By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Kyiv Needs a Stable Front in the Donbas and Western Security Guarantees

President Volodymyr Zelensky has spent recent weeks endeavoring to sell his “victory plan,” the core elements of which he unveiled to the Ukrainian parliament on October 16, to Ukraine’s partners. The plan includes expanded military assistance to stabilize the front, security guarantees through membership of NATO, and defense-industrial cooperation. The details of the plan have been met with significant skepticism among Ukraine’s partners, who fear that without reforms to Ukraine’s recruitment and training of military forces, equipment alone will be insufficient to stabilize the front. Nor are they sold on the willingness of the alliance to guarantee Ukraine’s security.

Though the details remain in question, the underlying analysis that shapes Zelensky’s pitch is sound. Russian President Vladimir Putin will negotiate seriously only if he believes he is losing militarily. To conclude the war on favorable terms, Ukraine must first stabilize the front, gain maximum leverage over Russia, and obtain security guarantees to ensure that it can prosper and remain secure after the conflict. To achieve those aims, Kyiv must be clearly aligned with its international partners.

The problem is that Ukraine now faces both a deteriorating battlefield situation and the stagnation of diplomatic efforts among its partners ahead of a U.S. election where the candidates have radically different approaches to the conflict. Over the summer, Russia managed to establish some significant advantages over Ukrainian forces, enabling it to make slow but steady progress through Ukrainian defenses. These Russian advantages can be blunted. But as Ukrainian casualties mount, Kyiv and its partners cannot waste any time. If Ukraine’s international partners wait for changes beyond their direct control to happen before they take action, as they appear to be doing now, they will increase the chance of failure.

 

Russia’s Grinding Advance

As things stand now, the Kremlin believes it can achieve its objectives in Ukraine militarily and is therefore not interested in immediate negotiations or withdrawal. Ukrainian forces have become dangerously stretched. They are now spread along a 600-mile frontline, and recruitment and training has failed to make up for the number of casualties in frontline units. Furthermore, Ukraine’s supplies of artillery, ammunition, tanks, and infantry fighting vehicles have been dwindling. The more it lacks these key types of equipment and weaponry, the more it must depend on infantry to hold the front, causing an associated rise in casualties.

Exploiting Ukraine’s manpower challenges along its eastern front, Russia has made gradual gains over the past few months. In the first half of October, Russian forces captured Vuhledar and broke into Toretsk—after two years of largely unsuccessful assaults on Ukraine’s Donbas defenses. Along with the seizure of key towns around the Ukrainian stronghold of Pokrovsk, these gains showed Russia establishing an effective formula for undermining Ukraine’s ability to hold positions. For Ukraine to be able to negotiate from a position of strength, it must end Russia’s advance and stabilize the front. But to do so, Ukraine’s military leadership will have to address several tactical challenges.

Russia’s current battlefield advantages rest on several capabilities. First, the thinning out of Ukraine’s tactical air defenses from late 2023—stocks of interceptors are perilously low, with only periodic resupplies—has allowed Russia to establish continuous and dense drone surveillance over the front. Russia now flies between 1,000 and 1,300 long-range reconnaissance drones over Ukrainian territory every day, providing Russia with valuable targeting data. Russian units use ballistic missiles to strike Ukraine’s air defenses if Ukraine tries to move them forward, as loitering munitions, uncrewed missiles designed to search and strike targets, scour the rear parts of Ukraine’s frontlines to destroy its artillery.

The threat from Russian loitering munitions and glide bombs forces Ukraine to keep its artillery away from the frontline, which in turn allows Russian forces to move their own artillery closer to the front, bringing them into range of Ukrainian logistics units, medics, and troops rotating behind the frontline. This pressure compels Ukrainian troops to remain in prepared fighting positions where they are safe from shrapnel. Meanwhile, Russia sends small groups forward to force the Ukrainians in fighting positions to expend ammunition and prevent them from resting. Once the fighting positions have been identified, the Russian forces call in airstrikes with 500- to 1,500-kilogram glide bombs, which can hit the positions with considerable accuracy. When the Ukrainians try to rotate their units, they are harassed by artillery. Then, when the defensive positions have been thinned out, the Russians attempt rapid assaults on motorbikes, often supported by armored vehicles, to get into the Ukrainian trenches.

