On December 29th, Russia fired more than a hundred and fifty missiles and drones on cities and towns across Ukraine, killing more than thirty people in Kyiv alone, the largest number dead in the capital in a single day since Russia’s invasion nearly two years ago. The first days of 2024 brought more of the same: day after day of aerial bombardment, with the seeming aim of weakening Ukraine’s air defenses and targeting facilities that produce long-range weapons. This year is likely to be marked by exchanges of missile and rocket fire rather than dramatic, large-scale maneuver warfare. But the most decisive fight may also be the least immediately visible: Russia and Ukraine will spend the next twelve months in a race to determine which side can better reconstitute and resupply its forces, in terms of not only personnel but also shells, rockets, and drones.
In other words, the war may not be won outright this year, but the conditions for victory may well be set in motion. If Western backers provide necessary arms, training, and financing to Ukraine, its military may emerge, by next year, with the upper hand. But such an outcome is far from assured. “The West is on a trajectory to end up losing this war through sheer complacency,” Jack Watling, a researcher of land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, told me. Watling has made more than a dozen research trips to Ukraine since the start of the invasion. “I’m not making a prediction,” he told me. “Rather, it’s a choice—Western countries have agency.”
Ukraine’s counter-offensive, which began in June before fizzling out in the fall, failed to capture any significant territory, let alone come close to reaching the Sea of Azov, which would have put pressure on Russia’s control of Crimea. In fact, according to an analysis from the Times, as of September, Russia controlled two hundred square miles more territory in Ukraine compared with the start of 2023. In Western capitals, this disappointment kicked off a round of finger-pointing, distress, and pessimism. Republicans in Washington had been looking for such a reason to question the merit of further U.S. aid to Ukraine. Last month, the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, after meeting with Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, said, “What the Biden Administration seems to be asking for is billions of additional dollars with no appropriate oversight, no clear strategy to win, and with none of the answers that I think the American people are owed.”
According to a recent report in the Washington Post, there have been frustrations on both sides: U.S. officials judged their counterparts in Ukraine as waging a delayed and inefficient campaign unlikely to yield maximal results. Ukrainian armed forces, meanwhile, have felt that they are expected to fight like the U.S. military without being provided with the full capabilities that the U.S. military possesses in the field. In an interview with The Economist last November, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, admitted that the war has reached a stalemate, saying “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.” But, he argued, only a significant change in the war’s technological balance could tip the fighting decisively toward one side. For Ukraine, that includes airpower, both fighter jets and drones; electronic-warfare capability to counter Russian jamming; and counter-battery fire to locate and target Russian artillery systems.
“Ukraine’s military options were limited not only by what the West would provide but also by political choices,” Michael Kofman, an expert in the Russian and Ukrainian militaries at the Carnegie Endowment, said. For example, the Zelensky administration made Bakhmut a politically symbolic battle, keeping Ukrainian units fighting there throughout the spring and summer, which meant that many of the country’s most capable and battle-hardened troops were unable to take part in operations elsewhere. Ukraine settled on a strategy for an offensive waged on three axes at once, hoping to exhaust Russian reserve units. But the result was to further spread out forces and artillery. Offensive operations in the south, the most important front, were conducted by more inexperienced troops, fresh from training. When the initial assault failed, Ukraine switched to attacks by smaller units, which preserved lives and equipment, but did not lead to a larger breakthrough. “Ukraine didn’t have any easy options,” Kofman said. “But the three-pronged offensive did not deliver.”
Whatever the causes, the failure of the offensive created a number of problems for Ukraine. Russian forces may hold certain advantages, especially in terms of matériel, at the start of the year, Kofman said, but none of them look particularly decisive on their own. More important are unity, patience, and determination among those Western states supporting Ukraine’s war effort. “When your ability to continue fighting is so dependent on outside support, you also depend on the expectations and belief—or not—those same outside powers have in your path to victory,” Kofman told me.
The danger for Ukraine is that Western pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mykola Bielieskov, a defense analyst at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, in Kyiv, said, “Skeptics in the West were provided with a very powerful argument: where is the guarantee that if we provide another sixty billion”—the amount that President Joe Biden is asking Congress to approve—“the result will be any different?”
