Ukraine in a bind as Russia moves into Dnipropetrovsk

The Russian Ministry of Defense announced on Sunday (June 8) that its forces had entered Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Region, which Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed is part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s buffer zone plan.

This was foreseen as early as late August once the Battle of Pokrovsk began, but has been achieved even without capturing that strategic fortress town. Russian forces simply went around it after breaking through the southern Donbass front. This development puts Ukraine in a dilemma.

It will now have to simultaneously fortify the Dnipropetrovsk front together with the northern Kharkov and southern Zaporozhye ones to guard against Russia using its new position to launch offensives into any of those three.

This could put serious strain on the Ukrainian Armed Forces as they are already struggling to prevent a major breakthrough in the Sumy Region from Kursk. Coupled with a depletion of manpower and questions about continued US military-intelligence aid, this might be enough to collapse the frontlines.

To be sure, that scenario has been bandied about many times since the invasion, but it now appears closer than ever. Observers also shouldn’t forget that Putin told his US counterpart Donald Trump that he would respond to Ukraine’s strategic drone strikes on Russia’s strategic nuclear forces earlier this month, which could combine with the abovementioned two factors to achieve this long-desired breakthrough.

Of course, the retaliation might just be a symbolic demonstration of force, but it could also be something more significant. Ukraine’s best chance of preventing this is for the US to either get Russia to agree to freeze the frontlines or to go on another offensive.

A frontline freeze could be achieved through a carrot-and-stick approach, proposing a better resource-centric strategic partnership in exchange for the US imposing crippling secondary sanctions on Russia’s energy clients (specifically China and India, with likely waivers for the EU). Alternatively, the US could double down on military-intelligence aid if Russia still refuses.

As for launching a new offensive, the 120,000 troops that Ukraine has assembled along the Belarusian border, according to President Alexander Lukashenko last summer, could either cross that frontier and/or one of Russia’s internationally recognized frontiers.

However, both possibilities stand only a slim chance of success: Russia has made it clear that it must achieve more of its goals in the conflict before agreeing to any ceasefire, while its success in pushing Ukraine out of Kursk bodes ill for other invasions.

The likelihood of Ukraine cutting its losses by agreeing to more of Russia’s demands for peace is nil. Therefore, it might inevitably opt, whether in lieu of the scenarios mentioned above or in parallel with one or both of them, to intensify its “unconventional operations” against Russia.

These refer to assassinations, strategic drone strikes and terrorism. All that will do, however, is provoke more (probably outsized) conventional retaliation from Russia and thus more pain on a Ukraine already poised for defeat.

With an eye toward the endgame, it appears as though an inflection point has or is about to be reached in the sense of irreversibly shifting the military-strategic dynamics in Russia’s favor.

It’s very difficult to imagine how Ukraine can extricate itself from this dilemma, although the conflict has already surprised observers on both sides before, so it cannot be entirely ruled out. But it’s a far-fetched scenario while Ukraine’s defeat increasingly seems imminent.

This article was first published on Andrew Korybko’s Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become an Andrew Korybko Newsletter subscriber here.