Can Ukraine Break the Bad News Cycle?
Narratives of defeat are back in vogue. They’re still wrong.
AMONG UKRAINE’S INTERNATIONAL SUPPORTERS, the passage last month by Congress of the long-awaited bill authorizing more U.S. aid generated a brief moment of euphoria. But with the start of the Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region, much of the commentary has shifted toward defeatism. How “bleak” is the situation there, and how worried should Ukraine’s supporters be?
Even staunch supporters of Ukraine, such as exiled Russian opposition leader and former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, are sounding pessimistic: His alarming May 16 Twitter thread, based on his remarks at an antiwar conference in Berlin, started with the words “The West is losing the war” and predicted that, without a massive new Western effort, “the fall of key Ukrainian regions to Putin” was inevitable in the next two years. The following day. Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment and Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, both experts on the Russian military, painted a less dire picture but described Ukraine’s current situation as “serious” and warned that “things are likely to get worse before they get better.”
Have earlier assessments, at least starting with the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, been colored by wishful thinking and excessive optimism? What should the West do? While an accurate picture is difficult to obtain amid rapidly unfolding events on the frontlines and reports both intentionally and unintentionally misleading, some facts are fairly clear, and some conclusions are in order.
THE KHARKIV OFFENSIVE, in a region from which Russian troops fled ignominiously before advancing Ukrainian forces in September 2022, was a jolt for many observers because it seemed to catch Ukrainians unprepared—despite earlier Ukrainian warnings that Russian forces were massing near the border. On May 10, Russian forces crossed the border and managed to advance rapidly across lightly defended and unfortified territory, seizing several villages and moving into the town of Vovchansk—while missile strikes against Kharkiv, some thirty miles away, grew worse.
The Russian gains shook not only Western observers but many in Ukraine, particularly since President Volodymyr Zelensky had touted the Kharkiv region in late 2023 and early 2024 as an example of successful construction of fortifications. The Russian advance raises tough questions about the extent to which the Ukrainian military is beset by the same corruption and negligence that have degraded Russia’s war effort. The respected Ukrainian open-source intelligence site Deep State Map showed shocking photos of “dragon’s teeth”—sharp small pyramids of reinforced concrete that can block the movement of tanks—piled uselessly by the side of a road instead of being used as fortifications. The anti-Ukraine right predictably and gleefully seized on these reports.
Zelensky has already replaced the commander responsible for the area, and Ukraine’s independent media and robust openness of political speech (all the talk of Zelensky’s supposed autocracy notwithstanding) will almost certainly ensure a proper investigation. So far, it’s not clear that the lack of fortifications in the areas taken by Russian forces is due to corruption or negligence; Kharkiv region governor Oleh Sinehubov told the BBC Russian service that fortification lines were built not close to the Russian border but deeper inside Ukrainian territory because shelling and bombing from the Russian side made construction near the border impossible. Even construction work as far as eighteen miles from the border, Sinehubov said, resulted in casualties—four dead and fifteen injured—and the loss of some thirty units of machinery. If so, it’s likely that, once again, Ukraine’s defenses were undercut by lack of weapons and munitions supplies from the West—and by restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western long-range weapons to strike inside Russia.
Even so, the panic seems exaggerated. After the Russians’ initial breakthrough, their advances in the Kharkiv region have reportedly either stopped or slowed to a crawl. Combat for control of Vovchansk is intense, and some 60 percent of it is still in Ukrainian hands, while the Russians have taken a few depopulated villages in the area. Russian forces in the area are suffering heavy casualties and lack the manpower for a further push. Expatriate Russian analyst Ruslan Leviev, founder of the open-source Conflict Intelligence Team, noted that the Russian offensive plan in Kharkiv rests on a paradox: Its apparent goal was to draw Ukrainian troops away from the Donetsk region to facilitate Russian advances in that area, but successfully maintaining the momentum in the Kharkiv region would require Russians to move their own troops from the Donetsk region to the Kharkiv region. The net result is to shift some of the fighting from the east and south to the north, but not much more. It’s far from clear that Russia will be able to use its modest and very costly gains in the Kharkiv region to partially encircle the city of Chasiv Yar in Donetsk, which appears to be one of its objectives.
