– Ahmed Adel –
(April 12, 2023, infobrics.org)
The Ukrainian military is planning a new spring offensive, which will reportedly begin between Orthodox Easter on April 16 and Labour Day on May 9. This expected offensive has received much international media attention, particularly because of the bold and bombastic claims made by Ukrainian officials, such as the fallacy that Ukrainian troops will reach Crimea within seven months. However, a leaked US intelligence document found that a shortage of troops, ammunition and equipment could cause the Ukrainian military to fall “well short” of their goals.
It is recalled that Ukraine unveiled on April 2 a 12-point plan on how to integrate Crimea into the country after conquering the peninsula from Russia. However, Washington is sceptical that it can be achieved, meaning that this planned offensive is just a method to secure more weapons, funding and interest from the West.
The leaked document, labelled “top secret,” gave a bleak assessment from early February and warned of significant “force generation and sustainment shortfalls.” More alarmingly for Kiev is that such an offensive will result in only “modest territorial gains.” This leak obviously provides a more realistic assessment of the war in Ukraine, which is why Washington is scrambling and threatening journalists to not publish the contents of the leaks as it obviously contradicts previous claims made by the State Department and their controlled media apparatus.
Most importantly perhaps is that many of the documents are dated to February and March, meaning most of the information is current and relates to the awaited Ukrainian spring offensive.
According to the Washington Post, the leaked document predicts that the Ukrainian military will only achieve “modest success” despite Kiev’s strategy revolving around capturing areas already liberated by Russia in Donbass, while at the same time pushing south to cut the land bridge between Russia proper and Crimea.
The near impossibility of the offensive, according to the document, is because of the potency of entrenched Russian defences, as well as “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies” which will probably “strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive.”
The Washington Post said that the leaks “reveal profound concerns about Ukraine’s readiness to withstand a Russian offensive” while “beyond the leaked document, US officials said the prospects for a modest outcome in the spring offensive also were reinforced in a classified assessment by the National Intelligence Council” which “found that Ukraine was unlikely to recapture as much territory as Kyiv did last fall.”
Although a senior Ukrainian official did not dispute the contents of the leak, another senior official said the revelations were unlikely to compromise the planned spring offensive, saying: “It’s been obvious to everyone since November that the next counteroffensive will be focused on the south, first Melitopol and then Berdyansk. But the exact place — we can change that the week before.”
Perhaps the most interesting changes since the leaks were published is a begrudging acknowledgement in Western mainstream media that the situation is not desperate for Russia, as people have been led to believe since the conflict began, and rather it is the Ukrainian military suffering from significant shortages.
Considering the Washington Post’s propensity to disseminate Ukrainian disinformation and fake news, the newspaper surprisingly acknowledged that “the difficult fight against Russia has exhausted Ukraine’s troops and hardware, making every day the war drags on an advantage to the larger Russian military.”
This is a point that has been argued for well over a year by military experts: Russia has all the time in the world to fight this war on its own terms; Ukraine does not have time as its military is exhausting, Ukrainian civilians are war weary, and European citizens are suffering from a self-inflicted economic and cost-of-living crisis.
As the newspaper noted, “the prospect of pouring billions of dollars into a military stalemate with only incremental gains in one direction or another could weaken the resolve” of those who are backing the Kiev regime, particularly Europe and the US, who could possibly sharpen “calls for negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow.”
This too will prove difficult though as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has endlessly promised a total victory, including the conquest of Crimea. This is obviously a delusional belief that will never come to pass, and rather it is a fantasy that Zelensky must maintain to continue receiving Western funds and weapons.
None-the-less, as the latest Washington Post article exposes, prospects for success, even with the arrival of thousands of Western-trained Ukrainian soldiers, are very low. This suggests that there could be a catalyst for a narrative shift in Western media, especially if the expected offensive fizzles out to nothingness after making some initial gains.
Yet, as already said, none of these revelations should be considered shocking or surprising if one objectively looks at events in Ukraine.
(Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher)