Why September is the crucial month for momentum in Ukraine

Winter is coming and with it a change in the dynamics of the war — for the Russians, the Ukrainians and, not least, the western countries backing Kyiv. Ukraine began its long-expected counter-offensive last week and it has left the Kremlin clinging on for colder weather that will slow down the attackers. Russia is on the defensive to make sure it does not lose the only significant city it holds — Kherson, in the south — and is not entirely sure it can hold onto all the territory it has recently taken in the Donbas either. The next month promises to be a pivotal time in the conflict.

Isolating the enemy

Across the 1,500-mile (2,400km) front, the Russians are digging in. They move around far more cautiously than a couple of months ago. The Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, offered the risible excuse that the offensive in the Donbas was being “paused” to minimise civilian casualties. But under Ukrainian pressure, Russian troops and equipment have already been transferred from the Donbas to strengthen the 49th Combined Arms Army (CAA) in Kherson. Russian forces there attempted some local counter-offensives, but made no impression. Now they face a concerted, multifront attack that has been building for weeks.

In July, Ukrainian forces crossed the Inhulets river to the north and east of Kherson city on a broad 50-mile front, in support of the 50-mile front extending from Mykolaiv directly towards the west and south of Kherson.

Acting like the Nato armies they model themselves on, and using western long-range artillery and rocket systems, Ukrainian forces attacked the ammunition stores, forward headquarters and reinforcement routes between Crimea and the Kherson oblast. Then, on Monday, they opened the offensive.

If it succeeds, it may go down in history as the Battle of the Bridges. The Antonovsky Bridge, carrying the critical M14 highway linking Kherson to the eastern bank of the Dnipro, has been impassable for military traffic for almost two weeks, as has the P47 highway bridge further upriver at Daryivka. Another P47 highway bridge further northeast that serves the Nova Kakhovka dam complex is also out of action. Russian forces are using ferries to cross the 1,000-yard Dnipro at Kherson. Last Sunday they completed a long pontoon bridge right next to the Antonovsky Bridge, which — to no one’s surprise — was immediately attacked.

About 20,000 Russian troops are based west of the Dnipro and their line of retreat eastwards towards Crimea is becoming ever more difficult. The first days of the offensive suggest the Ukrainians are going for broke in Kherson — attacking in a wide arc stretching from southwest of the city to points far to the north and east of Nova Kakhovka. They will have a lot of ground to cover, but the Ukrainians probably want to threaten Russian forces west of the Dnipro with encirclement. That would be likely to push the enemy to withdraw from Kherson and Nova Kakhovka — allowing Kyiv to grab them back and avoid the nightmare prospect of having to fight their way into their own cities.

Russians at full stretch

Russia’s 49th CAA, now augmented by units of the 35th CAA from the eastern military district, probably gives them a maximum of 24,000 troops to defend the area, though with good numbers of armoured vehicles. There is a new, all-volunteer 3rd Combined Army corps in pre-deployment training at Mulino in Russia, well-equipped with Russia’s best T-80 and T-90 tanks. But with the bridges down it is difficult to see how this new corps could help the Russians west of the Dnipro. More likely, it will be held back for a new Russian offensive elsewhere, sometime later.

So the Russians have to hang on to Kherson, wait for the winter and then get their stalled Donbas offensive moving again. During August, Russia gained precisely 0.01 per cent more Ukrainian territory after taking Severodonetsk in June. It holds about two thirds of the Donbas but does not get the remaining third unless it takes Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. The Ukrainians are waiting in their trenches to take advantage of Russia’s thinned-out forces, and hope to grab some of their Donbas territory back.

The Russians know they are in a strategic bind and need a break to regroup. In Ukraine, they are operating across 20 per cent of the second-biggest country in Europe — only Russia is larger. Their ground forces are significantly short of troops and being fought near to a standstill everywhere.

Russia’s regular peacetime army is 280,000 strong — excluding internal troops and other elements. About 180,000 soldiers were committed to the invasion and, by British official estimates, about 20,000 have been killed in action. That implies a total casualty number — including seriously wounded — of up to 80,000, even excluding militias and Wagner Group mercenaries who fight for Russia. Ukraine officially admits to 9,000 battle deaths. This may be an underestimate, but it suggests that Kyiv’s total casualties are running at about half the Russian army’s level — higher than it was, reflecting how bitter the Donbas has been for Ukraine. It is tough for both sides, and will get a lot tougher in Kherson. But the Ukrainians claim to be training an army of 700,000 — a plausible figure — while the Kremlin scrapes around its military districts and mercenary friends in Syria and Africa to find enough boots to put on the ground.

