A breakthrough vote to pass legislation authorizing additional aid for Ukraine sets the stage for “a race” between Russia‘s attacked forces and U.S. aid deliveries, with Ukrainian forces and territory hanging in the balance.
“It’s a race against time,” Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian parliament, told the Washington Examiner. “I hope that we’ll start receiving at least artillery shells within weeks … like two weeks or three weeks.”
As the House-passed legislation works through the Senate, U.S. and European officials are making a variety of overlapping plans to funnel more military equipment to Ukraine’s embattled forces. In parallel, Russian troops are working to exploit the existing shortages, especially in air defenses, ahead of an even more punishing struggle in May.
“As we predict, we will face a rather challenging situation soon,” Ukrainian defense intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said Monday. “[The Russians] are conducting a comprehensive operation. We won’t spend a lot of time speaking about it, but it will be difficult. Mid-May, early June.”
Ukrainian forces have faced a worsening battlefield landscape over the last several months, as the lapse in shipments of artillery rounds and air defenses from the United States inflicted a psychological blow while leaving troops outgunned and exposed to more and more aerial bombardments.
“Russia has basically a window of opportunity this year, and if they don’t attain a decisive advantage, which can be denied to them … then their overall advantage begins to decline [by] 2025,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and the war in Ukraine, said during a Center for New American Security podcast. “And then the odds of Russia attaining some of their objectives in this war actually really begin to decrease.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s objectives have been subject to revision in the Kremlin and debate in Western circles throughout the conflict. He justified the invasion in February 2022 by alleging that Russian-speaking Ukrainians in a pair of regions called Donetsk and Luhansk, also known as the Donbas, needed Russian forces to defend them from the central government.
That claim was belied by Russian military efforts, as the invading forces seized Ukrainian territory far beyond those regions, most significantly through their attack on the capital city of Kyiv and a sprint to form a land bridge from occupied Donbas territory to Crimea, the annexed peninsula where Russia started the war in 2014.
After months of setbacks, Putin shifted his emphasis by unveiling legislation that purported to formalize the annexation of the land-bridge territories, even though Russian forces did not even hold all of those territories. Russian forces redoubled their efforts to conquer Donetsk in recent weeks through a series of bloody attacks near Avdiivka and Chasiv Yar.
“Ammunition is definitely important,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow John Hardie told the Washington Examiner. “I think that’s really coming in the nick of time.”
Russian forces are having more success near Avdiivka than Chasiv Yar, but the latter has more military value due to its location in relation to other key cities and the topography. “Taking Chasiv Yar potentially could allow Russia to at least have a better shot at taking those other cities,” he added. “Gaining that high ground would be tactically advantageous as they try to push elsewhere, so you could see them having an easier time pushing to [another major city] after they’re able to take Chasiv Yar — if they are [able to do so].”
In parallel, Russian forces have intensified their bombardments of the Ukrainian front lines and major cities. These attacks have been powered by massive so-called “glide bombs,” a new ordnance inspired by “an American concept” known as a Joint Direct Attack Munition. The bombs are “near-impossible to intercept,” as a Center for European Policy Analysis memo put it. Furthermore, Ukraine’s declining stockpiles of air defense missiles have left them increasingly vulnerable to attacks from Russian ballistic and cruise missiles, such as the Monday strike that destroyed the television tower in Kharkiv, one of Ukraine’s largest cities.
“The No. 1 issue is air defense. We are in absolute need of air defense. Once the decision is passed, we urgently need concrete assistance with this,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told a delegation of U.S. lawmakers on Monday. “We also need very specific weapons to help the military and protect civilians. Of course, we are talking about the need for weapons with a longer range. Artillery shells are also very important.”
Ukrainian officials have pressed Western powers to provide more Patriot missile batteries, saying they need 25 to provide adequate coverage across the country, and Zelensky has said they need “a minimum” of seven more. Germany has agreed to donate one Patriot, while others reportedly faced pressure to open their stockpiles during a meeting of European Union foreign and defense ministers on Monday.
“Spain, for example, who has air defenses, who don’t need it — they are not a border country,” a senior European official told the Washington Examiner. “They don’t have dangerous neighbors [unless you count] Portugal, but that’s a [problem] on a football field, not a military issue.”
Several European countries that possess Patriots have been hesitant to send more of the air defense batteries to Ukraine because “there is a risk that they will go below the NATO guidelines,” as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged last week.
“If the only way NATO allies are able to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to defend themselves, well that’s the risk we have to take,” he said. “Provided that this is a national decision and provided that allies then make sure that they replenish their stocks so they, again, are able to meet the NATO capability targets.”
If Western powers continue to meet those needs, Ukraine could pay a heavy price later. It’s not clear what the United States with Europeans are willing to provide.
“If the right calls aren’t made in the coming months, the inertia will be very significant, and in the second half of the year, the risk of a Russian breakthrough really goes up,” Kofman said. “The inertia of that inaction, the failure to make those decisions, casts a very big shadow over the course of the rest of the year, right? And this is often the hardest thing to convey to decision-makers that ‘Look, you won’t be able to fix this when you get to the real crisis point.’”
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Merezhko says Putin hopes “to deprive us of electricity, to destroy completely our [power] grid” over the summer and fall, thereby leaving Ukraine in a crisis during the winter. But the Kremlin strongman doesn’t want to let the spring season — or, to be more precise, May 9, the date of Russia’s annual commemoration of victory in the Second World War — pass without at least a symbolic success.
“We’re talking about days when we need to receive this ammunition and military aid, and we hope that it will take days or at most weeks for this to reach our territory,” Merezhko said. “He might want to produce the result on the eve of this victory. That’s why this is a dangerous period for us.”