Crunch time for Ukraine: the line is holding but for how much longer?

My late but much-missed Scottish mother-in-law used to warn her family members “not to spoil the ship for a halfpenny of tar”. By this, she meant not to allow a major undertaking to come to grief because of negligence or an unwillingness to devote the modest and easily available resources to make it a success.

Yet today this is precisely the mistake that Europe and the United States are making vis-à-vis Ukraine. In recent weeks the news emerging from the front line has been sobering. Russian forces have pushed the Ukrainian defenders out of Avdiivka in the Donbas. They have subsequently gone on the offensive seizing a number of villages and forcing thousands of Ukrainian civilians to evacuate their homes as the Russians come closer. The loss of Avdiivka is not an immediate turning point in the war, even though surrendering a town that Ukrainian forces have tried so hard and so long to defend, suffering severe numbers of dead and injured in the fighting, will always be a psychological blow. Napoleon famously remarked that in war “the moral is to the physical by a factor of ten to one”. This said, a timely Ukrainian withdrawal has prevented the Russians from surrounding and capturing thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and can enable Ukraine to construct a new defensive line to the rear between Zaporizhzhia and Kramatorsk to stop the Russians advancing further and capturing a major Ukrainian city – something they have failed to do thus far. So as General de Gaulle was fond of saying: “to lose a battle is not to lose the war”.

Yet the loss of Avdiivka, following on from the fall of Bakmut last autumn and the failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive over the summer, is ominous both for Ukraine and for the Western strategy of ensuring that Russia doesn’t win the war. It clearly points to the strain that the Ukrainian army is now under after two years of continuous and high-intensity combat. Ukrainian commanders have publicly acknowledged that they are running out of artillery shells and air defence missiles, forcing them to carefully ration their dwindling stocks. Their forces in the Donbas trenches are becoming exhausted and urgently need rotation. Just this week, President Zelensky ordered the demobilisation of those army units formed before the Russian invasion of February 2022 and their re-assignment to the reserves. Yet this makes it even more urgent for the government in Kyiv to agree on a new conscription plan to raise hundreds of thousands of new troops from adult males still remaining in the country – large numbers having fled abroad or not returned from living and working in EU countries such as Poland. This task was not made easier after Zelensky fired a large number of military recruiters and closed regional recruitment centres last year after allegations of bribery and corruption in the recruitment process. This problem needs to be fixed fast and the government and the parliament need to agree on a conscription plan and associated budget. Yet as Ukraine calls up more military manpower it will dig deeper into its skilled industrial workforce, thus draining its economy. This will be a challenge at a time when Kyiv is trying to ramp up its domestic armaments production, partly through joint ventures with US and European defence companies. Ukraine is also under pressure from Russian missile and drone strikes against Ukrainian cities. These are now a daily occurrence, adding to the death toll of around 15,000 Ukrainian civilians officially recorded by the United Nations. These strikes demonstrate the Kremlin’s capacity to continue to manufacture or procure abroad missiles and drones – from Iran and North Korea – thereby giving the lie to those Western experts who asserted last year that Russia would run out of missiles soon. Lacking sufficient air defence, Ukraine is being forced to prioritise, leaving small- and medium-sized towns vulnerable as it concentrates its air defence assets to protect major population centres such as Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv.

Moscow continues to accept enormous casualties for minor tactical victories that can be spun by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine as major prestige successes. The Ukrainian general staff believes that Russia lost 30,000 soldiers in capturing Avdiivka. The Russian army has also learned the lesson from its earlier failures, using its air power much more to drop precision munitions on the Ukrainian front lines. It has also copied the Ukrainian innovations in the use of drones and the superior range of its artillery has allowed it to attack the Ukrainian forces from protected rear positions. Russia outnumbers Ukraine ten to one in missiles and artillery shells, enabling it to maintain concentrated fire for longer periods. Back in Moscow, the government has raised military spending to over 7% of GDP and 50% of the state budget. Russian society and the economy have been placed on a war footing and the Russian elections in just a few days will not put a peace party in power in Moscow or place any constraints on Putin’s ability to wage war as he chooses. This is problematic for Kyiv as only a crushing military defeat for Moscow rather than war fatigue will convince it to relinquish the portions of Ukraine that it currently occupies. 