Meanwhile, visually confirmed Russian losses now exceed 5,400 items of significant equipment, including 1,000 main battle tanks and over 1,500 armoured and infantry fighting vehicles. Comparable Ukrainian losses are about a quarter of that.

Visually verified losses are necessarily an underestimate. Western officials assume the true figures could be half as many again. Russia’s logistics remain severely stressed by their own poor organisation and Ukrainian long-range strikes. Such strikes will not, in themselves, defeat Russian forces. But they certainly contain them and make manoeuvre difficult or impossible for Russian commanders.

The biggest strategic bind of all is that Vladimir Putin is determined to pursue this operation indefinitely. But declaring a formal mobilisation — a “war” — might be politically terminal. He needs time for the current “crypto-mobilisation” to have an effect. Putin’s decree authorising an increase of 137,000 in armed forces numbers will take time to make a difference, either through a new round of conscription or another recruitment drive. Young men in Nizhny Novgorod were being offered a one-off bonus payment and more than twice the average monthly salary to join up for as little as six months. In St Petersburg and Moscow they are about to be offered four times the average monthly salary.

In July, the Kremlin ordered Russian companies to divert high-tech components and production into armaments. As a country with a vigorous retail sector, there are many opportunities to divert the microchips in consumer durables into war production. But the state already accounts for more than 40 per cent of the national economy. Getting the more limited commercial sector to divert towards new armaments will take time, even without the attendant corruption.

If Putin wants a big second offensive to get the operation back on track, he needs the winter to get ready for it.

Courting the west

The Ukrainians have a keen eye on winter too. It is the deadline for success in Kherson. Kyiv has made no secret of its intentions. The importance of a victory is to demonstrate to the West that Ukrainian forces are not just fighting gallantly and losing the war slowly. It would show, instead, that with western support they can liberate their own territory. It would provide real hope that Putin’s imperialist adventure does not somehow have to be appeased. It would offer the prospect that Russian aggression can be made to fail and the aggressor pay a price.

To win in Kherson before winter is a military deadline for Ukraine precisely because it is a political deadline in Kyiv’s relations with the West. Without increasing western military support, Ukraine cannot progress from “losing slowly everywhere” to “winning somewhere”. And without western financial support approaching $9 billion a month, the Ukrainian government simply cannot continue to operate while also fighting its war for survival. The United States provides more than 70 per cent of all its military aid, but European unity is critical to the maintenance of sanctions and to disinvesting in the Russian economy. The Europeans need to keep believing in Volodymyr Zelensky’s government.

But Europe faces a bleak winter: energy at stratospheric prices, industrial outages cutting production, economic recession, and probably social and industrial unrest as a result. Putin must be hoping that the energy stress Russia can put on Europe, particularly on Germany and Italy, and the concessions Russia can make to friends and waverers such as Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, will split Europe and puncture the sanctions regime in several places.

This winter is his best shot. Because Europe will buy ever-diminishing amounts of Russian energy from next year, and once this year’s panic-buying is over and global recession starts to bite, stratospheric energy prices are unlikely to recur. US and European leaders can take comfort from the knowledge that if they can get through this winter, the greater economic pressure will likely be on Putin from next year. The bad news is that Putin is ramping Russia up for next year and beyond.

A fault line for generations

So western leaders are facing a generational struggle over Europe’s security. Putin casts around for justification — the invasion is about Nazis in Ukraine, Nato enlargement, gay subversion of Russian culture, righting the wrongs of the Cold War’s end — anything but the truth. It is not just Putin but the Russian establishment, the Kremlin, the Duma, much of the policy community and large sections of popular opinion that appear now to believe in Russia’s historic right to restore its European empire.

Ukraine has become the fault line in a struggle that will probably involve an on-off conflict between Moscow and Kyiv for many years. This is already the second Russia-Ukrainian war since 2014. There will probably be a shaky ceasefire at some point before there is a third, and so on.

For the West, the stakes are huge. It seems ironic that the old imperial powers of Europe should now be fighting against a new imperialism on behalf of modern values. But so they are. That may be important to remember in the bleak winter to come.