US sees 'war of attrition' in Ukraine

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has turned into a war of attrition with potential for further escalation as Moscow is failing to achieve its military objectives, senior US intelligence officials said today.

The US intelligence assessment of a prolonged war is guiding President Joe Biden's administration in providing increasingly large amounts of military and economic aid to Kyiv andinits push for its European allies to gradually cut oil and natural gas imports from Russia. The Biden administration is also more explicitly tying potential relief from US sanctions targeting the Russian economy and energy sector to Kyiv's achieving its military objective of pushing Russian forces out of all Ukrainian territory.

"As both Russia and Ukraine believe they can continue to make progress militarily, we do not see a viable negotiating path forward, at least in the short term," national intelligence director Avril Haines told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The US intelligence community, which ahead of the Russian invasion made an unusual decision to publicize its assessments showing the Russian preparations for war, continues to believe that Moscow's objective remains to establish a friendly government in Kyiv despite initial setbacks, Haines said. "We assess that (Russian president Vladimir) Putin is preparing for a prolonged conflict in Ukraine during which he still intends to achieve goals beyond the Donbas" region in eastern Ukraine, she said. Most fighting in recent weeks took place in the eastern Donbas region, where the Russian forces have been unsuccessfully working to encircle and defeat the Ukrainian forces positioned along a line of contact predating the war.

"The Russians are not winning and the Ukrainians are not winning — we are at a bit of a stalemate here," Defense Intelligence Agency director, Lt General Scott Berrier, said. "It is attrition warfare."

Haines acknowledged that the US before the war did not expect the Ukrainian resistance to be so effective. The new perception of Ukraine's capabilities has led the Biden administration to provide advanced equipment and ammunition in what US officials describe as an effort to weaken Russia and to strengthen Kyiv's hand in future peace settlement talks. The US administration at the same time is nudging the EU to move faster to ban energy imports from Russia — "the timeline associated with lessening global dependence on Russian oil (should be) as soon as possible," the State Department said.

Dangerous path to escalation

Both Haines and Berrier said they expected Moscow to attempt to break the military stalemate — or escalate to reach its objectives by other means, such as announcing a general mobilization or placing the economy on a war footing.

"The uncertain nature of the battle, which is developing into a war of attrition, combined with the reality that Putin faces a mismatch between his ambitions and Russia's current conventional military capabilities, likely means the next few months could see us moving along a more unpredictable and potentially escalatory trajectory," Haines said.

Some of the potential measures Russia could undertake in the near future could include "increasing Russian attempts to interdict western security assistance, retaliation for western economic sanctions or (dealing with perceived) threats to the regime at home," she said.

Moscow has promised to target convoys delivering weapons and military equipment supplied to Ukraine and has even claimed to have struck some already.

Nuclear option

Putin and his senior military and national security advisers have also hinted at or threatened to deploy nuclear weapons in case of direct NATO involvement in the conflict. The US intelligence community expects such threats to continue, likely in the form of "authorizing another large nuclear exercise involving a major dispersal of mobile intercontinental missiles, heavy bombers, strategic submarines," Haines said.

The US takes the threat seriously but assesses that "there is not a sort of a imminent potential for Putin to use nuclear weapons," she said. The US intelligence community believes that a possible red line for Putin could be "in the event that he perceives that he is losing the war in Ukraine, and that NATO in effect is sort of either intervening or about to intervene in that context," Haines said.

"But there are a lot of things that he would do in the context of escalation before he would get to nuclear weapons," she said. "Also that he would be likely to engage in some signaling beyond what he has done thus far before doing so."

By Haik Gugarats