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In Ukraine, the fronts are entrenched. Neither side will be able to force a decision this summer. The only thing that is certain is further losses.
Kyiv – “Russia has paid a pretty gruesome price for his successes,” writes the Wall Street JournalAn anonymous source from the Ukrainian intelligence service had described May 14 this year – a day on which the troops Vladimir Putin’s attempted to advance northwest from Avdiivka towards Chasiv Yar, losing around 1,500 troops in the process. “This was Russia’s worst day since the war began, according to a Western assessment of Ukrainian and other intelligence services,” writes the journal and predicts bad things.
Both the Ukraine Both the US and the Russian invasion army are facing a deadly summer, the paper speculates, “without much hope of success.” Western observers, on the other hand, are not in favor of painting a bleak picture. The situation is tense, but not catastrophic, Franz-Stefan Gady, for example, recently told the ZDF. The analyst of the The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) believes that July will be the decisive month on the front lines. At the end of July, the wave of mobilization that has just begun in Ukraine will have an impact and change the front.
Ukraine: Tens of thousands of troops are just beginning their training
Gady speaks of tens of thousands of men who are just beginning their military training – he expects the first infantry training to last five weeks. This basic training is the same for all those called up, he says, and is followed by a few days or weeks of specialized training in the various brigades or in the NATOpartner countries or even in the USAsuch as the training of pilots or Patriot crews. Gady attributes the difficult conditions on the various fronts primarily to the current lack of personnel on the Ukrainian side.
“The West still has the power in this war; it can still bring about a change. For the Europeans, this means in particular that they must follow their words with actions. It is already late, but the Europeans can still correct this course.”
2024 will be the most difficult period for Ukraine since the first two months of the large-scale invasion, Gustav Gressel wrote in January. In the ideal scenario, the EU and Ukraine are working hand in hand, as he outlined for the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations: While the EU is starting to produce new large-scale equipment, Ukraine is holding up Russian offensives until the Russian units have been largely wiped out. At the same time, it is managing to improve its training activities behind the front lines, forming brigades of fresh troops and testing “new prototypes of electronic warfare equipment and anti-drone weapons,” he writes.
Summer forecast: Thousands on both sides likely to die
At least the beginnings of this scenario are there, although the EU is still struggling with supplies. In Gressel’s “intermediate scenario”, the USA in particular supports Ukraine, but only in dribs and drabs, because the election campaign is at a critical juncture. This is also reality. In the worst case scenario, which Ukraine faces, according to Gressel, US presidential candidate Donald Trump run an election campaign against Europe and form a republican movement. In fact, the last two scenarios seem to be closer to the future truth.
“Thousands are likely to die as warring forces search for openings along a largely static front line,” the Wall Street Journal – the pessimism seems justified in this respect. In fact, the ISW supports the Journal in this thesis. The ISW published statements by Putin from the beginning of June at the Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, according to which “Russia is not trying to achieve its military goals in Ukraine quickly,” as he said. Putin therefore declared “that the Russian armed forces are aiming to ‘push the Ukrainian armed forces out of those areas that should be under Russian control,'” as the ISW quotes him.
Inexhaustible resources: Putin sends up to 40,000 fresh troops to the front every month
He claims to have already conquered around 900 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, writes the Russian news agency Cup about Putin’s statements. According to the ISW report, Putin further indicated that the Russian armed forces were taking a gradual approach to their offensives. Various sources claim that Russia has been recruiting 20,000 to 40,000 troops per month this year alone. Putin did not say a word about ending the war in St. Petersburg, so it can be assumed that he intends to continue the war indefinitely.
“Containing Russia in Ukraine will therefore require moving away from the reactive approaches of the past two years and adopting a more proactive strategy,” write Elizabeth Hoffman and Benjamin Jensen. Wall Street Journal In order to prevent a so-called series of smaller or larger skirmishes, the two scientists from the think tank Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) claim a strategic foresight that corresponds to the length of this war so far and the length that is still to be feared.
Ageing army: Selenskyj’s soldiers are on average five years older than at the start of the war
Political scientist Gady also doubted that either side would be able to gain decisive ground in the near future with either an offensive or a counter-offensive. Just under 200,000 troops on each side are currently fighting against each other directly on the front lines, he said in ZDF – for every soldier who is directly fighting, he adds three soldiers who are assigned support tasks. However, he admits that as the war goes on, soldiers are getting older: Gady estimates that the average age of soldiers, especially on the Ukrainian side, has risen from 40 at the start of the war to 45. However, he says it is important to understand “that neither side has such quantitative superiority that a decisive breakthrough can occur,” he said.
The CSIS analysts would probably support the prediction of a deadly, costly and almost hopeless summer: “Crisis response is, at best, follow-up management. It is about fighting fires and quickly containing a burning building, rather than taking the time to think as a fire officer about how to prevent fires and control future fires,” write Hoffman and Jensen. Both the US President Joe Biden as well as Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), for example, must now come up with a strategy.
Western reaction: USA and NATO wait until something happens
“We said from the beginning that we always act according to the situation,” Major General Christian Freuding explained three weeks ago. In the Bundeswehr podcast Nachgefragt, the officer in the Ukraine Special Staff in the Ministry of Defense gave his opinion on the course of the front. Freudig spoke of helicopters that had attacked Ukraine from over the border between Kharkiv in Ukraine and Belgorod in Russia; he reported on the glide bomb attacks over 70 kilometers from the Russian heartland and that Russian guns had been able to fire on the defenders for days without being disturbed.
This was neither militarily nor morally justifiable, the German tank general concluded, and denied that Germany would become a party to the war by supplying weapons. Because these weapons were in the possession of the Ukrainians, were operated by Ukrainian forces and thus Germany was not responsible for any “damaging act”, as he put it. Wall Street Journal With his prediction of a hopeless and deadly summer, he raises the question of why the USA and its European partners did not help much earlier or more intensively based on this theory. Hoffman and Jensen call this the “logic of crisis response”.
They define this logic by saying that Ukraine would be supplied with weapons piecemeal, without coordinating “the temporal flow of resources” – this would lead to that the Ukrainian military would be unable to plan operations that would extend over a wide area and timeGustav Gressel had already criticised this logic in January: “The West still has the power in this war; it can still bring about a change. For the Europeans, this means in particular that they must follow their words with actions. It may be late, but the Europeans can still correct this course.”
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