The slow pace of the counteroffensive accentuates the war weariness of the Ukrainians and their supporters, who expected quick victories. Kyiv, forced to adapt its speech to the realities on the ground.
From plans to liberate Crimea to warnings about the difficulty of a counteroffensive: how Kyiv’s discourse has changed
Expectations of a Ukrainian counter-offensive that would have decisively turned the war in Kyiv's favor started in the fall of 2022, after the victories scored by the Ukrainian troops in the rapid counter-offensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions. The Russian winter offensive and the Battle of Bakhmut had shifted the focus to repulsing the enemy, but with the arrival of spring it looked like the assault of Ukrainian forces was imminent.
The impassable terrain, but also the slowness of deliveries of heavy weapons, especially modern tanks, requested by Kyiv, led to repeated postponements. Kyiv’s forces were ready - or thought they were ready - only in June. Both the Ukrainian people and Kyiv’s supporters had high expectations, especially given the successes scored in the fall; compared to the counteroffensives of that time, now the Ukrainians also had high-performance Western equipment at their disposal. Before the launch of the counteroffensive, President Volodymyr Zelensky had even mentioned the possibility of liberating the Crimean Peninsula . It is true, however, that the same Zelensky also tried to temper the expectations regarding the counteroffensive, saying that its success depended on the armament and support provided by Ukraine’s partners. The Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Oleksii Reznikov, also went along this line of lowered expectations, stating that the counteroffensive would not be a final battle, but possibly one of the last in this war, tempering Ukrainian expectations.
Such messages were relatively isolated, the dominant feeling being that of an imminent success of the Ukrainian army. However, losing the element of surprise and the fierce resistance of the Russians, who had months to strengthen their positions and set up multiple lines of defense, prevented the Ukrainians from making significant and rapid advances.
The realities on the ground forced Ukrainian officials to adjust their discourse. In late June, Ukrainian army chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi tried to temper Western expectations, telling the Washington Post that the counteroffensive was not "a show" but a real war. "Every meter is freed at the price of our blood," General Zaluzhnyi stressed. In the same interview, he voiced dissatisfaction with the delay in the delivery of modern fighter jets, without which none of Kyiv's allies would normally have launched any military operation to liberate the territories. Valerii Zaluzhnyi mentioned, for the first time, the pressures on the Ukrainian army for "a quick liberation" of the regions occupied by the Russian Federation.
In mid-July, the adviser to the President of Ukraine, Mykhailo Podolyak, said that the Ukrainian military was preparing for a long-term counteroffensive , a war that "will exhaust the enemy in time", admitting that the process of liberating the territories occupied by Russia was taking place much slower than Kyiv would have liked. The advisor to the President Volodymyr Zelensky explained that the Russians had mined the occupied territory, dug trenches and erected fortifications, and the West had not provided Ukraine with all types of weaponry that it had been insisting on getting in recent months. "It will be a difficult military operation, it will take a long time and it will require time," Mykhailo Podolyak said.
The slowness of the counteroffensive accentuates the war fatigue of Ukrainians and of Kyiv’s external partners
The role of the main vector of communication once again fell to President Volodymyr Zelensky, who told La Nation that the Ukrainian soldiers were tired, but the war initiative was still in the hands of Kyiv. Zelensky explained that there were a number of barriers to a quick and successful counter-offensive, adding that the Ukrainian army was not in retreat, but engaged in operations to recapture mined and well-defended territories from the Russians. "You can see fatigue in the eyes of the Ukrainian defenders, but fear in the eyes of the Russians. We have to be patient if we want to win," Zelensky said.
The Ukrainian president’s message, translated and distributed by the Kyiv media, was intended for both the internal and the external public, the urge being the same: patience. For Ukrainians, this patience means maintaining the support for the army, even if the counteroffensive is not to end quickly. For the West – not to rush Kyiv’s forces, which are fighting a much better equipped army.
Opinion polls show that Ukrainians' expectations of the counteroffensive have been going down since spring. According to a sociological study conducted in June, 16.3% of Ukrainians want the liberation of the territories occupied by Russia in 2022, 43.3% hope to see the liberation of at least part of these territories and only 9.6% believe in the return to the borders of 1991, which also means the recovery of Crimea and the entire Donbass. At the opposite pole, about 2% of Ukrainians believe that Russia will occupy even more territories.
The dropping expectations regarding the counter-offensive is also accompanied by another phenomenon, which may affect Ukraine's war effort more deeply: a kind of "collective disillusionment", a war fatigue which, for example, can be seen in increasingly less Ukrainians willing to volunteer to support the war effort from home, or in the attempts of an increasing number of men to avoid conscription - a phenomenon hard to imagine for those who remember those images from the beginning of the war in which thousands of Ukrainian men were lining up at recruitment centers to go fight the invading forces. According to Ukrainska Pravda , now pages and groups have appeared on social media posting information about the presence on the streets of representatives of the military commissariat. Some shops, neighborhoods or crossroads are bypassed by men of draft age to avoid running into the commissars. The men disappear on the very day they were supposed to report to the medical board. The border service informs weekly about attempts to reach EU states illegally and escape mobilization.
