"They are simply throwing bodies at our positions and numbers and gradually moving forward," says Serhiy Haidai, who heads Ukraine's Luhansk regional military administration.
Russia's fresh concentrations of manpower — numbered in the hundreds of thousands — have come with President Putin's appointment of Gen. Valery Gerasimov as his top commander in Ukraine. Although Gerasimov has also increased artillery barrages along eastern Ukraine's 140-mile front, his primary strategic and tactical shift is one of sacrificial, Red Army-like human waves against Ukraine's dug-in defenses. (Photo: Agence France-Presse.)
"I think it" — a new Russian offensive — "has started," says President Zelensky. Adds Denys Yaroslavskyi, a unit commander in Bakhmut, "They are just coming forward; they do not take cover, they are coming all-out." On Tuesday Yaroslavskyi told Britain's Sky News that "any scenario in the next two or three weeks" is possible; "the main fights are yet to come." On Tuesday alone, Russia also shelled the population-hollowed-out city with nearly 200 artillery strikes.
Ukrainian intelligence estimates that Putin has now stationed well more than 300,000 soldiers in-country, approximately twice the number of February 2022's original invasion force. Western analysts further estimate there are from 150,000 to 250,000 soldiers in Russia's reserves; some still in training, others waiting for orders to enter Ukraine.
NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, warns that Russia is "actively acquiring new weapons, more ammunition, ramping up their own production, but also acquiring more weapons from other authoritarian states like Iran and North Korea."
Meanwhile, the United States is still wringing its hands over sending its longest-range rockets to Ukraine, for this the Kremlin might interpret — God forbid — as an "escalatory" act by the West. Reuters reports that the U.S. is about to supply Ukraine with longer-range rockets, Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs with a range of 94 miles, but is refusing Ukraine's request for 185-mile ATACMS missiles.
Gen. Gerasimov's — which is to say, Vladimir Putin's — ultimate intentions are yet unknown by Ukrainian intelligence and Western analysts. The NY Times sketches three, strategic possibilities:
"Moscow could be preparing to open a new front, pushing across the Russian border to recapture territory in Sumy or Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine after being driven out months ago.... It might be escalating fighting along the eastern front to divert Ukrainian resources and hurt Kyiv’s ability to launch its own offensive. It could be planning a drive from occupied territory in eastern Ukraine to push deeper into the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, which make up Donbas."
The fourth, uncited possibility is that of all three. With a fighting force of double the number of initial invaders, Russia could overwhelm Ukraine's defenders in the east and northeast, perforce ruling out any otherwise-anticipated Ukrainian offensive this spring.
Had the West supplied Zelensky with tanks, armored vehicles and precision-guided munitions — as well as F-16 fighter jets — months ago, Ukraine would now be positioned to cut through Russia's revamped Powell Doctrine of overwhelming assault capabilities via the commitment of mass ground forces — that of "simply throwing bodies at [Ukraine's] positions."
Instead, the West opted for what Dick Cheney once labeled as U.S. "dithering" — in Iraq. The then-vice president's urging of overwhelming force bordered on the unhinged in America's foolhardy invasion of that Middle East nation. But Ukraine is not Iraq, Putin is not Saddam Hussein, and in Eastern Europe — unlike the Middle East — the West's national security interests align with President Zelensky's.
Yet out of unreasonable, veritably incomprehensible fears of Putinesque escalations — which have nonetheless rained down on Ukraine throughout this war — clockwork dithering has been the West's strategic approach. No armored personnel carriers; yes, armored personnel carriers. No Patriot missiles to save Ukrainian civilians; yes, Patriot missiles to save lives. No tanks; yes, tanks. No longer-range rockets; yes, longer-range rockets, but still not the longest. That particular dithering soon to be canceled, no doubt. Then more dithering over jets.
Of the 1930s and 40s' encroaching European fascism and Soviet totalitarianism, the poet W.H. Auden, decades later, powerfully reflected:
the sack of Silence, the churches empty, the cavalry
go, the Cosmic Model
become German, and any faith, if we had it, in immanent
virtue died. More than ever
life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, loveable,
but we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler,
trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively,
all is possible.
But we have trusted ourselves again. We have trusted that Putin's ambitions have an end; that his Cosmic Model, become Russian, is realism chained; that since Stalin and Hitler, much less is possible.
We have carelessly fooled ourselves. And Ukraine is paying the price of our insouciance. In Iraq, in an unprovoked war, the U.S. destroyed thousands of American lives and squandered trillions of dollars. A Russian tyrant is now pouring hundreds of thousands of men and trillions of rubles into crushing a free, neighboring democracy — and if victorious there, he'll move further into Europe's East and further threaten the West's security. Yet the U.S. has invested not one man and less than $30 billion in Ukraine's defense.
In the "next two or three weeks," says a Ukrainian commander, the bloodletting possibilities of Russia's bold new strategy shall unfold — possibly, a decisive strategy. The U.S. never saw Nazi Germany's 1944 Western offensive coming; the oversight nearly turned the war. Russia's similarly unpredicted, preemptive offensive could be more successful — but at any rate, it's too late for the U.S. to turn the war now.