Ukraine missed the chance to win the war in 2022 because of the hesitancy of its Western partners, a recently published fragment from a book by The Wall Street Journal correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov argues. Meanwhile, CNN reports on the operation of Ukrainian missile defenses against massive Russian attacks.
Reuters investigates the abduction of Ukrainian children by the invaders, and the BBC analyzes the likelihood of Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, becoming a Republican presidential nominee instead of Donald Trump.
offers a digest of Western mass media at the end of the January 8–12, 2024, business week.
The missed chance: How allies prevented Ukraine from winning
The Washington Post published a fragment from "Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence," a book by The Wall Street Journal correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov.In the fragment, the author tells that in February 2022, no one in Washington, and in most European capitals expected Ukraine to survive the Russian invasion.
Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson offered President Volodymyr Zelenskyi to set up a Ukrainian government-in-exile in London.
Zelenskyi asked for weapons instead. Just before the invasion, the United States and the United Kingdom delivered Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, but those were weapons best suited for a guerrilla campaign, not a conventional war.
Out of all European countries, only Poland didn’t despair, the author claims, citing Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. He attended Poland’s national security council meeting on February 24, the day of the invasion. Immediately, Poland sent several truckloads of ammunition and heavy weapons.
Restrained aid from the West
By failing to seize Kyiv in March, Putin had already suffered a strategic military defeat in Ukraine, Zelensky believed. Ukrainian officials kept telling their American interlocutors that Russia had already used all its weapons except the nuclear bomb on Ukraine, so there was no sense to fear an escalation. The United States, however, kept taking Putin’s nuclear threats seriously.
During the planning of the 2022 offensive campaign, Zelenskyi and General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, advocated for a push to the Sea of Azov in the Zaporizhzhia region that, if successful, would sever Russia’s "land bridge" to Crimea. According to Trofimov, Zaluzhnyi calculated that Ukraine needed about 90 additional howitzers and adequate ammunition to succeed.
Nevertheless, the United States rejected the request, as Americans were unsure of Ukraine’s capacity for large offensive operations. Without the necessary package of American weapons and ammunition, the offensive was limited to the Kharkiv and Kherson regions.
Volodymyr Zelenskyi in the U.S. Senate on December 21, 2022. The U.S. aid was already secured. Photo: Getty Images
How the U.S. was scared by Ukraine’s victory
In late September 2022, when Ukraine’s Defense Forces liberated the Kharkiv region in a sweeping advance, Putin delivered a speech, claiming that the occupied regions would henceforth become unalienable parts of Russia and making another nuclear threat. Ukraine called Putin’s nuclear bluff. In the following weeks, Kyiv pressed its offensive into areas that Moscow now considered Russian soil, taking the city of Lyman in Donetsk and then Kherson.
But in Washington, fears of a Russian nuclear escalation reached their highest point that week. According to U.S. intelligence estimates, Putin was likely to consider a nuclear strike under three scenarios:
- a major attack on Russia proper, especially with NATO involvement;
- the possibility of losing physical control over Crimea;
- a Ukrainian battlefield victory "that would completely and totally shatter the Russian military, such that the Russian state would sense an existential threat."
Therefore, the Biden administration tapered aid to Ukraine and reached out to Moscow to de-escalate. Without additional aid, the Ukrainian offensive ran out of steam.
All the hardware that Ukraine was begging for in 2022 — Leopard and Abrams tanks, Bradleys and Strykers, and Patriot batteries — was eventually provided the following year. However, the Russian army avoided a collapse, as nuclear blackmail bought it time to prepare for a new Ukrainian offensive.
Ukrainian air defense works "at the edge of its capacity"
A mobile air defense unit working at night
Russia began the new year with a barrage of air attacks that employed the full gamut of its aerial arsenal: cruise missiles, ballistic missiles from near the Russian-Ukrainian border, hypersonic missiles and slower drones, CNN reports. International analysts say the onslaught of Russian missiles, stockpiled for months, aims to overwhelm Ukraine’s limited missile defense.
According to the Ukrainian authorities, Ukraine only managed to shoot down 18 of the 51 missiles fired at the country on January 8. The terrorist country also employs new tactics.
