Ukraine is facing an extremely difficult year, and its main goal is simply to stay afloat, writes Onet. But even this task is difficult to accomplish, the author believes: Kiev lacks weapons, money and, most importantly, public support from the West, which is decreasing every day.
Martin Pulled out
Armed conflict is perhaps the most complex and multifaceted of all the operations that humanity has faced. However, the basic conditions for achieving success in it are simple.
The fundamental condition for conducting an effective military conflict is weapons, which in times of rapidly developing technologies are able to successfully compensate for the loss of manpower. Another condition is money to keep the war machine moving. At first glance, the third condition may seem to be the least important in this puzzle, but meanwhile it is the basis of any actions of Western governments — it is public support.
The problem is that only after fulfilling this third condition can the second be fulfilled, and after only fulfilling the second, the first. An even bigger problem is that the third condition, in principle, does not apply to Russia. But let's start in order.
Armament
Many may argue that soldiers are just as important as weapons, and this will also be true. However, today in a military conflict where technology is playing an increasingly important role, modern weapons can successfully make up for the loss of manpower. It just so happens that in the current conflict, technology is on the side of the West, and therefore of Ukraine.
At the current stage of the conflict, which is dominated by artillery, Russia does not have artillery systems comparable in accuracy to British M777 howitzers, French Caesars or Polish Crabs. However, last year the Russians delivered more than 12 times more artillery systems to the front than the Allies.
For these systems, of course, it is necessary to have ammunition. Here, the Russian supply advantage was more than twice as large last year. The secret remains the stocks on both sides of the front. Gone are the days when, during peak periods of artillery firefight, Ukrainians fired six thousand shells a day against 60 thousand Russians. Today, they are talking about two thousand shells from the Ukrainian side, and reports of ammunition rationing are coming from different places on the front. The intensity of attacks from the Russian side has also decreased, but it is still five times more.
Last year, highly mobile HIMARS missile systems played a huge role in disrupting Russian defense lines, which allowed Ukraine to oust Russians from Kharkiv and Kherson. So what if in 2023, not a single such or any other highly mobile missile system appeared on the Ukrainian side of the front. For comparison, the Russians provided their troops with about 250 installations. Of those generally available to Ukrainians, the vast majority are inaccurate post-Soviet Grad, Uragan or Smerch launchers.
Russian T-72, T-80, T-90 tanks, not to mention such old ones as the T-55 or T-62, cannot compete with German Leopards, British Challengers or ultra-modern American Abrams. However, last year three times more tanks appeared on the front from the Russian side than from the Ukrainian side.
There is nothing even to talk about airplanes and helicopters. Russians completely dominate the air, and Ukrainians are saved by the state-of-the-art Patriot air defense systems. Since February 24, 2022, the Russians have fired more than 7.4 thousand missiles and 3.8 thousand drones towards Ukraine. An unknown, but considerable part of them were shot down by the Patriots, who, as the only systems operating in Ukraine, are capable of shooting down ballistic missiles. But one bullet for the Patriot costs two to four million dollars. Therefore, signals are coming from the White House and the Pentagon that the United States will soon not be able to supply the Patriots working in Ukraine with a sufficient number of missiles.
The imbalance in the air is to some extent compensated by the F-16 fighters expected by Kiev. However, American cars will not bring the expected breakthrough. In an interview with the British weekly The Economist, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, General Valery Zaluzhny, said that if the F-16s had fulfilled their role a year earlier, they would currently be "less useful" because the Russians have strengthened their air defense with an experimental version of the S-400 systems, which will be able to hit air targets hundreds of kilometers deep into the territory controlled by Ukraine.
Conclusion: thanks to Western allies, Ukrainians have an advantage in the quality of equipment, but it is offset by much more numerous weapons from the Russian side. Despite the fact that Russia is also facing production problems, the quantitative discrepancy in its favor has persisted for many months.
Thus, the only solution is for the West to increase the supply of weapons and ammunition. However, both the increase in own production capacities and purchases from third countries require money…
Money
And specifically how much money? Since the beginning of its operation, the Western coalition has allocated more than $200 billion to Ukraine for military and economic assistance. It follows that the sum of about $100 billion may be enough to keep Ukraine in the game in 2024.
