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The U.S.’s gloominess on the war in Ukraine is now clear to see
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| A Ukrainian serviceman adjusts his helmet in a trench at the front line near Donetsk, Ukraine, on Sunday. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters) |
For months, U.S. officials have privately conveyed their concerns over the course of the war in Ukraine. In public, they stressed their enduring commitment to help Kyiv resist Russia’s brutal invasion and vowed to support its efforts as long as it takes. But in more candid discussions, with reporters and directly with Ukrainians, they pointed to a tougher reality: A total military victory for Ukraine seemed impossible; the military-industrial base in Western countries required to sustain the flow of foreign munitions and arms to the front was under severe strain; and, at some point, the support of Western publics, especially Americans, would wane, and the spigot gushing tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine would get turned off.
Then came the astonishing set of leaks of top secret Pentagon documents that surfaced. On Thursday afternoon, a young member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, identified as Jack Teixeira, was arrested in the investigation into leaks of hundreds of pages of classified military intelligence to an online group of young friends. According to my colleagues’ reporting, Teixeira had for months proliferated near-verbatim transcripts and, later, photographs of highly sensitive U.S. documents on a Discord chat server that he controlled. Those materials eventually surfaced on other social media platforms.
The trove of documents has offered revelations into the reaches of U.S. intelligence and its clandestine assessments of developments elsewhere. Among the latter are the deep misgivings of the U.S. national security establishment about the trajectory of the war in Ukraine, which, according to a leaked analysis by the Defense Intelligence Agency, will likely drift into 2024 with no resolution in sight.
U.S. officials scrambled to contain the blowback from the exposed materials, some more embarrassing than others. “I’m concerned that it happened, but there’s nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that is of great consequence,” President Biden told reporters in Ireland, in reference to questions about the leak, the bulk of which includes assessments from February and March.
Still, the documents regarding Ukraine paint an inescapably grim picture of the United States’ view of the conflict. According to my colleague John Hudson, the DIA assessment concluded that even if Ukraine recaptures “significant” amounts of territory — an outcome that U.S. intelligence found unlikely — those territorial gains would not lead to peace talks.
“Beyond forecasting a costly open-ended conflict, the newly disclosed document also predicts how Ukrainian and Russian military leaders will respond to battlefield challenges, and it anticipates that the year will end with the two sides achieving only ‘marginal’ territorial gains as a result of ‘insufficient troops and supplies for effective operations,’” Hudson wrote.
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A separate document among the leaked materials predicted only modest success for an upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive, which is aimed at retaking territory in the eastern region of Donbas and pushing south in a bid to sever Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, the peninsula it unilaterally annexed in 2014. New Russian fortifications as well as “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” the document warned.
Documents also pointed to Pentagon fears over Ukraine’s ability to sustain its air defense capabilities in the coming months. “One chart contained in the leak shows the burn rate of Ukrainian air defense projectiles and specifies the time frames for depletion, predicting that SA-11 systems will be out of commission by April 13, U.S.-made NASAMs by April 15, and SA-8s by May,” my colleagues reported, referring to different air defense systems. “On another chart, the prediction that particular types of ammunition will run dry suggests that Ukrainian defenders should prioritize their efforts by targeting Russian jets and helicopters but hold fire on smaller threats such as drones.”
None of this should be particularly surprising. My colleagues detailed last month how the Ukrainian military, which has suffered perhaps more than 120,000 casualties over the past year of fighting, is short on both ammunition and skilled troops. U.S. officials recently conducted strategic war game scenarios with Ukrainian counterparts, in an attempt to map out the paths ahead.
“All parties came away from those conversations with a sense that Ukraine was beginning to understand the limitations of what it could achieve in the offensive and preparing accordingly,” my colleagues reported this week, citing U.S. officials. “While severing the land bridge is unlikely to happen, these people said, the United States is hopeful that incremental gains could at least threaten the free flow of Russian equipment and personnel in the corridor, which has been a lifeline for invading forces.”
Ukrainian officials shrugged at the bleak implications in the intelligence assessments. “Everyone knows we’re low on ammunition — the president and the defense minister talk about that openly,” a senior Ukrainian official told my colleagues. “And it’s been obvious to everyone since November that the next counteroffensive will be focused on the south, first Melitopol and then Berdyansk. But the exact place — we can change that the week before.”
After a Tuesday phone call with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that Blinken “reaffirmed the ironclad U.S. support and vehemently rejected any attempts to cast doubt on Ukraine’s capacity to win on the battlefield,” and added that the United States “remains Ukraine’s trustworthy partner, focused on advancing our victory and securing a just peace.”
But the apparent pessimism of U.S. officials about the course of the war underscores the question about what should come next. To some analysts, the prevailing conditions should justify a surge in support for Kyiv. “If Ukraine’s stocks of anti-air defenses are running low, send more,” wrote Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute. “If the Ukrainian military is suffering from ‘force generation and sustainment shortfalls,’ step up and fill the relevant gaps.”
In a joint essay, Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations concurred, to an extent, arguing that the United States and Europe should in the near-term significantly step up their support for Ukraine’s war effort so that it may quickly regain as much lost territory as possible. But that should also come with a clear diplomatic strategy, they wrote, that offers meaningful inducements to both sides to accept a cease fire.
“For over a year, the West has allowed Ukraine to define success and set the war aims of the West,” wrote Haass and Kupchan in Foreign Affairs. “This policy, regardless of whether it made sense at the outset of the war, has now run its course.”