Ukraine Is Entering Its Third Year of War at a Difficult Crossroads

By Michał Fiszer and Michael Puttré

The Russia-Ukraine war has entered a very dangerous phase: a bitter war of attrition that Ukraine cannot win by the numbers. Something must change radically or Russia will ultimately triumph. History shows that without radical changes on the ground, radical changes of fortune are a fool’s hope. Right now, Ukraine is at a crossroads: likely military defeat or a negotiated settlement to end the war. The latter might seem tempting, but history also shows that a treaty with Vladimir Putin’s Russia would be a fool’s bargain.

Before we discuss this dilemma, it is important to understand how we arrived here. One year ago Ukraine’s supporters in the West had reasons to be cautiously optimistic. As the second winter of the war settled in, so had realism. Unbridled expectations born from Ukraine’s spectacular resistance and Russia’s early blunders gave way to the reality of a stabilizing front. Meanwhile, a steady pipeline of superior war supplies from NATO countries was flowing to Ukrainian forces that were also becoming more experienced.

Two successful Ukrainian offensives in the autumn of 2022 eliminated many of Russia’s initial gains and enabled observers to think that a continuation in 2023 could see Russian forces pitched back to their invasion start lines. Ukraine had widely incorporated heavy armored vehicles and advanced artillery into its armed forces by the spring. In the meantime, Russia’s winter offensive was a complete failure, with the only gain being the small city of Bakhmut, captured after almost eight months of fighting at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian casualties. The battle probably precipitated the dangerous and bizarre mutiny of the Wagner Group mercenary forces. The war seemed to be turning against Putin.

Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive started last June after Russia’s great push lost its potency. Ukrainian forces attacked in two places in southern Ukraine: near Berdyans’k and Melitopol. The apparent goal was to expand Ukraine’s hold on territory east of the Dnieper and threaten Russia’s land bridge to Crimea. However, after advancing about 20 kilometers on each prong, the efforts ran out of steam and stalled for the rest of the year. There would be no rolling victory in 2023, as there had been in 2022.

What Happened?

Expectations tend to soar in war. History is littered with “home by Christmas” offensives. Military campaigns designed to “shock and awe” enemies into submission are followed by seemingly endless battles against insurgents. The fact is, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s stock was sky high in 2023 after thwarting Putin’s designs, which is one reason the West sent him so much money and modernish weapons. Pro-Ukraine politicians and pundits were just as vocal in advocating for nearly unlimited resources for the plucky defenders as they were in warning about what would happen if Putin emerged victorious. The prescription was more money, more advanced weapons and more training, followed by more of all of the above again.

The problem with this approach is that Ukraine was never going to be able to militarily defeat Russia—absent a collapse of Putin’s regime, which has not happened and shows no sign of happening. Russia has managed to put itself on a wartime footing and has even found, if not allies, then fellow rogues, suppliers and economic co-conspirators that have helped supply it with weapons and blunted the worst effects of the West’s sanctions. The Russian people even still support the war.  

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces are assimilating Western equipment as it is made available at the fastest rate possible and adapting it to their own battlefield realities. But despite critics pointing to the vast expenditures of money and equipment, this aid has come too little and too late. This is astonishing to some, but as generous as the West feels it is being, Ukraine could have used the heavy equipment earlier. It could have used the precision rockets and strike missiles and air-defense weapons earlier. It could have used mountains of artillery shells earlier.

The fact is, forming new units and training them takes as long as it takes, which in war is always too long. Some processes simply cannot be sped up: A day has 24 hours and a week has seven days. Even basic military training is like learning a language: It cannot be done in a week. As we have written earlier, learning how to attack effectively on a modern battlefield is one of the most difficult skills people can master. This is why most armed conflicts tend to peter out after a burst of violence into simmering “forever wars.” It’s extremely hard to win by advancing against a determined enemy.

Therefore, when Ukraine began receiving advanced offensive weapons (as opposed to defensive anti-tank weapons) about a year after the war began, the training of new formations for an offensive could begin. The new units were ready by about the end of June 2023. Concurrently, the Russians had over half a year to thoroughly prepare likely defensive positions.