The slowness of the Ukrainian offensive has been noted in the West as well, where some started to see the Ukrainian operation as a failure. American officials have also started to publicly show their decreasing optimism regarding the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
In response, the Kyiv press has published a series of interviews with Ukrainian soldiers participating in the liberation operations. The NV media trust has analyzed critical information about the Ukrainian military (published in the Wall Street Journal or Bild), pointing out that the Ukrainian soldiers do not have time to write articles in the press because "they are involved in fighting every day, risking their lives." Pointing to the progress of the Ukrainian army in the southern direction, the analysts quoted by the Ukrainian publication claim that the West has no moral right to criticize Ukraine, as it has not provided Kyiv with the requested weapons.
The "territorial approach" of some Western journalists and experts has also been criticized, with emphasis on the fact that the fighting in southern Ukraine cannot be represented on the map every day. "On the front, there are fights not only for territory, but also for supplies. The Armed Forces continue to go on the offensive despite the enormous pressure on the Kupyansk-Limansk direction," NV writes, quoting a Ukrainian expert.
How pro-Kremlin propaganda uses the topic of the Ukrainian counteroffensive
The counter-offensive could not be absent from the information and propaganda war waged by Russia to mobilize its own population in support of the war, but also to demoralize the Ukrainians and undermine Western support for Kyiv.
Russian state media have used statements made by Ukrainian and Western leaders, as well as press articles, to convince the public that the targets of the so-called “special military operation” can be achieved.
Russian television stations have broadcast a series of programs about the destroyed Western tanks, while experts in Moscow commented that the entire counteroffensive was planned by the US, and Ukraine’s failure is a great embarrassment for President Joe Biden. Russian officials have announced that the Ukrainians are suffering colossal losses, occasionally citing Western sources who have expressed discontent with the actions of the Ukrainian military.
There’ve also been the usual references to Nazism and the Great War for the Defense of the Fatherland, which play such an important role in Russian propaganda: the Ukrainian counter-offensive has been compared to the Nazi one in World War II. Analyzing the failure of Nazi Germany during the Battle of Kursk, RIA Novosti wrote that history repeats itself. "The current counter-offensive has no logic, and we do them [Ukrainians] too big a favor by comparing them with the defeats and thoughtless decisions of the representatives of the Third Reich, despite the crimes they committed."
Finally, the Ukrainian counter-offensive has also been used in fake news produced in Russia, some of which have been dismantled by Veridica as well - for example the one according to which there are no burial places left for the Ukrainian soldiers killed by Russia, or the one about a demonstration calling for the establishment of a National Military Memorial for those killed, as a protest against the war and the Kyiv authorities.
The Ukrainian counter-offensive continues, so it cannot be called a failure
The results of the counter-offensive so far – disheartening for those who expected spectacular progress, such as those in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions in the fall of 2022 – have put Kyiv’s communicators in a difficult position. On the one hand, they must keep the morale of the population and soldiers as high as possible, but also the confidence of the Western partners regarding the fighting capacity of the Ukrainian forces; a loss of trust would call into question the efficiency and usefulness of the aid they provide to Ukraine.
On the other hand, communicators must provide explanations for the slowness of progress on the front, which is by no means easy. Simply admitting to difficulties can be discouraging and, moreover, leads to questions about who bears responsibility for the situation. The military commanders who didn't plan things well enough? The assault forces, unable to beat the Russians? The Western partners, who did not provide (or did not provide on time) the weapons that were needed? Neither option is satisfactory. Blaming the army and its commanders would dynamite all the confidence they had built up by being able to withstand much superior Russian forces and, moreover, defeat them in a series of battles (Kyiv, Kharkov, Kherson). Blaming the West risks irritating the very people whose support Ukraine needs in order to be able to keep fighting. Last but not least, Kyiv also knows that, in their information and propaganda war, the Russians are ready to exploit – amplifying, interpreting, taking out of context, etc. – any statement, any fissure, any development on the ground.
Beyond all these aspects, the reality is that, for now, the Ukrainian counter-offensive continues. It is true that, at this point, the liberation of Crimea seems utopian, and even breaking through to the coast of the Sea of Azov, before bad weather stops the Ukrainians, seems an increasingly difficult goal to achieve. But Ukrainian sources and even Russian military bloggers continue to regularly report little progress by Kyiv’s forces. The strategy of the Ukrainian forces has been adapted to the realities on the ground. Finally, information coming from the front suggests that Kyiv has so far held in reserve a large proportion of Western-supplied heavy tanks and armored personnel carriers, as well as some of the military trained by them – meaning that the force that was supposed to destabilize the Russian lines still exists.
Ukraine has not achieved a decisive victory in the two months since it launched the counter-offensive. But it hasn’t been defeated either.
