Please post which US and NATO officials made such claims.
The Times: Ukraine isn’t ready for its big offensive, but it has no choice
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Kyiv is locked into a spring or summer push despite burning through ammo so fast that the West can’t keep up.
Ukraine isn’t ready for its big offensive, but it has no choice. Kyiv is locked into a spring or summer push despite burning through ammo so fast that the West can’t keep up.
Kyiv has little real choice but to launch a major spring or summer offensive. President Zelenskyy has managed the West with great skill, but to maintain its support he has to show what Washington insiders rather tastelessly call a “return on investment”.
Zelenskyy must also balance domestic politics. Hawks such as Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, prevent any meaningful talk about negotiations, even though some in the government think now is the time to put out feelers. One western diplomat in Kyiv described a “surreal parallel experience” as his interlocutors “discuss potential formats for negotiations one evening” and then “shout that there can be no talks with Russia” in public the next day.
Lost element of surprise
In part this discrepancy reflects the difference between tactics and strategy. So far the Ukrainian military has demonstrated not just skill and determination, but also imagination. From using small, highly mobile anti-tank teams to blunt and block Russian armoured thrusts in the early weeks of the war to the deployment of jerry-rigged explosive drone-ships against Crimean ports, they have not just outfought but out-thought their enemies on a tactical level.
The Ukrainians have also often been able to catch the Russians by surprise at an operational and strategic level, such as in September’s Kharkiv offensive in the northeast of the country. By striking when Moscow’s attention was focused on the south, and in areas largely stripped of Russian troops, they were able to retake more than 12,000 square kilometres in a month.
Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, claimed on Thursday that 98 per cent of the western weaponry pledged to Ukraine had been delivered.
However, while the Ukrainians are moving quickly to assimilate their 230 new and reconditioned western tanks and 1,550 armoured vehicles, they still lack proper air defences for any big offensive operation. That puts them at risk from Russian airpower. Western defence sources are also uncertain whether senior commanders can adapt to the new systems as well as their soldiers on the ground.
Yet Kyiv has little real choice but to launch a major spring or summer offensive. Its leaders are increasingly boxed in. As an American defence official put it: “The Ukrainians have surprised us as well as Putin in the past, but have much less room for manoeuvre now . . . and the Russians know it.”
Weapons are no good without ammo
There are also sharp limits to what the West can do. While there are calls for new and more weapons to be provided, from ATACMS long-range missiles to F-16 jets, it is not just caution or parsimony that holds the West back. One of the key issues is that of ammunition: sending more weapons systems is of little value without the shells, bullets or missiles that they are consuming at a prodigious rate.
At present, for example, the Ukrainians expend more 155mm shells in a month than America produces in a year. The West is investing in new production capacity, but this takes months or years. Ammunition cannot be conjured out of the air and Paris is blocking the EU from buying supplies outside the bloc.
Kyiv will have to attack regardless, probably aiming at some ambitious target, such as the southern city of Melitopol, a road and rail hub whose liberation would cut the so-called land bridge between Crimea and Russia.
Moscow knows this. Beyond the continued grinding assaults on the cities of Bakhmut and Vuhledar, it is already moving into a defensive mode. Ukrainian estimates, endorsed by the British Ministry of Defence, suggest that the Russian casualty rate has fallen by almost a third as a result. They are digging in, with satellite photos showing a growing array of trenches and fortifications, especially along the likely lines of Ukrainian attack in the south. It is, of course, possible that Kyiv will strike elsewhere, such as at the city of Donetsk, but while this would be symbolically powerful, it would be a tough fight, and of much less practical value.
