially diminish China’s ability to successfully capture Taiwan.
So it is now or never for Xi.
Kremtroll alert:
Conrad Russell
Aggressive defence is the RF tactics as it saves lives and minimises causalities.
Western egg heads and so called experts fail to understand this way of thinking and go purely on territorial gains.
The slow grind by the RF troops forces the Ukrainian to use their reserves, ammo and logistics. Also the troops never get rotated as the thus Russian tactic is 24/7. So they are exhausted.
This is the mindset of the RF general staff and as the events on the battlefield show it works well.
The RF is self sufficient in most things and gets around the sanctions easily.
They operate outside the FIAT international financial system.
The USD is no longer the reserve currency of the world.
VP knew this day was coming ever since 2014 and has prepared Russia well.
The RF armed are battle hardened men with actual valuable experience and are rotated often.
The Russian had all the time in the world and with the USA 🇺🇸 focused on Gaza Ukrainian is slipping gown the priority list and the even the USA 🇺🇸 cannot fight 2 regional wars.
The Ukrainian defeats from the summer campaigns and Bakhmut and Avdiivka and other locations are setting a pattern which will not reversed.
The issue now is only the total collapse happens.
Scott Driver
Sorry to disappoint our Orc friends, but Ukraine will receive the $60 billion from the US sooner rather than later, so says Republicans Mike Pompeo and Congressman Fitzpatrick who’re currently in Ukraine. Republican leaders will be speaking with Biden later this week.
KYIV POST, 2O Feb: “I can assure you that Ukraine will get the assistance it needs. This is not just Ukraine’s fight, but it’s the world’s fight. Ukraine is on the front lines of democracy,” Fitzpatrick said at an event organized by the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv on Monday.”
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/28355
Mark Amerman
Popular Russian ‘war correspondent,’ volunteer, and enthusiastic supporter of the Special Military Operation Andrei ‘Murz’ Morozov has committed suicide days after claiming that Russia lost 16,000 men and 300 tanks in the battle for Avdiivka.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V8XhMPWT-0
According to Ukraine, Russia has lost seven fighter and fighter bomber jets in the last seven days. To put that in context, Russia makes 14 of these in a year.
Jonathan Karmi
Britain under Sunak is doing less to help Ukraine than would have been the case under Boris. This is depressing. The barbaric Russian invasion of a large European state aspiring to freedom and democracy is by far the most important item on the foreign policy agenda. Instead Parliament is tying itself in knots over vacuous declarations concerning the Israel-Hamas war. Most of our MPs are complete idiots and it will be infinitely worse when Labour bungles a win at the next election.
Florian Danzinger
We have an abundance of movies depicting the heroic British effort to face off the evil Nazi regime by declaring war on Nazi Germany. In 2022 we leave the fighting to Ukraine, whilst Russia resupplies ammunition from countries like Iran and North Korea. PooTin never would have dared the whole thing if he hadn’t counted on a soft response. Isn’t it time to put an end to him by all means?
That’s a rather honest summary, but a bit too short on positive aspects, for my liking. Not all is lost yet, there’s also some encouraging news, like this one:
“Commander of the 7th Tactical Aviation Brigade: Ukraine currently has more combat aircraft than it did before the invasion”
https://mil.in.ua/en/news/commander-of-the-7th-tactical-aviation-brigade-ukraine-currently-has-more-combat-aircraft-than-it-did-before-the-invasion/