Ukraine's vulnerabilities: ammo, soldiers, air defense
Ukraine’s top military commander has issued a bleak assessment of the army’s positions on the eastern front, saying they have “worsened significantly in recent days.”
Russian forces were pushing hard to exploit their growing advantage in manpower and ammunition to break through Ukrainian lines, the commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, said in a statement over the weekend.
“Despite significant losses, the enemy is increasing his efforts by using new units on armored vehicles, thanks to which he periodically achieves tactical gains,” the general said.
At the same time, Ukraine’s Energy Ministry told millions of civilians to charge their power banks, get their generators out of storage and “be ready for any scenario” as Ukrainian power plants are damaged or destroyed in devastating Russian airstrikes.
With few critical military supplies flowing into Ukraine from the United States for months, commanders are being forced to make difficult choices over where to deploy limited resources as the toll on civilians grows daily.
Even before the disappearance of U.S. assistance — a bill to provide $60 billion in military and other aid may come to a vote in the House of Representatives this week — there was a consensus among Ukrainian commanders and military analysts that the third year of war was going to be extremely difficult.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned again Monday night that delays in U.S. assistance are deepening the challenges at the front and said the latest information
A Ukrainian soldier from the 77th Brigade fires a rocketpropelled grenade during training in the Donetsk region of southeastern Ukraine last month.
from Ukrainian intelligence suggested that the Kremlin is preparing for some sort of major offensive in late spring or early summer.
The three most critical challenges for Ukraine have been evident for months: a lack of ammunition, a shortage of well-trained troops and dwindling air defenses.
Now, as Russia intensifies its assaults, each individual issue is compounding the impact of the other vulnerabilities and heightening the risk that Russian forces will push through Ukrainian defenses.
Here is a look at the critical challenges Ukraine faces at the moment and how its leaders are trying to mitigate them.
In testimony before Congress last week, Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, the top U.S. military commander in Europe, provided a blunt assessment of Ukraine’s dire shortage of ammunition.
“If one side can shoot and the other side can’t shoot back, the side that can’t shoot back loses,” Cavoli said.
The United States had provided Ukraine with the bulk of its artillery munitions, he said, and Russia is poised to soon be able to fire 10 shells for every Ukrainian shell.
“If we do not continue to support Ukraine, Ukraine could lose,” he testified, urging lawmakers to approve a new aid package.
The longer range and greater destructive power of rocket systems and big guns like howitzers — which are not affected by weather and are less susceptible to electronic warfare interference than drones — make them essential tools. While drones have significantly altered the battlefield, often turning any attempt to cross open terrain into a suicide mission, they have limits.
“Drones can effectively destroy military equipment, tanks,” said Viktor Nazarov, an adviser to the former Ukrainian top general, Valery Zaluzhny. “But you cannot destroy defensive lines with drones.”
When the enemy has an advantage of 5 to 1 in terms of shells, Nazarov said, they can attack. When it reaches 10 to 1, they can succeed.
Since the fall of Avdiivka this year, Russia has taken only small patches of land at great cost without scoring a major operational breakthrough. But after replenishing its arsenal with assistance from North Korea and Iran, Russia is using a period of warm, dry weather to launch assaults, Ukrainian officials said.
Syrsky said Russia was trying to seize the moment to achieve an operational breakthrough along several major lines of attack, posing the most imminent threat to the town of Chasiv Yar. The heavily fortified hilltop town — 7 miles west of Bakhmut — protects an agglomeration of some of the Donbas region’s largest cities, including the home of the eastern command in Kramatorsk.