The Ukraine War: Zelensky’s plea
Volodymyr Zelensky certainly knows how to work an audience, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Speaking to an “enraptured” crowd of 2,000 MPs and peers in Westminster Hall last week, the Ukrainian president pressed all the right buttons. He made references to Winston Churchill, British “grit and character”, and “delicious English tea”. To support his appeal for fighter jets, he presented the Speaker of the House of Commons with a pilot’s helmet inscribed with the words: “We have freedom, give us the wings to protect it.” In response, Rishi Sunak agreed that Britain would train Ukrainian pilots, and suggested “nothing was off the table” when it comes to supplying the Ukrainian air force. Zelensky later visited the European Parliament, where he again charmed representatives by speaking about “our Europe” and “taking care of the European way of life”.
Zelensky would welcome Western jets, said The Guardian, but he knows that, for logistical and political reasons, they’re unlikely to arrive any time soon. The point of his European trip was to bolster support for Ukraine and increase the supply of Western arms more generally. Kyiv is in a desperate “race against time”. Russia is believed to have about 320,000 troops in Ukraine and, with the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion coming next week, Vladimir Putin is demanding “sweeping advances”. The first tranche of US fighting vehicles and French combat reconnaissance vehicles have arrived on the battlefield, but it could be months before modern Western battle tanks materialise in the promised numbers. The worry is that Ukraine isn’t ready to fend off a concerted Russian offensive.
Russia currently enjoys a manpower advantage in Ukraine, said Lawrence Freedman in The New Statesman, and it’s making brutal use of it. This involves driving expendable, untrained conscripts against Ukrainian guns in order to exhaust the defenders and reveal their positions, before deploying more professional units. These tactics have ground out attritional gains – the UK Ministry of Defence reckons Russian forces have been winning “several hundred metres of territory per week” – but it’s hard to see them delivering “swift and effective” advances. The challenge for Kyiv, as it awaits the delivery of more powerful Western arms, will be to absorb these Russian attacks without conceding too much ground. The Ukrainians “need to avoid getting rushed into action before their new offensive formations are ready. Eventually it will be their turn.”