Although this isn’t the place for a primer on modern land warfare, it is important to understand why the conditions on Ukrainian battlefields today make offensives so difficult. Appreciating likely avenues of enemy attack, Russian forces built solid defensive belts, each several lines deep, with a line consisting of tangles of trenches and anti-tank ditches pocked with dugouts and bunkers protected by extensive minefields. The situation facing the Ukrainian attackers in June 2023 was not something their Western instructors had expected.

NATO does not have a doctrine for breaking through extensive field fortifications. On the attack, it envisions speed and maneuver with strong air support. Meanwhile, the Russians resorted to methods straight from World War I: They built field fortifications to great depth. Nobody in the West expected a repeat of Verdun or Passchendaele in Ukraine. This is why the summer offensives of 2023 failed.

Of course, the NATO school would respond by bombing everything. Needless to say, Ukraine does not have an air force capable of carrying out the volume of attacks required to support an offensive against fortified defensive lines. Airpower plays a relatively limited role in Ukraine because modern air defense has proven to be so strong and effective that it does not allow combat aircraft and helicopters to operate over the battlefield. This is true of both sides.

It is possible that stealth aircraft, such as the Lockheed Martin F-35, would perform much better, but neither side has them. Ukraine should become an important case study for Western military analysts and commanders because NATO relies so heavily on aviation. But that doesn’t help Ukraine embarking on its third year of war against a more powerful enemy with a population three times its size.

What Now?

There is movement to equip Ukraine’s air force with F-16s, which, in addition to being an extremely effective combat aircraft, is the most numerous fighter jet in the world. So there will be no shortage of planes, spare parts, weapons and training available for Ukraine’s F-16 force. However, there is no prospect of the country being able to acquire the numbers needed to go on the attack. Denmark has pledged about 20 F-16s through 2025 to make way for its new F-35s. The Netherlands and Norway have also signaled a possible willingness to send F-16s to Ukraine as they become surplus. Nevertheless, Ukraine would need a hundred or so fighters to sustain a modern air campaign in all the required roles, and such numbers are not in the cards. At best, the Ukrainian air force eventually will have a few dozen F-16s that will allow it to better defend its airspace against Russia and have more options to launch strikes at select targets—and this after years of acquisition and training. So the F-16s, as helpful as they likely will be, won’t radically change the situation on the ground.

The introduction of new battlefield weapons into the Ukraine war has tended to produce a burst of celebrity-like YouTube fame for each in succession: Javelin anti-tank missiles, Bayraktar drones, HIMARS artillery missiles, Leopard 2 tanks, Storm Shadow and SCALP strike missiles. F-16 fighters would get a similar reception and raise expectations accordingly. And yet the war will drag on.

The United States is clearly the largest supplier of military hardware to Ukraine, with deliveries of $44 billion through October 2023. Germany is in second place with $17.5 billion, followed by the United Kingdom (nearly $7 billion), Norway ($3.8 billion), Denmark (roughly $3.5 billion) and Poland (about $3.3 billion). European institutions in various countries have supplied $6 billion more. Together, European countries have delivered roughly the same dollar value of military equipment as the U.S. and Canada combined.

Ukraine is very much dependent on Western-supplied weapons and ammunition, since many domestic factories have been attacked and are under constant pressure of possible attacks, especially from Russian cruise missiles and Iran-supplied drones. Moreover, U.S. and European weapons have shown themselves far superior in quality to their Russian counterparts, and these come from Western factories.

A possible fatal problem for Ukraine is that the West will eventually tire of providing needed support. Recently, the military aid packages sent to Ukraine consist mainly of ammunition for the systems already delivered, and even this support is short of what is needed. More ominously, the enthusiasm for spending vast sums of money on Ukraine year in and year out for the foreseeable future is waning, to say the least.

The decaying enthusiasm in the United States for funding the lion’s share of Ukraine’s war needs indefinitely speaks for itself. One only has to say “border” or “Israel” or “China” to banish Ukraine funding from many people’s priorities. Expectations that Europeans will be eager to take up the slack must be measured against their demonstrated willingness to pay their fair share of NATO alliance burdens, which, with a few exceptions such as Poland, is not high.

