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“The Ukrainian military on Monday started a long-awaited counter-offensive against Russian forces in the country's south… Ukraine has regularly stated its intention to retake its south, and in particular the city of Kherson, the only regional capital that Russia has been able to capture from Ukraine.” Reuters
“Moscow and Kyiv traded fresh accusations on Saturday of shelling around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which has been a focus of international concern that fighting in the area could trigger a disaster… The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, wants to visit the plant in the south of the country and agency chief Rafael Grossi said on Thursday that it was ‘very, very close’ to being able to send officials there.” Reuters
Both sides are cautiously optimistic about the Ukrainian offensive:
“I’m reasonably optimistic (though far from certain) about a Ukrainian victory in Kherson, but I don’t dare hope for much more than that. The simple fact is that the kind of mobile warfare that enables rapid advances has been mastered by only the smallest number of militaries. It requires well-trained, well-equipped, and well-supplied troops who are powerful enough to punch holes in the Russian line and mobile enough to rapidly exploit any tactical gain…
“Yet the Ukrainian military has taken massive losses. Many of its best units have been used up in months of intense combat. While the Ukrainian people have rallied, and Ukraine can replace its losses, new troops are green. They’re barely trained. We can hope and pray that an army that possesses a hodge-podge of Soviet and western gear, is manned by a combination of worn-out vets and raw recruits, and confronts an enemy that still possesses an immense amount of firepower can somehow break clear through Russian lines, but that’s more a wish than a plan.”
David French, The Dispatch
“Assaulting prepared defensive positions is usually difficult and costly, and Russia has heavily fortified the outskirts of Kherson. Ukrainian troops must undertake large-scale coordination of infantry, tanks, artillery and airpower to succeed — a combined arms operation that Ukraine’s army has little experience performing at such scale. Russia itself has failed disastrously at executing this tricky type of operation…
“However, this month we have clearly reached the point where Russia’s military can no longer ‘continue their steady advance,’ as Moscow’s partisans have often bragged — and it is bracing for Ukraine’s counterpunch… U.S. and European weapons have already helped bring a halt to Russia’s slow advance in the east and created the potential for Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive. If that aid can be sustained — and undeniably, there are challenges and costs involved — it will make Russia’s invasion less and less sustainable.”
Sébastien Roblin, NBC News Think
Other opinions below.
“The Washington Post recently reported that by October 2021, the Biden administration had concluded an all-out Russian attack on Ukraine was inevitable… from October 2021 to the start of Russia’s invasion on February 24, the U.S. and Western allies had a crucial window in which to provide Ukraine significant weaponry and the training needed to use it. But instead of howitzers, multiple-launch rocket systems such as the HIMARs, and heavy ordnance, the U.S. doled out much more modest assistance…
“Had Ukraine been far better equipped, might it have forestalled Russia’s rapid takeover of the Kherson and Zaporizhya regions in the South? Might the blocking of that advance in turn have increased the chances Mariupol could successfully resist the Russian-led onslaught? Might more firepower deployed against Russia’s march on Kyiv have stalled the advance at an earlier point, and thus prevented the horrors in Bucha and Irpin? These are questions that may never be definitively answered, but they must be asked.”
Adrian Karatnycky, National Review
“The on-again, off-again U.S. media interest in the war in Ukraine probably partially reflects the short attention span of the American public and the reflexive isolation of many Americans. But the media’s intermittent interest likely also reflects the fact that the war in Ukraine has become another example of President Joe Biden talking tough and then generating disappointing results. Having failed to deter the invasion, Biden’s much-touted sanctions aren’t capable of shutting down the Russian economy or the war machine…
“Biden has constantly sent mixed signals on just how much he’s willing to do to stop the Russians. Biden publicly pledged to support Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes,’ but then unnamed White House officials leak to Thomas Friedman that they don’t trust Volodymyr Zelensky. From the beginning, there have been leaks that the Biden team wants Zelensky to concede territory to avoid or end the war. Sure, Biden wants to end Putin’s aggression, but what is he really willing to do to end it? It often seems like even Biden doesn’t know.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“Ukraine’s best chances for major advances probably lie months, not days, away, after its troops have received further equipment and training. That implies that its supporters in the West must adjust their plans accordingly…
“While Europe has maintained admirable solidarity in the face of economic pain related to reducing dependence on Russian energy, France and Germany have lagged the United States, Britain, Poland and even Norway in terms of aid to Ukraine relative to their total economic output, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker database at Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy. If the U.S.-led Western alliance has a weakness, ‘burden sharing’ is it. If Ukraine is to have any chance of success, the alliance must solve that chronic problem, once and for all.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“Sanity is a hard sell in a war in which Russia is waging a scorched-earth campaign to bring Ukraine to its knees, and Ukraine is fighting for its survival. Yet the recent agreement to allow grain shipments out of Ukraine demonstrated that international pressure on Russia to prevent the conflict from spreading beyond the battlefields can work. And with Chernobyl as a shared traumatic memory, Russians and Ukrainians know better than most nations the horror of a nuclear catastrophe…
“Zaporizhzhia is a more modern and far safer model than Chernobyl, theoretically capable of withstanding far greater damage. But the potential for a massive disaster when lethal shells land among the nuclear reactors, cooling towers, machine rooms and radioactive waste storage sites is real and present…
“Ukraine has called for international military and nuclear experts to be stationed permanently at the site to ensure that the power plant and its immediate surroundings are secure and free of heavy weapons. These are legitimate concerns and just demands; Russia, however, has rejected the creation of a demilitarized zone around the power plant. But these are differences that can be resolved, through quiet negotiations, if both sides agree on the larger imperative of avoiding a nuclear disaster.”
Serge Schmemann, New York Times
