New Weapons Aren’t Enough: The Challenges of Ukraine’s Coming Assault

In vicious but mostly static fighting in snowy, artillery-cratered fields and ruined cities, Ukraine rebuffed a Russian offensive over the winter. Now, it is Ukraine’s turn to go on the attack.

Signs are everywhere that it is coming in the next month or so.

New Western weapons that could prove critical in assaults, like German Leopard 2 tanks and American mine-clearing vehicles, are arriving in Ukraine. Thousands of recruits are training in newly constituted units tailored for offensives. And the military command is holding back elite soldiers from the worst of the fighting in the east, in and around the city of Bakhmut, to throw them instead into the coming campaign.

After more than a year of war, Ukraine is battle hardened. “We are covered in three centimeters of stone,” one fighter, Lt. Ilya Samoilenko, said in a recent interview.

But that toughness has come at a steep cost. Ukraine has lost thousands of its most experienced fighters. Now Lieutenant Samoilenko, a veteran commander and survivor of the siege of the city of Mariupol, is using his experience to train new recruits.