How Russia Stopped Ukraine s Momentum: A Deep Defense Is Hard to Beat
Many held high hopes for Ukraine s 2023 summer offensive. Previous Ukrainian successes at Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson encouraged expectations that a new effort, reinforced with new Western equipment and training, might rupture Russian defenses on a larger scale and sever the Russian land bridge to Crimea. If it did, the thinking went, the resulting threat to Crimea might persuade Putin to end the war.
The results fell far short of such hopes. Although the summer brought some Ukrainian successes (especially against Russian warships in the Black Sea), there was no breakthrough on land. Limited advances were bought at great cost and have now been significantly offset by Russian advances elsewhere on the battlefield. It is now clear that the offensive failed.
Why? And what does this mean for the future of the Ukraine War and the future of warfare more broadly? Robust answers will require data and evidence that are not yet publicly available. But the best answer for now lies in the way the two sides, and especially the Russian defenders, used their available forces. By late spring, the Russians had adopted the kind of deep, prepared defenses that have been very difficult for attackers to break through for more than the last century of combat experience. Breakthrough has been and still is possible in land warfare. But this has long required permissive conditions that are now absent in Ukraine: a defender, in this case Russia, whose dispositions are shallow, forward, ill prepared, or logistically unsupported or whose troops are unmotivated and unwilling to defend their positions. That was true of Russian forces in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson in 2022. It is no longer the case.