KYIV, Ukraine (news agencies) — After almost 30 months of war with Russia, Ukraine’s difficulties on the battlefield are mounting even as its vital support from the United States is increasingly at the mercy of changing political winds.
A six-month delay in military assistance from the U.S., the biggest single contributor to Ukraine, opened the door for the Kremlin’s forces to push on the front line. Ukrainian troops are now fighting to check the slow but gradual gains by Russia’s bigger and better-equipped army.
“The next two or three months are going to be probably the hardest this year for Ukraine,” military analyst Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment said in a recent podcast.
Lurking in the background is another nagging worry for Ukraine: how long will Western political and military support critical for its fight last?
On Monday, former President Donald Trump chose Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate for the Republican ticket in November’s U.S. election, and Vance wants the United States to attend to its own problems — not necessarily a war thousands of miles away on a different continent, even though he has said Putin was wrong to invade.
That view dovetails with Trump’s own stance. Trump has claimed that if elected, he would end the conflict before Inauguration Day in January. He has declined to say how.
Meanwhile, Hungary’s pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — whose country holds the European Union’s rotating presidency — recently infuriated other EU leaders by holding rogue meetings with Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Europe’s biggest war since World War II has already cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides, including thousands of civilians. There is no sign of it ending any time soon.
And Putin wants to draw out the war in the hope of sapping Western willingness to send billions more dollars to Kyiv.
Here’s a look at Ukraine’s major challenges:
Russia holds 18% of Ukrainian territory, after defensive forces pushed it out of half of the area it seized following its full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank, said in May. In 2014, Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimea.
Russia hasn’t accomplished a major battlefield victory since taking the eastern stronghold of Avdiivka in February. But its forces are now pushing in border regions: Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine, Donetsk in the east and Zaporizhzhia in the south.
To buy time, Ukraine has employed an elastic defense strategy by ceding some territory to wear down Russian troops until Western supplies reach brigades. But, analysts warn, Russia will undoubtedly win a lengthy war of attrition, unless Ukraine can strike using an element of surprise.
Russia claimed Sunday its forces had taken control of the Donetsk village of Urozhaine, but Ukrainian officials said there was still fighting there. Moscow’s army is aiming to take the nearby strategic hilltop city of Chasiv Yar, which could allow it to drive deeper into Donetsk.
Ukraine’s forces are largely holding back the Russian push around northeastern Kharkiv city, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank. The Kremlin’s troops have been trying to get within artillery range of the city and create a buffer zone in the region to prevent Ukrainian cross-border attacks.
Meanwhile, Russia is firing missiles into rear areas, hitting civilian infrastructure. Last week it conducted a massive aerial attack that killed 31 civilians and struck Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital in Kyiv.
Crippling Ukraine’s electricity supply has been a key goal of Russia’s relentless long-range missile and drone attacks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the bombardment has destroyed 80% of Ukraine’s thermal power and one-third of its hydroelectric power.
A hard winter likely lies ahead for Ukraine, analysts say.
Ukraine is such a large country that massive air defenses would be needed to protect it all. The country needs 25 Patriot air defense systems to fully defend its airspace, Zelenskyy said Monday.
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