This approach comes at a high cost in Russian troops, but for now, Russia has been able to absorb the casualties. Moscow seems to be wagering that it can achieve its objectives in Donbas next year and impose a rate of casualties and material degradation on the Ukrainian military high enough that it will no longer be capable of preventing further advances, giving Russia considerable leverage in negotiations.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, October 2024

 

Shells, Soldiers, and Supply Chains

To reverse this dynamic, Ukraine will need to do several things at once. First, it needs to limit Russia’s battlefield surveillance capabilities. Ukraine has developed effective interceptor drones that can knock down Russian Orlan and Zala surveillance drones. However it needs assistance scaling up the production of these interceptors and fielding a sufficient density of radar and other sensor systems to make them effective. Ukraine’s Western partners should augment this effort by expanding support in electronic warfare to interfere with the passage of Russian reconnaissance data. Kyiv’s Western partners can help protect the Ukrainian artillery by working with them to modify heavy machine gun remote weapon stations mounted on vehicles so that they can accurately engage loitering munitions. This would allow Ukraine to bring its artillery farther forward and put Russian guns at risk.

At the same time, Ukraine needs to make that artillery far more effective, and for that, it needs more howitzers and ammunition. Ukrainian forces still need approximately 2.4 million rounds a year to hold the front. With sufficient artillery pieces and the means to protect them, Ukraine would be able to cover gaps in the front with fire, rather than by having to continuously man fighting positions all along the front, with the added cost in Ukrainian losses that entails.

Kyiv also needs to dig new defense lines behind its current positions, with experienced soldiers supervising to make sure that civilian construction workers build the positions properly. Although Kyiv has commissioned the construction of defense lines before, its assembly and siting of fighting positions have often been poor, and the designs have presumed a greater number of troops than are available to man them.

Building more defense lines is of limited value if there are not enough personnel to occupy them. Over the past year, attrition has led to a decline in experienced Ukrainian soldiers in many units, and the training pipeline has failed to provide enough personnel or give those available soldiers sufficient training. In response, the Ukrainian military has cannibalized units, taking groups of more capable soldiers away for particular tasks and rapidly rotating command groups, which has undermined unit cohesion.

Kyiv needs to fix its dysfunctional recruitment and training system. Training for new troops has been inadequate throughout the war. This is something the Ukrainian military has been slow to acknowledge and slower still to address. It is also an area where Ukraine’s partners can do little. Although over fifteen of Ukraine’s partners have provided training to Ukrainian units, the logistical burden of transporting troops out of Ukraine with their equipment makes it impossible to scale up these operations. Kyiv’s willingness to make the hard political decisions to mobilize personnel and extend training times will determine whether Ukraine’s partners see their contribution to Zelensky’s victory plan as part of a viable strategy.

Conversely, Ukraine’s international partners can do much to reduce Russia’s advantage in firepower. To mount a capable defense against Russian artillery and glide bomb attacks, Ukraine needs to be able to strike stockpiles and airfields. Funding for and support of Ukraine’s own long-range strike programs and aggressive targeting of Russia’s supply chains of raw materials, machine tooling, and critical components of weapons production can have a significant effect. Europe and the United Stated should be able to help Ukraine force Russia to burn through more of its munition and to degrade the Russian defense industry’s capacity to replenish its supplies.

In combination, these steps could make further advances prohibitively costly for Russia, but they would need to be applied systematically and at scale. The Kremlin would also need to believe that they can be sustained. If such measures are delayed, the situation at the front risks deteriorating to a point where the Russians can begin to advance with impunity, and where the Ukrainians simply lack the personnel and equipment to block all the axes along which the Russians might push. Preventing that outcome is a prerequisite for Ukraine to be able to embark on successful negotiations.

 

The Ghost of Brest-Litovsk

Kyiv knows it must have a strong and stabilized front to be able to have any kind of leverage with Moscow. It also knows that Western support for its war is not unlimited and that it will face growing pressure to consider some kind of negotiated solution as the war passes into its fourth year. It would be particularly dangerous, however, if Ukraine were forced into negotiations as the situation at the front continues to unravel in Russia’s favor. This would create a Brest-Litovsk dynamic: in 1918, German forces achieved conditions in which they could advance with impunity against the Red Army, and therefore, when the Soviets entered talks, any attempt to push back on a German demand would cause the German Army to renew offensive operations until the Soviets conceded. In such a scenario, Moscow would effectively force Kyiv to all but concede its sovereignty at gunpoint.

A Ukrainian soldier launching a drone in the Donbas region, Ukraine, May 2024

If stabilizing the front is the indispensable precondition for talks, Kyiv also needs points of real leverage. In a surprise move on August 6, Ukrainian forces broke across the border into the Kursk region of Russia, rapidly overpowering lightly held Russian defenses to seize a chunk of Russian territory and trap some Russian forces on the south of the Seym River. The operation had three objectives. Kyiv hoped to show its partners that the trajectory of the war was not predetermined and that it could conduct successful offensive operations; it aimed to draw Russian resources away from Donbas; and it saw holding the territory as a useful bargaining chip if negotiations started. The first objective was largely successful. The second was not. The third will depend on whether Ukraine can hold the territory. Given that it required Ukraine to strip its forces in Donbas of reserves, the operation involved a high degree of risk, and it is not clear that Kyiv will be able to hold what it has taken. Nevertheless, the need for leverage remains.

