NATO believes that Ukraine will have to wait until 2025 to be able to counterattack Russia.
A NATO official told the New York Times that Ukraine may have to wait another year before launching a new counterattack against Russia.
This week, at the NATO summit in Washington, members of the military alliance agreed to provide Ukraine with more than $40 billion in new military aid to counter Russia’s military campaign.
However, the new aid will take weeks or even months to reach the front lines, with much of the support being long-term, the New York Times said.
Thus, a senior US defense official told the New York Times that Ukraine would remain on the defensive for the next six months, while an unnamed senior NATO official told the news agency that the aid would allow Ukraine to begin counterattacking Russia by 2025.
Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive failed without much breakthrough. By early 2024, Ukraine was in dire straits after Republicans in Congress blocked a new aid bill, and Ukrainian forces began to run low on ammunition and other supplies.
During that time, Ukraine’s European allies struggled to make up the shortfall and Russia was able to gain more territory on the eastern front.
However, additional US aid in April allowed Ukraine to stave off Russian attacks.
Ukrainian officials frequently complain that Western aid arrives piecemeal and often too late to make a decisive difference on the battlefield.
The US has also placed strict limits on how Ukraine can use certain weapons, banning Ukraine from using long-range missiles in strikes deep into Russian territory.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the NATO summit, called on the US to lift the restrictions.
Meanwhile, Western weapons that were highly effective in the Ukrainian offensive that drove the Russian military back in 2022, such as long-range GPS-guided missiles, are now significantly less effective due to improvements in Russian electronic warfare.
