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Russia’s progress around the southern village of Robotyne is a sobering development for Ukraine amid dwindling aid from the Western military.
By Constant Méheut
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
Russia has reclaimed hard-won land from Ukrainian troops at the height of its counteroffensive in the south, advancing around the southern village of Robotyne.
The scenario has reinforced the ultimate truth of the war: With their counteroffensive stalled, Ukrainian troops are now in retreat in many places. In addition to Robotyne in the south, they are also suffering in the east, all having yet withdrawn from the town of Marinka, officials said this week.
Deepening their challenges, Kyiv is increasingly worried that its military will not have the resources to keep up the fight. Washington announced on Wednesday that it was releasing the last remaining Congress-approved package of military aid available to Kyiv.
“Now, we are losing some fields, but if the U.S. aid is delayed, we will begin to lose towns,” Yehor Chernev, the 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 beginning to lose territory that was hard won this summer.”
For weeks, the reluctance of Republican lawmakers in Congress to help Ukraine as the war drags on for another year has thwarted Washington’s plans to send more military aid to Kyiv. Last week, Congress refused to pass a $50 billion security package for Ukraine. delay negotiations until next year.
Although some military aid could still flow from a separate program overseen by the Pentagon, the Biden administration is now tapping into the last remaining funds already approved by Congress. A $250 million package announced on Wednesday — which includes air defense equipment, artillery shells and over 15 million rounds of small arms ammunition — is likely the final tranche of available funding, according to American officials.
“When that is done,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last week, “we will no longer have a resupply authority at our disposal. “
Ukraine’s military says its troops are facing a shortage of gadgets and ammunition. Some infantrymen and commanders said this shortfall had led them to scale back some operations and adopt a defensive strategy.
The scenario around the village of Robotyne, in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia, may be a clever example of this.
Ukrainian brigades trained and supplied from the West retook 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 have now retaken positions captured across Ukraine in the counteroffensive. “likely after Ukrainian forces retreated to more defensible positions near Robotyne over the winter. “
Russian troops have recently approached from the southwest and east from Verbove, a nearby village that Ukrainian troops tried unsuccessfully to capture this summer to extend the advance they had created in Russian defenses, according to the I. S. W. and open-source battlefield maps.
Russia’s advances have been limited so far: The open-source battlefield maps show that its forces have barely recaptured a few square miles of territory on the flanks of Robotyne. But Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, the head of Ukraine’s forces in the south, acknowledged to the BBC on Wednesday that “the situation in our sector is extremely difficult.”
Evgeny Balitsky, the Russian-appointed head of the part of the Zaporizhzhia region that Russia claimed to have annexed last year, told Russian television this week that he hoped Russian troops would soon retake Robotyne and reach the starting line of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
This would be a serious blow to Ukraine’s morale.
Robotyne was one of the few successes of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Its capture after weeks of grueling fighting — far longer than the few days Ukrainian military leaders thought it would take — underscored the immense and demanding situations Kyiv faced in breaking through Russia’s deep, deep borders. dense defenses.
As Ukrainian troops are exhausted after months of grueling fighting, Moscow is putting pressure along the front line on Kyiv’s ability to withdraw its equipment and fill it for long-term offensives, said Jack Watling, a researcher and ground warfare specialist at the Royal United Institute. of Services in Great Britain.
“The Russians are going to have the upper hand in the coming months,” Watling said in a telephone interview this week. However, he added that they “will not be able to confront each other in the coming months” because of Moscow’s costly way of fighting, which consists of accepting huge human and material losses in exchange for limited territorial gains.
Watling said that if Ukraine’s allies continued to send more weapons, the dynamics on the battlefield could change.
Mr. Chernev, the Ukrainian lawmaker, said, “Everything will depend on how quickly Congress votes on the aid package for Ukraine.”
Constant Méheut has been France for the Paris bureau of the Times since 2020. Learn more about Constant Méheut
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