While House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wasted months struggling to stand up to his party’s pro-Putin wing, the battlefield situation in Ukraine took an ominous turn for the worse. Russian forces have been advancing since the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive last year. In February, the invaders captured Avdiivka, a strategic city in eastern Ukraine, securing their biggest victory since the fall of Bakhmut in May 2023. In all, since the start of the year, Russian forces have taken 139 square miles, an area the size of Detroit, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
Fears have been growing that a Russian offensive, reportedly planned for June, could break through Ukraine’s depleted front lines. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told PBS NewsHour this week that his forces were being outgunned 10 to 1 in artillery shells, making it impossible to “hold our ground.” CIA Director William J. Burns warned on Thursday that Ukraine could “lose” the war by the end of the year without U.S. aid. The alarms raised by U.S. intelligence agencies — combined with Iran’s attack on Israel — finally spurred Johnson to act on the long-stalled foreign-aid bill.
Russian forces have been pummeling Ukrainian defenders not only with artillery fire but also with massive “glide bombs” that can shatter fortifications. Meanwhile, Ukraine has confronted a critical shortage of air-defense ammunition, forcing senior leaders to make a Sophie’s choice between protecting front-line troops or urban centers.
Recent Russian airstrikes have inflicted heavy damage on Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, and this week, a Russian missile strike on the city of Chernihiv killed at least 18 people. Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, located only 20 miles from Russia, has been hit so hard that its mayor warns it is in danger of becoming “a second Aleppo,” invoking the Syrian city destroyed by Russian bombing between 2012 and 2016.
While Ukraine has grown weaker, Russia has been getting stronger. In chilling testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on April 10, Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the top U.S. commander in Europe, said that despite losing more than 2,000 tanks and 315,000 soldiers, Russian forces are “reconstituting … far faster than our initial estimates suggested.” He noted that the Russian army “is actually now larger — by 15 percent — than it was when it invaded Ukraine.”
Even more concerning than the growing size of the Russian forces is their increased competence. We should not imagine that the Russian army of today is the same one that couldn’t keep its tanks and trucks fueled during the initial invasion. As Cavoli noted, “The Russian military in the past year has shown an accelerating ability to learn and adapt to battlefield challenges both tactically and technologically.”
The Ukrainians have still won some critical victories in recent months, such as opening up the Black Sea to Ukrainian grain exports and using long-range drones to knock out one-seventh of Russia’s oil refining capacity. But the Russians have achieved parity, at a minimum, in drone capability while bringing to bear superior resources in electronic warfare, artillery and air power.
The U.S. armed forces must begin delivering emergency aid to Ukraine as soon as the Senate endorses the House bill and President Biden signs it, with artillery shells and air defense ammunition the most urgent priorities. That should allow Ukrainian forces to stanch the erosion of their lines and raise sagging morale. Much more, however, is needed to roll back the growing Russian menace.
Ukraine has been short not only of ammunition but also of soldiers: Its roughly 200,000 troops at the front face an estimated 470,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine. Many of the Ukrainian troops have been fighting since the start of the invasion, and they are getting tired and dispirited. Their numbers have been steadily depleted by Russian firepower and “meat grinder” assaults, leaving many units severely undermanned. (Zelensky said in February that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the start of the war, but the real toll is probably much higher.)
Yet fewer Ukrainians have been willing to enlist than in the heady early days of the war. That’s hardly surprising, given that potential recruits know they could be sent indefinitely to the front without adequate ammunition, leadership or training. Ukraine desperately needs more soldiers to hold the lines and to allow those already at the front to rotate back to the rear.
Earlier this month, Zelensky signed a badly needed law overhauling the unwieldy conscription process and decreasing the draft age from 27 to 25, but it will take many months to mobilize and train hundreds of thousands of new soldiers. That process can be streamlined if Western militaries send their own trainers — or at least contractors — to Ukraine rather than forcing Ukrainian recruits to go to other countries to be trained.
The House bill calls on the administration to send long-range ATACMS, missiles that could do serious damage to the Crimean bases that support Russian forces in southern Ukraine. Biden should have sent those weapons systems long ago, and it is imperative that they be dispatched now, along with the longer-range Taurus cruise missiles that Germany has so far refused to send. The United States and its allies must enable Ukrainian forces to finally knock out the Kerch Strait bridge linking Crimea to Russia — a critical cog in Russia’s war effort and a Putin showcase project.
The United States and its allies also need to dig deep — and take some short-term risks with their own defense requirements if necessary — to send more of the Patriot batteries that the Ukrainians are desperately requesting to protect against Russian airstrikes. If the United States will not use its own aircraft to defend Ukraine, as it did for Israel, then this is the least it can do. Beyond saving lives, air defenses offer the additional benefit of allowing Ukraine to expand its own defense production, thereby decreasing its long-term reliance on foreign aid.
The good news is that all is far from lost, despite the shamefully long delay in delivering U.S. aid and the resulting loss of Ukrainian lives. Ukraine still controls roughly 80 percent of its own territory, and the Ukrainian people remain united in resistance. The Ukrainian economy is projected to keep growing this year, while Russia is facing its own wartime strains — which could be exacerbated by tougher sanctions on its oil and gas sector.
The newly authorized U.S. aid package should come just in time — and not a second too soon — to avert a Ukrainian collapse this year. It will provide both a materiel and a morale boost, signaling to Ukrainians they are not being abandoned. But more needs to be done, both by Ukraine and its Western supporters, to wrest the battlefield advantage from Russia and to convince its dictator that he cannot win his cruel war of conquest. Indeed, more U.S. aid will be necessary in the future. Let us hope that next time Congress will move without first forcing Ukraine to the brink of disaster.
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