Ukraine may have hoped that its recent battlefield reverses would have persuaded its Western backers to significantly step up their own arms deliveries and other types of assistance to Kyiv. But this has not happened. This week the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmtryo Kuleba, complained about “the drip feed of aid” while Prime Minister Shmyhal asked what had happened to the €16bn promised at two donor conferences held in Poland in 2022. Defence Minister Umerov complained that at least 50% of military assistance arrives more than six months late, complicating Kyiv’s military planning. Ukraine also needs $3bn each month in financial support so that it can devote its domestically generated budget to the war effort. In the first two years of the war, according to statistics of the Ukrainian finance ministry, Kyiv received $73.6bn in non-military foreign aid. But this figure has slumped to just $3 billion so far this year. Meanwhile, the aid package of $61bn requested by the Biden administration is still held up in the House of Representatives despite repeated appeals by Biden, Zelensky, other foreign leaders and many Republicans in Congress as well. Yet the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, appears to be in no hurry to move forward as some Republicans continue to insist on more action on the southern border and Donald Trump seems ready to pay any price to deny Biden a foreign policy success ahead of the November elections. The US administration could still assist Ukraine by drawing down existing Pentagon stocks of missiles, ammunition and spare parts; but without a new budget authorisation from Congress, the Pentagon cannot order replacements from industry. It has just announced that it will have to cut shell production in the US by a quarter. This means supplying Kyiv at the cost of the US military’s own readiness. In Europe, French President Emmanuel Macron has taken the lead in rallying the continent into action behind Ukraine. He has held informal summits in Paris and last week was in Prague to discuss a Czech proposal for a multinational bulk purchase of 155mm and 120 mm ammunition which Prague had put together from a number of foreign suppliers. Paris has also signed a bilateral security pact with Ukraine. Yet some have pointed to the gap between Macron’s political stridency and the modest level of actual French military transfers, which the Kiel Institute for the World Economy calculates at a puny €635mn. Paris says the real figure is actually €2.6bn, although this pales in comparison to Germany’s contribution of €17.7bn – second only to the US. Most controversially, Macron has said that all options need to be on the table including the sending of western soldiers to fight in Ukraine. This is not just a red line for Russia and Putin in his State of the Nation address last week once more dangled the threat of nuclear retaliation; it is also a red line for the Biden Administration and its NATO allies as well, who all rushed to rule out any such plan. The need to deploy Bundeswehr support troops in Ukraine is one reason why German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has ruled out sending the German Taurus long-range cruise missile to Kyiv despite repeated appeals from Zelensky to have a long-range missile to strike deep behind the Russian lines. Macron, who likes to provoke debate, may not have been serious about sending foreign ground forces but might have been trying to warn his interlocutors of the unpalatable alternatives of not sending enough weapons to Ukraine. The drip feed of Western aid to Ukraine is all the more surprising given that a whole panoply of Western politicians and military commanders have recently called on NATO to be ready to fight Russia in three to five years. The general assumption is that if Russia wins in Ukraine it will move against a NATO country within a few years.

So, 2024 will certainly be the decisive year in determining if the Ukrainian resistance to Russia begins to crumble, and Kyiv will be forced to accept humiliating peace terms, or if the front line can be stabilised while Ukraine builds a new army with Western help to drive the Russians back in 2025. As spring and potentially a new Russian offensive approaches, there are some positive developments from the Ukrainian perspective and therefore no need to veer from the excessive optimism of last spring to a mood of doom and gloom just yet. 