Furthermore, critics note that the West’s defense industrial base is inadequate even for meeting its own need for arms. Most European NATO nations are struggling to fulfill their own alliance commitments for weapons. Meanwhile, the United States must gear up for a potentially world-altering defense of Taiwan against the People’s Republic of China in addition to its other far-flung defense commitments in Israel, Ukraine and elsewhere.

Time To Negotiate?

Hence, we are at the crossroads. The rising chorus of Western voices urging Zelenskyy to negotiate an end to the war is pitched to sound humanitarian and wise. As illustrated above, absent a near miraculous development, Ukraine cannot defeat Russia on the battlefield and will never achieve its stated war aims of recovering all territory it has lost since 2014, namely the Donbas and Crimea. If a war cannot be won, aren’t negotiations preferable to further loss of life and eventual, possibly inevitable, defeat?

Unfortunately, the sad truth is that negotiations with Russia will lead nowhere. There is nothing to negotiate over: Putin will do whatever he wants anyway. Russia is able to sign any piece of paper and then break the agreement the next day, as it has done many times. Russia has already violated the Belovezha Accords (1991) that ended the Soviet Union, the Budapest Memorandum (1994) that established Ukraine’s borders and two subsequent Minsk Resolutions (2014 and 2015), known as Minsk I and II, that were supposed to end Russian involvement in Ukraine after the earlier invasion. Russia has not kept any of these agreements, so why should it be expected to keep the next one?

Negotiated treaty enthusiasts do not care. The purpose of a treaty is to end the taxpayer burden on Westerners for defending Ukraine. Ukrainian forces and their leadership are willing to fight if military support continues. Yet the West is tiring of the fight. Supporters of negotiations tell themselves stories of Ukraine at peace joining the European Union or even NATO. At the very least, markets will stabilize. Grain and energy will flow again. Ukraine will be able to build back better!

Putin laughs at these stories. And while he may not have written the stories himself, as some critics of the negotiate camp charge, the Russian president certainly loves to hear them told. Any deal Russia signs will merely be a breather to replenish stocks of advanced weapons, shake off whatever ineffective sanctions inconvenience the Russian economy and reorient for another push westward. Ukraine will be politically destabilized and infiltrated. The war will eventually be renewed, as it always has been. War and conquest are now Russia’s state doctrine.

What’s more, Russia will be ready to attack Poland or some other NATO country such as one of the three Baltic states roughly five years after the fall of Ukraine. This is the view of many prominent figures in NATO, although estimates range from three to 10 years’ time. The point is that the war is here and it is ongoing, treaty or no.

Given that continuing the war in Ukraine is the only real option, the West should reconsider how it goes about providing future support. There are some scenarios where NATO and the EU can avoid war on their own soil. But the time frame for such solution is passing by quickly, as Ukraine will run out of available manpower within a year or so. Any chance for achieving Ukrainian victory—or at least staving off defeat until Russian losses cause it to reevaluate its goals—will come with more advanced weapons and training for Ukraine, not less. In addition to providing more of what Ukraine already has, the West must give the country long-range weapons to enable it to strike Russia directly and formidably. As with shipments of heavy weapons in 2023, sooner is better than later.

One might be afraid of Russian nuclear weapons, but such fear is baseless. Russia might want to conquer Europe, but it is certainly not interested in a “murder-suicide” act that would end the regime. Threats of nuclear strikes are like Putin’s promises of peace if only the West would abandon the corrupt Nazi criminals of Kyiv and allow Russia to achieve its objectives. They are designed to change minds in Moscow’s favor. When stopped by conventional military power, Russia will back up and start to create more favorable conditions for starting another conquest. This is not exactly a hopeful future, but it buys Ukraine and the West more time to prepare for Russia’s next aggressive moves.

Neither of the options at the crossroads is attractive. Negotiation will inevitably lead to defeat, followed eventually by more war. The problem is that the other option—enabling Ukraine to continue fighting—also is horrible. War is horrible. War is killing. But it is the only viable option the West has if it doesn’t want Putin to start swallowing up not only Ukraine but other parts of Eastern and Central Europe. That is the reality of the situation. It is foolish to think otherwise.