“Give us wings to protect freedom,” said the president’s Ukrainian pilot helmet Volodymyr Zelensky gave a gift to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London last year. The long discussions about supplying modern tanks were just over, although the first Leopard had yet to arrive in Ukraine. But tank formations are difficult without air superiority and now Zelensky came to beg the West to also speed up the delivery of fighter planes.
Ukrainian pilots are now training in Romania with the F-16s that the Netherlands and Denmark eventually agreed to, but they will not be active over Ukraine until the summer, it seems. In the meantime, the war is progressing considerably differently than the West had hoped last year. Russian anti-tank ditches and minefields proved to be an insurmountable obstacle for Ukraine, which is now on the defensive itself. From a ‘war of movement’ the battle has now become a ‘war of position’ with more fixed positions. In retrospect, smart drones and electronic warfare and demining equipment might have been of more value to Kyiv than tanks.
And it was too providedto conclude three American experts in a study for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British defense think tank. Weathering the storm; Western security assistance on the defensive, it’s name is telling. “At the heart of the problem is the tendency for Western support to reflect the war that Western policymakers and planners would like to fight, rather than the war that the Ukrainian armed forces are fighting,” the study said.
The most poignant example of this wishful thinking was the long-awaited Ukrainian summer offensive, for which thousands of Ukrainian soldiers in England and Bavaria had been trained with Western equipment and according to NATO methods, during which the West “put pressure on Kyiv to achieve results with the tens of billions in military aid.” Showing someone around a new tank in Grafenwöhr, Bavaria – the largest training area of the American army in Europe – is one thing. “But a well-oiled operation by a large formation of tanks and armored infantry in a war situation, [Westerse] combined armsmodel in which the Ukrainians underwent a crash course is something else again,” says Brigadier General Han Bouwmeester, a former staff officer at NATO and now professor of military-operational sciences at the Dutch Defense Academy.
American generals would have preferred that Ukraine start its offensive in the spring and concentrate on one point instead of attacking later on a broad front, as a reconstruction of The Washington Post. The question is whether it would have made a difference, the RUSI researchers think. Although the Russians were worse trained and armed, they were “well dug in.” Unlike Ukraine, Russia had enough attack planes and helicopters. And, decisively, so many observation drones that Ukraine could never prepare an attack unnoticed. As a result, the researchers write, “the offensive was doomed to failure from the start.”
Initiative by the Russians
Two years after the start of Russia’s ‘special military operation’, Ukraine is struggling with severe ammunition shortages and war fatigue, and has to watch with its allies as the Russians took the initiative this winter. After the recent capture of Avdiivka, Putin sees no reason to rest his troops; he seems to want to take maximum advantage of the weakened Ukrainian position as a result of the faltering Western arms supply. Kyiv’s European allies would like to supply, but do not (yet) have the ammunition; the US does, but Republicans are bothered there.
But what Ukraine receives in military support is not always what it needs, the RUSI experts conclude after conversations with hundreds of military planners and commanders in Ukraine and allies of Kyiv. At the end of last year, a Ukrainian colonel cited as an example that his troops can do significantly more damage to Russian tanks with a hundred kamikaze drones costing $2,000 each than with one Javelin anti-tank missile – which is a hundred times more expensive than one such drone. The Javelins were a wonder weapon early in the war, but Russian tanks now operate more cautiously; attack drones have revolutionized the battlefield.
At the front, Ukrainian soldiers feel every day the difference between their needs and what they are given. This simply involves having enough grenades for their howitzers and mortars. Not about cruise missiles and advanced air defense systems that protect Ukrainian cities – relatively astonishingly effectively.
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Ukrainian front units even depend on volunteers or non-governmental organizations. Among other via social media they raise money to buy SUVs that can handle the Ukrainian mud, energy bars, combat clothing, medicine, bandages, night vision goggles, drones or candles for the trenches. “We are doing what NATO should do,” said Rima Ziuraitiene, director of the NGO Blue/Yellow Ukraine last year against platform War on the Rocks. One NGO, Come Back Aliveeven bought mortar shells.
Air-Land Battle
From a NATO perspective, the difference between what Ukraine gets and what it needs is easy to explain, says Brigadier General Bouwmeester. “The Americans have it in the Cold War Air-Land Battleconcept, with all their weapon systems coordinated to achieve maximum effectiveness against the enormous conventional forces they saw behind the Iron Curtain. This requires a technologically high-quality armed force. You have that in the West.”
