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While the world holds its breath at the imminent starvation for thousands of Gazans, the situation in Ukraine seems also very dire. After winning a months-long battle for the key city of Avdiivka in the Donbas, some reports using satellite imagery suggest that Russian forces have advanced westward steadily, capturing three miles of territory in just three weeks.
The Ukrainian Defense Forces were recently given nearly $790 million to build fortifications in the expectation of a more fierce advance, but progress, the Wall Street Journal reports, is going slowly. Soldiers are forced to dig their own fortifications and tank trenches, often at night and even under artillery fire.
“What’s happening right now is what Russia has spent a long time preparing for. It has gathered enough forces and resources to pressure various axes all at once,” Maksym Zhorin, the deputy commander of the Third Assault Brigade, told the WSJ.
Both sides are learning from two years and two weeks of warfare, and Ukraine is replicating the Russian defenses that halted their counterattack in the Summer of 2023.
One defense analyst told the Journal that the lack of “layered defenses” should be a huge concern, and the problem with trying to replicate Russia’s strategy is that last summer, Ukrainian officials were quite cavalier about speaking openly regarding the directions of attack. As Commander Zhorin notes, the battle line is now larger, and with the Ukrainian army facing severe manpower shortages, the chance that they will be able to effectively cover all the potential lines of attack seems very low.
2 more years at this intensity
As an additional headache for Ukrainian defense plans, the US Congress still hasn’t approved a $60 billion war funding package, and some opponents have switched rhetoric from questioning the Ukrainian war strategy to outrightly saying the nation will never defeat Russia.
Democrats and Republicans have yet to come to a compromise over funding to address the migrant crisis on the US southern border, and the longer the standoff continues, the more possible it becomes for Congress to postpone the large funding decision until after the November presidential election, as sometimes happens. Donald Trump, who is now the sole Republication presidential candidate for the GOP, has previously said he is in favor of the war ending quickly.
Zelenskyy, having failed to rally the world much to his cause in 2024, described the Republican hold-up as “unacceptable”.
“When lives are lost, and partners are simply playing internal political games or disputes that limit our defense, it’s impossible to understand. It’s unacceptable,” he said. “And it will be impossible to forget—the world will remember this”.
WaL has previously reported that the lack of artillery shells in partcular is taking its toll on Ukraine’s ability to defend. Some artillery units are receiving 2-5 shells per day; sometimes less.
Meanwhile, Lithuanian defense intelligence estimates that Russia possesses enough “financial, human, material, and technical resources,” to continue the war at this red hot intensity for the “near term,” described in a report as between 6 months and 2 years.
“The Russian economy is holding up better than expected thanks to high oil prices, state investment in the military industry, and the ability to circumvent sanctions,” the report read.
On Wednesday, journalist Ted Snider compared a recent expose in the Wall Street Journal, which claimed to have seen the draft agreement for peace between Russia and Ukraine that was negotiated in Istanbul in April of 2022, with reporting on the deal at the time it was being negotiated and determined that the concessions made by Russia were real—and far better than anything Ukraine is capable of getting now. WaL
PICTURED ABOVE: A Ukrainian soldier digs trenches in Mariupol, 2014. PC: Maidan Translations.