WHAT ABOUT THE BIGGER PICTURE—in particular, the grim scenario painted by Khodorkovsky, who predicted that Kharkiv may fall to Russian forces by end of the year and Odesa may follow next year? Leviev and other military analysts such as fellow émigré Yuri Fedorov, a professor at Prague Municipal University, agree that the chances of that are virtually nil. Indeed, Khodorkovsky’s claims (almost certainly motivated by the laudable goal of impressing upon Western audiences the urgency of more support for Ukraine—a kind of “shock therapy,” in the words of expatriate pundit Alexander Nevzorov) often rest on dubious calculations. He asserts, for example, that “at the start of the war, Russia’s population was 142 million to Ukraine’s 40 million—a ratio of about 3.5:1. Now, two years later, that ratio is 7:1.” But such a startling change would have required half of Ukraine’s population to have fled the country, assuming Russia’s population stayed the same. That seems unlikely. In reality, while many warn that Ukraine faces dire demographic perils, the current population is estimated at 33 to 37 million. (These estimates are complicated by the fact that as many as 13 million Ukrainians live in occupied territories; but most of those territories have been under de facto Russian control since 2014.)
Manpower shortage is indeed a serious problem for Ukraine. But the idea that the men simply aren’t there, as both friends and foes sometimes seem to think (“Where is Ukraine going to get more soldiers? Breed them?” exclaimed exiled Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats), isn’t true. Kofman and Lee point out that the shortfall is “the consequence of policy choices, a rickety mobilization system and many months of political intransigence before the recent passing of a series of mobilization laws,” including one lowering the draft eligibility age from 27 to 25 and improving incentives for volunteers. Ukraine’s parliament also passed a law allowing some convicts to enlist in exchange for a promise of parole—though with much stronger safeguards than similar policies in Russia, to prevent the release of dangerous offenders.
Other problems are not at Ukraine’s end. Inadequate Western aid remains an issue. When deliveries are greenlit, frustrating delays often follow: The F-16 fighter planes, first promised to Ukraine last year, are still incoming, and only in small quantities. It’s also unclear how much of the materiel in the U.S. aid package approved last month has already reached the frontlines.
But the pessimistic narrative of Ukrainian defeat disregards some impressive Ukrainian successes that would once have seemed the stuff of fantasy—such as effectively disabling the Russian naval presence in the Black Sea with lethal drone strikes on warships (and, in the process, neutralizing Russia’s attempts to blockade Ukrainian grain exports). The doom-and-gloom narrative also tends to disregard Russia’s problems—including shortages of manpower and hardware. Leviev argues that even Kofman and Lee, who are guardedly optimistic about Ukraine’s prospects, are too willing to credit claims that Russia is currently signing up about 30,000 volunteers a month. Open-source data from the frontlines, he says, show no evidence of new troops arriving in numbers that would reflect such recruitment levels and that the real figures are likely no more than 10,000 a month.
And Russia faces other troubles. While its ability to weather Western sanctions has been touted as a success story, Russia’s war economy is not as robust as it seems. Gazprom, the natural gas giant, has posted its first net loss in more than two decades due to the collapse of gas exports to Europe. The oil industry is suffering from Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries and labor force shortages. Russia’s GDP growth is largely attributable to massive government spending on the military and associated industries. Private investment, the key to long-term real growth, has plummeted, and inflation is nearing 8 percent and rising.
Leviev believes that Russia may make marginal gains for the remainder of this year, but in 2025, when production of armaments in NATO countries finally ramps up, Ukraine is likely to turn things around and start retaking its territories again—though not enough to restore its 1991 borders. But in a world as volatile as the one we currently face, any predictions beyond 2024 seem foolhardy.
NARRATIVES TEND TO TAKE ON A LIFE of their own. In late 2022, Ukrainian battlefield successes created an optimistic narrative that led to inflated expectations of the liberation of all Ukrainian territories controlled by Russia. The pessimistic narratives in the wake of the fizzled Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023, and especially of the new Russian offensive of 2024, have their own dangers—particularly given the proximity of the elections in the United States. While Ukraine is not a high priority for most voters, the perception that Joe Biden’s Ukraine policy has failed certainly won’t help. Should Donald Trump win in November, his Ukraine policy, on which he has sent conflicting signals, may depend on how well Ukraine seems to be doing by inauguration day. If the momentum is not on Putin’s side, the Donald/Vladimir bromance may not survive Trump’s distaste for being associated with losers, or his zeal to take credit for wins. All this makes it all the more urgent to step up U.S. and European support for Ukraine this summer—and remove the restrictions on the use of long-range weapons to strike at military targets inside Russia.
Another factor to consider is Ukrainian morale as this summer’s partial mobilization kicks off. Every poll shows that the vast majority of the Ukrainian population is still committed to winning the war. Paradoxically, the Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region, where Ukrainian civilians have once again found themselves in the path of advancing Russian troops—with the attending reports of detentions, executions, and looting—may serve to remind Ukrainian conscripts of what they are fighting for, and against. But it’s no less important for Ukrainian soldiers to know that the free world is still in their corner and doing everything it can to improve their chances of winning the war.