Counterattack took months to plan
Ukraine conferred with US, UK experts on high-stakes move
WASHINGTON — The strategy behind Ukraine’s rapid military gains in recent days began to take shape months ago during a series of intense conversations between Ukrainian and U.S. officials about the way forward in the war against Russia, according to American officials.
The counteroffensive — revised this summer from its original form after urgent discussions between senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials — has succeeded beyond most predictions. Ukrainian forces have devastated Russian command and control and appear poised to capitalize on their advances in the northeast of the country and in another campaign in the south.
The work began soon after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told his generals he wanted to make a dramatic move to demonstrate that his country could push back on the Russian invasion. Under his orders, the Ukrainian military devised a plan to launch a broad assault across the south to reclaim Kherson and cut off Mariupol from the Russian force in the east.
The Ukrainian generals and American officials believed that such a large-scale attack would incur immense casualties and fail to quickly retake large amounts of territory. The Ukrainians were already suffering hundreds of casualties a day in what had become a grinding conflict. The Russian forces were experiencing similar losses but were still inching
forward, laying waste to Ukrainian towns in the eastern region of Donbas.
Long reluctant to share details of their plans, the Ukrainian commanders started opening up more to American and British intelligence officials and seeking advice.
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Andriy Yermak, a top adviser to Zelenskyy, spoke multiple times about the planning for the counteroffensive, according to a senior administration official. Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior Ukrainian military leaders regularly discussed intelligence and military support.
And in Kyiv, Ukrainian and British military officials continued working together while the new American defense attache, Brig. Gen. Garrick Harmon, began having daily sessions with Ukraine’s top officers.
Time was of the essence,
U.S. and Ukrainian officials believed.
To mount an effective counterattack, the Ukrainians needed to move before the first snow, when Russian President Vladimir Putin would be able to use his control of gas supplies to pressure Europe.
This account of the lead-up to the counteroffensive is based on interviews with multiple senior American officials and others briefed on the classified discussions between Washington and Kyiv that helped Ukrainian commanders shape the battle. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity.
American officials were hesitant to judge the full impact of the counteroffensive, anxious to see how it continues to play out.
For now, Kyiv has the advantage.
One critical moment this summer came during a war game with U.S. and
Ukrainian officials aimed at testing the success of a broad offensive across the south. The exercise, reported earlier by CNN, suggested such an offensive would fail. Armed with the American skepticism, Ukrainian military officials went back to Zelenskyy.
“We did do some modeling and some tabletop exercises,” Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s policy chief, said. “That set of exercises suggested that certain avenues for a counteroffensive were likely to be more successful than others. We provided that advice, and then the Ukrainians internalized that and made their own decision.”
The stakes were huge. Ukraine needed to demonstrate that this was not going to become just another frozen conflict, and that it could retake territory, for the morale of its people and to shore up support of the West.
Throughout August, at the behest of Ukrainians, U.S. officials stepped up feeds of intelligence about the position of Russian forces, highlighting weaknesses in the Russian lines. The intelligence also indicated that Moscow would struggle to quickly reinforce its troops in northeast Ukraine or move troops from the south, even if it detected Ukrainian preparations for the counteroffensive.
“We saw the fact that the Russians actually relocated a lot of their best forces down to the south in preparation for the other counteroffensive that the Ukrainians kicked off,” Kahl said. “So we had reason to believe that because of the persistent morale challenges, and the pressure of the Ukrainians, that there might be pockets of the Russian military that are a little more brittle than they appear on paper.”
Instead of one large offensive, the Ukrainian military proposed two. One, in Kherson, would most likely take days or weeks before any dramatic results because of the concentration of Russian troops. The other was planned for near Kharkiv.
Together, Britain, the U.S. and Ukraine conducted an assessment of the new plan, trying to war-game it once more. This time, officials from the three countries agreed it would work — and give Zelenskyy what he wanted: a big, clear victory.
But the plan, according to an officer on the general staff in Kyiv, depended entirely on the size and pace of additional U.S. military aid.
Ukrainian and American officials said the now weekly or biweekly Pentagon announcements of new shipments of weapons and munitions from U.S. stockpiles have given Kyiv’s senior commanders the confidence to plan complex simultaneous offensives.
As Ukrainian soldiers moved into areas in the northeast, Russian forces crumbled.
In some places around Kharkiv, Russian troops just walked away from the battle, leaving behind equipment and ammunition, according to U.S. defense officials.
The Kherson attack was never a feint or a diversion, according to people briefed on the plan. And it has succeeded in forcing Moscow to delay sham votes on whether parts of the Kherson region want to join Russia.
By failing to detect Ukraine’s buildup around Kharkiv, the Russian military has demonstrated incompetence and shown that it lacks solid intelligence. Its command and control have been decimated, and it is having trouble supplying its troops, giving Ukraine an opening in the coming weeks, U.S. officials said.