Russians paint Iranian-made drones black, camouflaging them against the night sky, and have moved the engine exhausts on some drones from the rear to the front, in an effort to confuse anti-air batteries using thermal sights.
Ukrainian media also reported of jet-powered Shahed drones, which, according to Ukrainian air force command spokesperson Yurii Ihnat, are harder to shoot down because of their much faster cruising speeds.
"They used to fly in a single trajectory, but now they zigzag. A drone can fly, then circle, hover, go down completely, then rise about half a kilometer, then fly sharply down. They are now very maneuverable and must be seen and destroyed," Sergeant Major Vitaliy Yasinsky of Ukraine’s Separate Presidential Brigade told CNN.
How the Ukrainian air defense system works today
He leads a mobile air defense unit armed with Soviet-designed heavy machine guns and hand-held Stinger anti-air missiles that dated from the Afghan mujahideen’s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Such teams are effective against slow-flying attack drones, while Western missile defense systems, like the American Patriot or German IRIS-T batteries, are best suited to deal with the fastest Russian missiles.
According to Melnyk, the Ukrainian air defense is working "at the edge of its capacity."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said on Wednesday, January 10, that his country was "sorely lacking" interceptor missile batteries, which Ukraine is currently unable to produce.
Journalists identified children abducted by Russia
Psychologists from Medical Teams International talking to children in a school in Vysokopillia, the Kherson region, on December 14, 2023. Photo: Getty Images
Last March, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, and her boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, on charges of illegally deporting children from Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities say Russia has removed more than 4,000 children who are orphaned or not in parental care.
Reuters reporters have spent six months investigating the fates of missing Ukrainian children. By interviewing dozens of witnesses to their deportations and reviewing social media and Russian news reports, Reuters has identified five teens from Kherson, who had been moved to occupied Henichesk.
Before that, the invaders kept the children in a camp in Crimea called "Druzhba," friendship in Russian, where they were forced to follow a strict schedule and punished for showing any allegiance to Ukraine.
What happened to orphans from Kherson
The journalists also traced 48 orphans aged five years or less from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home. They had been sheltered in the basement of a local Baptist church until the end of April 2022, but Russian soldiers eventually found them.
The invaders then ordered to return the toddlers to the orphanage. Of them, 46 are now kept in two orphanages and a sanatorium in Russian-held Crimea. Two other children are now in Russia. One is Illia Vashchenko, who was issued with a new Russian birth certificate.
Another is two-year-old Marharyta Prokopenko, who was adopted by Sergei Mironov, leader of a pro-Kremlin political party. Marharyta’s name has been changed to Marina Mironova.
Returning these children is an arduous task, volunteers and officials in Ukraine say. Almost all have been "brainwashed," said Mykola Kuleba, head of Save Ukraine, a nonprofit organization that helps to retrieve Ukrainian children from Russian-controlled territory.
Can Nikki Haley defeat Donald Trump?
Nikki Haley, a Republican presidential candidate, delivering a speech at the January 11 Iowa campaign rally. Photo: Getty Images
The popularity of Nikki Haley, a candidate for the Republican U.S. presidential nomination, is surging, although she is still far behind the front-runner, former President Donald Trump, the BBC argues. Unlike Trump, Haley favors continuing support for Ukraine.
In her speech delivered in Iowa this week the former South Carolina governor promised that her presidency would be a return to drama-free normality. At the the caucus, the first contest in the 2024 Republican race, she will compete with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for the second place. Meanwhile, polls suggest that Trump maintains a lead of around 30%.
Haley's allies insist that she becomes an alternative to Trump,for moderate Republican voters. Meanwhile, her critics argue that establishment-friendly conservatism favored by Haley no longer has wide support in the party.
How Nikki Haley can beat Donald Trump in the Republican primaries
Haley’s campaign aides hope that the Iowa vote will build momentum, which would carry her into New Hampshire, where polls with Trump are much tighter, and then on to South Carolina, her home state.
Polls suggest that Haley's measured approach could make her the most formidable opponent to President Joe Biden.
But she has to defeat Trump first. At least one-third of Republican primary voters are thought to be in the "always Trump" camp. Therefore, Haley needs to appeal to two very different groups of Republicans: the "never Trumpers" who despise the former president, as well as those who still like him but worry he will lose to Biden.
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