To Shorten the War, Ukraine Needs Additional Western Weapons Systems

Despite the onset of winter weather, the front lines in Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine are unlikely to freeze in the coming months. Although Russian rockets continue to cripple the Ukrainian energy grid, Kyiv's forces appear poised to continue liberating Russian-occupied territory once the ground hardens early in the coming new year.

"My personal assessment is the following: our armed forces do not plan to stop," Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said in answer to a question posed by Newsweek at the Odesa Media Center in Odesa, Ukraine on Sunday.

"We have stockpiles of winter gear that are three times larger than critical levels," Reznikov added. "We just need to wait for the ground to become less wet."

The speed with which Ukrainian counter offensive maneuvers will be able to advance, however, depends largely on the content of Western weapons shipments. The greatest needs are in the areas of air defense units, precision guided offensive weapons, and vehicles of all types.

"This war is a war of resources," Reznikov said, "and resources are finite on their side as well. We just need to keep being resilient."

Despite reports that Russia's supply of cruise missiles is dwindling, Ukraine's stockpiles of air defense ammunition are also limited. At the start of the war, Ukraine's air defense assets consisted largely of Soviet-era BUK systems and Russian-made S-300s.

While these systems continue to shoot down the overwhelming majority of the Russian cruise missiles and Iranian-made drones aimed at the country's electricity substations, the Russian-made rockets that these air defense systems fire into the sky cannot be readily replenished.

"These rockets are only produced in the Russian Federation, and, for obvious reasons, they are not being made available for purchase on the world market at this moment," Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, told Newsweek.

"After our supply of these rockets runs out," he added, "our BUK and S-300 systems will become absolutely useless for defending our skies."

As a result, the accelerated provision of Western-made alternatives will be necessary to prevent Russia from ever gaining air supremacy. Despite recent reports that the U.S. is preparing to supply Ukraine with an unspecified quantity of PATRIOT surface-to-air missile systems, further help is needed.

"Following the first massive wave of Russian rockets on October 10, our air defense situation has begun moving in the right direction," Gerashchenko continued. "We've finally started receiving American NASAMS batteries and HAWK systems, but we need more units and more ammunition."

"NASAMS can cover a radius of 25 kilometers, and so in order to protect all points of critical infrastructure across the entire territory of Ukraine, it would be necessary to have 60 or 70 additional systems," he explained. "So far, we have been promised eight. It's not enough to guarantee the safety of our electricity infrastructure, and as a result, millions of Ukrainians are now fated to spend many cold nights, without water and without plumbing."

While this winter promises to be a cold and dark one for Ukrainian civilians, the clearest path to ensuring that this is the last such season of suffering is to provide the Ukrainian military with the necessary resources to secure a battlefield victory by the end of 2023. Such a result is not possible without the transfer of additional ammunition for HIMARS systems, along with more heavy artillery batteries, infantry fighting vehicles and cargo trucks.

"American-made precision-guided munitions [PGMs] have demonstrated their effectiveness on the battlefield," Gerashchenko said. "A lot has been made of Russia's overall advantage in the quantity of shells it can fire, but I'd rather have 1,000 high precision rounds than 50,000 non-PGMs."

As with its Western-made air defense systems, Ukraine will require a constant resupply of ammunition for its growing arsenal of offensive weaponry.

"Without rockets, a HIMARS system is just a beautiful truck," Gerashchenko explained. "PGMs are high-tech goods. They consist of thousands of parts, including microprocessors, and it is imperative that America retool its productive capacity in order to turn out more of these rockets."

While HIMARS are indispensable as long-range strike weapons, the continuation of Ukraine's advances also depends on the quantity of armor it can mass against Russian forces' increasingly consolidated defensive positions.

"We also need Western tanks, we need more self-propelled artillery systems, and we need trucks to deliver ammunition to firing positions," Gerashchenko added.

"Ukrainian troops are also going to unveil some of their own tricks this year, especially when it comes to the use of attack drones," he said. "But when it comes to the supply of heavy artillery, we must rely on the continuing support of our Western partners."

Even if Ukraine still lacks several of the Western weapons systems it wants, Russia lacks much of what it would need in order to turn the tide of the war back in its favor. While winter weather means hardship for soldiers on both sides of the front lines, freezing temperatures will be significantly harder on one army in particular.

"The Russian troops' morale is bad, their equipment is terrible, they're not getting the winter wear they need, and they're still trying to patch up degraded units with newly mobilized call-ups," George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War told Newsweek. "The conventional Russian military has been largely degraded, and it isn't going to reconstitute itself in the coming months."

Given Ukraine's momentum, Barros sees no reason to expect that the General Staff in Kyiv will offer their Russian adversary the chance to regroup in the coming months.

"We've observed since 2014 that there's usually an intensification of the fighting after the onset of the hard freeze," he said. "The mud goes away, and conditions on the ground become suitable for maneuver warfare once again."

"The Ukrainians are prepared to stay on the offensive until the spring thaw turns the country back into mud," he added. "This isn't a secret. Ukrainian officials have been telegraphing for a while that they aren't planning any sort of operational pause."

However, after falling back from Kyiv and Chernihiv regions this past April, from Kharkiv early in the fall, and from right bank Kherson last month, the prospect of further Russian losses this winter does offer the prospect of one small benefit to the Kremlin's increasingly beleaguered army.

"The more territory Ukraine liberates, the more Russia can concentrate its forces," Barros cautioned. "That means Ukrainian gains this winter are unlikely to happen with the same rapidity we saw in Kharkiv back in September."

"But that doesn't change the fact that Russia simply isn't in a position to be an effective fighting force anytime in the foreseeable future," he added.