Ukraine’s spring offensive has been postponed — owing to weather, a need for more ammunition and aircraft from western allies, and a spectacular hole in US security ecology, more explicitly the huge dump of super-top secrets by Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, leaked via Discord (a social media platform).
All three factors must be uppermost in the thinking of Ukraine’s planners and commanders right now — and it is not all bad news.
The weather has been wet and soggy, turning the ground to mud — making manoeuvre very difficult for tanks, heavy guns and armoured carriers. Climate change is having its effect, shifting the seasons with storms and weird weather.
The new tanks from the allies, Leopard 2 and the British Challenger 2, have been going through their drills. Weighing over 65 tons, they require hard ground baked by summer sun. They will be the spearhead for the 11 or 12 strike brigades, which the Teixeira-Discord leaks say the Ukrainian forces intend to use for the upcoming offensive.
But don’t think this, or anything from Teixeira on Discord, is giving the game away. The Russians have long expected a Ukraine offensive. But the Kremlin, no more than any western ally, has not much of a clue where, when and how the attack will come.
The Ukrainian command has been astonishingly successful in maintaining operational security, not giving the show away to friend or foe, and managing their own information narrative.
It is said that currently only about four or five people are privy to the details of the new plans for the Ukrainian forces. Certainly the Russians seem to be guessing, putting massive reinforcements into the central front around Bakhmut, Avdiivka and miles of trenches and bunkers round Melitopol — fearing a lightning thrust through the city to the Azov Sea which would cut the 190,000 Russian occupying force in half and isolate Crimea. The parading of Vladimir Putin through Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblast was obvious propaganda whistling in the dark.
Few expect this summer to bring a conclusion to the conflict. Neither side seems prepared to talk peace, and to date no viable path to realistic negotiations has opened — whether via Beijing, Emmanuel Macron’s personal diplomacy, Brazil or Saudi Arabia. Ukraine is reaching limits in ammunition — its forces currently fire 90,000 shells a month — and don’t have enough reserve troops and aircraft. This is quite evident from the Discord disclosures.
The leaks also reveal how disjointed a lot of the Nato-EU planning and thinking is about the war. It also reveals quite how committed Britain is in supporting Nato and Ukraine. The disclosure that there are 50 SAS on the ground can hardly come as a shock but the report that a Russian Sukoy-27 nearly shot down an RAF Rivet Joint intelligence gathering plane over the Black Sea on September 29, 2022, shows how close Britain is to the conflict. Apparently the plane was saved by a Russian air-to-air missile ‘malfunctioning.’
A further reminder is the Danish report of Russian surveillance ships moving around offshore wind farms off the British Isles, Denmark and Norway. Some months ago we reported in these columns the growing activities of GUGI, the special Russian underwater surveillance and sabotage service. It has three specialised surface ships and a submarine, the Belograd, capable of running underwater drones and sabotage teams. One ship, the Yantar, had been spotted loitering around the landing points of transatlantic cables along the coast of Ireland last August.
All this serves as a warning to Nato and its main allies that they have to up their game and their thinking this summer. There has been some hope, promoted by a mix of allies and the isolationist wing of the US Republican Party, that support for Ukraine could be wound down. But pulling back would make the long war longer, and spreading beyond Ukraine itself.
The Nato summit in Vilnius in July will have to ask some tough questions. Two per cent of GDP will likely be a minimum target on defence spending. More effective rapid deployment forces will be required to patrol Nato’s eastern border.
As for Britain, too much of this government’s defence policy is based on procrastination. Ukraine means in Churchill’s favourite phrase: action this day.