In the first place, Kyiv’s reversals on land have been offset by successes against the Russian navy in the Black Sea. Last week, a Ukrainian high-tech sea drone sank a Russian patrol ship, the Sergey Kotov, one of the most modern in the Black Sea fleet. Ukraine says that 20% of the missiles fired at its territory come from Russian warships in the Black Sea and the radars and helicopters on these ships also disrupt its own drone attacks against Russian targets. So, pushing the Russian navy far away from Ukraine’s Black Sea coast not only enables Kyiv to export more of its grain from ports like Odesa and Mikolayaev but helps Ukraine defend itself on land as well. With the blockage in the US Congress, the Europeans have thankfully stepped up their efforts. In addition to the UK, France and Germany, Canada and Italy have signed long-term bilateral security cooperation agreements with Kyiv. As mentioned, the Czechs have located 800,000 shells from undisclosed sources across the globe. A number of EU member states are now partnering with the Czechs to buy the first 300,000 for Ukraine. This bulk acquisition is a powerful incentive for the EU member states to finally agree on refinancing the European Peace Facility, a fund of initially €5,5bn, which has been used by the EU to commonly fund weapons purchases and transfers to Ukraine. Germany has been contesting its percentage share given the considerable bilateral assistance that it is already providing, far above its EU neighbours. Yet the Czech example shows that ammunition on international markets is available to plug the gap before Europe can ramp up its own industrial output. There has been other positive news in recent days. Denmark will give all of its artillery shells to Ukraine and some of its F16 aircraft. The Netherlands and Norway have announced new armaments packages and the Czech munitions and explosives manufacturer, Czechoslovak Group, will set up a production plant in Ukraine. Zelensky was recently in Turkey and concluded some bilateral arms agreements with Turkish defence companies. Ankara is also building corvettes for Ukraine to operate in the Black Sea.

Most importantly for the long term, EU Commissioner, Thierry Breton, unveiled last week his long-awaited EU Defence Production Plan. He is seeking €100bn in the lifetime of the next Commission and the Plan has a start-up capital of €1.5bn. The Commission is proposing to give European defence industries the incentive to re-open production lines and invest in machinery, components and workforce skills to give the EU a degree of strategic autonomy in armaments and critical military supplies such as explosives, spare parts, IT and electronics. A mixture of EU and national funding will help defence companies to form partnerships and negotiate long-term contracts. Defence companies in NATO countries outside the EU can participate by forming industrial partnerships with their EU counterparts. But, as Eric Trappier, the CEO of Dassault, pointed out last week, it will take a few years before the European defence industry can fully supply EU military needs internally given the low base from which it is starting – in marked contrast to Russia’s armaments factories which have been operating round the clock for the past two years.

This mixture of positive and negative would not be so bad if Ukraine had had a successful summer offensive and had inflicted a few humiliating defeats on the Russian occupiers, opening up the prospect of a peace on Kyiv’s terms. But that is not where we are and repeating the familiar slogans such as ‘Russia made a strategic mistake in invading Ukraine’ or ‘Putin’s invasion has united NATO and made it stronger’ or ‘Russia will emerge weaker from the conflict’ or ‘we will be with Ukraine for as long as it takes’ no longer sound so convincing. We are now in a dangerous situation and the time for magical thinking is over.

The EU assistance package of €500bn of grants and loans approved by EU leaders last January, after Hungary lifted its objections, demonstrated this shift. But there is a danger of the assistance effort becoming fragmented and ad hoc,with nations offering small packages here and there in reaction to the ebb and flow of events on the front line in Ukraine. The confusing variety of programmes to supply 155 mm shells – NATO, the European Peace Facility or the Czech-led consortium – testifies to this duplication of effort. What is needed instead is a clear and agreed strategic plan that all NATO allies commit to create a Ukrainian army and logistics and supply system that can defeat Russia, and sustain Ukraine as the eastern flank of NATO’s collective defence and deterrence thereafter. What needs to be resolved to achieve this?

