As the New Year arrived in Ukraine with the Russian missile attack on Kyiv on the early morning of Jan. 1, 2023, there were two main questions on the minds of policy makers around the world. The first pertained to the fate of the continuing Russian winter offensive, while the second concerned the results of the planned Ukrainian spring counteroffensive.
The answer to the first question came in May when Yevgeny Prigozhin withdrew his Wagner Group troops from the ruins of Bakhmut. Taking control of Bakhmut had come at a high cost to Wagner, with perhaps 20,000 soldiers killed, most of them convicts recruited by Prigozhin from Russian prisons.
This was the sole significant success of the offensive. Bakhmut was to remain under Russian control, but Prigozhin rebelled when the Kremlin decided it didn’t need his services and ordered to roll his troops into the regular Russian army. The mutiny revealed fissures between the Russian political and military leadership, which didn’t rush to protect the regime. The Kremlin eventually assassinated Prigozhin, but the military brass’s dissatisfaction with Putin’s handling of the war suggested possible trouble in the future.
The counteroffensive
The failure of the Russian offensive opened the door for Ukraine’s June counteroffensive. Despite some optimistic predictions, the destruction of the Russian Army-controlled section of the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River effectively dashed Ukrainian hopes of using the dam as a bridge to cross the Dnipro and sever the supply lines connecting Russian troops in the south of Ukraine with their logistical hubs in Crimea.
As a result, the situation on the mainland reached a stalemate. Less than 200 square miles changed hands since the beginning of the year. Russia managed to stabilize the front line by bringing at least 300,000 additional soldiers and officers into the Russian army. Ukraine, as well as being outnumbered 3 to 1 in terms of manpower, lacked superiority and often even parity in firepower.
While the Ukrainians had received tanks, fighting vehicles and antiaircraft missile batteries, they didn’t receive the F-16 fighters they had requested, nor the U.S. ATACMS long-range guided missiles. Delays in supply were caused by various reasons, including disagreements between NATO commanders and their Ukrainian counterparts on the required weaponry and timing, quarrels between the allies on who should supply what (notably the public dispute between the U.S. and Germany regarding supply of Leopard and Abrams tanks), and White House concerns about crossing Putin’s red lines and provoking a nuclear war.
No end in sight
But efforts to prevent the war from escalating no doubt will contribute to lengthening it, likely through 2024 and beyond.
What’s more, the battles of 2024 will be fought amid a political event—the U.S. presidential election—that will be as important to the future of the war as any individual offensive. The U.S. remains the largest Western supplier of weapons to Ukraine and is second only to the European Union in financial assistance to Kyiv. The political uncertainty in the U.S. will greatly affect the country’s ability to provide Ukraine with crucial military aid.
Ukraine is likely to face a shortage of munitions at some point in the coming year. Yet it takes time for Ukraine’s Western partners to increase the production of munitions. The U.S. has already doubled the production of some artillery shells, but there is long way to go to meet the demands of the Ukrainian front.
Meantime, the European Union is unlikely to meet its pledge to supply one million shells to Ukraine. The surprise Hamas attack on Israel and the possible start of larger Middle Eastern war could further exacerbate Ukraine’s munitions situation.
To be sure, Russia also faces challenges in terms of munition supplies, but has been able to fill the gap with the help of North Korea, which supplied Moscow with one million shells. Beyond that, Putin has been effective in circumventing Western sanctions, stabilizing Russia’s economy and mobilizing its industry for wartime needs.
Land for peace?
As 2023 comes to an end, there are more calls for a cease-fire and eventual “land for peace" settlement.
However, such an outcome won’t provide either stable or lasting peace in the region. While Ukraine has been engaged with its allies in discussing the “peace formula," the Kremlin insists on achieving all of its original goals, including the so-called denazification of Ukraine, which is a code word for the destruction of Ukraine’s political and intellectual elites.
Ukraine can’t lose this war because the very existence of the Ukrainian state and nationdepends on its outcome. And ending it with an armistice resulting in the loss of people andterritories and without NATO membership is tantamount to losing the war.
Ukraine has been in that position before, in 2014-15, when the Minsk agreements never brought peace but provided Russia with the ability to build a stronger army and come back in force a few years later. The Russian policies targeting Ukrainian activists, kidnapping children and replacing school curriculums with the Russian ones would lead to eradication of anything politically and culturally Ukrainian on the occupied territories.
A loss for Ukraine also would be tantamount to a major loss for the U.S. and itsallies. Russian victory would result in Moscow strengthening its grip of the post-Soviet space, restoring its positions in the Caucasus, where Armenia indicated its interest in strengthening its relations with the West, and Central Asia, where Kazakhstan uses its ties with China to counterbalance Russian power in the region.
Even more important, Russia’s success in Ukraine would increase a threat to NATO’s Eastern flank—in particular the Baltic states and Poland. Outside of Europe it would embolden Moscow’s allies Iran and North Korea and provide a template for China for the military solution of the Taiwan dispute. In all those cases, the U.S.and NATO troops could find themselves in the midst of a military conflict of the sort that Ukraine fights today without direct involvement of NATO.
In many ways, the biggest disadvantage for the West is the striking difference between the ways in which the war is viewed in Russia and the West.
While the Kremlin perceives it as a life and death struggle with the U.S. and its allies, and whips the anti-Western hysteria in the Russian media to mobilize the population and resources to wage such a war, the Western governments imagine this war largely as a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and debate the degree to which they should help Ukraine without antagonizing Russia too much.
What the West perspective is missing is that the key question on the global agenda is the future of the West itself. At stake in this war isn’t just the fate of Ukraine but also the security of the West, the stability of the international order, and the future of democracy as a global force.
The outcomes of wars of such magnitude shape the future for generations to come. Even if much of the West doesn’t yet recognize this, this war is no exception.
Serhii Plokhy is the professor of history and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. He is the author of “The Russo-Ukrainian War: A Return of History." He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.