Ukrainian officials themselves said it by December 2023: the great summer offensive had not delivered the sweeping gains it promised. Reuters, six months after the start, put it bluntly. Kyiv’s forces had made little progress against entrenched Russian resistance, and the front line stayed mostly where it was.
Business Insider counted roughly 200 square miles of territory taken in the whole year. Ukraine had hoped to hit like an “iron fist”. It drew blood, the magazine wrote, but it did not break through.
The plan and its axes
Kyiv launched the operation in June, well behind the schedule observers had expected. Its centre of gravity was the Zaporizhzhia front, which analysts regarded as the shortest route to splitting Russian-held territory. That route stretched 80 km (50 miles), starting at Orikhiv, winding through Tokmak and ending at Melitopol, with the aim of cutting Russian supply lines to Crimea. Other thrusts went toward occupied Donetsk and around Bakhmut. According to Reuters, Western military advisers, particularly American ones, urged a concentrated push along the Zaporizhzhia axis. Ukraine chose several axes instead. Analysts still argue about whether that spread its combat power too thin; Seth Jones of CSIS told Business Insider the real difficulty was finding any spot where Ukraine could punch through.
Not everything was bleak in the early going. In September the Atlantic Council noted that the offensive had breached the first of Russia’s defensive lines in the south, taken the town of Robotyne and moved along the road to Tokmak. Its experts saw value in that: from Tokmak, Ukrainian artillery could reach the railway Moscow used to supply troops in the south, Crimea included.
Why it stalled
Reuters called the Russian defensive line the strongest defensive system built in Europe since the Second World War, and it held. Business Insider pointed to a chain of compounding problems. The fight for Bakhmut, the deadliest clash of the war to that point, kept some of Ukraine’s best troops, including the 24th Mechanized Brigade and the 80th Air Assault Brigade, tied down through the planning stage and the summer. The harder job of shattering Russian defences went to less experienced units. Around 70 percent of the 47th Mechanized Brigade had no combat experience, the magazine said, citing the Washington Post.
Training was squeezed into a few months. Brigades entering the fight in June had little time to master combined arms warfare, and some got lost, delayed attacks or gave up surprise. Within weeks, Ukrainian forces dropped parts of the Western approach and fell back on heavy firepower and infantry on foot to cross Russian minefields.
The kit was uneven too. HIMARS rocket launchers and M777 howitzers, paired with radars that locate enemy guns, made a difference. Tanks and armoured vehicles proved far less useful than hoped against mines and anti-tank missiles, and breaching tools and mine-clearing gear fell short. Ukraine rationed shells even as Western production rose. M1 Abrams tanks and ATACMS arrived late, and F-16 pilot training had only just begun. In an early December interview with the Associated Press, Zelenskyy said Ukraine “didn’t get all the weapons we wanted”.
Analysts also gave credit. Franz-Stefan Gady of the IISS said no other army with new weapons and a few months of training would likely have done better.
Sources
- How the Ukrainian Counteroffensive Against Russia Went Sideways (Business Insider)
- Mapping Ukraine's counteroffensive (Reuters)
- What's next for Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive? (Atlantic Council)
