Ukraine readies along all fronts for the next big attack by Russia
— Valentyn Lymarenko and his infantry unit have already been seasoned by a year of combat, but they are grunting through exercises in this snowy trench to prepare for the next phase of fighting: a much-anticipated Russian offensive.
“We know they are coming,” Lymarenko said amid the pop of practice rifle fire. “We don’t know where.”
As Moscow struggles to turn the tide of a war that so far has largely failed, Ukrainians are bracing for a Kremlin do-over. But just where Russia will seek to land its blow remains a mystery, forcing Kyiv to ready its troops along a varied and forbidding front stretching from Belarus to the Black Sea.
From boggy northern wetlands to raging street fighting in the east to the treeless southern steppe, each range of terrain presents its own set of challenges and openings for Russian invaders and the Ukrainians intent on expelling them.
Ukrainian officials warn that Russian could initiate its attack within weeks, even hours, as the calendar ticks toward the first anniversary of the invasion on Feb. 24.
A race now appears to be on between Russian forces aiming to meet President Vladimir Putin’s demand that they regain momentum — and seize more Ukrainian territory — and the arrival of additional Western weapons that could again help the Ukrainians choke off the Russian onslaught.
Ukraine has been adamant about its ambitions to push Russia out and retake all land, including the 10,000-squaremile Crimean Peninsula that Moscow has occupied illegally since 2014. But until newly promised tanks, munitions and air defense systems arrive, including more than $2.5 billion in arms pledged by Washington, military experts say Ukrainian units are likely to remain stalled in defensive positions they settled into after driving the enemy back in Kharkiv and Kherson last fall.
“It feels like we are waiting,” said Andrii, a soldier in the eastern Donetsk region where Russians have stepped up shelling, whom The Washington Post is identifying only by first name because of security risks.
The most obvious place for Russia to point the spear tip of a new attack is a few dozen miles to the north of where Andrii is stationed, in the center of the historically Russian-speaking Donbas, according to Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of military intelligence.
Moscow is pouring much of its swelling force — which Budanov estimates has topped 326,000 soldiers — into parts of the region Russia has controlled through proxy authorities for nearly a decade.
Many of those troops have headed into the raging battle for Bahkmut, a city on the path to Putin’s longtime goal of conquering Donbas, which comprises Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“Their whole task right now is to get to the administrative borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” Budanov said in an interview with The Post.
The Russians could also direct their attack at other lands they illegally claimed to have annexed last year in the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, parts of which help form Putin’s much-coveted “land bridge” between mainland Russia and Crimea, which Russia invaded and illegally annexed in 2014.
Even a major thrust into the western region of Rivne, which would allow Moscow to block the flow of Western weapons rolling in from Poland, is a scenario that strategists are examining.
Ukrainian commanders are watching everywhere, eager to decipher whether signs of a surge out of Belarus to the north or across coastal Kherson in the south are head fakes or a genuine assault, requiring a quick diversion of defenders from other parts of the front.
It’s a daunting defensive posture. But 50 weeks of war — during which Ukraine has roughly quadrupled the size of its overall fighting force — and billions in donated weapons have made the country for more able to cover the long horizon of threats than it was a year ago.
“This is not like end of February 2022, when we lacked manpower and so needed to impose priorities,” said Mykola Bielieskov, research fellow at Kyiv’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, a government-financed research institute that advises the Ukrainian president’s office on security and other issues.
“With 1 million men now in arms in Ukrainian security and defense forces, Russia cannot easily find an opening, even if they strike where there are no Ukrainian troops at all,” Bielieskov said.