The Ukrainian counterattack

The Ukrainian summer counteroffensive and the liberation of Kharkiv oblast

On June 30 Russian forces were driven from Snake, or Zmiinyi, Island, a small but strategically important outcropping in the western Black Sea. Located roughly 80 miles (130 km) south of Odesa and just 20 miles (32 km) from the mouth of the Danube River, Snake Island was taken by the Russians in the early hours of the war. Occupation of the island gave Russia significant leverage in the western Black Sea, and the proximity of Russian forces to Romania—a NATO member—posed an implicit threat to the alliance. With the sinking of the Moskva and the recapture of Snake Island, Russia’s ability to project force in the western Black Sea was significantly degraded. While Russia continued to maintain a blockade on most Ukrainian shipping, the liberation of Snake Island allowed the Ukrainians to expand their use of Danube ports and restore some measure of their export economy. The Russian defense ministry implausibly attempted to characterize their retreat from Snake Island as “a gesture of good will” toward Ukraine.

Russian forces captured Lysychansk in the first week of July, after weeks of indiscriminate bombardment that left the city in ruins. The fall of Lysychansk and the neighboring city of Syeverodonetsk gave Russia control of the last remaining major population centers in Luhansk oblast (region). This would prove to be the high-water mark of Russia’s offensive in the Donbas, however. Russian attackers would spend the next six months attempting sanguinary assaults on the Ukrainian stronghold at Bakhmut in Donetsk oblast without success.

While Bakhmut held, Ukrainian forces launched bold counterstrokes elsewhere along the front. In late July American-supplied HIMARS made their presence known with a series of strikes that heavily damaged bridges around Russian-occupied Kherson. Russian forces on the west bank of the Dnipro (Dnieper) River were in danger of being cut off, and Russian commanders shifted their attention from the Donbas to what appeared to be the focus of Ukraine’s efforts. Throughout August Ukrainian forces launched probing attacks along the Kherson front, but the large-scale offensive expected by many did not materialize. On August 9 a massive explosion at a Russian air base in Crimea destroyed as many as nine aircraft and sent Russian holidaymakers fleeing. Purportedly the work of Ukrainian special operations or partisan units, the attack on the air base led the Russian occupation government in Crimea to declare a state of emergency. As the buildup around Kherson continued, a HIMARS strike destroyed the headquarters of the Wagner Group in Luhansk, killing as many as 100 mercenaries. Despite this setback, Wagner and its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, continued to gain influence within the Kremlin as commanders in Russia’s regular army struggled to produce the desired results for Putin’s “special military operation.”

With Russia’s attention largely remaining fixed on Kherson, on September 6 the Ukrainians carried out a stunning offensive in the Kharkiv region. Russian lines crumpled, and, in the space of a week, Ukrainian forces liberated more than 3,400 square miles (8,800 square km) of territory. Izyum, which had fallen to the Russians in April, was recaptured on September 10; the loss of the key supply hub was an embarrassment for Moscow, and fleeing Russian troops left behind massive stores of weapons and ammunition. By the time the Ukrainian advance slowed, virtually the entirety of Kharkiv oblast had been freed from Russian control. On October 1 Ukrainian forces retook Lyman, a strategic rail center on the Siverskyy Donets River.

Putin’s “partial mobilization” and the expanding role of the Wagner Group

With his army falling back on multiple fronts, on September 21 Putin declared a “partial mobilization” of 300,000 troops to bolster his forces. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that only veterans with prior combat experience would be called up, but there was widespread evidence that men with no military background were being drafted into the armed services. Putin’s announcement triggered a wave of protests across Russia; in some cases, men who were arrested at demonstrations were served with draft notices while in police custody. It was estimated that between 260,000 and 700,000 men of military age fled Russia in the wake of the mobilization notice.

