The Daily - Understanding Ukraine’s Counteroffensive

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

For months, much of the world has been watching and waiting as Ukraine prepares for a major counteroffensive in its war with Russia. That battle is now underway, and it’s not what was expected.Andrew E. Kramer, the Kyiv bureau chief for The New York Times, reports from the front line.Guest: Andrew E. Kramer, the Kyiv bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Military analysts said it would take weeks or months to gauge the success of the attacks Ukraine mounted last week across a broad stretch of the front line.As Ukraine pushes to recapture territory, Russia has moved ahead with elections in occupied areas.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Katrin Benhold, in for Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. For months, much of the world has been watching and waiting as Ukraine prepares for a major counteroffensive in its war with Russia. That battle is now underway. And it's not what we expected. Today, my colleague Andrew Kramer reports from the front line. It's Friday, June 23rd.

Andrew, you're 20 miles from very intense fighting after visiting the front line yourself last week. Thank you so much for making time for us. Thank you for having me on. So there's been a lot of hype around this counter-offensive. When we last talked about it on the show, very little was actually known about it or the timing of it. But in the last couple of weeks, that has began to change. Can you walk us up to this moment where we're just starting to understand what we actually mean when we say counter-offensive?

Well, the war in Ukraine had settled into a stalemate since last fall. The armies were lined up against one another along about 600 miles of trench fortifications in southeastern Ukraine. And it was very intense and very violent fighting, but very little ground changed hands. The war had become a quagmire. So there was a lot of pressure on the Ukrainian government to show that the policies of arming and assisting Ukraine were going to yield results. So as this anticipation and hype arose about a counteroffensive, about a shift in the battlefield, this had been building for months through the winter and into the spring. But there was very little information about what

would actually happen. What were they actually saying, officially, publicly, the Ukrainians, about this coming counteroffensive? Well, interestingly, they were saying almost nothing. Just before the counteroffensive began, the government released a video that had the sounds of crickets in the background and soldiers who were holding their fingers to their lips and shushing, asking for silence. And the video had a headline that said, plans love silence. Right. It's a very quiet ad, almost too quiet to hear on a podcast. And I guess that's the whole point, to signal to the world this counteroffensive is shrouded in secrecy. That's right. It began with such secrecy that portions of the front line were closed to journalists.

The government was pleading with reporters, with society at large, not to reveal secrets about where the military would gather forces, where the first blows would land on the Russian line. blows would land on the Russian line. And in fact, when it began three weeks ago, information about this was so carefully guarded that the first we heard about it was from Russian military bloggers who were saying that the Ukrainian counteroffensive had begun. Only several days later, the Ukrainian government acknowledged that the initial attacks had in fact commenced and that the Ukrainian army was on the move in several locations in southern Ukraine. that the Ukrainian army was on the move in several locations in southern Ukraine. So at that point, did you get a sense of what the strategy was here, what the Ukrainian government's plan actually was?

It started to come into focus when we look at a map of the south of Ukraine and we see where the military was attacking. They were hitting at areas of the front line that face south toward the Sea of Azov. The Ukrainian strategy in the counteroffensive is to strike south and drive a wedge through Russian-occupied territory, dividing the Russian zone into two halves and cutting rail and road lines that connect Russia with the Crimean Peninsula. that connect Russia with the Crimean Peninsula. The idea of this strategy is a theory of victory that would cut logistical supplies to the Crimean Peninsula and also to everything west of where they drive this wedge through the Russian territory, which would probably force a retreat of Russian forces to the west of the counteroffensive. It's a theory of a step toward victory

that involves crossing about 60 miles of very flat terrain from where the front line had been three weeks ago to the Sea of Azov. So it's kind of like a version of divide and conquer as far as the Russian occupied territory is concerned. But what do the Ukrainians actually have to face to complete this strategy? What essentially lies in front of them? Well, what lies in front of them are farm fields as far as the eye can see.

Very flat, open terrain, militarily extremely difficult to cross, almost impossible to find cover for armored vehicles or for troops in the open. And the most difficult part is the first part. The Russians have had months to prepare a very dense defensive line, which is about 10 miles deep. And this is minefields, concrete barriers for tanks, ditches that would trap armored vehicles, bunkers and trench lines for infantry. And this is really a kill zone the Russians have set up for the Ukrainian army that is really intended to inflict as much damage on the Ukrainian army as possible. So the first goal is to breach this 10-mile strip of Russian defenses, this kill zone.

What's the tactical plan to breach that? Well, in each location, it's a little bit different. And one commander I spoke with compared this to a game of chess, where out on these open fields, there's sort of a checkerboard, tree lines and fields. And both sides can see almost everything that the enemy is doing with their drones, with satellites, with surveillance by soldiers on the ground. So the strategy is to find areas that might be a little bit weaker than elsewhere. In one location, for example, the Ukrainians attacked along a small meandering river, the Mokry Yaly River, where there are six or seven villages all in a line.

