White House Lauds Ukraine Offensive's "Notable Progress Over Past 72 Hours"

After two weeks of bitchy - and frequently inaccurate - anonymous criticism of Ukraine's counteroffensive from "sources" in Washington, the White House went out of its way today to praise Ukrainian forces' advances. 

This appears to be an effort by the White House to assert its authority over commentary about Ukraine's conduct of the offensive - as well as to signal that Washington is acknowledging genuinely impressive gains. JL 

Dinara Khalilova reports in the Kyiv Independent and Phillips O'Brien comments in NBC:

Washington has seen "notable progress" in Ukraine's counteroffensive on the southern front line in Zaporizhzhia over the past 72 hours, the White House said on Sept. 1. "And they have achieved success against that second line of Russian defenses." If Ukrainian forces make a breakthrough in this region, “it would allow them to split the Russians into two, so they would not be self-supporting or mutually supporting.” As a result, it would be hard (for) Russian forces in west (Ukraine) to remain with Ukrainian forces being able to block key roads and railroads. If the Ukrainians breakthrough, "it will be a vindication of what they’ve been doing and why they’ve been doing it.”

Washington has seen "notable progress" in Ukraine's counteroffensive on the southern front line in Zaporizhzhia Oblast over the past 72 hours, the White House said on Sept. 1, Reuters reported.

"And they have achieved some success against that second line of Russian defenses," U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.

According to Reuters, Kirby emphasized that it's up to Kyiv to decide how to take advantage of its success.

"That is not to say… that they aren't mindful that they've still got some tough fighting ahead of them as they try to push further south" or that Russia could launch a counterattack, the official said on a conference call.

 

On the same day, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told CNN that Ukrainian forces are "not failing" but "moving forward" in their counteroffensive.

Speaking with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Kuleba advised critics of the pace of Ukraine's summer counteroffensive to consider soldiers who make the push happen.

"How does it feel when you come back from your mission, and you take back your phone, open it, and start reading all the smart people saying how slow you are and that you're not doing well enough?" Kuleba said, as cited by CNN.

 

"You just lost two of your buddies. You were almost killed. You crawled one kilometer on your belly, demining the field. You sacrificed yourself, taking the damn Russian trench in a fierce fight. And then you read someone saying, 'Oh guys, you're too slow'?"

"Our partners who are helping us, including the United States, understand that things are moving in the right direction. And they understand that there's no tragedy or no kind of slow down," the foreign minister added. "It's just happening because it's tough. It's a tough fight."

Earlier, the Institute for the Study of War wrote that Ukrainian troops continued counteroffensive operations near Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast and western Zaporizhzhia Oblast and had advanced in both sectors of the front.

On Aug. 4, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said that the Ukrainian military had penetrated Russia's first line of defense, moving to the "intermediate one" in some areas on the southern front line.

If Ukrainian forces make a breakthrough in this region, “it would allow them to split the Russians into two and peg them to the east and west,” Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said in a telephone interview Thursday.

“So they would basically be split and not self-supporting or mutually supporting,” he said. As a result, he said, it would be hard to see how the Russian forces to the west would be able to remain in Ukraine.

“Everything would have come up through Crimea, the Ukrainians would be closer to Crimea, and it would pose a massive problem" for the Russian forces, O’Brien added.  

However, he cautioned that because Crimea was the natural place for Ukrainian forces to aim at, the Russian forces "were expecting them, so they have built a lot of defensive lines.”   

Horowitz agreed that a breakthrough in the region “would raise questions as to the viability of the Russian presence in the south, with Ukrainian forces being able to block key roads and railroads either directly or by regularly targeting them.”

He said this was the strategy Ukraine employed around the key southern city of Kherson late last year, “forcing the increasingly isolated Russian contingent in Kherson city and the nearby region to eventually withdraw.” 

If Ukraine was able to break through, it would be “a vindication" of its strategy” after a “bad period” of criticism about the way it was managing the campaign, O’Brien said.

One U.S. official told NBC News this month that there was frustration that the Ukrainian forces had “not used more of the combat power that they have,” and reports in the United Kingdom suggested there were rumblings in the British Defense Ministry about the slow pace of the counteroffensive.

In a sign of how sensitive Ukraine is to such comments, its foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said Thursday that critics of Kyiv’s tactics should “shut up.”

Speaking to reporters after a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in the Spanish city of Toledo, he said criticizing the slow pace of the counteroffensive was the equivalent of “spitting into the face of (the) Ukrainian soldier who sacrifices his life every day."

For O’Brien, if the Ukrainian forces did make a breakthrough, "it will be a vindication of what they’ve been doing and why they’ve been doing it.”