In most armies around the world, recruits spend several months undergoing basic training, with additional advanced training continuing for up to a year. However, some “mobiks”—as the men called up in Putin’s “partial mobilization” came to be known—were killed in action just 10 days after receiving their draft notices. Although Putin had criminalized criticism of the Russian military and its campaign in Ukraine with penalties of up to 15 years in prison, Russian social media was flooded with videos depicting the mobilization’s chaotic execution. Ill-equipped recruits were dispatched to the front in piecemeal fashion, and, once there, they served as little more than cannon fodder in frontal assaults on fixed Ukrainian positions. Russia ceded any possible strategic advantage that might have been gained by an influx of fresh troops, and even Putin’s most stalwart defenders in Russian state media voiced their disapproval of the “partial mobilization.”

As Putin’s shambolic “partial mobilization” was ongoing, Moscow staged sham referenda in the occupied Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson to determine if those regions should join Russia. From September 23 to 27 Russian authorities conducted hastily organized “elections” that saw gunmen accompanying poll workers to people’s homes in acts of obvious coercion. It seems clear that the loss of a huge swathe of terrain in Kharkiv oblast forced the Russian occupation authorities to attempt to legitimize their control before Ukraine reclaimed additional territory. As was the case with the staged Crimean referendum eight years earlier, the alleged outcome overwhelmingly favored annexation by Russia. The referenda were almost universally condemned as illegal, and Putin’s annexation of the territories—celebrated in a massive televised rally in Red Square on September 30—was vague on specific claims. Although Russia had exercised de facto control over large portions of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014, it held barely half of Zaporizhzhya, and its forces were in retreat across Kherson. The annexation declarations left unclear how, exactly, Russia proposed to administer land that was under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, in Russia’s prisons, Prigozhin was conducting his own recruiting drive for Wagner, and a video of these efforts surfaced on September 13. At a penal colony in Yoshkar-Ola, about 400 miles (640 km) east of Moscow, Prigozhin could be seen addressing a group of prisoners, saying, “I represent the private military company Wagner. You have probably heard of it.” He then told inmates that he could secure their release in exchange for six months of combat duty with Wagner. This video was notable for several reasons. First, private military companies were outlawed in Russia, and the Kremlin had repeatedly denied any ties between itself and Wagner. Prigozhin’s statement made clear that Putin had effectively authorized the creation of a parallel military structure outside of the regular Russian army. Second, Prigozhin himself had filed lawsuits against journalists who had tied him to Wagner in the past. As Russia’s reliance on Wagner mercenaries increased, it became less necessary for Prigozhin to remain in the shadows. This became clear in October, when Wagner opened a lavish headquarters in St. Petersburg. Third, prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Wagner had been a professional force of some 5,000 fighters, drawn largely from the ranks of the Russian military. Prigozhin’s recruiting efforts turned Wagner into a convict army numbering some 50,000 by the end of 2022.

The attack on the Kerch Strait bridge and the liberation of Kherson

On October 8, 2022, Ukraine carried out a spectacular attack on the Kerch Strait bridge, a 12-mile (19-km) span that linked Krasnodar kray (territory), Russia, with Russian-occupied Crimea. The bridge was erected in 2018, and it had been seen as symbol of Russia’s desire to assert control over Crimea and the surrounding seas. The bridge, which consisted of a four-lane road and a parallel rail line, had served as a key supply route for Russians in Crimea as well as those engaged in fighting in Kherson and Zaporizhzhya. Based on video of the event, analysts concluded that the attack was likely carried out by a truck bomb. The massive explosion destroyed a 900-foot (275-meter) section of the road bridge and ignited a fuel tanker train that was traveling on the rail bridge. Russia quickly worked to restore limited traffic over the bridge, but the Kremlin estimated that full repairs would not be completed for almost a year.

