An Orthodox Christmas offensive can set conditions for winning the Ukraine war

The time is now for Ukraine to conduct a winter shaping operation to set conditions for an offensive next summer to end the war on terms favorable to Ukraine and its Western benefactors.  

Building on its successful fall operations in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions, Ukraine must take advantage of the winter freeze to put itself in a position to deliver a decisive blow to the Russian invasion in the summer and force Russia into a disadvantaged negotiating position. That blow should come in Crimea, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly has stated, but Ukraine’s military is not yet in position to threaten Crimea directly.  

A winter offensive in the south can put Ukraine in a position to make good on Zelensky’s vow to recapture Crimea. However, Ukraine cannot successfully carry out a winter operation, let alone a major summer offensive, without a commitment and substantial ramp-up of military and financial assistance by the U.S. and its allies now. 

Ukraine cannot afford to postpone operations until spring, because further delay will enable Russia to fully integrate its mobilized reservists, acquire more munitions and hardware, and prepare for its own spring offensive while the destruction of Ukrainian energy and water infrastructure and its devastating impact on the Ukrainian population continues unabated.  Furthermore, Western resolve and assistance may wane after next summer. Thereafter, the conflict likely will become frozen until Russia has recovered its military capacity to continue the hot war. 

Eventually, all wars end in negotiations. This war will end in a negotiated settlement, but as with any war, the facts on the ground vastly shape the decision for negotiations and eventual settlement. Military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in “On War” that since “war is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration.” Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin has no intention of giving up his objective to subjugate Ukraine, despite the incomprehensible losses of manpower and materiel Russia has suffered in the war.

Yet, short of the unrealistic complete destruction of the Russian army, the surest path Ukraine has to dissuade Putin from his objective is to convincingly threaten or recapture his prize — Crimea — which may make his already damaged domestic position untenable. 

The West’s incremental assistance to Ukraine, by design, has prevented the war’s escalation into broader war with NATO but has not decidedly hastened Russia’s defeat. In some respects, this policy has lengthened the duration and destruction of the war without a durable and better peace in sight. According to the recently released U.S. National Security Strategy, America and its allies are “helping to make Russia’s war on Ukraine a strategic failure”; however, the level of Western assistance to Ukraine seems to merely offer Russia a strategic setback. Time will tell, but time is short. A decisive Russian military defeat in Ukraine could certainly make Russia’s strategic failure in Ukraine possible.   

In the near term, the Western allies must provide intelligence and operational planning support to the Ukrainian army for a winter offensive and future operations. They must provide the Ukrainians a combination of advanced and tactical drones and counter-drone capabilities.  Already months late, the recent announcement by the U.S. to deliver advanced air defense systems, such as the Patriot missile system, will take some of the destructive pressure off the Ukrainian energy infrastructure and help shield Ukrainian army forces for a winter offensive. 

In the intermediate term, the West must provide equipment and training to the Ukrainian military to prepare it to conduct a sustained, combined arms offensive in the south next summer to force Russia to abandon their objective of subjugating Ukraine. Reports have at once praised and decried the U.S. for failing to deliver the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and extended-range munitions known as Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), which would allow Ukraine to strike targets as far as 300 kilometers away. The point is not about the system or munition, but about the critical Ukrainian need to reliably target deep to enable its close fight — without which a large summer offensive is not likely to succeed. 

The Ukrainian army has demonstrated an aptitude for exercising combined arms maneuver using a variety of equipment sets. They will need equipment and crew training for artillery, tactical and integrated air defense systems, manned and unmanned attack aircraft, light naval craft, and protected mobility in the form of tanks, fighting vehicles and sapper engineering equipment. The West should offer existing NATO equipment based in Europe, rather than continuing to trade out NATO ally-held Soviet-era equipment. It is difficult to envision a post-war Ukraine exclusively going back to antiquated Cold War equipment. German Leopard tanks and Marder fighting vehicles finally could get some use. All of this takes time to train, so the time for equipping and planning for subsequent decisive operations and training is now. 

The U.S. and its allies must apply the means to achieve the National Security Strategy’s objective for a Russian strategic failure by next summer. The West’s incremental military support to Ukraine so far has balanced two competing strategic interests: Ukraine’s sovereign right to defend against and repel Russian imperial aggression, and the prevention of a NATO-Russia war that might lead to nuclear escalation. 

This winter is the moment to shape a decisive operation to end the war in the summer on terms favorable to Ukraine and the West. Typically, the ground in southern Ukraine along the approaches to Crimea freezes around the beginning of January, making cross-country maneuver feasible before the spring melt in early March. The Orthodox Christmas occurs on Jan. 7, which seems about right to start a winter shaping operation for the summer.   

Bob Ashley Jr. is a retired lieutenant general who served over 36 years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer. He was the 21st director of the Defense and Intelligence Agency (DIA) from October 2017 until November 2020. He previously served as the Army G2 and the Commandant of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center. He works as a private consultant for defense and security affairs.

Dan Soller is a retired colonel who served over 31 years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer, including more than 12 years in Europe beginning in the era of the Soviet Union’s collapse. He has worked with the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He works in the commercial space industry. 

The authors’ views expressed in this article are their own and do not represent the U.S. government’s position.