Lessons from Ukraine's Failed 2023 Counteroffensive

On June 8th, 2023, the western world watched Ukraine with bated breath. Kyiv had just launched its summer counteroffensive — a much-hyped attempt to smash through Russian lines and clear a path south to the coast. Armed with Western-supplied tanks, the Ukrainians appeared ready to do the impossible: to force Moscow into peace negotiations that would be favorable to Kyiv.

Sadly, “impossible” is exactly what the plan turned out to be. As August of 2023 got underway, there were already warning signs that something had gone wrong. Gains would be creeping, rather than sweeping. The dream of carving a line all the way down to the Sea of Azov was already fading.

Most people remember what happened next. Caught up in minefields, trapped without air support, and at the mercy of attack helicopters, Ukraine’s newly trained troops were devastated. By fall, the counteroffensive had petered out around Robotyne — a village that has since been retaken by Russia. The operation had, in every sense of the word, been a failure.

Why it failed has been the subject of endless speculation. Drawing on the most authoritative postmortem yet published — the Royal United Services Institute’s Preliminary Lessons from Ukraine’s Offensive Operations, 2022–23 — this analysis lays out the planning and preparation failures that doomed the offensive before it began: a hollowed-out force of experienced troops, a Western supply effort completely inconsistent with NATO doctrine, and an optimism bias that mistook one summer’s luck for a permanent Russian weakness.

A Plan Built for Speed, Not Reality

Conceived in September 2022 on the back of the successful Kharkiv counteroffensive — which had seen Russian lines crumble across a swathe of territory — the summer plan was built around nine armored brigades and a tight timetable. Three brigades would fix Moscow’s forces in the east. Three more would drive south and break through Russia’s defensive lines. Then another three would funnel through the breach to speedily attack the city of Tokmak.

With Tokmak in hand, the surviving forces would push south towards Melitopol. The largely unspoken hope was that they might even reach the sea. The opening phase — everything up to the capture of Tokmak — was supposed to take a mere seven days.

The reality was very different. Instead of taking Tokmak in a week, Ukraine’s forces stalled at Robotyne after months of fighting. The fixing action in the east around Bakhmut tied down far fewer Russian troops than required. And a separate attempt to cross the Dnipro River and establish a bridgehead at the village of Krynky turned into a bloodbath — one that, according to recent reporting from the independent Ukrainian outlet Slidstvo, killed vast numbers of men on both sides without accomplishing very much.

The Maths That Did Not Add Up

From the perspective of the planners, the failure was initially hard to explain. As former overall commander General Zaluzhny told The Economist with some irony: “If you look at NATO’s textbooks and at the maths which we did, four months should have been enough time for us to have reached Crimea, to have fought in Crimea, to return from Crimea and to have gone back in and out again.”

Those same textbooks envisaged an army of Ukraine’s standard “mov[ing] at a speed of 30km a day as it breached Russian lines.” When the real advance bogged down within weeks, it was clear something fundamental was wrong.

RUSI cautions against single-cause explanations, but it returns repeatedly to one issue above all others on the Ukrainian side: a lack of experienced troops. That shortage was not a tactical accident. It was the accumulated price of a brutal first year of war, compounded by two costly decisions and a supply effort that never matched the scale of the task.

The Hidden Cost of 2022

It has been somewhat lost under the narrative that 2022 was a disaster for Russia, but the first year of full-scale war produced staggering casualties among Kyiv’s forces. According to RUSI, “over the course of 2022, the AFU had taken approximately 30,000 killed and missing and a significant number of wounded.”

For a modern European army, 30,000 dead or missing is an astronomical figure. The entire British Army, by comparison, currently has a little over 73,000 active-duty soldiers. Those losses bought halting the initial invasion and liberating both Kherson city and swathes of Kharkiv Oblast — but they meant 2023 began with Ukraine lacking many of its best-trained troops. As RUSI notes, “many of these losses were concentrated among Ukraine’s professional military brigades, which had been on the frontline continuously since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.”

This was not a problem unique to Ukraine. Russia entered 2023 throwing freshly mobilized men and prisoners onto the frontlines with almost no training, having lost many of its own elite units in the chaotic first weeks of the war. The difference was what each side did next — and where each chose to spend the soldiers it had left.

Bakhmut: A Stand That Bled the Wrong Side

Kyiv then made a decision that would rob it of even more professional soldiers, in what became the bloodiest battle fought on European soil since the Second World War: Bakhmut. Fought from fall 2022 until May of 2023, the battle utterly destroyed the small Donbas city, produced some of the highest casualties of the war, and even helped trigger Wagner’s aborted rebellion that summer.

Less well remembered is the strategic fear behind it. Ukraine worried that letting Russia take Bakhmut would allow Moscow’s forces to drive onto Chasiv Yar — a strategic hilltop town from which Russia would have gained fire control over critical ground lines of communication. So the decision was taken to hold Bakhmut at all costs: to drag the Russian war machine into grueling urban combat and chew up its forces.

