This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
Roughly a week into counteroffensive that Kyiv hopes will turn the tide of the nearly 16-month Russian invasion, Ukrainian forces continue to grind forward, claiming to have recaptured at least six villages along the southern and southeastern sections of the 1,000-kilometer front line.
Russia, meanwhile, has reportedly pushed back in at least one location, and the two sides are engaging in heavy artillery battles and close-quarter tank combat in several places. Deep Russian defenses — trenches, minefields — have inflicted serious damage on some Ukrainian units and slowed their progress.
So who’s winning?
For military experts, intelligence officers, historians, and other observers, it’s way too early to make a definitive assessment that Ukraine’s counteroffensive has been a resounding success — or a decisive failure. Up to now, Ukraine has already outperformed all expectations, first thwarting a Russian effort to seize Kyiv in the first weeks of the invasion and then conducting blitz counteroffensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions late last year.
And now Ukraine’s forces are fortified by billions of dollars’ worth of Western weaponry — tanks, artillery, armored vehicles, drones, missiles — and bolstered by months of training in NATO warfare and Western battlefield tactics. For Ukraine’s Western backers, the hope is Kyiv can punch through Russian defenses and achieve a decisive victory — of some sort.
Still, military doctrine holds that an attacking force is nearly always at a disadvantage to a defending force; it is generally more difficult to recapture or seize territory than it is to defend it.
For some observers, whether the fighting happening now even constitutes the main thrust of Ukraine’s offensive is an open question.
“The gains the Ukrainians have achieved, you cannot speak about them [in terms of] relative success or failure. It’s too early,” said Pentti Forsstrom, a retired Finnish lieutenant colonel who also served as Finland’s defense attache in Moscow.
“I have the feeling we haven’t seen the real offensive yet,” he told RFE/RL. “Yes, they are fighting in many places, but to my mind, not with the full capacity. Ukraine hasn’t committed their heavier brigades yet.”
Here’s how things look on the battlefield so far, based on open-source reporting, posts by Russian military bloggers, official Russian statements, and Ukrainian statements.
What’s Happened So Far?
After months of signaling, Ukraine’s forces began their new offensive effort last week. The exact date of the beginning is unclear; U.S. officials have said D-Day was June 4. Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said on June 5 that new Ukrainian operations were under way, reporting a “large-scale offensive on five sectors of the front in the southern Donetsk area.”
The first detailed reports of full-scale combat emerged on June 8, from Russian military bloggers and defense officials, with new clashes reported in at least three regions.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on June 8 that Russian forces had beaten back a Ukrainian attack near Novodaryivka, in the Zaporizhzhya region just west of the Donetsk region line, and in nearby Velyka Novosilka, which involved one of several newly constituted, Western-trained units, the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade.
Shoigu claimed up to 1,500 troops and 150 tanks and armored vehicles were involved in the fight, a claim that could not be corroborated.
In the following days, Ukrainian officials began pointing to offensive operations in several locations.
During a June 10 news conference with the visiting Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, Zelenskiy stated outright that a counteroffensive was under way.
“Counteroffensive and defensive actions are taking place in Ukraine, but I will not say in detail what stage they are at,” he said.
The Ukrainian generals “are all in a positive mood,” he told Trudeau. “Pass that on to Putin.”
In recent days, Ukraine has claimed to have recaptured at least six villages, claims partially corroborated by both Ukrainian sources and Russian military bloggers, some of whom have close ties with military or intelligence units.
The captured settlements are primarily straddling the Mokriy Yaly River, south of Velyka Novosilka, a Donetsk region town to close to the administrative border with the Zaporizhzhya region.
At least one Western military expert said Velyka Novosilka was currently the main focus — “the center of gravity” — of Ukrainian operations.
“Both defensive and offensive fierce fighting is ongoing in the east and south of our nation,” General Valery Zaluzhniy, commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces said in a post to Telegram on June 13.
At a briefing two days later, Brigadier General Oleksiy Hromov said that Ukraine had regained control of over 100 square kilometers of territory in its counteroffensive.
“We are ready to continue fighting to liberate our territory even with our bare hands,” he told reporters in Kyiv.
During a visit to the White House on June 13, NATO secretary-general, meanwhile, said the Ukrainians were “making advances.”
“This is still early days but what we all know is the more land the Ukrainians are able to liberate, the stronger their hand will be at the negotiation table and the more likely it is that President Putin will understand that he will never win this battle, never win the war of aggression on the battlefield,” Jens Stoltenberg said.
What About Russia?
Since seizing large parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions in the early weeks of the February 2022 invasion, Russia has been building a network of defensive lines across large parts of the region: trenches, concrete firing posts, minefields, anti-tank fences.
Daunting defensive lines have also been reported in the eastern Kharkiv region near the administrative border with the Luhansk region, and also around the city of Bakhmut, which has been largely obliterated and all but captured by Russia after a 10-month campaign in the area.
“Russian fortifications are the most extensive defensive works in Europe since World War II,” according to a report published on June 9 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Russia has also replenished the ranks of its units, frontline or otherwise, with some of the estimated 300,000 reservists called up in a major mobilization decreed by President Vladimir Putin in September.