First, a discussion of how much of the Western support and training effort could be moved inside Ukraine itself. It is currently located mainly in Poland and Germany. This is not an issue of combat forces, which have clearly and for good reason been ruled out. But as President Macron’s advisers and most recently the Polish Foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski, have indicated, there are useful support functions that Western military experts, located well behind the lines in Western Ukraine, can fulfil; for instance, training, equipment repair and maintenance, logistics and movement control, cyber defence, improving data collection and management, procurement and quality control, budgeting and helping Ukraine to overhaul its army recruitment and call-up system. Medical units and field hospitals to help treat wounded soldiers have their place too. Armies like to talk about their ‘teeth-to-tail’ ratio of front line troops versus office functions. If Western experts can take over some of these administrative and support functions it should help Ukraine to put more troops into the front line combat functions. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of private contractors and private security companies, financed by NATO governments and subject to rigorous supervision and rules, could be useful in this context. The idea of putting more foreign military advisers and support personnel into Ukraine will of course be controversial and it carries risks of Russian targeting of the locations and facilities that will be involved. But victory without risk in Ukraine is impossible and no important decision in any war came without the assumption of enormous risks and the balancing of extremely difficult choices. The West has already faced those risks in providing more advanced and heavy weapons to Ukraine, defying Putin and his red lines in the process.

Second is to help Ukraine to define a defensive strategy for 2024 to hold its territory, to give it the best breathing space to recover and to rebuild for future offensives. The priority is to help Ukraine build a heavily fortified front line and to plug weak points where Russia could punch through. The more territory Ukraine loses, the harder it will be to recapture it all. Kyiv will need more air defence to push Russian bombers back, as it has done for Russian warships in the Black Sea and the speedy introduction of the F16s so that it can maintain air superiority over its territory. Long-range artillery and more cruise missiles could hamper Russia’s attempts to concentrate its forces for an attack and to bring up supplies and fuel storage. Tank traps, loitering drones and mines can make it harder for Russia to use its superiority in tanks and armoured vehicles. The wider use of robots and automated firing systems can take some of the pressure off manpower and help to mitigate the impact of fatigue. Special operations forces can carry out sabotage attacks and harass the Russian supply lines in rear areas. Meanwhile, as it builds up its domestic armaments industry, consideration needs to be given to how to make the production sites less vulnerable to Russian drone and missile strikes; for instance, moving production underground as Nazi Germany under the direction of Albert Speer did successfully in World War Two, or protecting key sites with layered air defences. Building redundancy in supply chains and distributing production over a number of sites to avoid a single point of failure. Ukraine also needs to have tactical reserve forces that can be deployed rapidly to reinforce parts of the front line under pressure and to prevent a Russian breakout.

The third challenge is to develop a long-term concept for the Ukrainian army of the future and a stage-by-stage train and equip programme to transition to it. The problem at the moment is that countries are giving Kyiv weapons in response to short term needs and requests and according to what they have to spare in their stocks. As a result Ukraine has ended up with 230 different weapons systems, vastly complicating maintenance and spare parts and making standardised munitions impossible.

NATO and the EU should establish a joint Ukraine Defence Assistance Command to integrate their respective efforts. It could be staffed 50/50 by military and civilian officials from both NATO and the EU and member states. Partners like Japan and Australia can set up liaison offices. This Command could start by identifying a number of capabilities consortiums tasked to deliver a specific capability to Ukraine by a target date. This should not be too difficult as many European countries have already set up informal groups to help Kyiv with specific things, like the Netherlands, Denmark and Romania on F16 pilot training, France and the UK on cruise missiles and drones, the UK and Norway on long-range artillery, Poland and the Baltic States on vehicle repair, and, of course, the Czech Republic and six other countries on ammunition. The Command could ensure more coherence in equipment procurement vis a vis the 2040 Future Vision and track the speed of production and delivery from the newly placed defence contracts. Where delays occur, the Command can find stop gaps, workarounds and interim solutions. As Thierry Breton’s Defence Production Plan is rolled out, Ukrainian companies and joint ventures should be integrated into it and given access to technology and EU funds, as Ursula von der Leyen has advocated. Some other European leaders, such as the newly elected Finnish President, Alexander Stubb, have suggested that the European Investment Bank (EIB) in Luxembourg could change its investment rules to allow for participation in defence projects and companies. If this sensible idea is implemented, Ukrainian banks and defence companies could also be part of the constructs for proposed EIB funding. All these steps would usefully prepare the ground for Ukraine’s eventual membership of NATO and the EU by ensuring the full military and industrial interoperability of Ukraine and the West’s defence establishments

