The Ukrainian Counteroffensive Is Not an Action Movie
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The Ukrainian counteroffensive, under way since the spring, is slogging through miles of trenches and minefields. Progress will depend on the battlefield, not on Western impatience.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
The triumph of the January 6 committee Trump’s threat to democracy is now systemic. The queasy liberal schadenfreude of watching Trump wreck DeSantis Vladimir Putin and the parable of the “cornered rat”Dragging On, as It Must
Attacking an entrenched force, as the Ukrainians are doing now, is the stuff of military nightmares. The enemy knows you’re coming, they’ve prepared for your attacks, and their objective is to cede back as little ground as possible while making you pay in blood for every inch. Offensive operations, such as the initial Russian invasion into Ukraine, are different: They are predicated on shock, speed, and mobility, especially if they begin with at least some modicum of surprise.
The American military, with its focus on operational excellence, executes such offensives very well. In its wars over the past 30 years, the U.S. has had almost every edge over its battlefield enemies, including superior firepower, complete control of the skies, advanced technology, and a superbly trained force.
The Ukrainians have almost none of these advantages. Their weaponry, including tanks and air defenses, has been getting better, but not fast enough. They are outnumbered by an enemy that uses untrained troops dredged from prisons as bullet sponges. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians must carefully conserve their best-trained forces to protect them from being wasted in engagement with soldiers who are in effect walking dead men.
Worse, even to get to those doomed Russian forces, the Ukrainians have to spend time—and lives—clearing the so-called Surovikin Line, named for the general who designed Russia’s defensive position in Ukraine (and who is now apparently under some sort of detention—a Moscow official has said he is “resting”—because of his apparent involvement with the mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin). As The Bulwark senior editor Benjamin Parker pointed out on Monday, this is not really a line but “a series of zones, sometimes miles deep, of minefields, tank traps, trenches, booby traps, and other fortifications,” and the Ukrainians lack the kind of reconnaissance and firepower that Western militaries would normally use to overcome such obstacles.
Nonetheless, there are some hopeful signs. For one thing, the fact that the Ukrainians are on the offensive at all is something of a miracle. Americans, as my friend and fellow Russia-watcher Nick Gvosdev pointed out to me recently, tend to think of military conflicts as having the same narrative arc as action movies: The good guys take an initial ass-kicking at the beginning, go through a Rocky-like training-and-recovery montage, and then crush the bad guys. That’s not reality; as I warned earlier this summer, the dramatic blowing of a whistle and a charge from the trenches was never going to happen.
But Ukraine survives and is taking the fight to the enemy, both on the battlefield and in Russia’s capital city. The original Russian plan, more than a year and a half ago, was to erase Ukraine as a state in a matter of days. Instead, the Russians are complaining about repeated Ukrainian drone strikes in the heart of Moscow, while President Vladimir Putin’s forces, however slowly, are ceding back occupied territory.
These drone attacks have been small and ineffective—so small, in fact, that my first guess about their origin this past spring was that they were a Russian false-flag operation. But they have had an outsize psychological impact on Putin’s regime. Back in 2022, Putin’s implicit bargain with his citizens was that the war would be glorious, short, and kept far from Russia.
The latest drone in Moscow struck a skyscraper housing some government agencies. It produced no casualties but broke a lot of glass; apparently, it also broke the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, who compared the attack to 9/11. Zakharova knows better, as do I, because I was in Moscow just weeks after the actual 9/11. The atmosphere in the Russian capital back then was somber—and, to an American visitor, sympathetic. The Russians knew the magnitude of 9/11, and for Putin’s stooges to now invoke the attack shows both their cynicism and their humiliation. After all, the Ukrainians by this point were supposed to have been building schools named for Putin, not rattling the nerves of Kremlin flacks with late-night explosions.
Ukrainian forces have also recaptured the village of Staromaiorske as part of a move to the south that could imperil Russian supply lines. There are reports of accelerating attacks in the Zaporizhzhia region, where the Russians have dug in and mined the area around Europe’s largest nuclear plant. (The Russians, for their part, claim that the Ukrainians launched a “massive” attack toward Zaporizhzhia, but remember that it is in the Russian interest to inflate the size of every Ukrainian attack: If Russian defenses hold, they have repelled an onslaught, but if they fall, it was to a “massive” attack.)
