Ukrainian soldiers cut metal from destroyed Russian tanks to remove armour plates to secure Ukraine’s dwindling supplies of equipment, underscoring Kyiv’s ongoing battlefield challenges at the beginning of a new year of military confrontation, according to The New York Times.
A Ukrainian soldier with the call sign Jaeger reported:
“If our international partners moved faster, we would have kicked their *** in the first three or four months so hard that we would have gotten over it already. We’d be sowing fields and raising children. We’d be sending bread to Europe. But it’s been two years already.”
However, Western military aid is no longer flowing in the volumes it used to, as countries are frustrated by the lack of significant military successes. Ukraine’s summer counter-offensive in the south, where Jaeger was wounded in the first days of the operation, ended without achieving any of its objectives.
Instead, Russian troops are advancing, especially in the east of war-torn Ukraine. Maryinka town has almost fallen, Avdiivka is slowly being surrounded, and the offensive at Chasiv Yar near Bakhmut is about to start.
The lack of effective tactics has brought the conflict to a standstill, with the war increasingly resembling the Western Front of World War I, where there was pure mass versus mass.
Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently visited Ukraine and argued:
“The Russian advantage at this stage is not decisive, but the war is not a stalemate. Depending on what happens this year, particularly with western support for Ukraine, 2024 will likely take one of two trajectories. Ukraine could retake the advantage by 2025, or it could start losing the war without sufficient aid.”
Currently, Kyiv is facing overdue problems within its armed forces: Ukrainian soldiers are fatigued from prolonged combat and lack of rest, casualties are rising each day, and the ranks are only partially replenished with old and poorly trained recruits.
The recruitment strategy suffers from overly aggressive tactics and more frequent attempts to evade conscription, while efforts to address this problem have sparked a political dispute between the military and civilian leadership.
While military officials stress the need for broader mobilisation to win the war, the administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is wary of introducing a new policy to mobilise the 500,000 new soldiers needed to confront Russian forces.
US officials estimate the number of Ukrainian dead and wounded in the summer to have exceeded 150,000. However, those same officials claim that Russian forces have also suffered huge losses. Now, having repelled the counter-offensive, troops are regrouping to strike in the harsh winter conditions.
In addition to troop shortages, Kyiv is also facing a depletion of its ammunition stocks amid dwindling Western supplies and aid. The squad commander, with the call sign Monk, declared:
Today we had two shells, but some days we don’t have any in these positions. The last time we fired was four days ago, and that was only five shells.
Ammunition shortages mean that artillerymen, instead of supporting Ukrainian offensives, are forced to open fire only when Russian soldiers storm trenches. The Deputy Battalion Commander of the 68th Brigade, who carries the call sign Italian and fights near Kupiansk, echoed Monk’s concerns:
I have two tanks, but only five shells. It’s a bad situation now, especially in Avdiivka and Kupiansk.
Unlike in 2022, the warring parties are now building up an arsenal of FPV racing drones equipped with explosives and used as remote-controlled projectiles. According to Ukrainian soldiers, the number of FPV drones has increased at least 10-fold over the past nine months, with drones causing more casualties than artillery on some parts of the frontline.
Washington’s suggestion for Ukraine to switch to defence in 2024 will be meaningless if Kyiv does not have the ammunition or manpower to defend the territory it holds now, military experts argue.