And by hopping from village to village, the Ukrainians could find cover in abandoned houses and move their equipment and their infantry forward into this area. So it's like they're trying to push through this Russian defense line. It's almost like they're pushing against a wall, trying with their hands in different places, and identifying the weakest spot. Exactly. That's what's happening now. They're probing, they're looking for a weakness in the Russian defensive line. And right now they're doing this with only a small portion of the soldiers who have been specifically trained and equipped for the counteroffensive. Only three of 12 brigades that will eventually take part in this military action are now probing and fighting along the front line.

And presumably when a weak spot is found, those who are in reserve will come rushing forward in a major battle to break through the Russian defenses and then flow into southern Ukraine and advance toward the sea. And it looks like it will be a very difficult and grueling battle once all 40,000 Ukrainian soldiers are engaged in the fight. At that point, it could be the largest land battle in Europe since World War II. Wow. So how is that pushing and probing on that Russian wall going? It's going very slowly. Even President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged that it's going slower than desired. In some areas now, they've moved about four miles into the zone, and that's where the fighting is taking place now. It's been a very difficult fight. It's lethally dangerous. One of the biggest challenges in this area are minefields. There have been many

Ukrainian soldiers who've stepped on mines. According to medics, there are casualties coming out from these minefields and also Western equipment that's blowing up on the minefields. It strikes me that this feels almost reminiscent of, you know, past European wars. I mean, we've heard so much about this advanced Western weaponry that the Ukrainians have asked for and received, but this sounds almost like a 20th century land war. Well, it certainly looks that way when you're out along the front line. And one of the reasons is that neither side has air superiority.

So the Russians can fly right up to the front line and the Ukrainians can as well, but neither side can really use fighter aircraft or helicopters to fly over the minefields, over the trenches and attack the enemy. So in this sense, it's definitely a fallback to mid-20th century land warfare in Europe. So this sounds like it's a real slog. It's going very slowly.

And Andrew, you've been spending time on this front line with some of the soldiers. What's your sense of what morale is like at this point? It was my sense that some of these soldiers, at least, or many of them, were quite motivated, and not least because soldiers who are fighting in this offensive are internally displaced people who've been pushed out of their home villages and towns in southern Ukraine and are now fighting to liberate them. I met with some soldiers at a picnic table a few miles back from the front line out in a field where they were resting and talked about how the fight was going and what their motivations were. And this is what I was told, that they were very intent on reclaiming this land.

And the military, though it had initially been very secretive about its plans, about two weeks into the fighting, there was a shift and they started to open up access to the military, though it had initially been very secretive about its plans, about two weeks into the fighting, there was a shift and they started to open up access, and I was able to go into one of these liberated villages and see what it actually looked like firsthand. Andrew, take us to that Ukrainian village you visited that had just been liberated, and tell us about that trip. It began on the Ukrainian side of the former front line. The photographer, David Gutenfelder, and I got in an American armored vehicle, an MRAP, a very large, bulky truck with lots of armor. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes to drive from the front line into one of these liberated villages, the village of Akadatne.

You zigzag across swampy fields around a blown-up bridge. The vehicle at times accelerates. It's a little bit hard to see what's going on outside the windows. You just see some destroyed houses going by. You just see some destroyed houses going by. And these vehicles, these MRAPs, which the Ukrainians used to drive in and out of some of the liberated areas, are very large and easy targets. So when we arrived, the back door opened and we had to immediately run out and run away from the vehicle and into the village.

So suddenly you're in the middle of a fight. And after you emerge from that vehicle and get to safety, what do you see? What are your first impressions of that town? Well, it was overgrown. I can see that many of the fruit trees in the yards had limbs blown off from shelling. And every house that we passed had some sort of damage. Either it was burned or the roof had been blown to pieces from artillery. So it was an abandoned place, very eerie.

Either quiet or with the sounds of explosions. It wasn't what you would expect of perhaps a liberated territory where people would be greeting the soldiers or there would be some happy moments for the Ukrainian forces that had entered this area. It was very, very, very tense and very dangerous. So it was sort of liberated in name, but ultimately the atmosphere was different. It was ultimately a destroyed village, a village in rubble. That's right. It was completely destroyed and abandoned.

