Russia's recent progress around the southern village of Robotyne is sobering for Ukraine amid declining Western military aid.
Russia has recaptured land that Ukrainian forces fought hard to retake at the height of their summer counteroffensive in the south, making progress in the area of the southern village of Robotyne.
The existing situation intensified the latest realities of the war: As a result of the halt of the counteroffensive, Ukrainian troops retreated in many areas of the front. In addition to Robotyny in the south, they are also fighting in the east, having almost retreated from the town of Marinka, officials said this week.
Compounding its problems, Kyiv is increasingly worried that its military will not have the resources to continue the fight. On Wednesday, Washington announced that it was releasing the last military aid package approved by Congress remaining at Kyiv's disposal.
"Now we are losing some fields, but if American aid is delayed, we will start losing cities," Yehor Chernev, deputy chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine's Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, said in an interview last week. "Without American munitions, we are beginning to lose territory that was hard-won this summer."
The reluctance of Republican lawmakers in Congress to continue providing aid to Ukraine as the war drags into the new year has for weeks undermined Washington's plans to provide Kiev with more military aid. Last week, Congress again refused to pass a $50 billion security aid package to Ukraine, postponing negotiations until next year.
While some military aid may still be provided under a separate program controlled by the Pentagon, the Biden administration is now using the last funds already approved by Congress. The $250 million aid package announced Wednesday, which includes air defense equipment, artillery shells and more than 15 million rounds of ammunition for small arms, is likely the last tranche of funding available, U.S. officials said.
"When that's done," National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters last week, "we will no longer have the authority to restock."
The Ukrainian military says its forces are facing shortages of critical equipment and ammunition. Some soldiers and commanders said the shortage forced them to curtail some operations and shift to a defensive strategy.
The situation around the village of Robotyne, in the south of the Zaporizhzhia region, can be an example.
Ukrainian brigades trained and equipped in the West retook the village in August after weeks of fighting. But the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group, said on Wednesday that Russian forces had retaken positions captured by Ukraine during the counteroffensive, "probably after Ukrainian forces withdrew for the winter to more secure positions near Robotyny."
Russian troops have recently advanced from the southwest and east, advancing from Vervovoy, a nearby village that Ukrainian forces tried unsuccessfully to capture this summer, to expand the salient they created in Russian defenses, according to ISW data and publicly available battlefield maps. sources
So far, Russia's advance has been limited: Open-source maps of the battlefield show that its forces have barely retaken a few square miles of territory on Robotny's flanks. But Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, the head of Ukrainian forces in the south, admitted on Wednesday in an interview with the BBC that "the situation in our sector is extremely difficult."
Yevgeny Balytskyi, the Russian-appointed head of the part of Zaporizhzhia region that Russia annexed last year, said in an interview with Russian television this week that he hopes Russian forces will soon return Robotyn and enter the starting line of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
This would be a significant moral blow for Ukraine.
Robotine became one of the rare successes of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. His capture after weeks of grueling fighting – far longer than the few days Ukrainian military leadership had originally hoped for – underscored the enormous difficulties Kyiv faced in trying to break through deep, dense Russian defenses.
With Ukrainian forces exhausted from months of grueling fighting, Moscow is applying pressure across the front line to reduce Kyiv's ability to withdraw its units and replenish them for future offensives, said Jack Watling, a research fellow and ground operations specialist at the Royal Institute of Combined Arms Britain.
"The Russians will have an advantage over the next few months," Mr. Watling said in a telephone interview this week. However, he added that "they will not be able to resolve the conflict in the next few months" due to Moscow's expensive way of conducting hostilities, which involves accepting huge human and material losses for the sake of limited territorial gains.
