How the best chance to win the Ukraine war was lost
By Yaroslav
Trofimov
Washington Post
January 9, 2024
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was flying home on a
Turkish Airlines plane from New York when Russia invaded. He had
just been welcomed into the
White House by President Biden. It felt like he had been
diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, he thought. The warm handshakes, the
empathetic smiles were meant to be final farewells — for him, and
for his country.
In Washington, and in most European capitals, no one expected Ukraine to
survive in February 2022. The CIA director, William J. Burns, had
secretly flown to Kyiv at Biden’s request, warning Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky that Russia was planning to assassinate him.
“They spoke about the physical liquidation of our leadership, about the
creation of filtration and concentration camps,” said Zelensky’s
national security adviser, Oleksiy Danilov. “But what could we do? We
kept asking: give us weapons. But they didn’t really give weapons to
us.”
As the United States shut down its embassy in Kyiv ahead of the
invasion, it did ship some weapons to great fanfare, such as Javelin
antitank missiles. But the quantity was puny: only about 90 Javelins,
according to Danilov. Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, while
also briefed about the hopelessness of the Ukrainian cause, had
overruled internal objections and authorized a heftier load of about
2,000 NLAW missiles. Still, those were weapons best suited for a
guerrilla campaign, not a conventional war.
At the time, Ukraine’s military leadership, under Gen. Valery Zaluzhny,
had successfully kept Kyiv’s war planning secret — and not just from the
Russians. Neither Washington nor many senior officials in the Zelensky
administration knew Zaluzhny’s blueprint. “We were pessimistic about
Ukraine holding out in part because the Ukrainians didn’t share any of
their preparations or planning with us,” a senior Pentagon official told
me later. “And the preparations and plans that they did share with us
were military deception.”
Western governments were stunned by the speed of the Russian advance and
mindful of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warnings not to interfere.
Johnson called Zelensky with an offer to arrange an escape, one
of several such calls that the Ukrainian president received. One
possibility, Johnson explained, was to set up a Ukrainian
government-in-exile in London, the way a Polish government-in-exile had
been established there after the Nazi and Soviet invasions of 1939.
Zelensky asked for weapons instead.
Poland, perhaps because of its history, was the only nation that didn’t
despair in these early hours. Rerouting his connecting flight, Kuleba
attended Poland’s national security council meeting on Feb. 24, the day
of the invasion. The Polish government, like other NATO members, had
been told by the alliance’s intelligence that a swift collapse of the
Ukrainian state was near certain. Still, Warsaw refused to give up.
Immediately, Poland sent several truckloads of ammunition and heavy
weapons. “The Poles believed in us more intuitively than fact-based,
because all the facts spoke against us at the time,” Kuleba recalled.
The mood was very different in other European capitals. “Nobody was
giving the Ukrainians any chances,” Johnson said. “If this is going
to happen, the best thing is that maybe it should happen quickly,” a
senior aide to German chancellor Olaf Scholz told him at the time.
In his
speech on the day of the invasion, Putin threatened unimaginable
consequences should the West try to help Kyiv. And, since the first
days of the war, the White House’s overriding priority had been not
to overstep Russia’s “red lines” and provoke a direct confrontation
between Moscow and NATO — especially a nuclear one.
Putin’s admonishments worked, to a significant extent. In the months
to come, the United States and its partners held back from supplying
Ukraine with Western-made capabilities at a time when they would
have had the biggest effect, and prohibited Kyiv from using Western
weapons to strike military targets on Russian soil. By the time many
of these Western systems did arrive, in the second year of the war,
Russia had built up defenses, mobilized hundreds of thousands of
troops and switched its industries to wartime footing. The best
window of opportunity for a clear and quick Ukrainian victory had
disappeared.
I went to see Zelensky in his fortresslike office in Kyiv in July
2022. Ukraine had survived, repelling the initial Russian onslaught
on Kyiv, but was bleeding men as Russia refocused on seizing the
eastern region of Donbas, where the conflict began in 2014.
Encouraged by Kyiv’s military abilities, the Biden administration
and Western allies had just started supplying outgunned Ukrainian
forces with Western artillery. It was indispensable: Ukraine’s own
Soviet-standard ammunition, used to repel the Russians around Kyiv,
had almost run out. Still, Ukrainian requests for Western tanks,
fighting vehicles, combat aircraft or Patriot air defenses kept
getting dismissed out of hand — mostly because of fears about
Moscow’s reaction.
Zelensky was grim-faced, chronically tired and visibly aged. I had
last met him 2½ years earlier at a banquet in a Kyiv art space. At
the time, the former comedian performed a short standup routine and
deferred thorny questions about his relationship with President Donald
Trump to the guest of honor at his table, whom he kept calling
“the real president”: actress Robin Wright, a.k.a. President Claire
Underwood in the television show “House of Cards.”