For that reason alone, military experts have predicted that Ukraine would have an exceedingly difficult time breaching Russian lines, particularly if one of the goals was to push south toward the Sea of Azov in a bid to rupture the “land bridge” that allows Russian overland access to the occupied Crimean Peninsula.
“The defense system itself is built quite skillfully,” said Major Maksym Zhoryn, the commander of Ukraine’s Third Separate Assault Brigade, whose unit is battling to take positions around Bakhmut and reportedly has already taken some higher ground positions.
“They’re trying to do it in accordance with military science, by chapter and verse,” he told Current Time. Russian troops “are trying to hold on to [their defensive positions]. Unfortunately, at the moment I can’t say that there are positions that are being completely abandoned.”
“The enemy is trying to hold on to all its positions, trying to fight. This slows our advance, but doesn’t stop it,” he said.
“Russia plans to fight linear defense battles from trench lines, exploiting obstacle belts, falling back on deeper defensive positions when pressed,” said Ben Barry, a retired British brigadier general, now a senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“I’d comment that if Ukraine can rapidly break through a defensive belt … it could get behind the Russian defenses and unpick them,” he told RFE/RL.
Around the Zaporizhzhya region city of Tokmak, Ukrainian forces have reported serious defensive lines that, complemented with Russian artillery and attack helicopters, have made advances slow going. Moreover, Ukrainian forces have yet to hit the main, even more formidable lines some 10-15 kilometers further to the south.
Russia’s Defense Ministry also claimed that its forces had captured or destroyed NATO-supplied weaponry, including Leopard tanks from Germany and Bradley infantry vehicles from the United States. Video published on Telegram showed several disabled vehicles not far from the village of Orikhiv, west of Velyka Novosilka. Some unconfirmed tallies said up to 17 Bradleys and at least three Leopards had been damaged.
Meeting with a group of prominent Russian military bloggers on June 13, Putin claimed Ukrainian losses were “approaching a level that could be described as catastrophic.”
“We have 10 times fewer losses than those of the armed forces of Ukraine,” he asserted.
But Putin and other Russian officials have made many exaggerated claims about the war in Ukraine. And while Russia’s military and sympathetic bloggers boasted about destroying NATO equipment — Germany’s Leopard is considered one of the most advanced tanks in the world — Western observers doubted that the loss of several pieces of equipment, with or without commensurate casualties, should be considered a failure.
Russia may have suffered a substantial propaganda defeat as well this week. A prominent Russian military blogger reported that Major-General Sergei Goryachev, chief of staff of the 36th Combined Arms Army, was killed on June 12 by a Ukrainian missile in the Zaporizhzhya region.
The report, which was later deleted, has not been independently confirmed. But if it is verified, he would be at least the fifth Russian general to have been killed since the start of the invasion — providing Ukraine fodder for bragging.
In another unconfirmed incident, a unit of Russia’s 20th Combined Arms Army mustering near the village of Kreminna, in the eastern Luhansk region, awaiting the arrival of another general were hit on June 14 in a strike from a Ukrainian HIMARS unit. Russian military bloggers, including one with links to the Defense Ministry, said an unknown number of troops were killed.
HIMARS, a U.S.-supplied multiple rocket launcher that can be equipped with high-precision rockets, has been used repeatedly by Ukrainian forces to target Russian weapons depots and bases.
Fog Of War. War Of Fog.
The biggest question about the counteroffensive at this point is whether Ukraine will be able to breach Russian defenses in one or more places along the front line, considered one of the most complicated and dangerous procedures any military can perform.
“The extent of a success will be determined by how much progress is made on the other side of the breach,” Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal Armed Services Institute in London, said in a note.
“If a breach can be achieved, then the critical question will be how many units Ukraine has in reserve to surge forward and exploit the success. If operations are currently methodical, once a breach in the line occurs, speed will be of the essence,” he wrote.
Another major question is whether Ukraine’s ongoing operations really do constitute the main effort, or whether, as some experts suspect, they are “probing” or “shaping” operations, aimed at locating weak points in the defenses.
“The Ukrainians are looking for the weak points, where the Russians are at their weakest,” said Forsstrom, who is now a senior researcher in the Russian research group at Finland’s National Defense University.
“The crucial decision is if it’s about reconnaissance, intelligence, where they can find the Russians at their weakest, so they can’t organize a counteroffensive,” he told RFE/RL. “They are now seeking the crucial points where the Russians might not have the capacity to make a counterattack.”
“There is a big difference between starting an offensive, and the main attack or main effort of the operation. The offensive has clearly started, but not I think the main attack,” Ben Hodges, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who commanded U.S. forces in Europe, said in an article. “When we see large, armored formations join the assault, then I think we’ll know the main attack has really begun.”
The assessment that Ukraine had yet to commit in full to the offensive was echoed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian businessman and bombastic founder of the private mercenary company Wagner Group.
“I can say one thing, that any offensive must be evaluated, and its results, after the enemy’s offensive potential has been exhausted. As far as I understand, Ukraine’s offensive potential is far, far from exhausted,” he said in a post published by his company’s press service. “And therefore…don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”