Where we were in Blokhodatne, on the southwestern side of the village, there was an open field and then some reedy swamps and the river. That was essentially the new front line, was some several hundred yards in that direction on the edge of town. Some of the detritus of Russian positions were seen. You could see trenches. The Ukrainians had captured some machine guns, trophy weapons from the Russian forces that had been just pushed out of that village recently. You would see garbage the Russians had left behind and some of their personal belongings, such as wrappings for Russian military rations. I found a pornographic book

called The Machine of Love, left by a Russian soldier. And there was graffiti scrawled into the walls of the houses. I saw one was a Russian Orthodox prayer. There were also nicknames of soldiers and dates and the numbers of their units when they had been there. And it's an interesting artifact, a little bit of the spirit of the Russian troops that had recently left, lingered in this graffiti. We've seen this in many areas that have been liberated by the Ukrainians. Often it's very angry, it's taunting the Ukrainians, it's threats against them. But there are also sometimes apologetic notes. Some Russian soldiers have written on walls, I'm sorry, or I don't understand what I'm doing here. That's wild. It kind of reminds me of something that the Russians did when they marched into

Berlin and liberated Berlin at the end of World War II. You can still see the graffiti of these Russian soldiers at the time in the German parliament today when you take a tour. That's right. This was a bit fresher. But there wasn't much time to linger and look at these details because the village was in the sights of Russian artillery and it was very much still in the fight. And this is what the soldiers had confronted when they came into the village. And did you get a chance to talk to any of these troops? Did they sort of tell you what it had been like to retake this village, what the battle had felt like, how long it went on for?

I did. I talked to one of the commanders with a Ukrainian unit who had come in with the assault troops and retaken the village and then was based there while trying to stabilize this part of the front line. He was speaking in a darkened room where he was on his walkie-talkie, dealing with various situations, including while we were there,

one of the MRAP armored vehicles was destroyed by a grenade drop from a Russian drone. armored vehicles was destroyed by a grenade drop from a Russian drone. He was in between dealing with these small crises which were coming up minute to minute. He was saying that this was an existential fight for Ukrainians, that he felt that he had lived his life in a worthwhile way, for being involved in this combat and recapturing the village. And also that when he came in and saw these gardens and these village homes, that he had a sense that they were certainly Ukrainian.

There are so many Ukrainian names here, if you noticed. No Ukrainka, Blagodatny. — He saw his own culture, Ukrainian culture, in this agrarian village in eastern Ukraine, although he was from the western part of the country. — We asked the commander how he thought the war would end, and he said it was going to be a very difficult fight, that the Russians were dug in, they had lots of time to prepare and lots of ammunition, but that ultimately the Ukrainian army would continue to advance. He thought the war would still be going on by the end of this year. But in the end, that the Ukrainians would prevail in pushing Russian forces out of Ukraine. And then he said that God would punish the Russians and the Ukrainian army would do the same.

And in a way, it's worth stopping for a moment and remembering that Ukraine is fighting the Russian army. And at the very least, for the moment, they're not losing. That's right. What you see in this village is the Ukrainians now moving forward, now on the offensive against the army that had been considered the second most powerful army in the world. And now it's stepping back, even if in small ways, but stepping back in front of a Ukrainian attack that the hope is, in Kiev at least, that this will continue through the summer and they will be able to push the Russians back into the sea. And this was one thing that the soldiers I talked to, both in this village and elsewhere, were joking,

the next time I'll see you, I'll see you on the beach. But this was just one village. To advance to the Sea of Azov, they'll need to capture dozens or hundreds of villages like this. They'll need many small victories like this. And I couldn't help thinking what was in front of them. And it was not a joyous moment because on the one hand, they had reclaimed the village. On the other hand, this had just turned them into a target for Russian artillery and Russian attack helicopters. So it was almost a metaphor for the counteroffensive that every

step forward would become one step toward a more difficult task ahead for the Ukrainian army. So in a way, what you're seeing there in this tiny village on the Ukrainian front line sums up the paradox of this moment, that Ukraine is putting up an incredible fight, but that every gain is excruciating and incremental. And that if we thought this counteroffensive was going to be this fast and furious blitzkrieg, we were wrong. Well, that's exactly right. When President Zelensky was talking recently about the counteroffensive, he said this would be a slow fight. And then he went even further than that. He said that it's not going to be a Hollywood movie.

It's not going to follow a script that would be pleasing for people who are watching this. It would be very difficult. There would be lots of casualties. And he said that a good portion of the Western weaponry, these billions of dollars of armored vehicles and air defense systems and howitzers that have been given to the Ukrainian army, will be destroyed just moving through these first miles. And he said that what's at stake here is the lives of his soldiers. Andrew, thank you.

Thank you for having me on. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. This morning, an ROV, or remote-operated vehicle, from the vessel Horizon Arctic discovered the tail cone of the Titan submersible approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the seafloor. In a news conference on Thursday,

the United States Coast Guard said it had found debris of the deep-sea submersible that went missing on Sunday and that all five people aboard are believed to be dead. On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire Unified Command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families. I can only imagine what this has been like for them. Coast Guard officials said it appeared that the vessel, whose safety had been repeatedly questioned by many experts, had imploded during the expedition. When asked

whether the bodies of the victims could be recovered, the Coast Guard said it was unlikely. This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the seafloor. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto, Shannon Lin and Diana Nguyen with help from Michael Simon-Johnson.

It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lin and Mike Benoit. Fact Check by Susan Lee contains original music by Mary Lozano, Dan Powell, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lanswork of Wanderley. Special thanks to Sasha Belova. That's it for The Daily. I'm Katrin Benholt. See you Monday.