If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In February 2023, Ukraine started hyping its spring counteroffensive. High-budget commercials were produced for it. The NAFO online brigade, fresh off ignoring Zelensky’s plea for them to leave their desks and join the fight in reality, were giddy with excitement to live vicariously through what was sure to be the Ukrainian army’s unstoppable string of victories.
“To the Azov Sea!” They proclaimed. “And then Crimea and then Moscow!” They would type out, often in all CAPS when feeling particularly worked up.
“It all started there, and it will end there, with the return of Crimea,” the head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, Major General Kyrylo Budanov claimed in March 2023 while hyping the counteroffensive.
The spring counteroffensive was continually delayed and after a few failed attacks that Ukraine assured us definitely were not the counteroffensive, the newly named summer counteroffensive launched in June.
Hundreds of Western-made tanks and armored personnel carriers rushed to the front lines across the battlefield, opening multiple fronts, including outside of Rabotino, Staromlinovka and Artemovsk. It did not go how Zelensky or NATO envisioned.
Months later, after only gaining a few small villages and fewer square miles of land than Russia did during the same period, even Western media had to admit that the Ukrainian counteroffensive had failed completely to meet its goals. Worse, Western countries were embarrassed. Their hyped modern weapons were destroyed in droves, with 789 tanks and 2,400 other armored vehicles left as flaming husks. Fields outside of Rabotino were nicknamed “Bradley Square” after the number of US-made Bradley Fighting Vehicles that were destroyed there, although it was also the final resting place of numerous German-made Leopard 1 and 2 tanks. Wrecked and twisted metal, they now serve as monuments to the West’s failure.
Before it even ended, NATO’s veneer of invincibility was wiped away, with its weapons and tactics completely defeated by Russian forces. Ultimately, 166,000 Ukrainian soldiers were dead or seriously injured, never to return to the battlefield. Since then, Russia has taken back most of the meager gains Ukrainian forces made and has taken the conflict’s largest prize since Artemovsk: Avdeyevka.
With Russia on the march and hitting targets across Ukraine with little to no resistance from what's left of Zelensky’s air defenses, it is easy to dismiss the comedian-president’s ramblings as a desperate attempt to boost morale. He needs to present a plan for victory to justify his decision to sacrifice an even broader swath of Ukraine’s youth, already a precious commodity after a massive drop in Ukraine’s birthrate in the 1990s, by lowering the country’s conscription age. This 2025 counteroffensive is seemingly the best he could come up with.
Already, videos are leaked on a near daily basis of Ukrainians attempting to avoid the meat grinder by running from or fighting conscription officers. Most of the time, they are pulled into vans and presumably sent to the new meat grinders in Chasov Yar, Netailovo, or The Russian romanized spelling for the town of Novomikhaylovka. A few lucky ones escape, typically when the Ukrainian townspeople turn on the conscription officers and defend their men from being sent to an almost certain death.
That is only going to increase as Zelensky’s goons start taking ever-younger Ukrainian sons off the streets. How many Ukrainian mothers, having just grieved the loss of her eldest son, will stand by as they take her second or third son in the same manner and for the same lost cause?
Though it was only just announced, it is already apparent the hype around Zelensky’s latest counteroffensive will not materialize. Not even the NAFO keyboard warriors seem able to get excited for it. No commercials have been made yet, but they are unlikely to be taken seriously if they are. If anything, they would come off as a brazen waste of resources. Ukraine’s cities are in darkness, who cares about a commercial?
On Tuesday, Zelensky criticized German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for not handing over his country’s Taurus long-range missiles, seemingly pegging it as one of the “more advanced Western weapons” he says he needs. But even if Scholz acquiesces, the Taurus won’t make the 2025 counteroffensive a success, just as the Bradley, Leopards, Abrams, HIMARS and ATACMs failed to turn the tide.
What Zelensky really needs, and wants, is more men to put between himself and the advancing Russian army. He doesn’t need Taurus missiles for that. He just needs more money to pay conscription officers and more transit vans to kidnap Ukrainian men with. And that, at least, is a price Western leaders are likely willing to pay.