But not yet in Ukraine. Although it has organized its armed forces in an increasingly Western way since independence, the equipment is still largely of Soviet make. Since the invasion of Crimea (2014), Ukraine has been switching gears at an accelerated pace. But since the raid on February 24, 2022, it has not received weapons that are crucial for ‘NATOstyleoperations. Such as long-range missiles that can hit the Russian war machine far behind the lines, or fighter planes that can shoot down Russian bombers.
The Western arsenal that Kyiv does have at its disposal is also of an unreally colorful composition. According to Bouwmeester, this involves up to six hundred different systems, from infantry fighting vehicles, anti-aircraft defenses, tanks, guns, artillery, mortars, each with its own ammunition and from different countries. “Everything works differently and each system has its own logistics chain,” says Bouwmeester. “Also the Leopard tank; almost every country has its own version.” Amid the increasing ammunition shortages, Ukrainian frontline soldiers and maintenance technicians are having to make do.
In addition, the RUSI experts say with a sense of understatement, that many Western weapons do not come from the top segment. Such as the 31 American Abrams tanks. Ukraine received an older and ‘stripped-down’ variant, to prevent modern technology from falling into Russian hands. The Bradley infantry fighting vehicles were far from ready to go after their arrival. And of the howitzers and machine guns delivered, many should have been rejected before export. Bouwmeester: “And then there is often a lack of spare parts. “Repairing battlefield damage then becomes a piece of cake.”
Together, it underlines what Zelensky has been saying for some time: the West provides enough to ensure that Ukraine does not lose, but not enough to ensure that it wins. Or as Gabrielius Landsbergis, the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, said this week on X: “We tell you how far we want to go, but we do not draw a red line for Russia. We tie our hands in public but leave Putin free to destroy, plunder and rape. […] Time to change course.”
Yet there was hope that Ukraine would break through the Russian lines at least in one place even without air superiority. “They tried it,” says Bouwmeester. “But they quickly discovered that with that hodgepodge of resources they couldn’t fight the type of fight the Americans wanted.”
Russian robot
Putin’s army is known as a cumbersome machine that relies on mass – firepower and physical exhaustion of the opponent, regardless of its own losses. But the war in Ukraine has shown that the Russians do adapt to changing circumstances. For example, they quickly copied the smart Ukrainian drones that collect intelligence and drop explosives. The Russians now probably produce more drones than Ukraine. This also includes ‘land drones’ that transport weapons and ammunition and can shoot.
Russia is also making great strides in electronic warfare, a traditional specialty. In this way, it can better jam Ukrainian communications and – as it turned out last year – divert ‘smart’ GPS-guided artillery shells away from their target. It also caused numerous Ukrainian drones to crash out of control in recent months by blocking communications with the operator. According to a previous RUSI study the Russians could sometimes take control of Ukrainian drones.
In January this year, Ukrainian forces discovered another Russian invention: a brand new command and control system that uses AI to automatically detect and block enemy radars and radio signals, potentially over hundreds of kilometers of distance. That was destroyed, by the way.
Dig in
The West must also adapt to the changing force field, writes RUSI. In part, this comes down to what Russia did before: digging in behind minefields. And arm yourself against drones. As the then commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, said last year argued in The Economist: innovation of drones and improvement of electronic warfare are a prerequisite for the West to force a breakthrough. The American experts predict that Ukraine will have to deploy “about ten thousand drones every week.” These are drones that – thanks to AI – can operate autonomously, that are invulnerable to electronic jammers, and that have sufficient firepower to destroy enemy lines – although drones of the latter type probably do not yet exist.
Bouwmeester thinks that Ukraine’s allies will not deliver such innovations – given the sensitivity of the technology and the conservative attitude so far. “The know-how in the field of AI is still in its infancy. The Americans are already afraid that a tank will fall into Russian hands, after which it will be completely dismantled. That is one of the reasons that Ukraine gets the basic configuration of everything, not with the full on-board computers and communication systems. You will also see this with AI and new drones.”
Ukraine will mainly rely on its own proven innovative capacity and efficiency according to British defense specialist Phillips O’Brien is three times higher than that of the Russians. Ukraine manages to have a major impact with limited resources; the large number of Russian naval vessels sunk in the Black Sea testifies to this. As well as the recent spike in the number of crashed Russian fighter and other aircraft, which – although a conclusive explanation is still lacking – is not only the result of friendly fire could be, as Russian military bloggers insist.
According to the RUSI researchers, what the West can mainly help Ukraine with now is a rapid adjustment of the “dated Western way of training” according to the unfeasible combined armsmethod in which all parts must work together seamlessly. “This means that Western trainers and advisors must continuously update their instruction programs in view of the actual war situation in which Ukrainian soldiers find themselves. […] Current Western efforts to train the Ukrainian armed forces are inadequate and come too late,” the experts said.
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