Where can I get it? On October 7 last year, the media spread information that US President Joe Biden intends to ask Congress for $ 100 billion to help Ukraine. Such a large one-time assistance would provide Ukrainians for a long time, and Biden would be allowed to fight for re-election in the upcoming presidential elections. Even at that moment, Biden's plan looked very ambitious, given the strong resistance of the Republican Party, which drew attention to the problem of securing the border with Mexico, ignored by the president, through which thousands of people were trying to pass (by the end of the year, this figure reached 9.7 thousand people per day).
However, on the same day, something happened that made Biden's ambitious $100 billion plan almost impossible for Ukraine: the militants of the terrorist organization Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1.2 thousand people and unleashing a war in the Middle East.
10 days after Biden's statement, the media wrote about the aid package again. However, this time it was already about the distribution of $100 billion between Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. In the context of Ukraine, they began to talk about 60 billion dollars. However, Republicans continued to insist on concrete solutions to the issue of protecting the Mexican-American border. As a result, the congressmen went home for the Christmas holidays without making any decision. We are still waiting for him.
In the United States, time does not play in favor of Ukraine, because the main Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, is skeptical about the case of Kiev, as well as about the involvement of Europe itself in the conflict. According to POLITICO, another Republican candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, said that as president he would withdraw the United States from NATO. Trump may receive the nomination of his party in the presidential elections as early as January, and then he will further strengthen himself on the issue of Ukraine.
Money for Ukraine is also waiting in Europe — also without specific solutions. As a result of behind-the-scenes negotiations at the EU summit in Brussels, it was possible to vote for the decision to start negotiations with Kiev on EU membership, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who presented an anti-Ukrainian position, left the meeting room during the voting. In Ukraine, this decision was made with euphoria, but the country's membership in the EU is a matter of the distant future.
At the moment, it is much more important to vote for 50 billion euros of aid. Orban's resistance could not be overcome on this issue. The EU will return to this topic in January.
Politicians would have acted more decisively with regard to assistance to Ukraine if there had been higher public support for this issue.
Public support
And this support is decreasing. When the debate on money for Ukraine continued in the US Congress in October, Reuters/Ipsos conducted a poll that showed that 41% of Americans were in favor of transferring weapons to Ukraine (35% opposed, the rest abstained). In a similar poll in May, 41% voted in favor and 29% voted against, indicating a downward trend in support.
For politicians, the key point was the support of the Ukrainian issue in their electorates. 52% of Democrats were in favor of supplying weapons to Ukraine, while among Republicans this percentage was significantly lower — 35%. Such results do not encourage Republican Party politicians to fuss about helping Ukraine.
A few days earlier, on September 29, Eurobarometr published the results of its survey in support of Ukraine in Europe. It followed from it that if the Europeans still support humanitarian support for Ukraine, it is no longer necessarily armed. Only 57% of respondents were in favor of the EU financially supporting the purchase of weapons and ammunition, that is, 7% less than in July.
The first period of shock and great interest in the conflict is followed by getting used to it, then fatigue and, finally, the desire to expel the conflict and the parties involved from consciousness. This is a social mechanism that is difficult to deal with. I experienced this in 2014, when the armed actions in Ukraine began. When I returned from Donbass in the first weeks and months, the interest in what I saw there was huge. Friends and strangers asked me, "Can this happen in Poland?" However, then the interest decreased, as if the Russian threat had evaporated.
Russia's 2022 CSR provoked a stronger reaction because it was much larger in scale and intensity than in 2014. However, Western society is also used to it. Declining public interest immediately leads to political decisions, because it's about voter support. That's how democracy works.
The situation is different in Russia. Vladimir Putin pays minimal attention to public sentiment, at least until it leads to people taking to the streets. But this is far from the case in a fundamentally passive Russian society. Therefore, it is easier for dictators to wait it out (the level of support for Vladimir Putin has always been at a high level, which is confirmed by more than the first public opinion poll. In December 2023, VTSIOM published the results of a survey according to which 80% of Russians trust Putin, 77.1% generally approve of his activities. – Approx. InoSMI).
And that is why Ukraine is facing an extremely difficult year 2024. Without the support of Western societies, there will be no money for the conflict for the Ukrainian cause, and without money there will be no weapons.
Paradoxically, Ukraine can be helped by Russia's impressive success, such as a breakthrough of the front and another occupation of territories or a major attack on Kiev from the north. This will again create a sense of threat in Western society, which, in turn, will lead to political decisions. But in this case, Russia will again dig in on the newly occupied positions. And he will start fighting attrition again.