In the epic heat of the Ukraine summer, the battle for Donbas — and maybe the outcome of the entire ground war this year — is at a pivotal stage. The Ukrainians have staged a tactical withdrawal from the last cities in Luhansk to “straighten the line”, establishing a narrower defensive position reinforced with the new Nato rocket and artillery systems.
Vladimir Putin has been ordering reservists to the Ukraine border, with the aim of pushing onto Slovyansk and Kramatorsk by the end of August. The call-out is just short of a national mobilisation — already reservists aged up to 65 have had their call-up papers.
“The war aims haven’t changed at all,” a senior UK official told me. “The aim is to take the Donbas, establish the coastal corridor to Crimea, and still to take Kyiv.” Putin still wants to erase Ukraine and its regime, make it a puppet like neighbouring Belarus and is unlikely to stop there.
This requires a change in strategy for the Ukrainian command and their allies and supporters in the West, the US and Britain in the lead. After visiting Ukraine last week, senior British commanders and advisers are awaiting a fresh set of requests from the Zelensky government and command, with whom they are in constant dialogue.
The commitments from Britain and key allies like the US, France and the Joint Expeditionary Force group — and European Nato partners like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania, now need to be long term — an undertaking of at least five years. It is already being shaped to be a core part of UK defence and security policy under Ben Wallace.
So far Ukraine has hardly featured in the various deliberations and proclamations of the candidates to be our next prime minister. It would be interesting to know which of them, if any, see the questions of national security posed by the Ukraine crisis in the same light as the Defence Secretary and the outgoing PM, Boris Johnson. Tom Tugendhat, a former soldier, has been pretty forthright about the growing and changing threat from Putin’s imperialist fantasy policies. Penny Mordaunt, former defence secretary and an honorary Naval Reserve captain, has expertise but is yet to pronounce definitively. Liz Truss has colourfully talked about the “need to defeat Russia”, only to add recently that Ukraine should be supported as much as we could afford.
This points to Mr Sunak in the Treasury corner. He and his former ministry do not like defence much — and had been actually looking for cuts. It would be interesting to see which, if any, of the finalists would endorse Johnson’s pledge to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030. “It’s likely to require a lot more than that,” one security insider whispered last week, given the huge costs in the requirements for Cyber and Space security, as well as land, sea and air, the demands to maintain resilience home and away, in which the services will have a growing sustaining and support responsibility.
Decisions on national security, strategy, defence and resilience need a modest retooling of last year’s rather incoherent reviews and papers. Meanwhile, there is the immediate concern for the next battle for Donbas.
By pulling back, straightening the line, and forming a narrower defensive front before Kramatorsk, the Ukrainian forces have left a huge swathe of open territory that the Russians now have to occupy and hold — a part of warfare they have been very poor at executing this year. If they advance in the open, they become targets for aerial bombardment by the HIMARS and MLRS rocket systems now arriving from Nato.
As in the messy wars in Chechnya and the Caucasus, the Russians are reluctant to fight in such conditions, hence Putin’s desperate search for new canon fodder, from minorities like the Chechens and mercenaries like the Wagner Group. Much-needed weaponry stocks may be running low, hence the rather desperate shopping expedition to buy cheap drones from Iran next week.
All sides now face a winter deadline. Moscow hopes that by autumn Europeans led by Germany will be keener on getting gas for their heating than supporting Ukraine’s fight for freedom.
Ukraine fatigue is already apparent among many allies. By the winter Ben Wallace will need to have completed his quiet mission to reshape UK thinking. He will have to persuade the new PM that in the new reality, defence and supporting Ukraine are not discretionary matters, to be dropped and discarded at will.
