Zelensky’s U.S. Visit: Signs of Hope and Danger
The front lines give cause for optimism. American politics is another matter.
UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY is in the United States to address the U.N. General Assembly in New York, visit an American munitions factory in Pennsylvania, and meet with several world leaders, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. However, a meeting with former President Donald Trump is apparently not happening, and Trump has ratcheted up his anti-Ukraine, anti-Zelensky rhetoric, pushing a narrative of Ukraine’s certain defeat. With American aid still essential to the Ukrainian war effort, Ukraine’s position in American domestic politics has never been more uncertain.
Meanwhile, how is Ukraine faring in that war effort? The reality on the ground is complicated, but it does not support the defeatist narrative.
The news in Donbas is worrying, with reports that the Russian army is achieving some tactical successes by overwhelming Ukrainian units with superior manpower and artillery, and by using small, mobile units to attack from several directions at once. While the Russians are suffering massive losses in both soldiers and equipment, they still keep coming, and Ukrainian casualties are growing, too. The audacious Ukrainian incursion into Kursk, the Russian border region, has not, so far, caused Russians to redeploy units from Donetsk (though it may well have slowed down the Russian offensive by keeping the Russians from deploying more troops in the Donbas). If current trends continue, the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region is likely to fall to Russian forces in two or three months. The situation appears to be even more dire in Vuhledar, where a Russian assault suffered a notorious defeat last year; right now, it seems likely that Ukrainian troops there will be forced to retreat to avoid encirclement. Russian forces would then be in position to advance toward the larger cities of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, bringing them closer to occupying the entire Donetsk region.
Expatriate Russian journalist Michael Nacke confirms that Russia’s “swarm attack” tactics are yielding some results: “Vuhledar is in danger, the situation near Pokrovsk is worsening, and the Russians are also making some gains in Toretsk.” (However, the Ukrainians are making some gains in other areas of the front: In the Kharkiv region, for instance, Ukrainian forces have just regained control of an important stronghold in the city of Vovchansk, a chemical aggregate factory the Russians had held for three months.)
Nacke, who draws on a wide range of sources for his analysis, advises against panic. He points out, for example, that Ukraine is currently working to fix problems that have contributed (along with the intensity of the Russian assaults) to the failures near Pokrovsk: namely, poor chain-of-command communications and other tactical errors in the local units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Nacke also argues that it’s far from clear for how long Russia will be able to sustain its offensive at the current pace, since right now Russian troops are “throwing everything”—men and materiel—into the meat grinder. He notes that the more independent Russian war-hawk blogs are complaining about attempts to make up critical shortages of soldiers with men who are physically unfit or untrained for combat.
Evidence of such brutal strategy abounds. The Insider, an independent Russian-language news site, published a report of soldiers being sent to fight despite health issues such as poor vision, heart disease, asthma, hypertension, and even cancer, as well as previous combat injuries like missing fingers or limbs. Those who refuse to fight on medical grounds are locked up and, in some cases, beaten and threatened with torture.
Some units in the Russian Army are also reassigning soldiers with non-combat specialties, including conscripts, to combat roles. Two soldiers from the Altai region mobilized to work as repairmen recently recorded a video pleading with the region’s governor to rescue them: They were ordered to fight, with no combat training, and have been beaten for refusing. “They’re using us to plug up the holes because there are huge losses on the frontlines!” one of the soldiers (who self-identify by name, date of birth, and unit) says in the video. “We’re being sent into assaults with no preparation, like cannon fodder.”
How long can this continue, given that Putin has resisted another large-scale mobilization? Ukrainian veteran and military analyst Evhen Dikiy assesses that the Russian casualty rates near Pokrovsk, horrific even by Russia’s usual standards, are unsustainable for an extended period of time. One of his hypotheses, echoed by Nacke, is that the Russians are betting everything on one big push to seize as much land as they can by winter, in hopes of getting a ceasefire deal that freezes the territorial status quo. Crucially, this plan may be dependent on Trump winning and strong-arming Ukraine into surrender.
Yet if Ukraine can successfully defend Pokrovsk and perhaps even Vuhledar for the next six weeks, the momentum may shift in its favor. And even if Russia does take these cities, almost certainly reducing them to rubble in the process, those victories may prove pyrrhic if it doesn’t have the capacity to continue the offensive. It doesn’t take a sophisticated analyst to point out that while Russia has more men than Ukraine, it is also suffering from severe manpower shortages. .
A new round of large-scale mobilization may be inevitable—yet it remains politically perilous even under Putin’s autocracy. A few days ago, on the second anniversary of Putin’s first mobilization decree, about two dozen wives and mothers of still-deployed conscripts protested outside the Ministry of Defense in Moscow. They were harassed and berated by pro-government activists, and about ten of the women were briefly detained. Yet compared to what other protesters have faced, these women got the kid gloves. This is one situation where the regime knows mauling protesters is bad optics.
AT THIS POINT, any attempt to declare a ceasefire and freeze the current lines of control would create a significant problem for Russia. That’s because of Kursk, where Ukrainian troops have been successfully repelling the Russian counteroffensive, moving forward, and reportedly even breaking through a new section of the Russian border.
In more bad news for the Kremlin, Ukrainian drone strikes last week destroyed several more munitions depots deep inside Russia, including two major facilities in Toropets and in the Tikhoretsky district. The blast at the Toropets depot—which reportedly stored a large cache of artillery rockets and missiles, including some North Korean imports—set off about a dozen explosions, shattered windows four miles away, and registered as a 2.8-magnitude earthquake. According to Estonian intelligence official Ants Kiviselg, some 30 tons of munitions were destroyed—the equivalent of about 750,000 artillery shells, or two to three months’ supplies for Russia’s operations in Ukraine.
