Ukraine’s Path to Regaining the Offensive: Challenges and Strategies

Can Ukraine Get Back on the Offensive?

Toward the end of 2023, the Russian military was presented with an opportunity to truly transform the war in Ukraine. Kyiv’s ground forces had run out of steam in their southern counteroffensive. Ukraine had blown through large quantities of munitions and air-defense interceptors and was struggling to resupply its lines. At the same time, a controversial bill to expand mobilization stalled in Ukraine’s parliament, as the country’s manpower shortages became acute. It only passed parliament in April after months of debate, coming into force in May. And in the United States, support for Ukraine was fracturing along party lines, holding up a $61 billion aid package in Congress.

But over the past six months, Russia has generally failed to capitalize on this convergence of openings. It has launched air and missile attacks against Ukraine’s power grid—dramatically reducing the country’s capacity to generate electricity—and it has terrorized civilians. Yet Russian ground forces have only managed to gain small bits of land. All in all, the total amount of territory seized by Russia since January 2024 adds up to around 360 square miles, an area roughly two-thirds the size of New York City. It is hard to describe these gains as a success when they came at the cost of more than 180,000 Russian casualties, according to Western intelligence estimates.

Moscow’s forces are not done with their offensive. They keep attacking across multiple fronts on the ground and bombing Ukrainian infrastructure from the air. But even the largest and most capable military organizations cannot sustain offensives forever, and after losing so many troops, Russia’s window of opportunity may soon close. The soldiers who have died in combat were disproportionately Russia’s best. Its equipment reserves are being slowly run down. Moscow will eventually have no choice but to pause its offensive and regroup.

In military institutions, this is known as a culminating point: the time when the attacking force runs out of the people, equipment, and capacity it needs to be effective. The timing of culminating points is difficult to predict, and Russian President Vladimir Putin appears comfortable fighting on in this offensive for as long as his country possibly can. But Russia has been attacking for more than half a year, and it can probably sustain its current tempo for only has a month or two more. The military will likely be able to carry out some ground and aerial attacks afterward, but at a significantly reduced rate.

That means Ukraine must begin planning for how best to capitalize on Russia’s impending wane. Doing so will not be easy: its people are suffering, and many of the factors that will determine its success are beyond its control. Kyiv, for example, cannot determine when or where Russian forces will culminate, and it cannot be certain that the West will provide continuous support. But Ukraine can closely study the battlefield for signs of Russian weakness. It can work with NATO to train and prepare for new offensives. It can manage outside expectations. And it can devise a new theory of victory—one that makes Russia’s military position truly untenable. It is then, and only then, that Ukraine will be able to negotiate on favorable terms and secure a durable win.

UP IN THE AIR

Ukraine may have brighter days ahead. But analysts should make no mistake: the past six months have been the country’s lowest ebb. Moscow failed to make great territorial gains during its recent offensive, but Ukraine lost substantial numbers of troops in its tenacious defense. Although the United States finally passed a new aid package, in April, Western weapons and munitions flows have yet to return to the levels they were at throughout most of 2023, before U.S. aid to Kyiv became entrapped in partisan congressional debates. Ukraine faces a critical shortfall in air-defense systems, and its national budget is on life support. The country’s power plants and generators have only half the capacity they need to handle Ukrainians’ requirements this winter.

These challenges are just the starting point for Kyiv. Unfortunately, Ukrainian officials will have to contend with additional obstacles—ones that are outside of its control. The first of these is their enemy: Moscow. Despite enormous losses in personnel and equipment, the Russian military remains extraordinarily dangerous. It is producing long-range missiles and rockets that can rain down on Ukrainian infrastructure. It is now able to make up for its own deficiencies by sourcing weapons from its Iranian and North Korean partners, forming a kind of arsenal of authoritarians. Moscow can purchase dual-use technologies—goods that have both civilian and military purposes, such as microchips—from China. The Russians have also demonstrated they can learn and adapt at the tactical and strategic levels; the old saying that the enemy always gets a vote continues to hold true. And nothing the United States or Europe has done thus far has changed Putin’s mind or his destructive strategy for Ukraine.

The United States and Europe can also be fickle partners. Their decisions, like Russia’s, will shape Ukraine’s ability in 2025. Scared out of their post–Cold War slumber by an aggressive Russia and a NATO-skeptic Republican presidential nominee in Donald Trump, most European countries have increased their defense budgets. The continent’s defense-manufacturing capability is expanding, as well. But the growth will not by itself meet the current requirements of the Ukrainian military, let alone the much larger requirements of any 2025 offensives.

Even if Democrats triumph, Ukraine could see U.S. support dip.