That quick smile, the sparkle in the eyes and the desire to please
the crowd were gone. Again and again, Zelensky returned to the
horrendous damage inflicted by Russia on the Ukrainian people. Only
a fraction of the many thousands of deaths went reported, he noted.
“You have an explosion in a city center, and 11 people are missing.
What does it mean? This means that nothing is left of these people,
nothing at all.” He waved his hands. “Children without limbs,
children without heads …”
By failing to seize Kyiv in March, Putin had already suffered a
strategic military defeat in Ukraine, Zelensky believed. “He
opened his mouth like a python and thought that we’re just
another bunny. But we’re not a bunny and it turned out that he
can’t swallow us — and is actually at risk of getting torn apart
himself.”
Zelensky showed his exasperation with Washington tying itself in
knots of self-imposed red lines. He dismissed fears of Russian
escalation as unwarranted. After all, as Ukrainian officials
kept telling their American interlocutors, Russia had already
used all its weapons except the nuclear bomb on Ukraine. What
else could it do?
The United States, however, kept taking Russian nuclear warnings
seriously. “The Venn diagram between our and Ukrainian interests
overlaps about 85 percent, but that remaining 15 percent is
pretty important,” a senior Pentagon official told me. “The
Ukrainians are already fighting for their existence. But the
United States has a special obligation to avoid a nuclear war
that would end all life on Planet Earth forever.”
As I talked to Zelensky, Ukrainian, U.S. and British commanders
were meeting at a U.S. base in Wiesbaden, Germany, to figure out
precisely where the Ukrainians should launch their attempt to
regain Russian-occupied land — at that point nearly a quarter of
the country.
From Kyiv, Zelensky and Zaluzhny advocated for a push to the Sea
of Azov in the Zaporizhzhia region that, if successful, would
sever Russia’s “land bridge” to Crimea and deprive Moscow of its
biggest prize in the war. After months of losses, the Russians
were on a back foot, with as few as 100,000 combat-capable
troops left in Ukraine. Unwilling to admit that his “special
military operation” was not going according to plan, Putin
rejected his generals’ calls to mobilize reservists. Russia was
at its weakest. A better chance to strike a decisive blow might
not present itself. What Ukraine needed to succeed, Zaluzhny
calculated, were about 90 additional howitzers and adequate
ammunition, according to his aides.
It wasn’t a huge ask, but the allies weren’t convinced. The
Ukrainian military had not yet demonstrated any capacity for
offensive operations, especially large ones involving complex
coordination between multiple brigades, the U.S. advisers said.
They urged a more modest operation in Kherson.
Zaluzhny disagreed. “We must attack where we should, not where
we can,” he argued, according to his aides. But without the
requested package of U.S. weapons and ammunition, the
Zaporizhzhia push was impossible. The Ukrainians focused on
Kherson and Kharkiv.
In late September 2022, I followed Ukrainian troops into the
just-liberated city of Kupyansk, which had served as the capital of
the Russian-occupied part of the Kharkiv region. Russian defenses
had crumbled overnight in Ukraine’s most successful offensive of the
war so far. U.S. officials were stunned — and worried.
The big square in front of the municipality was empty, except for
two Ukrainian troopers who ran from building to building to evade
Russian snipers. Several Russian flags were scattered in the dirt,
some half-burned. A billboard with the words “We are a single people
with Russia!” was still hanging on the facade. Abandoned in haste,
this had been the inner sanctum of the Russian occupation
administration.
The Russians had left behind hundreds of copies of IDs of Kupyansk
citizens who had come to collect subsidies or to apply for Russian
passports. Some of the rooms were full of brand-new textbooks and
teaching aids written in Russian, still wrapped in cellophane and
meant for the new schools that were supposed to supplant Ukrainian
education. I was surprised by the sheer quantity of paperwork left
behind. Minutes of meetings, agendas, guidelines, allocations were
spilling from cupboards. The Russian bureaucratic machine had been
preparing for permanence.
Joining a Ukrainian patrol, I advanced around the remains of
burned-out Russian tanks and armored vehicles, past the anti-Russian
graffiti that testified to local Ukrainian resistance, and past the
bloated remains of a Russian soldier. He was lying in a pool of
dirty water under a billboard advertising a Ukrainian
fish-processing company that proclaimed, “We value everyone, we work
with the best!”