In narrow terms, Ukraine succeeded. According to figures Prigozhin gave in May 2023, some 20,000 Wagner fighters were killed in Bakhmut; a joint investigation by the BBC and Mediazona later placed the true figure at 19,547 dead, with a similar number wounded. Against Ukraine’s 10,000 dead and wounded in the same battle, that is a ratio of four Russians lost for every Ukrainian taken off the board.

Why a Favorable Kill Ratio Was Still a Bad Trade

It was not a fair trade. Fighting on through to February — when Russia captured the high ground and brought its artillery to bear — likely killed enough Wagnerites to be worth it. After that point, things sharply dipped. As RUSI puts it: “88% of Wagner losses were of mobilized convicts. Thus, while Ukraine was losing experienced personnel, Russia was expending what it considered disposable untrained troops.”

Bakhmut therefore did double damage. It tied up some of Ukraine’s best troops, making them unavailable for the counteroffensive, and it killed a great many of them. By making a stand where they did, the Ukrainians robbed themselves of yet more desperately needed veterans. The point is not new — as far back as February 2023, analysts like Michael Kofman were noting that the high Russian death count obscured the fact that Kyiv was making a bad trade.

War, in the end, is not simply about who kills more of the enemy. If it were, the United States would have won the Vietnam War by a country mile. A favorable exchange rate against disposable convicts is worth little if the cost is paid in the irreplaceable professionals an offensive depends on.

The Mobilization Ukraine Never Ordered

Arguably, the bigger manpower mistake had nothing to do with Bakhmut. It was the failure to launch a full-scale mobilization. Although chaotic and unpopular, Russia’s partial mobilization in September 2022 produced enough raw bodies to hold the line as Ukraine pressed forward that fall. Just as importantly, it placed a large number of men into a training pipeline — the results of which would show later, as Moscow’s forces crept forward on multiple fronts.

Ukraine, by contrast, continued to rely on a combination of volunteer fighters and a much more limited draft. Had Kyiv announced a full-scale mobilization around the same time as Russia, it would have had tens of thousands of well-trained men available for the counteroffensive, rather than the fresh, minimally trained recruits it ultimately used.

Ukraine was not alone in deferring painful decisions with terrible consequences down the line. NATO countries — especially those in Europe — should have moved their defense industrial bases onto a war footing in the fall of 2022. By not doing so, they contributed to the shortages that helped badly hobble the counteroffensive.

A Rounding Error of Tanks

The scale of Western donations can make any talk of shortages sound bizarre. Multiple countries donated vast proportions of their national stocks. But RUSI is careful to put this in context: by the start of the full-scale invasion, most Western nations had spent three full decades neglecting their militaries. Those donations represented huge percentages of national stocks not because NATO countries were generous, but because they had so little equipment left to give.

The figures are stark. Across the entire war, Ukraine has been donated 671 tanks by foreign partners — only 150 of which are modern Western models like the Leopard II. By comparison, the open-source intelligence blog Oryx lists Russian tank losses in the war so far at 3,267, with at least 3,000 more in storage that could potentially be refurbished and sent into battle. Against numbers like that, 671 tanks is a rounding error.

As RUSI puts it: “While what was gifted was a significant proportion of the national stocks of Ukraine’s partners, that did not make the volume of equipment commensurate with the task.”

The authors fault the West for failing to grasp the true scale of the fighting — combat at an intensity the world had not seen in decades — and for not moving to a war footing earlier. Had Europe’s defense industrial base been mobilized in fall 2022, Ukraine’s offensive would have been better equipped, and the shell hunger that proved so devastating later could have been avoided.

Late, Mismatched, and Unfamiliar Equipment

Even the equipment that was pledged came after significant delays. German dithering over sending advanced Leopard II tanks ran through most of late 2022 and into early 2023, helping kill plans to launch the offensive in spring rather than summer. It may also have contributed to the debacle around Bakhmut: as RUSI tells it, Kyiv was terrified that German chancellor Olaf Scholz would use the city’s fall as an excuse to block equipment transfers. A major reason the AFU made its bloody stand was to convince the Germans that Ukraine was deserving of their help.

The deeper problem became clear once the equipment arrived. RUSI documents in excruciating detail the sheer variety of platforms donated, meaning each Ukrainian brigade had to familiarize itself with up to five different varieties of armored vehicle. Many arrived without spare parts. Soldiers who had trained abroad on certain vehicles were shocked to find that the version sent to them was substantially different, with different maintenance requirements.

Nothing sums it up better than RUSI’s own verdict: “Only a part of the pledged equipment arrived in Ukraine prior to the offensive, and the Ukrainian brigades did not have enough time to train on the equipment that did arrive. The brigades were, therefore, undertrained at the start of the offensive, which accounts for a significant proportion of the tactical mistakes made during the execution of the operation.”

