Ukraine seems ready to go on the offensive, at least as far as Kherson is concerned, having shown a notorious ability to disrupt Russian plans, denying him a victory that Moscow considered guaranteed five months ago. But, although limited in geographical terms, an offensive that covers a front of no less than 200 km is not only a declaration of will that seeks to instil victory morale in its own side and demoralize the enemy, but rather, in order not to remain a dead letter , you need to have real means that make it feasible to move from words to deeds.
So, to begin with, kyiv needs create a superiority in human means of at least three to one, as the lessons learned from so many wars demand- and up to five to one -if you enter into local combat-. Barely a month ago, the Ukrainian Defense Minister, Oleksi Reznikov, assured that in Ukraine, where 44 million people lived before the invasion, up to 700,000 soldiers from the Armed Forces were already mobilized, some 90,000 soldiers from the National Guard, around 60,000 border guards and 100,000 police officers. A not insignificant force, which has shown high combat ability and endurance to stop the Russian invasion, but deployed in a country of about 640,000 km2. A force obliged to attend, simultaneously, the eastern front in Donbas -about 1,000 km long and where Russia is exerting its main effort-, the north front -especially to defend kyiv and surroundings from possible attacks from Belarus- and the south front, with Odessa included – in which it is intended to launch the aforementioned offensive to recover Kherson. That means, with the addition of the millions of refugees in other countries, the casualties recorded since then and the attrition of the troops employed, that today Ukraine still does not have that numerical superiorityessential to make the launch of such an operation credible.
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On the other hand, as Volodymyr Zelensky himself has insistently made clear from the beginning, the attack cannot be unleashed either. If you don’t have material means sufficient to reiterate the necessary efforts to bring about the defeat or, at least, the withdrawal of the enemy. And although it is known that kyiv continues to receive more and better weapons from many Western capitals, a week ago the commanders fighting on the Kherson front recognized that “we are running out of ammunition and Russia knows it”. Without more tanks and armored personnel carriers and without ammunition and precision artillery, it is even more difficult to break through the Russian front – which has had plenty of time to reinforce its positions – and to make rapid progress, to prevent them from rebuilding a new line of defense.
Ukraine, in short, is practically at the limit of its capacity to enlist more soldiers, knowing that in no case will it have regular units from any Western army to join the fight. Her wager, therefore, inexorably involves immediately disposing of more stuff. Given that its industrial capacity to replace lost material, to build those necessary weapons systems and to manufacture the ammunition that its front-line units need is greatly reduced, the vault key of this announced offensive rests on the Western will to address the repeated requests from kyiv. And Russia knows it too.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.