Another potential sign of Russian desperation: The Poles have reported that roughly 100 men from Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, the mercenaries who have been effective fighters in Ukraine and who nearly marched to Moscow in June, might be approaching the Polish border from their new home in neighboring Belarus. (Poland has also accused Belarus of violating Polish airspace.)
Belarus’s president and Putin’s fellow dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, has been taunting the Poles, saying that Warsaw should thank him for keeping Wagner forces in check, but it’s hard to know exactly what Putin or Prigozhin think they’re doing by rattling this tiny saber at a NATO nation. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said on Monday that attacks by Wagner mercenaries would be viewed by the United States “as an attack by the Russian Government,” and if Putin thinks that trying to rattle the Poles will somehow weaken NATO support for Ukraine, then he still does not understand the nature of the disaster he’s created.
I am not overly worried about Wagner’s Potemkin pantomiming, nor do I think the Russians really believe they are living through a new 9/11. But I am concerned that Americans and others in the West do not understand the immensity of the task before the Ukrainians, who must recapture territory that has been turned into a hellscape of death traps. The United States and its allies should speed up aid at this crucial moment. As my colleague David Frum implored more than a year ago: “If there’s anything that Ukraine can use in any NATO warehouse from Vancouver to Vilnius, that’s a scandal. Empty every inventory.”
In The Guardian this morning, an unnamed Western intelligence official summarized both the hope and the danger in the current battle: “There is no reason why the Ukrainians cannot break through the Russian main defensive line,” the official said. “It’s not going to be easy, so we shouldn’t shy away from that.”
In the meantime, the summer of drones and trenches will drag on—as it must.
Related:
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A federal jury unanimously recommended the death penalty for Robert Bowers, the gunman responsible for the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Beijing was hit by its heaviest rainfall in 140 years, resulting in at least 21 deaths. Stocks in the U.S. dropped after Fitch Ratings downgraded its U.S. credit rating from the highest rating, AAA, to AA+ due to “a steady deterioration in standards of governance.”Dispatches
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Evening Read
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.The Most Misunderstood Concept in Psychology
By Olga Khazan
Recently, I asked a group of adult children of immigrants from the former Soviet Union about attempts to enforce boundaries with their parents. (It’s a group of which I am a member: class of ’89, Leningrad to Texas.) Rarely have I received so many responses from sources so quickly.
One day, Olga B.’s mom came over and replaced her silverware with silverware that she (the mom) thought was “better.” Anna Z. gave her parents a key to her house for emergencies only, but one day, she turned around in her backyard and saw her mom waving hello at her from her own bedroom window … Veronica M. told me her father believes that “boundaries are Stalinist.” Nevertheless, she compared boundary setting to the Dutch children’s tale about a boy who sticks his finger in a dam to prevent a flood: “It would be even worse if I didn’t try to protect my boundaries.”
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Plus: We’re going live! Starting on Friday, August 11, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, will be the new moderator of the live show Washington Week, rebranded as Washington Week With The Atlantic. Tune in each week at 8 p.m. EST.
P.S.
In yesterday’s Daily, I referred to a scene from the majestic Paul Newman movie The Verdict. I have a special place in my heart for The Verdict because I was working where some key scenes were filmed.
In early 1982, I was a college student but also a full-time legislative aide in the Massachusetts State House. The Verdict used the statehouse to double as the fictional St. Catherine Labouré Hospital. The director apparently wanted something with a rundown, Depression-era feel, much like the St. Eligius of the NBC drama St. Elsewhere, which began airing that same year. The statehouse, with its stone walls and tiled floors, was the opposite of a brightly lit and antiseptic modern hospital. (I loved the statehouse specifically for its seedy public-works grandeur.)
One morning, I got off the elevator and walked into a “hospital ward.” I thought we’d had some kind of disaster or a gas leak or something. I figured out that filming was under way, but I had work to do, and the sets were closed. I knew all of the back hallways and shortcuts; later that day I went barreling down a narrow (and rarely used) staircase and almost plowed right into … Paul Newman and some of the crew. I wish I could say that I said something clever or shook his hand, but they were busy, so I apologized and kept moving.
I love the movie for its Boston ambience, and for Newman’s astonishing performance. (He was robbed for Best Actor at the Academy Awards; Ben Kingsley won the Oscar for Gandhi that year.) And I especially love it because anyone who’s gone through a dark period in their lives and somehow kept their faith can identify with Newman’s portrait of a lost man returning to himself—but that’s a story for another day.
— Tom
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
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