The never-ending myth of a looming Ukrainian 'breakthrough'

For those casually observing the war in Ukraine, the failure of Kyiv’s recent strikes on Russian territory to impact the battlefield might be disappointing, even inexplicable. For those who have paid close attention to the war, it is just the latest demonstration that there is no feasible military solution to the conflict.

Earlier this summer, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a 40-day campaign of deep strikes in Russia, with the stated goal of pressuring Russian leadership to end the war. Mainstream media wrote triumphantly about the pain Ukraine was inflicting with its U.S.-assisted drone attacks inside Russia, claiming that Ukraine was “ now turning the tide ,” had a “ decisive upper hand ,” and was even “ winning the war .”

But detailed analyses of the actual battle lines showed that, when the 40-day clock expired earlier this month, little had actually changed on the ground. In fact, Russia had made some minor territorial advances, while Ukraine’s severe manpower, demographic and economic crises continued to deepen.

Worse, the drone attacks have elicited the most severe Russian retaliation yet. Moscow has markedly stepped up its strikes on Ukraine, including one of the largest ballistic missile attacks of the entire war, at the precise time the United States and Europe are running low on interceptors to defend it. With Russia now attacking Ukraine’s port facilities and commercial vessels in the Black Sea, the country is being starved of billions of dollars of revenue, and its GDP could drop by as much as 1.5% .

At the same time, it seems that the underlying goal of the Ukrainian drone strikes — convincing a skeptical President Donald Trump that Ukraine is winning and thus deserving of ongoing U.S. military support — has not succeeded: the Atlantic reported that, though the campaign initially seemed to have changed Trump’s mind, progress on this front had “fizzled in a matter of days.” On top of all this, Russian President Vladimir Putin has now reportedly hardened his negotiating demands and refuses to return any occupied territories in future talks.

In other words, the ultimately unsuccessful Ukrainian drone assault is something we have now seen over and over again: Kyiv embarks on an audacious, headline-grabbing military gambit; Western media and officials seize on it to claim the tide is turning; and then when the smoke clears, it turns out nothing has been achieved but an escalation of the war. Ukraine winds up battered even worse, and with less favorable negotiating terms on the table.

In late 2022, when Ukraine partially destroyed Putin’s prized Kerch bridge connecting the Russian mainland to Crimea, there was rapturous celebration on the Ukrainian side and among its Western backers.

“Putin’s Regime Faces the Fate of His Kerch Strait Bridge,” blared the headline of a piece by the Atlantic’s Eliot Cohen, who told us it marked “the moment when Russian elites began to understand that they are losing.”

“Russian propagandists are beginning to signal that they understand deep down that the Kremlin is losing the war,” wrote an analyst from the hawkish, weapons manufacturer-funded Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

Of course, this is not what happened. The attack did, however, give Russian hardliners an upper hand in Moscow and consequently elicit a major Russian escalation that badly damaged Ukraine’s energy infrastructure just as winter was about to set in.

Then there was the much-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive of summer 2023. “Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive has a good chance of succeeding,” said a fellow at the similarly hawkish, similarly arms manufacturer-funded Atlantic Council.

“Ukraine’s current counter-offensive likely will be slower, deadlier, and less impressive in making immediate territorial gains. But be patient — that does not mean it will not be a success,” cautioned CEPA. When initial results were indeed underwhelming a month later, Time magazine assured readers that “the Ukraine counteroffensive can still succeed.”

Sure enough, after five months the counteroffensive was definitively determined to be a “disaster,” as Zelensky’s own former adviser put it . Between that January and September, Ukraine had gained only 143 square miles compared to Russia’s 331 square miles, and had done so at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, according to official U.S. estimates . Two months later, Ukraine’s top military commander at the time, Valery Zaluzhny, declared the war a “slatemate.”

The following year saw Ukrainian forces launch a daring incursion into Russian territory, taking 28 settlements and 300 square miles in the border region of Kursk. “Ukraine’s gamble in Kursk restores belief it can beat Russia,” went the headline from Chatham House. “Ukraine can use the occupied territories [in Kursk] as a bargaining chip for a territorial swap,” one expert proffered . It had revealed “critical truths,” wrote the American Foreign Policy Council’s Elliott Petroff, one of which was that Ukraine “can still find ways to break the stalemate and win this war.”

Once again, none of this came to pass. The Kursk gambit ended up being a hugely costly operation for Ukraine that exposed the actual frontline to Russian forces, who then made significant advances into Ukrainian territory at the very time pundits were lauding the move, and ended up expelling Ukrainian forces from Russian territory anyway. It also scuttled ceasefire talks that would have halted further attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which instead escalated .

It’s a consistent pattern: a combination of wishful thinking and misinformation does just enough to keep the idea of a military victory alive, undermining the chance for painful but necessary negotiations, and ultimately rebounding in ever worsening ways on Ukraine and its people. The major human, economic, and social costs for Ukraine of continuing war, meanwhile, remain invisible to much of the Western public, which is instead fed a recurring diet of headlines and rhetoric assuring it that victory is close at hand.

Ukraine supporters’ unwillingness to let go of the fantasy of a military breakthrough is understandable. Ukraine is the victim, after all, and it feels inherently unjust that the aggressor state would come away unpunished or even having gained something from a flagrantly illegal and immoral act.

But this fantastical thinking has served Ukraine poorly, to say the least, every time it has prevailed. It is not clear that either side is ready at this moment for serious peace talks. But when that chance comes again, we mustn’t be lured away from it by yet another media campaign promising one weird trick to defeat Russia.