Clock ticking on Ukraine’s spring offensive as Biden admin in delicate holding pattern

Ukraine’s widely hyped spring counteroffensive was cast as a turning point that would reclaim territory from Russia and give Kyiv and its Western allies vital leverage in eventual peace talks with the Kremlin.

Instead, with the season drawing to a close, the campaign has yet to begin. Both sides are edging toward a stalemate as Russian forces reinforce defensive positions in eastern Ukraine.

That puts the Biden administration in a delicate holding pattern while patience with a seemingly endless war in Eastern Europe grows thin in Washington and inside NATO.

Administration officials told The Washington Times this week that the overarching U.S. goal is still to put Ukraine in the strongest possible negotiating position with Russia, but they stressed that any talks would unfold solely on Ukraine’s terms and timeline.

The spring offensive — building off a campaign last fall that drove back invading Russian forces in the south and east — was seen as a key marker in the broader effort to put Ukraine in the driver’s seat. The loftier hope was to force the Russians out of the territory entirely and leave them with little choice but to call off the invasion altogether.

Instead, analysts say, the U.S. and its NATO allies have been forced to wait and watch as the ground thaws and mobility is restored. If the counteroffensive falls short or never truly begins, the dynamics on the ground — and in Washington and capitals across Europe — could change rapidly. Ukraine suddenly could be left with few good options, analysts say, and could face private pressure from the West to look for a way to end the fighting with large swaths of territory in Russian control.

“Reality will dictate what actually happens,” said Jim Townsend, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy in the Obama administration.

“If Ukraine has that offensive, if it bogs down or doesn’t achieve much, it won’t be the administration telling them [to pursue peace talks]. It will be fate saying it, reality saying it,” he said. “And then the administration will say, ‘We gave you everything, and it only went so far. So what do you think about [peace] discussions now?’”

“It’s a game of time and space and political will,” Mr. Townsend said. “The administration doesn’t come out and say anything definitive because time, space and political will will be dictated by others, not by them.”

The White House and Pentagon are taking a wait-and-see approach to Ukraine’s offensive in the Donbas, which remains the epicenter of the war. In the early days of the conflict, administration officials talked openly about how the fight would end at the negotiating table. They thought Ukraine needed a favorable bargaining position when that day arrived.

The public talk of negotiations has grown quieter over the past nine months, especially after Ukraine’s counteroffensive last fall recaptured key cities such as Kharkiv and Kherson and dealt major, high-profile defeats to a Russian military that suddenly seemed vulnerable and ill-equipped for a 21st-century war. The failures of the Russian military appeared to change the calculus across the West, and a clear Ukrainian victory no longer seemed as far-fetched as it did when the conflict began.

Officials insist the U.S. position has not changed. In conversations with Ukrainian leaders, U.S. officials say, the focus is on providing support, not pushing Kyiv to the negotiating table or proposing specific terms for a peace deal.

“We’re not here to tell them you should change your position,” an administration official told The Times. The official was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the White House’s thinking on the war.

“We don’t see our role as telling Ukraine what to do,” the official said.

‘Landmark battle’

Ukrainian leaders insist the counteroffensive is coming and deny they are trying to manage expectations or downplay its importance.

“Like it or not, we are approaching a landmark battle for the recent history of Ukraine,” Kyrylo Budanov, chief of the intelligence directorate for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, told the news outlet RBC-Ukraine in an interview published Tuesday.

“This is a fact; everyone understands it,” he said. “When it will start is a mystery. But everyone understands that we are getting closer to it.”

The Russian military also knows that the offensive is on the horizon. Russian forces reportedly have ceased forward advances across eastern or southern Ukraine, except for Bakhmut. The city has been largely reduced to rubble after months of fierce fighting, with neither side claiming complete control. Ukrainian troops still hold western Bakhmut.

A muted Russian offensive that began in March failed to make appreciable gains. Russian forces have concentrated instead on building fortifications in the areas still in their possession.

The shift in Russia’s approach has paid dividends, foreign analysts say. After months of heavy casualties and embarrassing battlefield setbacks, Moscow has ordered its military commanders to focus on defensive positions throughout the Donbas and surrounding areas.

British intelligence officials say Russia’s daily average casualties have dropped from an estimated 776 in March to 568 this month.

“Russia’s losses have highly likely reduced as their attempted winter offensive has failed to achieve its objectives, and Russian forces are now focused on preparing for anticipated Ukrainian offensive operations,” the British Defense Ministry said Tuesday in a Twitter post.

Although Ukrainian forces have consistently outperformed expectations in the fighting, Biden administration officials have voiced public and private doubts that they have the firepower and resources to rout the Russians in the next offensive and are likely to fall far short of driving the invaders from all Ukrainian territory.

“That is a significant military task. Very, very difficult military task,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the publication Defense One last month. “You’re looking at a couple hundred thousand Russians who are still in Russian-occupied Ukraine. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m just saying it’s a very difficult task.”

U.S. intelligence assessments allegedly leaked online by a National Guard airman offered a pessimistic take on the spring offensive’s chances for a breakthrough. A February report warned that “force generation and sustainment shortfalls” in the Ukrainian military mean Kyiv can likely expect only “modest territorial gains.”

Ukrainian generals have refused to give a target date or signal whether the attack will strike east into the disputed Donbas or make a feint toward the Sea of Azov to the south, effectively cutting off the Kremlin’s vaunted “land bridge” connecting Crimea to Russia. A successful drive to the south in the Zaporizhzhya region would divide Russia’s occupied lands into two and put Crimea, the Russian naval base in Sevastopol and the Kerch Strait bridge all within range of Ukrainian artillery.

Journalists have been largely banned from staging areas, further cutting off information flows on where Ukrainian forces are gathering and what their prime targets are.

Fight for Crimea?

Nowhere are those Russian defenses stronger than in Crimea, which Moscow forcibly annexed in 2014. Russia has used the Crimean Peninsula, still formally a part of Ukraine, as a staging ground throughout the war.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian leaders have signaled that their definition of victory includes recapturing all territory from Russia, including Crimea.

Such a goal is exceedingly difficult. U.S. military officials have said retaking Crimea would be an uphill climb for the Ukrainian military, even if its offensive pushes Russian troops out of the Donbas.

Kyiv may have a secondary motivation for Crimea, suggesting that Ukraine is at least open to the idea of negotiations with the Kremlin, analysts say.

“If public pronouncements about retaking Crimea help cement Ukrainian national unity, that too is a positive,” Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in an analysis last week. “And by reiterating territorial claims that the overwhelming majority of the world’s governments recognize, Kyiv’s leaders make Crimea into, at a minimum, a major bargaining chip in any negotiations down the road.”

Indeed, other analysts say Ukraine — and by extension its U.S. and NATO allies — must stick to that theoretical goal of liberating Crimea from Russian control. Abandoning that goal, they say, could crush Ukrainians’ fighting spirit.

“It’s important for morale, it’s important for the Ukrainian people, that they’re going to recover every inch of Ukraine,” Mr. Townsend said.

“I don’t think you’re going to have anyone saying, ‘Well, we’ll do part of it.’ They have to present a positive face, that we’re going to do this.”