The Kremlin, meanwhile, used 2023 to reorient the Russian economy around the war effort, pumping billions into arms production and related industries. Defense spending makes up nearly a third of the state budget for this year, during which Russian factories will produce as many as three million shells, a larger number than what would come from the U.S. and Europe combined. Watling pointed out the irony of Russia, an economy the size of Italy’s, outproducing the entirety of NATO in terms of artillery ammunition. Last year, Ukraine largely fought the war with munitions produced before the start of Russia’s invasion. “This year,” Bielieskov said, “is when we will begin to really feel the effect of decisions not taken earlier.”
Watling recalled meeting with defense ministries of NATO states as far back as the summer of 2022. “They asked me, ‘What does Ukraine need?’ ” Watling relayed the rough numbers in terms of troops and ammunition. As he tells it, he had another round of meetings this winter: “I told them, ‘We had this same conversation more than a year ago. The numbers haven’t changed. We’ve only lost time.’ ” By his estimate, last summer, Ukraine was firing seven thousand shells a day, and Russia was firing five thousand. Today, that ratio has swung dramatically in the opposite direction, Russia firing ten thousand shells for every two thousand launched by Ukraine. “The failure to translate rhetoric into action has a body count attached to it,” he told me.
At a recent Kremlin ceremony, Vladimir Putin appeared as sanguine and self-assured as he had since the start of the war, smiling with a glass of champagne in hand. Ukraine produces virtually no weapons of its own, he declared, and has “no future.” “But,” he added, “we do.”
“Putin can draw a certain line,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told me. “In Putin’s understanding, the counter-offensive has failed, and the West won’t be able to provide the level of military aid that would fundamentally change the situation on the front going forward.” A period of uncertainty, going back to the unravelling of Russia’s initial invasion plans in 2022, appears to have ended, and one of stability has begun. All Russia has to do now is wait. “Putin thought all along that support for Ukraine was temporal and that he would outlast it,” a U.S. defense official told me.
Putin, then, isn’t entirely wrong to feel a renewed sense of confidence at the start of the year. And, if Russia can resist the temptation to waste lives and equipment in a winter offensive, its defensive positions look stable. But that may prove unlikely. “Our generals may well mistake the ability to defend with an opportunity to go on the attack yet again,” a defense source in Moscow told me. “The results of such an action are predictable.” (The source returned to an oft-repeated axiom: “Russia is never as weak as may appear, but it’s not as strong, either.”)
Fundamentally, Putin’s political goals for Ukraine remain as grandiose as ever. “In his mind, he really doesn’t want to take Kyiv by force,” Stanovaya told me. “He wants them to give up, to fall to their knees.” In other words, regime change, with a pro-Russian government in Kyiv not because Russian tanks installed it there but, rather, because modern Ukraine failed from within and could no longer resist Russia’s imperial dominion. “This was never about territory for him,” Stanovaya said. “He doesn’t care where the borders are drawn. If Ukraine is friendly, it doesn’t matter what territory formally belongs to whom—it’s all our land, in our zone.”
But, if Ukraine remains, in Putin’s terminology, “anti-Russia,” then it must be injured and weakened, one strike at a time. This explains the existence of two seemingly contradictory phenomena: Putin’s interest, as reported by the Times, in negotiating a ceasefire that would effectively freeze Russia’s current positions, and the unprecedented aerial bombardment of recent days. He’d prefer the former, but the latter is a way to demonstrate the cost of not making a deal on Russia’s terms. “Putin believes that not only is his preferred outcome achievable but that it is inevitable, and must be realized as swiftly as possible,” Stanovaya said. Entreaties about a ceasefire may be an attempt by Putin to lead Western politicians to question the necessity of further arms transfers to Ukraine.
After all, as Putin has always seen it, his real interlocutor is not the government in Kyiv but its Western backers, the U.S. most of all. Stanovaya encapsulated the Russian leader’s appeal for the coming year: “Either you abandon your support of Ukraine and reach a deal with us, or we take Ukraine anyway, and destroy a lot of lives and billions in your military equipment in the process.” As for the West, Watling said, “We’re really running down the clock.” ♦
