Where Will Ukraine's Counteroffensive Happen?

• Ukraine is planning a spring counteroffensive, leaving Russian military bloggers and talking heads guessing as to its location.
• Tens of thousands of Russian troops are thought to have been killed in recent fighting in the Donetsk Oblast for little gain.
• Observers are speculating that Ukraine may look to break out in the south around Zaporizhzhia or seek to recapture parts of the eastern Donbas region.

With Moscow's attritional eastern offensive reportedly nearing culmination, attention is again turning to Ukraine's planned spring counteroffensive, which Kyiv and its foreign partners hope will collapse Russian lines and liberate another significant chunk of occupied territory.

Russia's grinding attacks in the Bakhmut area of the Donetsk Oblast—and in the last week also around the town of Avdiivka—have achieved limited success at high cost. Western officials believe tens of thousands of Russian troops have been killed in recent fighting in the area, with Wagner Group mercenaries and regular units almost surrounding, but not seizing control of Bakhmut, despite inflicting suspected heavy Ukrainian losses.

"Russian forces may or may not be able to drive Ukrainian troops out of Avdiivka or Bakhmut, but they will gain no significant operational advantage from doing either because they lack the ability to exploit such advances," the Institute for the Study of War said on Sunday.

"The Russian milblogger space and Russian, Ukrainian, and Western media are full of discussions of the upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive, about which the only real questions appear to be when and where it will occur," the ISW update added.

Recent reports in Russian media have hinted at frayed nerves. The state-run TASS news agency on Monday cited Vladimir Rogov—the chairman of the collaborationist "We Are Together with Russia" movement in the occupied southern Ukrainian regions—saying Kyiv had amassed some 75,000 troops on the Zaporizhzhia front in the south of the country.

And last week, another Tass report suggested a growing concentration of Ukrainian artillery on the eastern Donbas front, where Ukraine may also look to launch its counterpunch after months of defending against Russian attacks.

Russian oligarch-turned-warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin has even warned that Ukrainian forces might be seeking to counterattack around Bakhmut, where Wagner and Russian forces have ground to a near-halt.

Information Warfare

Oleg Ignatov, Crisis Group's senior analyst for Russia, told Newsweek that Moscow's demonstrably lacking insight into Ukrainian planning has sown seeds of doubt throughout the national security and military spheres.

"They are very worried," Ignatov said. "They've always had bad intelligence about Ukraine. I think they don't have a clear understanding of how many resources the Ukrainians do have right now," he added, noting that Ukrainian troops have been training across Europe, far from Russian eyes.

"I don't think that military intelligence is really their strong point," Ignatov said.

The lack of battlefield success and a new round of mobilization orders suggests something is not going to plan, Ignatov added. "They understand that the military operation in winter failed," he said.

"They are at the stage of exhaustion, and they understand that if the work continues, they will constantly need more and more soldiers on the ground."

Mark Voyger—a former special adviser for Russian and Eurasian affairs to then-commander of the U.S. Army Europe General Ben Hodges—told Newsweek the Kremlin might already be preparing Russians for bad news.

"My impression is that they're prepping the population for some sort of defensive operation with the intent, probably, to try to freeze the conflict on their end, and until they can amass those hundreds of thousands of new recruits and reconstitute, probably toward the end of the summer," he said.

Ukrainian leaders are closely guarding their intentions, though have made clear that a spring counteroffensive is in the offing; likely supported by the new glut of Western main battle tanks and other armored vehicles arriving in the country.

The Ukrainian military command has proved adept at masking its intentions. Last September, the long-awaited and much-vaunted Ukrainian push towards Kherson—eventually liberated in November—in the south was upstaged by a surprise drive in the northeastern Kharkiv region, which collapsed Russian lines and sent Moscow's unprepared units there fleeing for their lives.

"I expect them to replicate a similar disinformation operation," said Voyger—now a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Analysis and professor at the American University of Kyiv. "They will have to replicate successfully what they did in the fall; this is critical."

But so much expectation and discussion of the planned offensive means this will be difficult. "These days it's difficult to make people shut their mouths," Voyger added. "At the same time, maybe this saturation of this information space with so much comment, conjecture, and analysis, also creates a 'white noise,'" which may help Kyiv hide its plans and throw the Russians off balance.

South or East

Russian units have had several months to prepare for the next Ukrainian attack and have been steadily constructing fortifications on occupied territory and trying to integrate some of the hundreds of thousands of Moscow's mobilized reserves.

In the Donbas, Russian units and their locally sourced collaborators have spent eight years fortifying parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts after their seizure in fighting since 2014. On both sides of the front line, the area is pockmarked with hill-top fortresses and scarred by rows of defensive lines.

A Ukrainian offensive in this area would be risky, though perhaps less so if the Russian units there have been sufficiently degraded by the fighting in hotspots like Bakhmut, Kreminna, Avdiivka and Svatove.

"If the Ukrainians tried to launch a major offensive in that area, I would imagine the defensive lines there are more substantial than those in the south," Voyger said.

In the south, successful attacks from either Kherson or Zaporizhzhia—or both—would imperil Crimea, threatening the land bridge from the occupied peninsula to the western Russian border via occupied and devastated Mariupol. Melitopol, which sits south of the Zaporizhzhia front line, would be a key goal for any Ukrainian offensive in the area.

The flatter territory in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts would be better suited for the Ukrainian tanks that have played a relatively limited role in the battles around Bakhmut, which have been dominated by artillery and various types of infantry. These will likely be augmented with Western tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.

Though Russian units there have been preparing defensives, they have only had a short time to do so when compared with their compatriots in the east.

"Maybe a dynamic stalemate in Donbas works for both sides, while the Ukrainians are preparing a strike in those two general areas; either Melitopol or in the southwest," Voyger said.

Kyiv is keeping its cards close to the chest, though it appears Ukrainian commanders have decided to wait to launch their counteroffensive until new Western weapons and NATO-trained troops are ready to fight.

Alex Kokcharov, a U.K.-based risk analyst specializing in Russia and Ukraine, told Newsweek that deep strikes against Russian logistics networks will be an indication of when and where the counteroffensive might fall. "This is what we observed back in September last year in the Kharkiv counteroffensive, and then in October-November in the south for the Kherson," he said.

There are no easy options for the Ukrainians, Kokcharov said. Sallying forth from Kherson across the Dnieper River, or attacking towards Enerhodar across the Kakhovka Reservoir, would be "very high-risk operations," he said. "I'm also skeptical that the Ukrainians would try to conduct counteroffensives in heavily urbanized areas in Donetsk, Horlivka, or Bakhmut because this would be very costly urban warfare."

The northern part of Luhansk Oblast is less populated and flatter, making it more suitable for mechanized fighting. But, Kokcharov said, even success there would create a vulnerable Ukrainian salient between Russian-occupied Donetsk to the south and Russia proper to the north and east.

A southern drive from Zaporizhzhia towards Melitopol and the Sea of Azov coastline appears the most suitable. "That would cut the Russian forces in Ukraine into two groups, one in the east and the south," Kokcharov explained.

"The one in the south would become much more vulnerable in terms of supply lines because the only supply line available would be via the Crimean bridge. So, if it gets damaged again, that would be a problem. But Russians are fully aware about that."

Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry by email to request comment.

3/27/23 10:35 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include comment from Alex Kokcharov.