A range of issues will prove extremely difficult to settle in talks. Since March 2022, for example, Russian forces have occupied the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Ukraine’s largest piece of energy-generating infrastructure. Russia has been unable to maintain it safely: it wants to exploit the power station for energy but cannot safely bring the reactors back from the cold shutdown. In any settlement, Ukraine will want Russia to end its occupation of the plant and allow its energy workers, who are being held hostage there, to return to operate it. To account for these contentious matters, Ukraine must have in the bank things that Russia wants.

Sanctions are one possible form of leverage. In many cases, Ukraine and its partners will want sanctions to remain in place after the conflict, to slow down Russian rearmament and punish Russia for its long list of crimes. But in areas where Kyiv and its partners can agree to put things on the table, they will need to coordinate to give Kyiv collateral with which to trade.

Given the mutually incompatible demands on both sides, the most likely outcome of talks is a cease-fire without a wider peace agreement. Russia, for example, may demand that Ukraine abandon any military agreements with the West; Ukraine is unlikely to recognize Russia’s annexation of its territories. The risk is that Ukraine’s international partners see a cease-fire itself as justification for reducing support to Ukraine. If Ukraine is left with an unaffordable level of mobilization and no prospect of significant foreign direct investment—owing to fears that Russia could restart offensive operations at any point—then Moscow will have a wide array of opportunities to destabilize Kyiv. In any case, the Ukrainian government will find it difficult to persuade its own people that any concessions to Russia are justified unless they come with very substantial security guarantees.

 

Diplomats in Boots

When Zelensky and how traveled to Washington in September, he continued to make the case for NATO membership, potentially along the lines of what was agreed with West Germany in 1954, whereby security guarantees applied only to the unoccupied parts of the country. Such a deal, however, is highly implausible. Accession to NATO requires a consensus of its members, and Hungary, for example, likely will not commit to going to war with Russia to defend Ukraine. Although NATO membership may be unrealistic in the medium term, Zelensky remains correct that a lasting peace can be secured only with ironclad security guarantees to Kyiv.

Satisfying this need will prove a delicate task. For the United States, the prospect of extending new long-term security guarantees to a large territory in Europe is hardly enticing. Amid Washington’s years-long effort to pivot its resources to the Indo-Pacific to deter China, such a step would undoubtedly require it to divert some of those resources to Ukraine to make the guarantee tangible. Understandably, many in Washington also argue that this is the greatest security crisis facing Europe in decades and that Europe should shoulder the burden of addressing it. Nonetheless, for the time being at least, Russia does not consider NATO’s European members to be credible without the United States.

The solution to Ukraine’s security needs therefore will have to involve a coalition of the willing who deploy to Ukraine after a cease-fire is reached, with the United States voicing its support. After the failure of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom pledged to uphold Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, Kyiv will require a military presence in Ukraine to convince it that its partners will honor their security guarantees. To make such a proposition credible to Russia, however, Europe’s defense industry must be able to show it can equip and sustain deployable formations. With European NATO members’ firepower concentrated in air forces, the credibility of their security guarantees depends on the munitions available to suppress and destroy enemy air defenses. Although European armies will be critical, European nations’ purchase of air-launched stand-off weapons, which can strike targets from beyond the range of defensive systems, along with the ability to produce them in significant numbers, will determine any agreement’s plausibility.

European powers, therefore, will need to ramp up their investments in European defense industries to credibly backstop any security guarantees offered to Ukraine. European countries must step forward to lead this effort. Several members of the Joint Expeditionary Force, comprised of northern and Baltic members of NATO, share a similar view of the threat posed by Russia and how to confront it, but central and western European states must also commit to guarantees.

After nearly three full years of war, Ukraine finds itself in a better position than many expected. But a favorable outcome is far from guaranteed, and no time for complacency remains. Despite their potential reluctance to sign on to Zelensky’s victory plan, Western powers must act quickly to secure—and avoid losing—the vital leverage that Ukraine will need to achieve an end to the war that does not empower Russia. Positive signs abound: the Australian government’s announcement that it will provide M1A1 tanks to Ukraine, Sweden’s provision of a large tranche of infantry fighting vehicles, and the United States’ commitment to supply additional equipment before the end of the year.

The security of Europe now depends on significant multilateral cooperation to ensure that any path toward ending the war achieves the best possible result for Ukraine. But as attention shifts to negotiations, U.S. and European military support must not wane, for although a successful outcome can be achieved only through diplomacy, what is diplomatically possible will always depend on the military realities on the ground.

 

 

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