arms package, which is worth up to six hundred million dollars and will include additional ammunition for HIMARS systems and artillery rounds. On September 15th, the Biden Administration announced the latest U.S. “When their offensive started, we had nothing with which to sew up those holes,” this person told me, “and the Ukrainians went right through.” Ukraine began striking Russian ammunition depots, command posts, and logistics hubs far behind enemy lines, forcing the Russian Army to move its reserves even farther to the rear. But the Ukrainian military was constantly refreshed with new conscripts, and able to marshal significant deliveries of Western weapons-notably, the U.S.-made HIMARS rocket system, which is able to hit targets at around fifty miles. According to a person familiar with Russian defense policy, the retreat from the Kharkiv region represented an “extremely serious operational loss for the Russian Army, which could turn into a strategic one.”įor months, this person told me, it had indeed looked as if the Ukrainian and Russian Armies suffered from the same problem: neither side had the strength to push forward and move the front strongly in one direction or another. Across more than a thousand square miles, one line after another simply collapsed. That plan came crashing down earlier this month, when a two-front Ukrainian counter-offensive, in the south and northeast, forced the Russian Army to abandon the entirety of the Kharkiv region, without much of a fight, in a matter of days.
The war-or “special military operation,” as it is known, in increasingly flimsy official parlance-could be fought on the cheap and dirty, using mercenaries, Kadyrovtsy from Chechnya, men rounded up from the streets of occupied Donetsk and Luhansk, and prisoners who were promised pardons if they survive the front. Russia wouldn’t win by outright knockout, but through a kind of slow-motion T.K.O. The lines looked effectively frozen in other areas that Russia occupied, such as the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, buying Putin time for the status quo to take on the air of the inevitable. It was possible for Putin to maintain faith in this vision for much of the summer, as Russia used its substantial artillery power to blast its way across the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. Russia would emerge victorious in two campaigns at once: the subjugation of Ukraine and the dethroning of the Western-led security order. To win, he wagered, he would merely have to wait until the West, facing spiking prices for energy and food, inflation, and unrest, softened its support, and Ukraine, exhausted by war and depleted of resources, gave up.
The goal of some in the West “is to weaken, divide, and ultimately destroy our country,” he said.Įarlier this spring, having effectively lost the battle for Kyiv, Putin switched to what he saw as the long game. Putin cast the war in Ukraine as a struggle for Russia’s very existence-at the hands of not the Ukrainian Army but, rather, the combined forces of the collective West. His televised address contained three central messages: the Kremlin plans to carry out referendums in its occupied Ukrainian territories in the south and east, so as to pave the way for their immediate annexation those lands will then be considered within Russia’s national borders, meaning that Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons to defend them and a “partial mobilization,” that is, a military draft, has been ordered to prop up the Russian war effort. On Wednesday morning, Vladimir Putin announced that the war in Ukraine is entering a new phase-or, at least, that was his intention.
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