Finally, there is a parallel here with the early Cold War years. In 1952, Paul Nitze of the US National Security Council drew up NSC 68, which was to become the key doctrine in guiding US national security and foreign policy for the remainder of the Cold War. It was based on George Kennan’s earlier theory of containment of Soviet power and communist ideology but called for a broader mobilisation of the US economy and its science, technology and industrial base as well as of the US political leadership to buttress US allies in Western Europe and South East Asia. The driving force behind NSC 68 was a realisation that the Soviet moves to expand its zone of control beyond its borders were not isolated incidents that could be handled separately and with mixed responses, but part of a systematic campaign to undermine the democracies and behind which all Soviet forms of power were mobilised. NSC 68 was far from perfect and it occasionally led the US astray, as in the ill-judged intervention in Vietnam and the associated secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia. US support for some unsavoury characters in Latin America is not something to trumpet either. But NSC 68 did sustain NATO and the defence of Japan and South Korea for four decades and US steadfastness in its global leadership role was undoubtedly a key factor in bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end in 1990. What we are living through today is not identical to the Cold War and the US clearly now needs to share its leadership role with the EU and the Asian-Pacific democracies. But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, his unrelenting hostility towards the West and the way he is trying to undermine democracies at every turn means that, like the US in the early 1950s, Europe needs to raise its game and get ready for a full spectrum competition with Russia and its partners, including Iran, North Korea and China. An ad hoc and essentially reactive approach will no longer suffice. This implies that future assistance to Ukraine has to be part and parcel of a new grand strategy to simultaneously build up NATO’s collective defence and make the democracies more resilient to Russia’s hybrid warfare campaigns and economic and business penetration. The completion of the enlargement of NATO and the EU to Ukraine and Moldova and to the Western Balkans has to become a two-way process: strengthening the new democracies along the eastern flank of the Alliance and the EU, but also in turn driving internal reforms and programme priorities so that they can operate with nearly 40 members in the future. NATO and the EU will also need to consult on a long-term and targeted sanctions strategy vis-à-vis Russia that will disrupt its military supply chains and access to advanced military technologies. The NATO 75th anniversary Summit in Washington in July will be joined by the EU leadership and the heads of government of Japan, New Zealand, Australia and South Korea. So, it is the best opportunity to start mapping the contours of the integrated grand strategy that the transatlantic democracies urgently require. It will not come in the form of an NSC 68 which was the strategy of just one country. But NATO has a practice of devising Strategic Concepts – the current one was approved at the Madrid Summit in 2022 – and every decade or so the EU revises its Global Strategy. It published a Strategic Compass two years ago. Confronted now with the reality of an aggressive Russia, the Washington Summit can task NATO and the EU to jointly update their core strategic visions and combine them coherently into a comprehensive joint approach for the defence of the Western democracies. It will soon become clear that Ukraine is the lynchpin which will determine the future of the European and transatlantic security project. The closer this interdependence becomes, the more likely that international support for Ukraine will increase during this turning point year.

On paper, Western democracies have resources far superior to those of Russia. But it is the effective coordination and marshalling of effects that determine victory in warfare and paper advantage is of little use if not translated into concrete action on the ground. There is still time for NATO and the EU to make their power and capabilities count in Ukraine, but the lesson of the past two years since Russia’s invasion is that half-measures won’t do the trick against an adversary willing and able to go all in.

This article is part of Friends of Europe’s Ukraine Initiative series, find out more here. The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.