Ukraine digs in and hopes for the best in 'spring defensive'

Brian Bonner's story for The Cipher Brief on March 20, 2024, chronicling Ukraine's shift from offense to defense in the war against Russia.

Ukraine digs in and hopes for the best in 'spring defensive'

Ukraine is spending $800 million to build trenches and multilayered fortifications along a 600-mile front line in the eastern part of the country to stop advancing Russian troops. While Russia looks to capitalize on recent battlefield gains, Ukraine isn’t planning for fresh ground offensives of its own; it’s planning what might be called a spring defensive.

What a difference a year makes.

Last spring, Ukraine and its Western allies hoped a spring offensive would liberate more of the nation from Russian occupiers. But Russia’s dense defenses—which included deep trenches, anti-tank barriers, and tens of thousands of mines—proved to be impenetrable, and instead, it was the Russians who gained a bit more territory.

If 2023 was the year of the failed Ukrainian ground offensive, 2024 is the year of the Ukrainian defensive—and it’s a fight that Ukraine cannot afford to lose. 

Ukrainian military expert Pavlo Narozhny told The Cipher Brief that without Western aid, “We can hold out for three to five months. I cannot imagine a Ukrainian offensive in the current circumstances. We don’t have enough human resources. We don’t have enough firepower.”

Given Russian gains and the fact that a $60.1 billion aid package for Ukraine is still stalled in the U.S. Congress, Ukrainians now fear the prospect of more cities going the way of Mariupol and Avdiivka – once thriving places now reduced to depopulated rubble and firmly under Russia’s control. Russian forces already hold nearly 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory, but the evidence is building to support Narozhny’s view that further Kremlin encroachments are likely. Russia’s missiles have recently found weak spots in Ukraine’s air defenses in major cities, including Kharkiv, Odesa, Sumy, and Mykolaiv.

As bleak as that sounds, many politicians and military analysts in Ukraine and beyond share Narozhny’s pessimism. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the war’s fate may be decided this spring or summer. “Many analysts expect a major Russian offensive this summer, and Ukraine cannot wait until the result of the next U.S. elections,” Borrell told reporters in Washington as he campaigned to break the political logjam holding up more aid to Ukraine.

The $800 million construction project

Russian forces repelled last year’s Ukrainian offensive largely because of the “Surovikin line,” a long stretch of defenses named for the Russian general and air defense commander Sergey Surovikin. Ukrainian troops could not get through the maze of trenches, anti-tank ditches, mines, and pyramidal concrete obstacles known as “dragon’s teeth.”

Now, the tide of the war has turned, and the shoe is on the other foot. Early in 2024, Ukraine took a more defensive posture and ordered stronger fortifications. With fierce Russian ground assaults expected in spring and summer, it’s the Ukrainians who are now engaged in what reports from the frontlines suggest is feverish construction to stop the next Russian onslaught. 

The elements of the fortification project include everything from old-style trenches to sophisticated tunnels and heavy anti-tank barriers. 

While the structures and layers vary according to need, available material, and local strategy, military analysts and local reports suggest three primary lines of defense are being built for long stretches of territory in eastern Ukraine.

The first, Narozhny said, involves a lightly fortified line of trenches and wooden dugouts for infantry. In some places, civilians have joined soldiers in the digging of basic trenches. As Captain Maksym Radchenko told The Independent, “Every infantryman knows that the best piece of equipment is a shovel.”

The second line of defense, Narozhny said, is more fortified – including concrete bunkers, deeper dugouts or “foxholes” to avoid bombardment and even tunnels. Some military experts say this second line is also the place for armored vehicles, tanks and artillery to cover the first-line infantry troops. In front of the second line are anti-tank obstacles such as “dragon’s teeth” and “Czech hedgehogs,” made of angled metal beams – familiar sights for anyone in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, where these “hedgehogs” have remained scattered on roadsides since Russia’s initial invasion two years ago.

According to RBC Ukraine, the third line of defense is likely the most fortified and the base for headquarters, command posts, air defenses, ammunition depots, fuel supplies, and hospitals.

Narozhny said mines are being placed “nearly everywhere,” with paths between each minefield that are “known only to soldiers.” 

While the nation races to complete the long defensive lines, in some areas the Russians are already coming. Some of the heaviest fighting at the moment is centered near Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region. Askold Krushelnycky reported for the Independent on Monday that Ukrainian soldiers there are outgunned and “are fortifying their defenses with razor wire, trenches, and metal ‘dragon’s teeth’ to ensnare any tanks that seek to break through.”

