hankyoreh

(Left to right) Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council; Hanna Maliar, deputy minister of defense for Ukraine; and Mykhailo Podolyak, advisor to the Ukrainian president (Noh Ji-won/The Hankyoreh, courtesy of Podolyak)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began as a gauntlet thrown against the US-led liberal global order that has been in place since the Cold War, has entered a second year, defying initial projections.

What this drawn-out war has demonstrated to us is Ukrainians’ powerful will to resist and defend their homeland. But can Ukraine achieve final victory against Russia, a nuclear-armed state?

To answer that question while also gauging the progress of the war and gaining a view of what is to come, the Hankyoreh visited the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Jan. 2-3 and conducted a series of interviews with three key figures in the country’s leadership: Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council; Mykhailo Podolyak, advisor to the Ukrainian president; and Hanna Maliar, deputy minister of defense.

Those three figures predicted that Russia’s brutal air strikes would continue this year and said that the war can’t end until Ukraine has reclaimed all its territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, and until Russia has paid reparations for its war crimes. But there are several conditions that must be met for those hopes to become a reality: the West will have to keep providing military support, and Russia will have to refrain from using nuclear weapons.

The three Ukrainian officials acknowledged that the fighting in Bakhmut, a city in the eastern region of Donetsk, was “very difficult.” But they said that since the Russian military has been unable to break through the current deadlock, the Russian military is enduring a much higher casualty ratio.

“The current casualty ratio is one to seven — seven Russian soldiers are dying for every Ukrainian soldier,” Danilov emphasized.

“Russians tried to enter the city of Bakhmut and capture it, but in doing so they suffered great losses and did not manage to do so,” Maliar said.

Podolyak went into greater detail. “We’re effectively defending Bakhmut and have launched a counterattack in Kreminna,” he said.

The three officials all agreed that Ukraine’s goal is not returning to the status quo on Feb. 24 of last year, when Russia’s invasion began, but recovering all the territory possessed by Ukraine when it gained its independence from the Soviet Union in December 1991 — including the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in March 2014.

That shows that Ukraine’s ultimate goal in this war is to eliminate all the potential issues that could arise in its future relationship with Russia, which has become a major existential threat to the Ukrainian state, even if that requires major sacrifices for now. The officials emphasized that there is a national consensus on that point.

But it would seem that a complicated set of prerequisites must fall into place if Ukraine is to achieve that goal.

The key variable is continuing arms support from the West. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was visiting the US on Dec. 21, the US and major European countries agreed to provide Ukraine with Patriot anti-aircraft missiles and light tanks.

This military assistance is aimed at stiffening Ukrainians’ will to fight as they face a winter made even colder by Russian attacks on the power grid and other aspects of civilian infrastructure. A flurry of weapons aid has been announced since then, including Bradley fighting vehicles from the US, light tanks from France and Marder armored vehicles from Germany.

But it’s unclear whether the West will continue offering military aid until the Ukrainian forces reclaim the Feb. 24 border, not to mention Crimea.

Significantly, the US and other countries have not provided Ukraine with the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), which has a range of 300 km, or with heavy tanks such as the Abrams (US) or the Leopard (Germany).

When a Ukrainian reporter bluntly asked in a press conference following the US-Ukraine summit on Dec. 21 why the US was holding back on the ATACMS, which could help Ukraine quickly end the war, US President Joe Biden explained that such aid “would have a prospect of breaking up NATO.”

“They’re not looking to go to war with Russia — they’re not looking for a third World War,” he added.

“Without a doubt, we are going to receive all the support we need, in even larger quantities,” said Podolyak in an apparent attempt to dispel concerns about whether the West would continue to provide aid.

Danilov addressed calls for compromise. “They’ll be ashamed of themselves. There can be no compromise.”

The other variable is the Russian response. Several experts are concerned that if a Ukrainian push to retake the Crimean Peninsula makes Russian defeat inevitable, Russian President Vladimir Putin might resort to tactical nuclear weapons. That could even set off a third World War, just as Biden is afraid might happen.

Some also expect Russia to launch a major counteroffensive in February using 150,000 troops who haven’t been deployed to the front after being mobilized last September. To counter that, Ukraine will need to secure adequate troops.

But when the Hankyoreh visited Ukraine, there were disturbing signs that the country is running low on troops, with men in their 50s being ordered to report for military service.

Maliar seemed troubled by the same prospect. “Russia is counting on and is ready for prolonged war;” — in other words, a war of attrition — “if we want to finish this quickly, we need substantial military support.”

For such reasons, some media outlets and experts are outlining the depressing prospect of Ukraine ending up like Korea — a nation divided for decades to come.

That’s a prospect that Ukraine refuses to countenance.

“We will not have any 38th parallel,” said Danilov, who frankly described the armistice deal that ended the Korean War in July 1953 as a “mistake.”

Podolyak offered the optimistic prospect that Ukraine could achieve victory by the “summer of 2023.”

But the armistice in the Korean War 70 years ago was decided not by Seoul and Pyongyang, but by Washington, Beijing and Moscow. Even today, the harsh reality of the global order doesn’t seem to have changed fundamentally.

By Noh Ji-won, staff reporter

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