As the war in Ukraine approaches the end of its second year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is facing the harsh reality that his Western-supported summer counteroffensive failed to produce any significant territorial gains and that Russian President Vladimir Putin has even less incentive to give any ground given that U.S. and Western support appears to be weakening.
In a New Year’s interview with the Economist, Zelensky sounded resolute but realistic about what can be achieved this year, absent the ability to break through Russia’s multilayered defenses to cause a collapse of the front lines in the occupied southern region of the country.
“The war in 2024, this is the new page,” he said. “We have one strategy goal: to de-occupy our territories.”
“Our goals didn’t change. The goal is to save and to have more successful steps in the Black Sea, to continue success on Crimea, on the south,” Zelensky told Zanny Minton Beddoes, the Economist’s editor-in-chief. “I can’t tell you the details, but we will do it.”
Minton Beddoes later told CNN, “He was very frustrated. He senses that the narrative has shifted in the West and people think the Russians have the upper hand.”
“He called Putin an animal who senses weakness, and [he argued] that if you allowed Putin to win in Ukraine, it would be much, much worse, it would be an existential risk for the rest. And that argument just at the moment isn’t landing, I think, and that’s what really is sort of underpinning his sense of frustration, which was very real,” Minton Beddoes added.
There are multiple explanations for the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive to turn the tide of battle in 2023: U.S. aid was too slow in coming, giving Russia too much time to fortify its defenses, Ukraine lacked airpower and longer-range weapons that could cut supply lines, Ukrainian forces were dispersed along too many fronts, and breaking through Russia lines would cost the lives of too many Ukrainian troops.
At the outset of the counteroffensive, Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, believed his better-trained, Western-equipped troops would prevail, inflicting heavy casualties on the demoralized, poorly led Russian troops.
A declassified U.S. intelligence report provided to Congress in December assessed that Russia has lost 315,000 dead and injured troops since the start of the war.
In the last six months, Russia’s casualty rate has been upward of 20,000 troops a month, according to the Ukrainian General Staff.
“Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country, such casualties would have stopped the war,” Zaluzhny told the Economist in a separate November interview.
But not Russia, where Putin has little regard for the loss of life on either side.
“That was my mistake,” Zaluzhny lamented.
Ukraine, which does not release its casualty figures, has also suffered heavy casualties, with U.S. estimates suggesting more than 70,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed and more than 100,000 wounded.
At an end-of-year news conference in Kyiv, Zelensky revealed that after almost two years of intensive fighting, his military commanders are facing a manpower shortage and have asked for more troops for the front lines.
“They proposed to mobilize an additional 450,000 to 500,000 people,” Zelensky said. “This is a significant number.”
Zelensky, who had high, if unrealistic, hopes of winning the war in 2023, is not making any sweeping predictions for 2024 except to say there is no way he will negotiate with Putin, who has shown time and time again he can’t be trusted.
“We are not ready to give our freedom to this f***ing terrorist Putin,” Zelensky told NBC News in November. “That’s it. That’s why we are fighting. That’s it.”
Zelensky is facing a shortage of artillery shells and anti-aircraft munitions needed to blunt the constant aerial bombardment of Russian drones and missiles.
Putin is sacrificing his troops and biding his time, clearly banking on Western support evaporating and the reelection of former President Donald Trump, who has publicly indicated he would force Ukraine’s capitulation in less than a day.
“I will need 24 minutes — yes, 24 minutes, not more. Yes, not more, 24 minutes to explain to President Trump that he can’t manage this war. He can’t bring peace because of Putin,” Zelensky said in the NBC interview.
Many Western military experts, including retired U.S. commanders, dispute the notion the grinding war of attrition has settled into a stalemate or that Ukraine is losing simply because its land campaign failed to produce a dramatic breakthrough.
“I do not believe that ‘failed’ is the right descriptor,” retired Gen. Philip Breedlove, a former supreme NATO commander, said at an Atlantic Council event this month. “The Russians have lost large, impactful numbers of soldiers as they have been throwing themselves at the Ukrainians, so even though the Ukrainian large land movements did not materialize, Ukraine made progress on the ground.”
Breedlove, like other analysts, argues the focus on the limited gains on land is eclipsing Ukraine’s stunning defeat of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in 2023 despite Ukraine not having a navy.
“One area where I think the media has not done a good service is in highlighting the success of ‘the battle of the Black Sea,’ as I call it,” the Hudson Institute’s Luke Coffey said at the Atlantic Council event.
“The Ukrainians are achieving amazing things in the Black Sea. I think the latest number is 21 ships of the Black Sea Fleet have been destroyed or damaged. Many of the ships have moved out of Crimea, and the shipping lanes are open for grain exports to the global South,” Coffey said.
“All these things are made possible by the weapons that the West is providing combined with Ukraine’s ingenuity, creativity, and boldness.”
Zaluzhny, Zelensky’s top wartime general, advocates shifting to what he calls “positional warfare,” which emphasizes defensive operations, along with more drones, electronic warfare, anti-artillery capabilities, and de-mining equipment to maintain the initiative and avoid falling in a long war, which would play to Russia’s advantage.
It’s a strategy that should not be seen as “an acceptance of an inevitable Russian victory,” retired Australian army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan said in a recent podcast. “It is defensive, but only as a temporary position while the Russians are attrited, their drone and missile attacks defeated, and the Ukrainians rebuild their strength for a larger and more capable offensive in 2025.”
Still, Zelensky wants 2024 to be the year the Russians are forced to abandon Crimea, the strategic peninsula Putin illegally annexed in 2014.
Ukraine has already made the Crimean port of Sevastopol untenable for Russian warships with its drone and missile attacks — dropping a section of the 12-mile-long Kerch Bridge, the critical supply link between Crimea and Russia, could do the same for the whole peninsula.
“Russia has to know that for us, this is a military object,” Zelensky said in his Economist interview, but he insists he needs longer-range weapons such as American ATACMS or German Taurus missiles.
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“Ukraine armed with ATACMS and/or TAURUS would be able to reach every square meter of Russian-occupied Ukraine,” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “No Russian HQ or rocket launcher or ammunition storage site would be safe. No Russian ship would be safe. It’s only our lack of political will that stops this.”
“After ten years of war with every advantage, Russia controls only 18% of Ukraine, has failed to achieve air superiority, its Black Sea Fleet is retreating from Sevastopol, over 330K killed and wounded, and they are begging North Korea for ammunition,” Hodges noted. “Who’s losing?”