Ukraine Is Preparing the Battlefield for a Spring Offensive – Foreign Policy

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Report: Ukraine Begins Pre-Offensive Probe of Russian Lines
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If you take it from Yevgeny Prigozhin, the already-bad battlefield situation in Ukraine for Russian troops is going from bad to worse. Taking to his Telegram channel last week, the boss of the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group said that Russian units had begun to flee the eastern city of Bakhmut as probing Ukrainian attacks netted the defenders their largest swath of recaptured territory in months. 
If you take it from Yevgeny Prigozhin, the already-bad battlefield situation in Ukraine for Russian troops is going from bad to worse. Taking to his Telegram channel last week, the boss of the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group said that Russian units had begun to flee the eastern city of Bakhmut as probing Ukrainian attacks netted the defenders their largest swath of recaptured territory in months. 
“Those territories that were liberated with the blood and lives of our comrades,” Prigozhin said in an audio message, “are abandoned today almost without any fight by those who are supposed to hold our flanks.” Wagner has lost tens of thousands of troops in the grisly nine-month battle for the salt capital of the Donbas region, according to Western estimates. 
If this is the opening salvo of Ukraine’s long-awaited spring offensive, officials in Kyiv are being more cautious. The gains may be the largest in months, but Ukraine has only retaken 7 square miles of territory in the suburbs north and south of Bakhmut, a top Ukrainian defense official said on Tuesday. And Russia continues to rake the city with artillery as it sends in more paratroopers. 
“I would like to remind you that the enemy has an advantage in terms of numbers of people and weapons,” Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said. British intelligence couched the gains as “tactical progress” that is holding off Russia’s western advances and giving Ukrainian troops better access to supply lines, as the city is a key Ukrainian logistical and transport hub. 
Still, some top Ukrainian military officials are going as far as to label the Ukrainian gains as the first offensive success in the nine-month battle to defend Bakhmut. For now, spoiling is just as good as toiling.
“We fight with less resources than the enemy,” the commander of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrsky, said on Monday. “At the same time, we manage to destroy its plans.”
Ukrainian officials are also keenly aware they are playing an expectations game with Western allies, especially the United States, which has just $6 billion left in weapons it can give to Kyiv from Pentagon shelves. Kyiv might not feel overt pressure from Washington to launch the much-vaunted spring offensive. But the Ukrainians are worried that if they aren’t able to take a Kharkiv-like bite out of Russian gains in the Donbas, or get their new long-range guns in range of Crimea, it will look like a failure to U.S. and NATO officials who are already clutching their pearls, tightening the purse strings, and watching the political clock. 
“The real worry I heard in Ukraine was very clear,” said Phillips P. O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews who recently returned from meetings with Ukrainian officials in Kyiv. “The worry is they launch this offensive, it makes some gains, but it’s not a knockout blow. So it’s like, okay, we’ve done well, but it hasn’t driven Russia out of the war, and they instantly get pressure from the Biden administration to settle. This is their fear.” 
The probing attacks, which some Western officials see as shaping operations ahead of a larger assault, can still deal damage to reeling Russian forces. U.S. intelligence believes Russia has lost 20,000 troops since December 2022—out of about 100,000 total casualties—and the Kremlin has scrambled to plug gaps in the 600-mile long front line, ranging from the south bank of the Dnipro River all the way to Kupyansk and Izyum, liberated in Ukraine’s fall offensive against the east. 
Russia may need tens or even hundreds of thousands of troops to begin conducting offensives again, not to mention better equipment. Russian war museum curators have watched with horror as their treasures trundle to the front lines. But Ukrainian officials aren’t anticipating a knockout blow. “It’s impossible to destroy all Russian troops at the moment,” said one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. 
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has used the moment to launch an offensive of his own: a diplomatic charm offensive. A three-day, four-country swing to Britain, Germany, France, and Italy that wrapped up on Monday marked the Ukrainian president’s longest trip outside of the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion began 14 months ago. Zelensky garnered billions of dollars in new weapons commitments for Ukraine, including a pledge from France to begin training Ukrainian pilots on Mirage jets. Kyiv, with European backers, is still pressing for F-16s from Washington. Zelensky also managed to get $3 billion in military aid from Germany, the largest arms package from Berlin so far. 
Ukraine is anxious to reclaim the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which has faced the unfortunate threat of a meltdown since Russian troops occupied it last year, threatening the power supply that cools the reactors. Ukraine also now has the reach to jab Crimea, in Russian hands since 2014. But woolens, more than weapons, might be the issue. “Are their own forces ready?” said Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe. “Do they have enough combat power that can penetrate multiple trench lines and minefields?”
Hodges added that Ukraine doesn’t need to push on hundreds of miles of Russian lines to have an impact, but can do damage with probing attacks in a handful of places that keep Russian troops in place and prevent them from moving. 
“When you combine courageous, well-led infantry supported by artillery, you can still make limited gains,” Hodges said. “So just imagine what it’ll be like when they’ve got a dozen armored brigades with tanks and mechanized infantry and armored engineers and all these combined arms teams that have been practicing and rehearsing over and over how they’re going to do this.” 
“I would really hate to be a Russian private sitting in a trench right now, waiting for all this to start,” he added.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @JackDetsch
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