Russia's recent progress around the southern village of Robotyne is sobering for Ukraine amid cuts in Western military aid.
Russia has regained territory that Ukrainian forces had struggled to regain at the height of their summer counteroffensive in the south, making progress near the southern village of Robotyne.
The situation has exacerbated the new realities of war: As a counteroffensive stalls, Ukrainian forces have retreated in many areas of the front. In addition to Robotyne in the south, they are also fighting in the east, having almost retreated from the town of Maryinka, officials said this week.
As its problems deepen, Kyiv is increasingly concerned that its military will not have the resources to continue the fight. On Wednesday, Washington announced it was releasing the last remaining military aid package approved by Congress to Kyiv.
“We are losing some fields now, but if American aid is delayed, we will start losing cities,” Yegor Chernev, deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s committee on national security, defense and intelligence, said in an interview last week. “Without American ammunition, we are starting to lose territories that were hard-won this summer.”.
The reluctance of Republican lawmakers in Congress to continue providing aid to Ukraine as the war drags on into the new year has been undermining Washington's plans for more military aid to Kyiv for weeks. Last week, Congress again refused to approve a $50 billion security aid package for Ukraine, delaying negotiations until next year.
While some military aid may still be available under a separate program overseen by the Pentagon, the Biden administration is now using the last of the funds already approved by Congress. The $250 million aid package announced Wednesday, which includes air defenses, artillery shells and more than 15 million rounds of small arms ammunition, is likely the last tranche of available funding, U.S. officials said.
“When that is 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 shortages have forced them to scale back some operations and shift to a defensive strategy.
The situation around the village of Robotyne, in the south of Zaporizhia region, can be an example.
Ukrainian brigades trained and equipped in the West recaptured the village in August after weeks of fighting. But the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said Wednesday that Russian forces had retaken positions captured by Ukraine in a counteroffensive, “likely after Ukrainian forces withdrew for the winter to more secure positions near Robotyne.”.
Russian forces have recently advanced from the southwest and east, advancing from Verbovoye, a nearby village that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully tried to capture this summer, to expand the salient they have created in the Russian defenses, according to ISW data and open-source battlefield maps.
So far, Russia's advance has been limited: Open-source battlefield maps show its forces have barely regained a few square miles of territory on the flanks of Robotyne. But Oleksandr Tarnavsky, the commander of Ukrainian forces in the south, admitted to the BBC on Wednesday that "the situation in our sector is extremely difficult.".
Yevhen Balytsky, 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 troops will soon retake Robotyne and reach the starting line of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
This would be a significant moral blow for Ukraine.
Robotyne was one of the rare successes of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Its capture after weeks of grueling fighting – far longer than the few days that the Ukrainian military leadership had initially expected – highlighted the enormous difficulties Kyiv faced in trying to break through the deep, dense Russian defenses.
With Ukrainian forces exhausted by months of grueling fighting, Moscow is applying pressure along the entire front line to reduce Kyiv's ability to withdraw its units and replenish them for future offensives, said Jack Watling, a research fellow and land operations expert at the Royal United Forces Institute in the United Kingdom.
“The Russians will have the upper hand for the next few months,” Mr. Watling said in a telephone interview this week. But he added that “they will not be able to resolve the conflict in the next few months” because of Moscow’s costly way of waging war, which involves accepting huge human and material losses for limited territorial gains.