On October 10 Russia responded by launching a massive air attack against civilian structures in Ukraine’s cities. Scores of cruise missiles and more than a dozen Iranian Shahed-136 “kamikaze” drones struck critical infrastructure facilities as well as residential buildings. Damage to Ukraine’s energy grid led to power outages across the country, but as Russia stepped up its campaign against Ukraine’s cities, Ukraine’s air defenses became more capable. By November Ukraine had acquired several National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) from the U.S. for use against Russian cruise missiles. Spain dispatched HAWK and Aspide anti-aircraft systems, while France sent Crotale air defense units. Germany transferred dozens of Gepard Flakpanzers (anti-aircraft tanks) to Ukraine. The Gepard’s twin 35-mm autocannons proved especially effective against Shahed-136 UAVs; Ukraine claimed that its air defenses had intercepted more than 500 of these drones in the last four months of 2022. The U.S. Humvee-mounted Avenger employed Stinger surface-to-air missiles to provide a highly mobile point defense for Ukraine’s oft-targeted critical infrastructure sites. By year’s end, Washington pledged to send highly sought Patriot missile systems to Ukraine, and Ukrainian crews began training on them in January 2023.

While Russia continued its bombing campaign against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, Ukrainian troops increased the pressure on the beleaguered Russian garrison in Kherson. In what was perhaps the most dramatic reversal of the war since the sinking of the Moskva, on November 9 the Kremlin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson. The loss of Kherson—the only Ukrainian regional capital to be seized by Russia during its invasion—was especially humiliating for Putin; just weeks earlier, after the illegal referendum, he had declared that the residents of Kherson would be “our citizens forever.” Days after Kherson was liberated, Zelensky visited the city, declaring that the Ukrainian victory there signaled “the beginning of the end of the war.” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov responded by repeating the claim that Kherson “is Russian territory.”

Operations on the ground slowed as winter set in, but Ukraine became increasingly bold with strikes deep behind the front lines. On December 5 Ukrainian forces attacked a pair of air bases in Russia with modified Soviet-era reconnaissance drones. The bases, located in Engels and Ryazan, were some 300 miles (480 km) from Ukrainian territory, and both hosted elements of the strategic bomber fleet that Russia had been using to target Ukraine’s infrastructure. Russia acknowledged that the strikes had damaged several bombers and killed three personnel, and the psychological effect of the attacks was enormous. Russia had long boasted about the strength of its air defense network, and its S-400 system was widely regarded as one of the most effective surface-to-air missile platforms currently in use. The fact that Ukraine had been able to strike at two of the most valuable military sites in Russia using adapted 20th-century technology served as an indictment of Russian defense priorities. Although Russian commanders claimed that they had strengthened air defenses around Engels, another Ukrainian drone attack on December 26 killed three more Russian personnel. The Kremlin claimed that Russian air defenses had intercepted the drone some distance from the airfield and that the casualties were caused by falling debris, but video evidence indicated that the drone had successfully struck the air base’s busy taxiway. In January 2023 Pantsir air defense systems began appearing on rooftops throughout Moscow, but a Russian official decried photographic evidence of the deployments as “fake.”

The Battle of Bakhmut and Prigozhin’s rebellion

Prigozhin’s Wagner forces intensified their focus on the city of Bakhmut in an effort to deliver some kind of victory for Moscow. For months poorly equipped Wagner convict troops conducted bloody human wave attacks while trying to encircle the city, but Ukrainian defenses held. In May 2023 the Ukrainians withdrew from the ruins of Bakhmut, and Prigozhin declared victory; it was estimated that Russian casualties in the battle exceeded 100,000, including more than 20,000 killed in action. Prigozhin himself confirmed that the latter figure was a low estimate, as at least 20,000 Wagner fighters had been killed in the Battle of Bakhmut, to say nothing of additional casualties among the regular Russian military. Still, it was Russia’s first battlefield success in nearly a year, and Prigozhin’s stock rose accordingly.

Infighting between Prigozhin and the Russian military establishment had begun during the siege of Bakhmut, when the Wagner chief accused defense officials of withholding supplies from his mercenaries. There were also several reported “friendly fire” incidents between Russian forces and Wagner troops in which both sides suffered casualties. Putin, for his part, did little to dampen the feud between Prigozhin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. The clash of personalities reached a dramatic climax in late June when Prigozhin “declared war” on the Russian defense ministry and crossed from Ukraine back into Russia at the head of an armored column composed of some 25,000 Wagner mercenaries.