The odds that a Democrat will remain in the White House have gone up since President Joe Biden dropped out of the United States’ November elections. But the outcome of the race is still uncertain, and so, for Ukraine, Washington is even more of a question mark than Europe. Pew Research Center polling in July found a split in support for Ukraine between Democratic and Republican voters: less than 15 percent of Democrats believe the United States is providing too much assistance to Ukraine, but nearly half of Republicans do. Should Trump win in the presidential race and should Republicans win the Senate and House, Russia may find itself surprisingly well positioned for the year ahead. Both Trump and Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, his vice-presidential pick, have indicated they favor reducing U.S assistance and pursuing a negotiated end to the war.

If Trump and Vance win the election, they may, naturally, switch course. It is easy to imagine Trump, frustrated by a Putin unwilling to seriously negotiate over Ukraine, pivoting to backing Kyiv. But Ukrainian and NATO planners must consider the possibility that Washington will not be of much help.

In fact, even if Democrats triumph, Ukraine could see U.S. support dip, depending on what happens in other parts of the world. Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel fundamentally decreased the global visibility of the war in Ukraine, affecting support for Kyiv. Although the munitions required by the Israeli Defense Forces were often different than those requested by Ukraine, the IDF’s needs have made decision-makers in Washington and elsewhere spend more time and resources on the Middle East, leaving less for Kyiv. The war in Gaza also spurred a massive shift in media attention away from Ukraine, which, in turn, had a negative effect on popular support for the country. If conflicts in the Middle East expand, it will only further drain Ukraine of resources and attention—particularly if Israel’s war with Hezbollah heats up. A full-blown Hezbollah-Israeli conflict would consume almost exactly the same kinds of artillery and air-defense weapons that Ukraine needs, such as 155-millimeter munitions, tank ammunition, and even aircraft-dropped precision bombs. Expanded fighting with Iran or the Houthis might eat up similar provisions.

COMMAND AND CONTROL

Ukraine cannot control global geopolitics, and it has little sway over the domestic politics of its partners. But much of what will shape 2025 is well within Kyiv’s power to influence. Consider, for instance, training. The ground forces Ukraine employed in the south did not receive enough high-level collective instruction before the 2023 counteroffensives, with little in the way of simultaneous battalion or brigade-level operations. The most experienced formations were kept in eastern Ukraine, and there simply was not enough time to raise and train new brigades so they would be highly competent in simultaneous, higher-level combined arms operations. To have any chance of successful offensives in 2025, Ukraine will have to remediate this shortcoming. Some of this will require the support of the United States and NATO partners, particularly when it comes to developing more senior leaders and planners. But Kyiv can take the lead on giving basic recruits better training. Consequently, Ukraine will need to find rapid and effective solutions for raising and instructing more individual soldiers as well as for equipping new brigades.

Ukraine also has agency over its operational and strategic targeting campaigns. The country has developed a powerful strike capability, featuring indigenously developed missiles; long-range unmanned systems, especially drones; Western missiles, such as those fired from U.S. Army Tactical Missile Systems and European Storm Shadow missiles; and some remaining Soviet-era weapons. This capability also employs a mix of Ukrainian and NATO sensor data. And Ukraine has learned to use NATO’s joint-targeting doctrine, a standardized method for planning, conducting, and assessing long-range strike activities.

Kyiv’s strike complex is currently being employed against three key targets: the Russian oil industry; standard military assets, such as airfields, headquarters, troop reserves, air defenses, and logistics hubs; and Crimea and Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Over the next few months, Ukraine will have to make difficult tradeoffs about how to prioritize these targets and how many weapons it should keep in reserve. But these choices are entirely within Ukraine’s remit.

So are decisions about the timing and location of future offensive operations. The country’s ultimate selections will have to remain closely guarded secrets in order to give Kyiv the best chance of surprising Moscow. That will not be easy given current technologies, which have provided Russia with extensive sensor networks. But as the Russians showed in their 2024 Kharkiv offensive and as the Ukrainians showed in their 2023 Kharkiv counteroffensive, it is possible—especially when it comes to timing. It is harder to keep secrets about geography, but Ukraine can still be guarded and wise about where it launches counteroffensives.

Ukraine should coordinate its whole new theory of victory with the West.

Kyiv has no shortage of potential targets. It could choose to start in the Donbas, in order to frustrate Putin’s aim of taking Ukraine’s entire east. It could select Kharkiv, to ensure Ukraine’s second-largest city remains outside the range of Russian artillery. Other possibilities include parts of southern Ukraine, because of its economic importance, or even Crimea.

