Western officials and commentators have begun facing the possibility that Kyiv may lose its war with Russia, which began early last year with the latter’s invasion of eastern Ukraine.
“From a military perspective, a Ukrainian victory is inconceivable,” Italian army Gen. Marco Bertolini, former head of Italy’s Joint Operations Command, told the Italian press earlier this week.
“This should be taken into account, and negotiations [with Russia] should be started,” he added.
Gen. Bertolini’s remarks come almost three months into a Ukrainian counter-offensive that even Western officials admit has largely failed to achieve its goals.
Since the counter-offensive began in early June, Ukrainian troops have retaken a handful of villages near the frontlines—but at enormous cost in both manpower and equipment, according to Russian and pro-Moscow sources.
The counter-offensive is currently focused on the village of Robotyne in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, where Ukrainian troops reportedly raised the national flag earlier this week.
“A historic day! Soldiers of the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade set up the flag of Ukraine in the village of Robotyne,” the brigade declared on its Telegram channel on Aug. 23.
From there, Kyiv hopes to push its forces southward to Melitopol, thereby cutting Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, which Moscow effectively annexed in 2014.
Tankmen of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade "Kholodnyi Yar" take part in military training near the frontline in Donetsk region, Ukraine, on Aug. 1, 2023. Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images
Captured by Russia in the opening days of its invasion, Melitopol is a crucial road-and-rail junction through which troops and equipment can be transferred from Crimea to the Ukrainian front.
Ukrainian forces have also recently made modest gains in the eastern Donetsk region.
Earlier this month, Kyiv claimed its forces had recaptured the village of Urozhaine after having taken the adjacent village of Staromairoske.
Russian sources, however, have consistently disputed these claims.
They say fighting remains underway—to varying degrees of intensity—in and around most positions that Kyiv claims to have decisively captured.
Ukrainian servicemen fire with a tank during military training near the frontline amid Russia's attack on Ukraine in Zaporizhzhia region, March 29, 2023. Stringer/Reuters
Moreover, these positions sit north of Russia’s main line of defense, which Ukrainian forces have yet to penetrate.
On Aug. 25, Vladimir Rogov, a pro-Russian official in Zaporizhzhia, claimed Ukraine had lost more than 1000 men since late July in repeated assaults on Robotyne.
“The Ukrainian army’s losses are colossal,” Mr. Rogov told Russia’s TASS news agency.
“The number of irrecoverable losses, meaning those killed or seriously injured, currently stands at more than 1000,” he added.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, Ukraine has lost more than 43,000 men overall—and vast amounts of military hardware—in the past two months alone.
The Epoch Times could not verify the Russian assertions, and Kyiv is notoriously tight-lipped about its casualty figures.
A still image shows what are said to be destroyed armored vehicles of the Ukrainian armed forces in an unidentified location in the southern Donetsk region, taken from footage released on June 10, 2023. Russian Defense Ministry via Reuters
But in a sign of the grim frontline situation, Swiss newspaper Le Temps reported this week that journalists in Ukraine had been barred from visiting the front without Kyiv’s express permission.
Meanwhile, on the northern front, Russian forces are making headway. They are reportedly advancing on Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region, threatening to undo Kyiv’s earlier gains from a counter-offensive waged last fall.
Earlier this week, Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, admitted that the situation near Kupiansk was “difficult.”
“The enemy is not abandoning its plans to move forward … and is pulling up additional forces,” she said in televised remarks on Aug. 21.
Russian tanks damaged in recent fighting near the recently retaken village of Kamianka, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, on Oct. 30, 2022. Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo
In light of these battlefield realities, even pro-Ukrainian media outlets have begun to admit that Kyiv’s vaunted counter-offensive is unlikely to achieve its objectives.
On Aug. 17, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that Ukrainian forces would likely fail to reach Melitopol.
The newspaper cited “people familiar with the classified forecast” to support the assertion.
Should the “grim assessment” prove correct, the Post wrote, this would mean Kyiv “won’t fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push.”
According to the newspaper, the forecast is based on Russia’s “brutal proficiency in defending occupied territory through a phalanx of minefields and trenches.”
When asked about the report at an Aug. 18 press briefing, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said: “I’m not going to speak to intelligence reports.”
“Over the course of the past two years, there have been a lot of analyses of how this war would unfold,” Mr. Sullivan asserted.
“And we’ve seen numerous changes in those analyses over time as dynamic battlefield conditions change,” he added.
A satellite image shows Novofedorivka with annotated trenching operations in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, on April 11, 2023. Capella Space/Handout via Reuters
Gen. Bertolini, for his part, described the assessment cited by the Washington Post as “an acknowledgment that Kyiv’s goals are unattainable.”
“The Ukrainians cannot win,” he said in an Aug. 22 interview with Italy’s Libero Quotidiano newspaper.
So far, he added, the only significant Ukrainian advance occurred last fall in Kharkiv, where “Russian forces simply withdrew due to their numerical inferiority.”
Gen. Bertolini went on to note recent remarks by Stian Jenssen, a top aide to NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg.
Changing Narrative
On Aug. 15, Mr. Jenssen publicly floated the idea of granting NATO membership to Ukraine in return for the latter formally ceding lost territory to Russia.After Kyiv reacted angrily to the proposal, Mr. Stoltenberg himself quickly walked back the remarks.
“It is the Ukrainians, and only the Ukrainians, who can decide when there are conditions in place for negotiations,” the NATO chief said on Aug. 17.
But according to Gen. Bertolini, Mr. Jenssen’s initial remarks—even though they were soon retracted—“could not even have been said until recently.”
“There is now mounting skepticism in the West regarding Ukraine’s actual capabilities,” the general asserted. “The narrative has begun to change.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