On June 24 the Wagner force downed more than half a dozen Russian aircraft and proceeded to occupy the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov-on-Don. While Prigozhin remained in Rostov-on-Don, a column led by Dmitry Utkin, a former GRU and Spetsnaz (special forces of the Russian interior ministry) officer who had cofounded Wagner with Prigozhin, headed north, encountering no meaningful resistance as it passed through Voronezh before it finally halted just 120 miles (roughly 200 km) south of Moscow. Prigozhin then abruptly ordered his men to return to their positions in Ukraine, while Belarusian Pres. Alexander Lukashenko announced that he had brokered an agreement between Prigozhin and the Kremlin. In exchange for Wagner halting its mutiny, the mercenaries would be granted amnesty and offered military contracts; Prigozhin would live in exile in Belarus.

The fate of Prigozhin and Wagner seemed uncertain in the weeks following the failed mutiny. Russian state media reported that Prigozhin and Putin had met in Moscow in late June and that Putin had offered Wagner commanders “further options for employment and further combat use.” In July thousands of Wagner mercenaries relocated to Belarus, where they established a barracks at Tsel, on the site of a former Belarusian missile base. A video on the social media platform Telegram appeared to show Prigozhin welcoming his fighters to Belarus, but, after that post, the Wagner leader kept an unusually low profile. Prigozhin resurfaced in August when he posted a recruitment video, apparently filmed at a Wagner garrison in Africa, stating that Wagner was “making Russia even greater on all continents.”

On August 23, just days after the release of that video, Prigozhin’s business jet crashed north of Moscow. Wagner-affiliated social media channels immediately claimed that the aircraft had been downed by Russian air defenses. Both Prigozhin and Utkin were listed on the flight’s passenger list, and Russian authorities confirmed that the dead bodies of both men were among the 10 recovered from the crash site. Two days after Prigozhin’s presumed death, Putin issued a decree that compelled all Wagner fighters to swear an oath to Russia, effectively bringing the mercenary force under the umbrella of the regular Russian military.

Ukraine’s Western arsenal grows and Putin faces war crimes charges

Western support increased conspicuously in the early months of 2023, with the long-discussed transfer of armored vehicles finally gaining approval from several countries. In early January the United States pledged scores of M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), and the United Kingdom promised to deliver 14 Challenger 2 main battle tanks. Later that month, the U.S. Department of Defense confirmed that it would send to Ukraine the equivalent of an entire armored battalion of M1 Abrams tanks, and Germany concurrently announced that it would dispatch more than a dozen Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. Perhaps more significantly, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz approved the transfer of Leopards to Ukraine from other European countries (as the manufacturer of the tank, Germany held veto power over its reexport). A flurry of countries responded by pledging Leopards to Ukraine, and, by the end of January, more than 300 modern Western tanks had been promised to Kyiv. Although Russia had cautioned that these actions would dangerously escalate a conflict for which it bore sole responsibility, its response amounted to little more than heated rhetoric. On February 20, 2023, just days ahead of the war’s first anniversary, U.S. Pres. Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv, where he met with Zelensky and pledged additional security assistance to Ukraine.

Another of the Kremlin’s “red lines” was crossed in August 2023, when the U.S. authorized the transfer of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. More than a dozen countries pledged planes, instructors, and munitions under the program; many of the F-16s came from the Netherlands and Denmark, as these two countries had just transitioned to the F-35 as their primary air superiority platform. Although there was a significant delay associated with the training of Ukrainian pilots on the new aircraft, the F-16 represented a noteworthy upgrade to Ukraine’s Soviet-era air power capabilities. An F-16 with Ukrainian livery was unveiled in an interview with Voice of America in February 2024, indicating that the integration of the aircraft into Ukrainian service was proceeding as planned.