Captain Radchenko was among those in the fighting near Kupiansk. “We are constantly improving our defenses,” he said, “and we are ready if the Russians change their tactics or launch a large-scale assault.”

By air, land or sea, a bleak picture – except for drones

For the last decade, Narozhny supplied weaponry to the Ukrainian military through his Reactive Post charity. Today, he says the grim situation – and the strategic shift to a defensive mindset – is simply a matter of numbers. He told last week’s “War & Business” conference in Kyiv that while Ukraine’s high-tech, flashy drone strikes have their place and have had success, the country is suffering from deficits on multiple fronts.  

In the air, Ukraine is in no position to dominate its skies and still awaits the arrival of a smattering of promised F-16 fighter jets to deploy in battle. At sea, Ukraine has a weak navy, though it has scored repeated hits against the Russian navy via the use of sea drones. Those attacks have destroyed key vessels – perhaps a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet while forcing other Russian ships to move to eastern shores closer to Russia. That, in turn, has allowed Ukraine to open a safe corridor along the Black Sea’s western coast to export agricultural and other commodities – vital to holding the wartime economy together.

On land, Narozhny and others believe that Ukraine lacks sufficient manpower and weaponry, particularly artillery shells. At best, Narozhny said, Ukraine will be able to recover two of four mainland regions that Russia now claims as its own—Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—but even those advances, he said, will require more Western aid and more troops. For the foreseeable future, he believes his nation should forget about liberating the Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as the Crimean Peninsula.

On the personnel front, Ukrainian politicians remain reluctant to lower the nation’s unusually high conscription age from 27 to 25. Parliament may vote on the mobilization issue later this month; lawmakers are pressured to act because of a consensus that – as Russia pours more soldiers into the battle – Ukraine will need as many as 500,000 fresh soldiers. As The Cipher Brief reported recently, Ukraine has 1 million personnel in the military, but the presidential administration says that as few as 300,000 are currently in combat positions. 

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–South Carolina), visiting Kyiv on Monday, told Zelensky that Ukraine needed to draft more soldiers at younger ages.

“I would hope those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can’t believe it’s at 27,” the Washington Post quoted Graham as saying. “You’re fighting for your life, so you should be serving — not at 25 or 27. We need more people in the line.”

When it comes to artillery, the situation is even worse. Citing NATO intelligence estimates, CNN reported that Russia produces nearly 3 million shells yearly, almost three times as many as the 1.2 million shells produced by Europe and America combined. By comparison, one of Ukraine’s largest weaponry suppliers, the private Ukrainian Armor Design and Manufacturing Co., publicly reports making 20,000 120 mm shells per year, Narozhny said.

These numbers mean that Russia is now firing much more artillery than shell-rationing Ukraine. While an initiative led by the Czech Republic aims to raise enough money to supply Ukraine with 800,000 shells, even that amount will not be enough.

Reasons for hope

A more optimistic scenario may prevail if Ukraine’s $800-million defenses succeed, more Western aid and Ukrainian troops arrive, and the country continues its success in the drone war.

Former Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, fired by Zelensky in September, appeared at the same conference with Narozhny. Reznikov said he hopes technological breakthroughs in drones and other modern weaponry will redefine the way the war is fought and give Ukraine the edge over Russia’s Soviet-style tactics. 

“We are not a Soviet army,” Reznikov said. “We are a modern army with Western weaponry and a Ukrainian approach.” The sea-drone stealth attacks in the Black Sea have been a part of that approach, and Reznikov also cited the enormous cost advantages of first-person view (FPV) drones over artillery, particularly precision-guided shells. But drones are not infallible; they are weather-dependent, and both sides can jam their signals.

All that said, Ukraine’s military and civilian leaders clearly believe in them. 

In a Telegram post reported by Reuters, Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said this week that “the development of the use of unmanned systems is my priority.” Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation Oleksandr Bornyakov said the nation is ramping up production to supply 1 million new drones to the battlefield in 2024. “We understand how to do drones, how to make them very deadly,” Bornyakov told the Kyiv Post. And Minister of Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshyn said in January: “We have 200 companies that produce everything that flies, goes on the ground, on the water and under water…Out of those 200 companies, I am sure 10 unicorns will emerge.”

But while it scales these new technologies and pleads for more help from the U.S. and Europe, Ukraine had decided it must also concentrate on building all those barriers. Whether the defenses will be strong enough to stop Russian advances will soon be tested—in some places, such as the battle near Kupainsk, the test is already taking place.

In much of the war zone, the Ukrainians have to hope that their shovels and “dragon’s teeth” can be the weapons that at least buy time until reinforcements arrive – and that their “spring defensive” will succeed.