The soldiers belonged to Ukraine’s International Legion, with
Ukrainian officers and troops made up from foreign volunteers. I
asked one of the legionnaires, a Tennessee medic who went by the
call sign “Doc,” why he had decided to come fight for Ukraine. He
told me it was the images of destruction wrought by Russia that he
had seen on TV. “Everybody saw these pictures. For me, it wasn’t a
choice, really. If I didn’t do this, I would have hated myself,” he
replied. “I just don’t like fascists and I don’t like people raping
and murdering.”
A white truck with Russian military “Z” markings spray-painted on
the sides in orange sat in the middle of the road, its windows shot
out and two corpses spilling out from the cabin. A tank without a
turret smoldered nearby, alongside a stack of carbonized cadavers. I
took a photo with the squad of legionnaires. Within a few weeks,
some of these men were killed.
A pickup truck sped past. In the back, a Ukrainian soldier winked
and raised a thumb. There was a black bundle at his feet, and it
took a minute to realize that it was a person. From the back, it
seemed like a hunched old woman. It was only once I approached that
I grasped it was a wounded Russian soldier.
The Ukrainian escorts asked the blindfolded prisoner where he was
from.
“Ah, neighbors! Have you been to Kharkiv before the war?”
“Of course,” the Russian replied. It used to be common for the
people of Belgorod to visit the much bigger Kharkiv on weekends. The
two cities were only an hour and a half’s drive apart, back when
there was no war and when the border was easy.
“Did you see any Nazis there?” the Ukrainian asked, squinting.
Putin’s declared goal of the war, after all, was Ukraine’s “denazification.”
“No,” the Russian mumbled.
“Then why the f--- did you come here to fight?”
That week, as Russian armies fled in disarray, a stern-faced Putin
delivered a speech to the nation. Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk,
Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions — none of them fully controlled by
Moscow — would
henceforth become unalienable parts of Russia.
Once again, he reminded the world of Moscow’s nuclear weapons. “In
case of a threat to the territorial integrity to our nation, to
defend Russia and our people, we will, without a question, use all
the means available to us,” he warned. “This is not a bluff.”
The war, he added, was no longer just against the regime of Ukraine
but against “the entire military machine of the collective West.” To
win, Russia needed more troops. At least 300,000 more.
Within hours, Russian recruitment offices started rounding up men.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians stampeded to flee the country
through the few available exit routes. Flights to the few
international destinations still linked with Russia sold out in a
matter of hours. That week, the cheapest one-way economy ticket from
Moscow to Dubai cost nearly $8,000.
Ukraine called Putin’s nuclear bluff. In the following weeks, Kyiv
pressed its offensive into areas that Moscow now considered Russian
soil, taking the city of Lyman in Donetsk and then Kherson — the
only regional capital that Russia had occupied since the full-scale
invasion.
But in Washington, fears of a Russian nuclear escalation reached
their highest point that week. According to U.S. intelligence
estimates, Putin was likely to consider a nuclear strike under three
scenarios. One was a major attack on Russia proper, especially with
NATO involvement. Another was the possibility of losing physical
control over Crimea. And the third, according to a senior Pentagon
official, was a Ukrainian battlefield victory “that would completely
and totally shatter the Russian military, such that the Russian
state would sense an existential threat.”
Crumbling in Kharkiv and Kherson, the Russian military seemed on the
verge of such a collapse in the fall of 2022 — a consideration that,
at that critical moment, again tempered U.S. assistance to Kyiv. The
Biden administration reached out to Moscow to de-escalate.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan went on American television
networks. “We have communicated directly, privately, to the Russians
at very high levels that there will be catastrophic consequences for
Russia if they use nuclear weapons in Ukraine,” he
said.
By late November 2022, the Ukrainian offensive had run out of steam.
There was no massive resupply of artillery ammunition, and Kyiv’s
pleas for Western tanks and fighting vehicles kept getting turned
down. Meanwhile, Russia’s new commander for the war, Gen. Sergei
Surovikin, had hundreds of thousands of fresh troops at his
disposal. Ukraine’s advantage in manpower was over. Surovikin
ordered these men to spend the winter digging, creating nearly
impregnable fortifications along the entire front line.
All the hardware that Ukraine was begging for in 2022 — Leopard and
Abrams tanks, Bradleys and Strykers, and Patriot batteries — was
eventually provided the following year. “A mountain of steel,” is
how U.S. officials termed it.
But, by then, it was a different war. The Ukrainian offensives of
2023 gained little ground against an entrenched, prepared and more
numerous enemy. Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship had gained him time —
not just to prevent a military collapse, but also for indispensable
military aid to Ukraine to get caught up in the United States’ own
domestic politics.
Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign affairs correspondent of the
Wall Street Journal. This article is adapted from his new book, “Our
Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of
Independence.”
|