Ukraine seeks to win back southern territory
What happened
As Russia’s war on Ukraine dragged into its sixth month this week, Ukrainian troops fought back hard in the south, damaging a bridge in Kherson that had been an essential Russian supply line. Russian forces control most of the Donbas region in the east and the provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south, where they have been exerting their rule by distributing Russian passports and rubles. But in addition to bombing the Antonovsky Bridge, Ukrainian troops have clawed back 15 percent of Kherson, and officials expect to retake its central city— Russia’s first major conquest—by September. Ukrainians are losing far fewer troops now, from between 100 and 200 per day to about 30 per day, partly because they have been using their 12 U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, to destroy dozens of Russian ammo depots and dramatically reduce Russian shelling. The Biden administration said it would send four more such launchers, but that’s far short of what Ukraine is asking. “For an effective counteroffensive,” Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said, “we need at least 100.”
Following talks between Russia and Ukraine brokered by the U.N. and Turkey, Russia last week agreed to unblock Ukrainian ports to allow grain shipments to resume. Odessa alone supplies one-eighth of the world’s wheat, and the blockade has been causing a global hunger crisis that the U.N. says could starve 47 million people. Under the deal, Ukrainian naval vessels will escort the grain ships, and Russia has pledged not to attack them. The day after the pact went into effect, though, two Russian missiles hit Odessa. Still, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine remained committed to the deal, and the first convoy of ships could depart within days.
What the editorials said
“Well, that didn’t take long,” said The Washington Post. Zelensky deserves credit for refusing to back out of the Odessa deal, especially as the Russian attack was likely intended to provoke him to renege and allow Moscow to blame him for holding up 20 million tons of badly needed grain. The affair underscores how Russia has consistently operated in bad faith. Its “indiscriminate bombardment” of civilians—including a recent cruise missile attack that killed a 4-yearold girl pushing a stroller—is intended to “terrorize Ukraine into submission.”
Russia clearly wants the entire south, said The Wall Street Journal. White House officials believe that Moscow plans to annex Kherson and Zaporizhzhia next. To prevent that, “Ukraine needs more advanced weapons.” But so far, the West has been sending only enough firepower to keep Ukraine from losing outright, not enough for it to regain its territory. That must change. The “fastest way to a settlement” is to convince Russia “that the costs of war will keep growing.”
What the columnists said
Vladimir Putin has made a different calculation, said Mark Gongloff in Bloomberg. He’s betting that Westerners won’t keep supporting Ukraine if it means cutbacks and high prices. Russia’s Gazprom this week cut the flow of natural gas to Europe in half, “citing obviously bogus technical difficulties.” That forced the European Union to require each member state to slash its gas use by 15 percent, angering members that don’t source gas from Russia. Disrupting the flow of “fuel, food, and fertilizer” is Putin’s way of “turning the West’s putative strength—democracy—into a weakness.”
The West must prove him wrong, said William Galston in The Wall Street Journal. The southern offensive could be the crux of the war, and Zelensky’s government needs everything we can give, including “weapons, training, money, and unswerving moral support.” Allowing Putin to annex half of Ukraine would signal to other dictators that democratic nations “lack the will to defend their own cause.” This is “not the time for half measures.”
Offensive operations are much harder than defensive, said retired Australian Gen. Mick Ryan in The Sydney Morning Herald. But with enough Western support, Ukraine is “very capable” of taking back its southern territory. If Ukraine can drive the Russians back to Crimea, its long-range weapons could threaten the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. If it fails to retake the south, it will have lost a vital region that is home to key ports and power plants. The stakes for both sides are perilously high. Ukraine’s coming offensive will be “a violent, hard-fought, and very bloody affair.”