One reason Ukrainian forces have not been able to stabilize the front is that the Russians have been out-shelling them at ratio of about 10 to 1. (Yes, insufficient Western aid is also to blame.) The damage from other recent Ukrainian strikes on Russian arsenals is unknown, but the loss of the Toropets depot alone is substantial enough to disrupt Russian operations and, quite possibly, slow down the Russian advance in Eastern Ukraine.
Obviously, such a strike boosts Ukrainian morale—especially because it didn’t require Western weapons—and saps Russian morale. When the Toropets depot opened in 2018, Russian authorities touted it as a state-of-the-art facility capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. Ukrainian drones, on the other hand. . . . (Or make that debris from Ukrainian drones: The regional governor claimed that all the drones were shot down and it was the debris that caused a fire.) The explosion was big enough to generate a mushroom cloud, leading to rumors—which the ultranationalist TV channel Tsargrad blamed on Western “psy-ops”—that the depot may have been struck by a nuclear missile or may have housed a nuclear weapon set off by the strike. (Don’t buy it: The explosion of 30 tons of TNT would be tiny even by the standards of battlefield nuclear weapons, which often have yields an order of magnitude higher.)
The blast also prompted the temporary evacuation of some 7,000 locals—and probably the deaths of at least 200 Russian soldiers at the facility, a likelihood mentioned by war blogger Anastasia Kashevarova but unreported in the official Russian media. (“How many more lies and mistakes are there going to be?” Kashevarova asked.) Local authorities also threatened residents with prosecution for sharing photos or videos of the fires.
There’s plenty of other demoralizing news in the Russian media these days, such as a scandal involving a video recorded by two soldiers (not the aforementioned repairmen) shortly before they were killed in one of the Donbas “meat storms.” The men, skilled drone operators, said they were being reassigned to infantry and sent on a suicide mission after they accused their commanding officer of stealing and drug dealing. (After an outcry among war bloggers, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov ordered an investigation; but it was wrapped up a few days later with the commander fully exonerated)
Stories of abuse and corruption in the ranks punctuate a steady stream of gruesome crimes by Russia’s new convict-soldiers. One such veteran, a career criminal released from a penal colony in 2022 to fight in Ukraine, is now charged with raping and strangling his neighbors’ 11-year-old daughter. He wants to return to the frontlines, and may get help from a law working its way through the Russian Duma, which streamlines the crime-to-combat pipeline by allowing those charged with crimes to enlist without going through the formality of a trial. In a rare moment of dissent, Communist Party Deputy Renat Suleimanov protested that the law would let perpetrators off the hook and lamented that the Russian armed forces were being turned into a warlord’s army of “criminals and felons.” The bill is still likely to pass.
WHILE THERE HAS BEEN A LOT OF TALK about understandable war fatigue in Ukraine, where a third of the population is now open to territorial concessions to end the war, there are distinct signs of growing war fatigue in Russia, too. These days, the Ukrainian operation in Kursk makes even Vladimir Solovyov, the Mad King of Kremlin war propagandists, bristle when some guests reprise claims that “all is going according to plan.”
A recent telephone survey found that 49 percent of Russians backed an immediate Russian withdrawal from Ukraine and a peace agreement without achieving any of Russia’s stated goals (up from 39 percent a year ago), with only 33 percent opposed. More than 60 percent of Russians supported a peace agreement with Ukraine “with mutual concessions” in the next year. When asked to choose between a new wave of mobilization and a peace treaty, respondents chose the peace treaty by 49 to 29 percent. Only 32 percent say they would be willing to fight if ordered to do so, a drop from 42 percent in February 2023—while 29 percent, up from 20 percent, said they would be unwilling. These numbers are especially remarkable given that Russians are likely to underreport antiwar sentiments—even private pollsters are commonly suspected of being linked to the authorities.
To what extent public opinion informs Putin’s decisions is hard to say. But his reluctance to authorize a new round of mobilization suggests that, even with the press trampled and elections thoroughly rigged, he cannot afford to ignore discontent completely.
Meanwhile, Zelensky offers his own “victory plan” in which Ukrainian successes would compel Putin to accept a peace summit with no offer of territorial concessions from Ukraine. Ukrainian strikes at military targets deep inside Russia with long-range weapons would certainly strengthen such pressure on the Kremlin, and Biden’s refusal to allow them is a frustrating missed opportunity.
For now, Ukraine has done remarkably well, even when insufficient aid and onerous conditions from its Western partners held it back. But for Zelensky, the stakes in the U.S. election are extremely high. While he has clearly tried not to burn bridges with Trump—he was openly critical of JD Vance in his New Yorker interview but stressed his good relationship with the former president—Trump is staking out a hardcore anti-Ukraine position. At a rally on Tuesday, he not only took a swipe at Zelensky as “the greatest salesman” shaking down the United States for more money, but mocked the Ukrainian leader’s promise that “we will win.” He repeated his ahistorical claim that Russia always wins its wars. And he reiterated his promise that Putin and Zelensky will be forced to make a deal by Day One of his presidency.
Trump’s rhetoric will no doubt further motivate Putin to bet on a Trump victory and keep the slaughterhouse in Eastern Ukraine going until November. It also gives every Ukraine supporter more motivation to make sure that victory doesn’t happen. A new Trump presidency may not sink Ukraine, but it will make its position far more precarious.