Ukraine tries to manage ‘expectations of success’ ahead of counteroffensive

Ukraine’s top defense official cautioned the country’s citizens not to set expectations too high for the anticipated counteroffensive.

“It is definitely overheated; everyone wants another victory,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told a Ukrainian media outlet. “They want another victory. It’s fine; it’s emotions, expectations of success.”

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Ukrainian officials have been preparing for months for a counteroffensive in eastern Ukraine, strengthened by an influx of Western armored vehicles and artillery. Recently leaked Pentagon documents suggest that U.S. officials expect Ukrainian forces to make “modest territorial gains,” in part due to a shortage of ammunition and equipment, but NATO leaders maintain that recent deliveries have given Ukraine an effective fighting force.

“In total, we have trained and equipped more than nine new Ukrainian armored brigades. This will put Ukraine in a strong position to continue to retake occupied territory,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Thursday.

The Western tanks and artillery are a necessity for fighting across the farmland of southern and eastern Ukraine. Russian forces have been entrenched in parts of Donbas and annexed Crimea since 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, but they seized a substantial swath of Ukrainian territory to form a “land bridge” from Crimea to Donbas and mainland Russia after the full-scale invasion began last spring.

“Any force can always use more of everything, but according to the modeling that we [have] very carefully done with them, the Ukrainians are in a good position,” Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the commander of U.S. European Command and NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, told the House Armed Services Committee.

Ukraine and its Western partners have been scrambling to deliver main battle tanks and other armored vehicles since late January, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz dropped his opposition to the transfer of German-made Leopards after months of appeals from Ukraine and central European members of NATO.

The Biden administration has withheld some of the longest-range U.S.-made artillery out of an apparent anxiety that Russia might deem those more advanced weapons provocative and retaliate.

“This is a well-prepared offensive, counteroffensive, and it can it can succeed,” former Ambassador Bill Taylor, who led the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv on two different postings, told the Washington Examiner. “It does need continued flow of ammunition. It does need continued flow of anti-aircraft [weaponry] to keep the Russian Air Force out of the fight. And the chances of succeeding go up if we provide these long-range systems that we just talked about.”

Stoltenberg acknowledged that “we should never underestimate Russia” due to the quantity of men and material Moscow can bring to bear.

Reznikov emphasized that the war is “not a sprint distance” while recalling the successes of the past year. “So far, we have successfully run this whole stage,” he told RBC Ukraine, according to an unofficial translation. “For us, as for the country, for the state, the clear goal and task of — to leave and to prove to the whole world that the change of territories by force is impossible in the modern world.”

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And he adopted a resigned attitude about how people will react if they encounter a setback in the next phase of the war.

“My mother [is] a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. She always told me, ‘If you can’t change circumstances, try to change your attitude towards them,’” he said. “So we agree with [Ukrainian military officials] and [Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Anna Maliar], [who] says, ‘Guys, don’t overestimate your own expectations so that there is no disappointment later. Then get upset. Not everything is so simple. It’s a war. And not only that, we will not tell you exactly when, how, and where.’”