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By Ellie Cook
Senior Defense Reporter
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"Autumn rains and winter cold changes everything," said Major Viktor Tregubov, a Ukrainian fighter currently serving in Kyiv's armed forces in the eastern Donetsk region, telling Newsweek: "It's the survival of the fittest, those who can adapt themselves to the new conditions."
Ukraine's summer counteroffensive was always going to be a race against time. It has said the push was delayed by up to nine months because of hitches in Western weapons deliveries reaching the country—something that pushed Kyiv closer to the infamous muddy season now starting to hit the country.
Nonetheless, Kyiv's troops have chipped away at Russian-held territory, but secured fewer hard-won gains than Ukraine's political and military chiefs had likely hoped for. But the weather has now turned—and even the arrival of significant U.S. military aid this week may not be enough to combat the inevitable march of the seasons.
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"I fear we should now admit that Ukraine has no longer much chance of making substantial and important territorial gains this summer," according to Frederik Mertens, a strategic analyst with the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies.
"Breaking the land bridge to Crimea can probably be ruled out before the rasputitsa (Ukraine's muddy season)," he told Newsweek. "That part of Ukraine's summer offensive hasn't been a success."
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Russia formally annexed the southern Ukrainian Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in September 2022. However, Moscow does not fully control the regions and has lost control of a smattering of villages to Kyiv in the past few months.
Severing this "land bridge" and isolating Russian forces in southern mainland Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula would be a significant victory for Ukraine, and was touted as one of the counteroffensive's main aims. Kyiv had hoped to cleave a path down to Russian-controlled Tokmak, going onto Melitopol before ultimately reaching the Sea of Azov.
But Ukraine's rasputitsa has always loomed large in the last months of the year, as it did in 2022.
It has only been a couple of days since the weather worsened, but "definitely, it is much more difficult to be in the trenches than [during the] summer," commented Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament. Many of Kyiv's troops have been in these trenches for almost 20 months, and "they are exhausted, they are tired," he told Newsweek.
"It will be a very hard winter," Goncharenko said. "We need to acknowledge the truth."
"Cold weather doesn't really make you happier," Tregubov said. "If we're talking about combat readiness, autumn rains and winter cold changes everything, and limits the offensive potential for both sides."
Ukraine has vowed to keep pressing on. "In the cold, wet and mud, it is more difficult to fight," Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency, said in September. However, "fighting will continue, the counteroffensive will continue," he said.
It is still possible to fight in the south and the east, but it will be a "great challenge," Volodymyr Omelyan, a captain in Ukraine's military and a former minister for infrastructure, told Newsweek. It is hard to predict how Ukrainian operations will pan out, he said, but added that Ukraine was nonetheless "very grateful" to Kyiv's steadfast Western backers.
And optimism does remain. "Russia has been fighting against Ukraine since 2014; so many autumns, winters and springs have already been met in combat operations," said Yuriy Fedorenko, who commands the Achilles unmanned aerial vehicle company of the Kharkiv-based 92nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, currently deployed around the embattled Donetsk city of Bakhmut in the east of the country.
"As it starts to get cold and it rains, the soils become muddy," he told Newsweek. Logistics become more complicated, deliveries to front line positions are disrupted, he said. "But the enemy has the same problems."
The mud will likely swallow up the potential progress for Ukraine's 31 newly received Abrams tanks. The heavy, U.S.-donated M1 Abrams will be mired by "limited mobility" in the muddy terrain, and will likely need armored recovery vehicles to pry them out of the sludge—as long as the tank's crew are not under fire, Marina Miron, a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of War Studies at King's College London, U.K., previously told Newsweek.
But it is not just tanks that make for advances. Ukrainian sources emphasize the importance of drones, and just how crucial long-range missiles will be in taking out Russian assets and storage facilities far behind the entrenched front lines through winter and spring, Fedorenko said.
Guns, rocket fire systems and munitions will be even more critical to maintaining pressure on Russian forces, the drone company commander said. "In the areas that become impassable in the cold period because of the mud, it is very important that we can ensure a firepower advantage over the enemy," he said.
The war has long since turned into a battle of attrition, with no indicators that it is likely to change. Russia's military chiefs have become infamous for eye-watering personnel losses, suffering high casualties in operations also claiming scores of military vehicles.
Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry via email for comment.
Kyiv needs to walk the tightrope of achieving the much-needed advances and conserving its battle-hardened but fatigued forces, Goncharenko said. "We just can't have big losses."
Update 10/25/2023 at 11:55 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
Update 10/26/2023 at 7:45 a.m. ET: This article was updated to correct the reference to the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies.
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