While American and Russian diplomats prepare peace talks, the war grinds on in Ukraine. At last week’s security conference in Munich, U.S. defense secretary Peter Hegseth said that negotiations have to be based on “the realities on the ground.” These seem to worsen with every day that passes as Russia moves closer to swallowing up the Donbass region, with its vital mineral resources.
But Zelensky’s 2023 “Summer Counteroffensive” was a poorly planned and ill-conceived military disaster.
Media attention has been fully focused on vitriolic verbal exchanges between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky blaming each other for the deteriorating situation, with occasional glimpses of Paris meetings among sidelined European leaders trying to look useful. “What have they come up with? Nothing,” commented former Spanish defense minister Federico Trillo in a TV interview.
But through the voluminous reams of print copy and air space focused on the verbiage, insults, and bluster of the past few days, some brief and virtually unnoticed statements by Vladimir Putin give clues as to his plans for a ceasefire.
Putin said on Russian Television that he expects to shake on a deal with Trump in “six months.” This is probably based on his calculations of the time it should take for his army to swarm into the main industrial cities of Donbas and for his North Koreans, Chechens. and Russian marines to surround Zelensky’s beleaguered invasion force in Kursk.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, the Russian military command has been transferring infantry, tank, and artillery units from the southern end of the Donetsk front around Pokrovsk, towards newly occupied northern positions in Toretsk. This is in clear preparation for a spring assault on Kostyantynivka, the closest of three main cities comprising the industrial triangle of the Donetsk valley, eastern Ukraine’s mining, engineering, and steel producing powerhouse.
Toretsk is located 13 miles southeast of Kostyantynivka, which is midway to Kramatorsk, the largest of the three cities with a population of over 100,000, valuable steel mills, coal, iron ore, and titanium mines.
While Russia moves what could amount to a mechanized division to Toretsk, according to ISW, it’s sending reinforcements to Chasiv Yar, the fortress town dominating a ridge line protecting the eastern approach to Kramatorsk. According to ISW, a fresh Russian tank regiment and two airborne battalions are reinforcing troops that have been besieging the area for months. According to Russian defense spokesmen, they already control half of Chasiv Yar, located 15 miles from Kramatorsk.
As Russia gets positioned for its pincer movement on the industrial and mining hub of Donbas, its forces may also be maneuvering to cut off what’s left of four elite mechanized brigades that Zelensky ordered into Kursk last summer. Speaking to the media this week, Putin said that his troops had crossed into Ukraine just south of the Ukrainian salient in Kursk, threatening its rear logistical center in Sumy.
Military bloggers report that Russian rocket artillery and Iskander missiles pummeled the area ahead of the advance. Ukrainian spokesmen say that a Russian “reconnaissance force attempting to break through the border was repelled.”
Prior to his meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia last week, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov insisted that no peace agreement was acceptable without recognizing Russian control over all four Ukrainian territories it claims: Kherson in the south, Zaporizhzhia further east, Donetsk, in the center, and Luhansk in the north.
Donetsk is the one region that Russia is closest to fully controlling, where it holds the regional capital, railway connections, and may soon have its main industrial sites well within range of field artillery. Ninety percent of Ukraine’s lithium deposits are also located in Donetsk, just outside Pokrovsk, in the village of Shevchenko, which the Russians took last month.
While Zelensky says that he won’t agree to Trump’s proposal of exchanging U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine’s rare minerals because “Ukraine is not for sale,” the real reason may be that he has lost them. Trump complained in a Fox News interview last Thursday about Zelensky wasting Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s time in a visit to Kyiv to close the deal only to get stood up by Zelensky.
Ukrainian counter-attacks have failed to recover much territory in Pokrovsk. The newly created 155th Brigade trained by France, with AMX-10 tanks and Caesar howitzers mobilized for the task, collapsed due to a large number of desertions from its infantry component. Special forces managed to retake some Russian held trench positions, preventing Pokrovsk’s total encirclement but hopes of securing the area have faded in recent days.
“Zelensky keeps trying to negotiate with no cards,” Trump said on Fox, also expressing annoyance at Zelensky’s attempts to interject himself into Rubio’s talks with Lavrov in Riyadh.
Trump’s comments about Zelensky being a “dictator” and responsible for starting the war have been lambasted by the media. The criticism may have been better directed at Zelensky’s military incompetence. His war time leader showmanship may have been critical at the start of the war to rally his people and international support. He also deserves credit for marshaling resources for a domestic arms industry producing large volumes of innovative drones causing major Russian losses and a 5 percent drop in its oil production with deep strikes in Russian territory.
But Zelensky’s 2023 “Summer Counteroffensive” was a poorly planned and ill-conceived military disaster from which Ukraine’s army and national morale has never recovered. “No NATO army would have launched an offensive under those circumstances,” a senior Ukrainian army officer who was attached to NATO’s planning staff told me at the time. Air cover essential for any Western offensive doctrine was sorely lacking for a frontal assault against the thickest sector of Russian defenses.
The Biden administration and Europe’s NATO allies who kept lionizing Zelensky are much to blame for endlessly delaying transfers of F-16 fighters he requested at the start of the war. But instead of adapting to the circumstances, Zelensky went ahead with his fixed plan, driven less by military logic than a deluded obsession of marching into Crimea.
Zelensky furthermore discarded the vital element of surprise by broadcasting his plans to the world well in advance. It’s recently learned that his army chief, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, currently ambassador in London, suggested using Russia’s anticipation of an offensive in the southeast by pivoting to a less fortified northern sector of the front that could threaten the Russia’s logistical base in Belgorod and throw its army off balance. Zelensky ignored the advice.
He had not read enough military history to know of the elaborate efforts undertaken by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in WWII to make the Germans believe that the allied D-Day landings in France were planned for Calais instead of less defended beaches in Normandy.
Zelensky did use surprise in his invasion of Kursk but Putin was well into Donetsk by then. As predicted by The American Spectator, a situation has evolved in which effective counter-attacks cannot be mounted in eastern Ukraine, because Zelensky’s most professional NATO trained units like the 47th Mechanized Brigade are tied up fighting for survival in Kursk, where Putin threatens to surround them.
It’s still possible that new deliveries of NATO weapons, including a growing number of F-16s and a few Mirage-2000 fighters donated by France which are starting to engage in ground support and tactical bombing operations, may block Russia’s pincer on Donetsk’s industrial heartland sufficiently to make Putin settle for less than he wants.
But whether the war gets decided on the negotiating table or on the battlefield, Zelensky seems to lack an aptitude for either task and NATO should start considering ways of easing him out. In the meantime, Trump should forget about the minerals.
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