Ukrainian troops are probing Russian defenses as spring gives way to a second summer of fighting, and Kyiv’s forces are facing an enemy that has made mistakes and suffered setbacks in the 15-month-old war. But analysts say Moscow also has learned from those blunders and improved its weapons and skills.
Russia has built heavily fortified defenses along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, honed its electronic weapons to reduce Ukraine’s edge in combat drones, and turned heavy bombs from its massive Cold-War-era arsenal into precision-guided gliding munitions capable of striking targets without putting its warplanes at risk.
The changing Russian tactics along with increased troop numbers and improved weaponry could make it challenging for Ukraine to score any kind of quick decisive victory, threatening to turn it into a long battle of attrition.
U.S. Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Mark Milley said in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday that while Ukraine’s military is well-prepared, as time goes on, “this will be a back-and-forth fight for a considerable length of time.”
Most attention last week focused on catastrophic flooding in southern Ukraine caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam that both sides blame on each other.
At the same time, however, Ukrainian troops have unleashed a series of attacks in several parts of the front that so far have made only marginal gains against multilayered Russian defenses.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that counteroffensive and defensive actions are underway against Russian forces, asserting that his commanders are in a “positive” mindset about its success. Ukrainian authorities have stopped short of announcing the start of a full-blown counteroffensive.
A day earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that it had begun, but that Ukraine failed to make any headway and suffered “significant” losses.
Sir Richard Barrons, a retired general who led the U.K. Joint Forces Command, said the Russian military has built “textbook” defensive lines and adjusted its tactics following its hasty retreat from wide swaths of the Kharkiv and Kherson regions last fall under the brunt of a swift Ukrainian campaign.
He pointed at the improved Russian ability to both counter and use drones and also noted that Moscow has learned to keep key assets like command headquarters and ammunition dumps out of artillery range.
“And they have sharpened up how they can fire at Ukrainian artillery and tanks when they spot them,” he told AP. “So if you add all that together, everybody knows this will be a harder fight than for Kherson or Kharkiv in the autumn of last year.
“People are still using those two successes, and they were successes, as benchmarks, which I think is unfair, unreasonable in the circumstances,” he said.
Russia has fielded more troops to protect the long front line, even though many of them could be poorly trained, he said.
At the start of the war, Russian military convoys stretched for miles to become easy prey for Ukrainian artillery and drones during a failed attempt to capture Kyiv, in what was seen as a major blunder.
Ukrainian missiles then sank the Russian cruiser Moskva, the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, in a major blow to Moscow’s pride; Kyiv’s rockets pummeled Russian ammunition depots and command headquarters; and Kremlin forces hastily pulled back from large areas in the east and the south in the fall.