As the country considers when and where to start fighting, one of the most important factors will be opportunity. Ukrainian intelligence, working with NATO and other partners, will monitor Russian troop strength and morale, Russia’s holdings of key munitions, and Russia’s reserves, for indications of weakness across different fronts. Kyiv may choose to start fighting along several axes in order to generate uncertainty about the location of its main effort, or to figure out which front is most vulnerable. But every potential zone will be difficult, given how many forces Moscow now has in Ukraine and the dense networks of defenses it has constructed across the east and south. A successful counteroffensive anywhere will require sustained strike operations beforehand, significant intelligence, and stockpiles. Training and rehearsals for the military forces involved in each region will be slightly different.

As should be the case in all democratic countries, Ukraine’s elected leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, will have the final say in both the location and the timing of Ukrainian offensives. Zelensky and his closest advisers will, therefore, carefully evaluate Russia’s capabilities as well as their own, and look for the best possible openings. He will receive advice from Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s commander in chief. At the political and strategic levels of wartime decision-making, there is no such thing as military autonomy. The interplay of civil and military personnel can improve military planning by testing different options from different perspectives.

As they make choices, Zelensky and his team will also monitor Western support, including via polls and comments from Western politicians. His team will work to manage partner countries’ expectations. In the lead-up to the southern 2023 counteroffensive, Americans and Europeans believed that Kyiv would succeed, thanks to media reporting, statements by politicians, an influx of new equipment, and Kyiv’s victories at the end of 2022. Unfortunately, these expectations were dashed on the battlefield. This disappointment had significant political consequences. The long U.S. debate over whether to keep assisting Ukraine was probably influenced by the outcome. So, too, was Kyiv’s civil-military crisis of late 2023, which led to the February dismissal of Valery Zaluzhny, the country’s then commander in chief. Ukraine cannot afford to have such a letdown happen again, and so it will need to work with NATO and foreign leaders to better control perceptions. Kyiv’s military operations must also achieve political outcomes and ensure Ukraine is optimally placed if it is forced into early negotiations.

PREPARATION AND OPPORTUNITY

Ukraine’s specific geographic, logistical, tactical, and timing decisions are all essential. But ultimately, the country’s success will hinge on whether Kyiv can develop a theory of victory that draws from its own resources and from those of its supporters.

This theory of victory is likely to have military, economic, diplomatic, and informational components. It will seek a political outcome—including the liberation of all Ukrainian territory, Crimea and the Donbas among it—but it must consider the range of strategic and operational realities presented by the current state of the war. The theory will require battlefield victories on the ground, in the air, and at sea which at least double the number of casualties that Ukraine is currently imposing on Russia. Doing so is necessary to force Moscow, which is currently drafting as many men as it is losing, to make harder political choices about who it recruits or conscripts. Ukraine, therefore, will need to develop new, more effective offensive military doctrines and incorporate larger masses of unmanned systems in the air and on the ground. Defensive operations are now the dominant form of war for Ukraine, but Kyiv will need new offensive maneuvers to approach and break through Moscow’s lines. Much hinges on Ukraine successfully developing such concepts before Russia does.

It must do so with NATO’s help. In fact, Ukraine should coordinate its whole new theory of victory with the West. This theory cannot focus exclusively on the defense of Ukraine; it must also focus on defeating Russia. That will require an increase in Western resourcing and training and a change in the West’s mindset. Kyiv must, accordingly, get its backers on board.

To succeed, Ukraine should remind its partners that there is no way to end the war as long as Putin still believes he can win. Moscow could agree to talks today, but if Putin remains confident, he would simply use any cease-fire to rearm before attacking again—as he did in Chechnya and by invading Ukraine in 2022, in violation of peace agreements in the Donbas. It is true that almost all wars end with negotiations. But the best negotiations are those in which the enemy is on its knees, as Germany and Japan were at the end of World War II, or in which they are exhausted to the point where withdrawal is the only real option, as the Soviets were in Afghanistan. Ukraine will have to make fighting so intolerable and unsustainable for Russia that the latter is willing to agree not just to a temporary respite but to an actual termination of the war.

Kyiv has what it takes to succeed. Despite facing wave after wave of devastating attacks, it has frustrated a Russian military that has many advantages. Ukraine has done so while experiencing significant manpower and firepower deficits. Now Moscow’s window of maximum opportunity has almost passed. Over the coming months, as Russian momentum wanes, Ukraine will be preparing, reconstituting, and watching for chances. Success is never certain in war, but Ukraine will be better placed in 2025 than it has been this year to liberate territory and to convince Russia that the cost of the war is not worthwhile. But to prevail, Kyiv will have to rebuild its offensive capacity, carry out diplomatic efforts, influence operations, and come up with a new theory of how to win.

By Mick Ryan