By the end of 2023, U.S. military aid to Ukraine had approached $50 billion, but another round of funding was blocked by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. Support for Ukraine among the American public had eroded as the war progressed, especially among Republicans, and the Donald Trump-led MAGA movement was broadly pro-Putin. The embrace of a Russian autocrat by the most conservative elements in American politics represented a dramatic reversal; for decades Ronald Reagan had been the lodestar of American conservatism, and his policies were credited with hastening the demise of the Soviet Union. Trump, conversely, was openly hostile to NATO, had praised Putin on numerous occasions, and in February 2024 said that he “would encourage [the Russians] to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members who did not meet the alliance’s defense spending target of 2 percent of GDP.

Ukraine’s domestic arms industry received a much-needed shakeup with the formal dissolution of Ukroboronprom in June. The state-owned defense conglomerate was replaced by Ukrainian Defense Industry (UDI), a joint stock company. Tapped to head the new concern was Herman Smetanin, a 31-year-old engineer who was tasked with battling corruption, boosting production of ammunition and FPV (first-person-view) drones, and bringing Ukraine’s defense industry into alignment with international corporate norms regarding efficiency and transparency. A key partner in Ukraine’s transformed military production and procurement sector was the German defense firm Rheinmetall, which entered into a joint venture with UDI in October. In addition to direct transfers of military hardware, Rheinmetall pledged to build manufacturing plants in Ukraine for the production of Fox armored transports and Lynx infantry fighting vehicles.

While there continued to be widespread support for Ukraine, Russia and its leaders were increasingly isolated. The U.S. and the EU strengthened their sanctions against Russian business owners and government officials, and Putin retaliated with an edict that effectively authorized the nationalization of any foreign company still operating in Russia. On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for war crimes related to the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied areas. The Ukrainian government confirmed that some 20,000 Ukrainian children had been abducted and unlawfully transferred to Russian territory, although it acknowledged that the true figure could be much higher. Putin’s international travel was sharply curtailed in the wake of the arrest warrant, and Moscow responded by issuing arrest warrants for several ICC judges and senior officials.

Surprisingly, given the strength of the sanctions regime and Moscow’s lack of access to foreign markets, Russia’s economy grew in 2023. This expansion was fueled by a massive increase in government expenditures that was funded by deficit spending and a steady devaluation of the ruble. Russia’s federal budget for 2024 showed a dramatic increase in military spending—up to 6 percent of GDP—a clear sign that Putin did not see an end to the fighting in the foreseeable future. Russia’s transition to a war economy led some international observers to question the policy’s sustainability; they also noted a historical parallel. International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva observed, “That is pretty much what the Soviet Union used to look like—high level of production, low level of consumption,” and that, although Russian GDP “looks like a good number, there is a bigger story behind [it] and it’s not a very good story.”

Russia also remained largely outcast from the international community. In August Putin was forced to attend a BRICS summit in South Africa via video conference due to his outstanding international arrest warrant. Russia’s bid to return to the UN Human Rights Council (it was suspended in April 2022) was frustrated in October, when its candidacy was overwhelmingly voted down in the General Assembly. Many international sporting federations also maintained their blanket bans on Russian athletes ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics, although the International Olympic Committee stated that it would allow Russians and Belarusians to compete as neutrals, without flags or anthems.

At year’s end Kyiv appeared poised to take the next step in a journey that began in the earliest days of the Ukraine crisis. In December 2023, almost exactly 10 years after the start of the Maidan protest movement that brought down the Yanukovych government, the EU officially opened accession talks with Ukraine. The event was celebrated in Brussels and Kyiv, and Zelensky hailed the news as “a victory for all of Europe.”

Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive and the destruction of Kakhovka Dam

There was much anticipation for Ukraine’s counteroffensive operations in 2023, but the front lines were largely unchanged by year’s end. The campaign in the Kherson theater was delayed when the Russians blew up Kakhovka Dam, a major hydroelectric station on the Dnipro River, on June 6. Over the following days, an ecological disaster unfolded as one of the largest reservoirs in Europe drained into the Dnipro basin, flooding some 240 square miles (620 square km) of territory, killing scores of people, and inundating dozens of towns. Up to 1 million people were left without drinking water, thousands were displaced, and tens of thousands of acres of agricultural land were adversely affected by floodwaters. Both Russian and Ukrainian troops were forced to withdraw from the banks of the Dnipro, and, as the waters receded, there was a scramble to reclaim strategic positions. In October Ukrainian marines and special forces units began carrying out probing attacks on the left (eastern) bank of the Dnipro, and, by November, they had secured a significant bridgehead near the village of Krynky.

In Zaporizhzhya, Ukrainian troops liberated the town of Robotyne in August, but dense Russian defenses checked the Ukrainian advance short of Tokmak, a strategic road and rail hub. Ammunition shortages threatened to erase those gains, however, and the Russians retook some of the territory around Robotyne in early 2024. In the Donbas, combat was centered on Avdiivka, an industrial city that was once home to 30,000 people, but months of combat reduced it to ruins. In October two full Russian field armies were tasked with capturing the city, and the Russian offensive was a virtual repeat of the Battle of Bakhmut. At least 13,000 Russian troops were killed or wounded in the first two months of the assault on Avdiivka, a city that was seen as a crucial stepping stone for any Ukrainian attempt to liberate the Donetsk region. Among the defenders of Avdiivka was Ukraine’s elite 47th Mechanized Brigade, a veteran unit fielding German Leopard 2 tanks and American M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. The Western-equipped armored force inflicted incredible losses on the Russian attackers with bold hit-and-run tactics, destroying more than 350 Russian tanks and some 700 armored vehicles. By early 2024, however, the Republican freeze on U.S. military aid had led to severe supply shortages in the Avdiivka sector, with artillery shells and ammunition for the Bradleys becoming dangerously scarce, and the Ukrainian position in Avdiivka appeared increasingly untenable.

On February 18 the Ukrainian army withdrew from the ruins of Avdiivka, an event that the Biden administration characterized as “the cost of congressional inaction.” During the Battle of Avdiivka, Russian casualties were estimated to have been about 17,000 killed and 30,000 wounded; in five months of combat against an enormously outnumbered Ukrainian force, Russian casualty totals exceeded those of the 10-year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

On February 8, 2024, Zelensky dismissed Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top military commander, as part of a “reboot” of the war effort. Zaluzhny remained immensely popular within the military and the Ukrainian public, but disagreements between the two men over the direction of the war had become fodder for headlines in the Ukrainian press. The dismissal had the potential to split Ukraine’s political and military elite into opposing camps, but Zelensky and Zaluzhny acted quickly to present the move as an amicable one, and the two were pictured smiling and shaking hands in Zelensky’s office. Zaluzhny’s replacement was Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, ground commander of the defense of Kyiv in the early days of the war and architect of the wildly successful Kharkiv counteroffensive in summer 2022. Syrsky also oversaw the costly defense of Bakhmut, a battle in which Ukraine suffered thousands of casualties for a city whose importance is far more symbolic than strategic.

Russian advances in the Donbas and Ukraine’s offensive in Kursk

Russia continued to make incremental advances in Donetsk throughout the spring, as Ukrainian defenders struggled with acute supply issues along the front lines. Especially pronounced was an imbalance in artillery capability, and Ukrainian officials estimated that the ammunition shortage had left them outgunned by a factor of 10 in some areas. In April 2024 a long-stalled $60 billion military aid package was approved by the U.S. Congress, but the delay allowed Russian forces to consolidate their gains in the Donbas and to reopen fighting in Kharkiv oblast.

