South China Morning Post

ZELENSKY PLUGS GAPS TO KEEP RUSSIANS AT BAY

Offensive by Moscow in Kharkiv region has stretched Ukraine forces, and analysts say it could be tactic to force troops to divert from other hotspots

Russia’s weeklong offensive in northeaste­rn Ukraine is setting alarm bells ringing in Kyiv as President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals rush to shore up their defences.

Zelensky has cancelled foreign travel plans for the next few days and on Thursday met his key commanders in Kharkiv, the border city that has become the focus of Moscow’s attacks.

While the Kremlin appears to lack the necessary forces to actually capture Ukraine’s second city, the attacks are turning up the pressure on the country’s stretched defensive lines as they struggle with shortages of manpower, air defences and artillery.

“The Russians don’t have the numbers necessary to do a strategic breakthrou­gh” and there were no indication­s they were generating such forces, General Christophe­r Cavoli, Nato’s supreme allied commander for Europe, said after a two-day meeting of the alliance’s defence chiefs in Brussels.

“They don’t have the skill and the capability to operate at the scale necessary to exploit any breakthrou­gh to strategic advantage,” he said. “I’m in very close contact with our Ukrainian colleagues and I’m confident that they will hold the line.”

Russia now has more than half a million troops attacking Ukraine, giving the Russians “significan­t” numerical superiorit­y, according to Jack Watling, a senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in Britain.

Watling said the Russian generals might be trying to force the Ukrainians to spread their forces along the 1,000km front line to create an area of weakness they could exploit. The push toward Kharkiv could be followed by another attack close to the southern city of Zaporizhzh­ia at the other end of the country, he said.

That would draw Ukrainian reserves away from the eastern region of Donbas where Russia could then intensify its main offensive.

Others have suggested Russia could attempt an offensive further north in the Sumy region.

“There is pressure along the entire front line,” said Ruslan Pukhov, head of Moscow-based think tank the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologi­es.

“If the attack on Kharkiv can weaken Ukrainian positions in the south and east, then a breakthrou­gh could come there.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin was in China this week to cement relations with Xi Jinping and secure help for Russia’s war effort as the Kremlin seeks a breakthrou­gh before the arrival of long-delayed US military aid.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, meanwhile, was on a visit to the Ukrainian capital and said his country was rushing arms supplies into Ukraine to shore up forces battling the most serious incursion since the early days of the war more than two years ago.

Russia has taken advantage of Ukraine’s shortage of air defences to pound Kharkiv since last month, preparing the way for its infantry to advance. Last week its troops surged in northeaste­rn Ukraine, seizing control of some villages and entering the town of Vovchansk, 5km from the border.

With Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi personally directing operations in the Kharkiv region, “decisive actions” by Kyiv’s units forced Russian troops to significan­tly reduce their activity, Ukraine’s General Staff said on Thursday.

Ukrainian forces appear to have stabilised the front line in the region for now and the pace of Russian operations has slowed in recent days, according to people with knowledge of allied intelligen­ce, who asked not to be identified.

Ukraine is at its most vulnerable right now, according to Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Internatio­nal Peace, with Russia likely to accelerate its attacks in the east and the full weight of Western lethal aid still to reach the front. All the same, she said, the Russians might not have the agility to take advantage.

“There are meaningful limits to Russian military power,” she said. “They still waste manpower in pursuit of their goals and Ukrainian forces are effective on the defence when they are supplied with men and materiel.”

The US in April approved US$61 billion in aid for Ukraine after six months of legislativ­e obstructio­n by Republican­s and is sending ammunition, armoured vehicles, missiles and air defences.

But Kyiv remains frustrated by a US ban on using American weaponry to attack Russian territory and a delegation of Ukrainian lawmakers are lobbying to remove it on a trip to Washington this week.

While some Ukrainian parliament­arians say the US policy prevented it from taking pre-emptive action to stop the Russian assault in the northeast, there has been a wave of criticism by military bloggers in Ukraine of a lack of defences in the border zone.

Putin on Wednesday told a meeting of military district commanders that Russian forces had pushed back all counter-attacks and in recent months “every day, on all fronts, they are constantly improving their position”.

Russia’s army delivered its first significan­t victory in months in February when it seized the strategic eastern city of Avdiivka.

A senior European diplomat said allies were concerned about the Russian progress but still hopeful that with the promised aid from the US and other allies, Ukrainian forces would be able to stabilise the front and eventually push Russian forces back.

Ukraine faces a long, drawnout war of attrition because advances in technology mean that both sides can monitor each other as far as 15km behind the line of contact, according to Mykola Bielieskov, a Ukrainian military analyst. That gives defensive forces a significan­t advantage.

Ukraine should pursue “active defence” to gradually exhaust Russia’s army, trading space for time and then restoring the front line through counter-attacks with reserves brought from the depths, he said.

“The next year-and-a-half will be a critically important period,” he wrote in a paper Thursday.

The Russians don’t have the numbers necessary to do a strategic breakthrou­gh GENERAL CHRISTOPHE­R CAVOLI, NATO’S TOP COMMANDER IN EUROPE