An expected major Russian offensive in the spring or summer failed to materialize, however. A Russian assault on Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian logistics hub in Donestk oblast, ground on for months with minimal gains but at enormous cost; thousands of Russian troops were killed and more than 1,500 armored vehicles were destroyed in the attack. The Russians captured Vuhledar in early October after more than two years of fighting, but what followed was Russia’s deadliest month of the war thus far. An estimated 1,500 Russian troops were killed or wounded every day during October, but that failed to translate into any sizable territorial gains.

While Ukraine remained on the defensive in the Donbas and Kharkiv, a new front was opened on August 6 when several Ukrainian brigades crossed into Russia. Over subsequent days, these forces captured dozens of towns in Kursk oblast, with some 200,000 Russian civilians fleeing the fighting. Zelensky acknowledged that a major goal of the incursion was to disrupt the tempo of Russian operations on Ukrainian soil, and to this end the invasion was a success. Russian counteroffensive efforts were slow to develop, and in an effort to maintain troop strength on other fronts some 11,000 North Korean soldiers were dispatched to Kursk to assist the Russian war effort. North Korea maintained one of the largest standing armies on the planet, but its troops were lacking in combat experience, and this move signaled a deepening of military ties between Moscow and Pyongyang. Unsurprisingly, South Korean officials interpreted this development as a threat to their country’s security, and South Korean Pres. Yoon Suk-Yeol signaled that he would consider sending lethal aid to Ukraine in response.

In November, in an effort to bolster Ukrainian capabilities in Kursk, Biden lifted restrictions on the use of ATACMS, a U.S.-supplied tactical ballistic missile system, on Russian soil. The move came just weeks after the convincing victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election, and uncertainty swirled around the future of U.S. support for Ukraine. Many within Trump’s orbit opposed any additional involvement with Ukraine, and Trump himself had boasted that he would “have that war settled in one day,” a claim he made without providing any details. Working with the assumption that Ukraine policy would change significantly under the Trump administration, Biden’s Defense Department began a “surge” of security assistance to ensure that all congressionally authorized military assistance would be dispatched to Ukraine before Trump took office.

The war in the Black Sea

While the Ukrainian ground campaign struggled to gain momentum in 2023, Ukrainian naval operations in the Black Sea were startlingly successful. This was especially notable as the Ukrainian Navy had virtually ceased to exist after the Russian capture of Sevastopol in March 2014. The Ukrainian surface fleet consisted of a handful of small patrol boats and landing craft, but the use of unmanned surface drones by Ukrainian special forces units took a heavy toll on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. In addition, Ukrainian cruise missiles targeted docked ships as well as the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. One of the ships destroyed, the Kilo-class attack submarine Rostov-on-Don, represented the first combat loss of a Soviet or Russian submarine since World War II. So effective were these strikes that by October Russia had been forced to relocate a major portion of the Black Sea Fleet from Crimea to Novorossiysk.

This slowed but did not stop Ukraine’s naval campaign. In the space of two weeks in February 2024, Ukrainian naval drones sunk the Russian missile corvette Ivanovets and the large landing craft Caesar Kunikov off the coast of Crimea. Analysts estimated that Ukraine had knocked out roughly a third of the Black Sea Fleet, having destroyed 25 surface ships and one submarine, with more than a dozen more ships being damaged so severely that they were forced into port for repairs.

Asserting dominance over the western Black Sea had an obvious economic benefit. In July 2023 Russia had abandoned the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a UN-brokered deal that allowed Ukraine to export grain through a designated maritime humanitarian corridor. In September Ukraine responded by unilaterally declaring its own protected shipping route along the western shore of the Black Sea, hugging the coastlines of Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria. The waters along the route were too shallow for Russian submarines to operate, and Russian surface vessels were justifiably wary of Ukraine’s deadly fleet of naval drones. By 2024 cargo volumes at deepwater ports such as Odesa were approaching their pre-war levels, and the introduction of the shipping corridor meant that Ukraine was on pace to export all of the surplus grain that its farmers had harvested in 2023. This was a massive boon to Ukraine’s economy: it was forecast that the reopening of ports in the Odesa region would add 1.2 percent to Ukraine’s GDP.