The Airpower Myth — and the Surprise That Was Lost

For all that, RUSI goes out of its way to dispel a major myth: that the offensive failed for lack of Western air support. A year ago, online debate was saturated with takes blaming the West for not supplying Kyiv with sufficient airpower. RUSI acknowledges that the gap put Ukraine at a “serious disadvantage” — but it also concludes there was no realistic way to fix it in time. As the report states, “it would not have been possible to build Ukrainian airpower capabilities in a manner where Ukraine would have been capable of conducting effective close air support inside the threat envelope that prevailed and within the timeframe of the Ukrainian 2023 offensive being planned and executed.”

A more decisive problem was the loss of surprise. Ukraine’s need to generate hype about its counteroffensive — combined with US leaks and Ukrainian PR — pushed the plans into the public domain. As a result, RUSI notes, “Russia knew precisely where and approximately when the offensive was to take place.” With surprise effectively a non-factor, and Ukraine hamstrung by missing equipment and capabilities, even the minimal goal of taking Tokmak was probably out of reach.

Why Kyiv Did Not Hit Pause

Given all this, why not call the operation off and wait for more equipment? RUSI records that the Russians had lined up 105,000 men, 470 tanks, over 1,400 armored fighting vehicles, some 720 artillery systems, and 60 attack helicopters to defend the road towards Tokmak and Melitopol. Add the vast minefields and the dug-in Surovikin Lines, and the operation was risky in the extreme.

The main answer is that time was running out. The longer the Russians had to dig in and funnel newly trained recruits to the front, the dimmer the prospects became. Everyone in the planning could see the chance was fading, and they were scared of blowing it.

A secondary factor lay in the events of 2022. Against all odds, Ukraine had not just survived the invasion but humiliated Russia: Moscow’s forces were repelled around Kyiv in spring; the flagship cruiser Moskva was forcibly upgraded to a submarine; and in the fall, Russian lines collapsed around Kharkiv, letting Ukraine retake 8,000 square kilometers of territory in mere days.

The Optimism Bias That Sank the Plan

As these Russian humiliations piled up, Ukraine’s leadership seems to have been gripped by an understandable — but dangerous — optimism bias. Rather than reading the victories as signs of poor Russian logistics or insufficient manpower, they came to believe they reflected collapsing Russian morale. That, in turn, fed wildly optimistic planning.

Instead of seriously reckoning with how to breach powerful defensive lines, Kyiv ran with the theory that a massive armored assault would cause panic and a localized collapse — Kharkiv in 2022 all over again. It almost worked: RUSI details how Russian troops retreated from the first defensive lines in a disorderly manner, allowing them to be obliterated by Ukrainian artillery. But the disorder never spread into even a small-scale collapse, and the Russians regained their footing.

As the report puts it: “To some extent, Ukraine repeated the mistake that Russia had made during the first stage of the war, counting on shock induced by offensive operations preventing the enemy from putting up an adequate resistance. This theory of success was a poor planning assumption.”

Western partners were swept up in the same hype, apparently believing the AFU could power through dense defensive lines armed with little more than pluck and courage. How else to explain the absence of vital breaching equipment among the materiel donated?

Marching Into Hell Without the Right Tools

The clearest example was demining vehicles. Everyone knew the Russians had laid enormous minefields — in wargames played before the offensive to identify problems, the minefields kept coming up as a major obstacle. Yet little was done about it. Western partners supplied only a fraction of the demining vehicles such an operation required.

Others were not delivered until August and then needed two months of training, meaning they were ready only after the counteroffensive had already lost all steam. RUSI’s verdict is blunt: “At the beginning of the offensive, Ukraine had significantly fewer demining vehicles than would be considered the minimum required in doctrine.”

Anti-aircraft weapons told the same story. The sixty attack helicopters assigned to defend the sector made mincemeat of Ukraine’s forces. Lacking air defenses or any means of destroying the aircraft on the ground at distant airfields, the AFU could do nothing but grimly slog ahead amid a rain of fire from the sky. It was not until October that the Biden White House gave Kyiv long-range ATACMS and permission to destroy Russian air power on the ground — by which point it was too late to make a significant difference.

There are multiple instances of this pattern in the report: Western backers cheerfully asking the Ukrainians to march into hell with a fraction of the equipment they would demand for their own armies. As the authors write, “the interesting thing about this is that Ukraine’s international partners provided equipment in a manner that was completely inconsistent with NATO doctrine.”

The Path Not Traveled — and the Years Ahead

In RUSI’s telling, the root issue was extreme short-sightedness by Western politicians who preferred to dither and put off tough decisions until the window for acting had already passed. The irony is that taking the path of least resistance has now left leaders like Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden in a far more difficult position. Had they gone all-in in 2023, the war might be over now and the Kremlin chastised. Instead, Russia’s whole economy is on a war footing, while the West lost huge amounts of vital equipment in a counteroffensive it had effectively doomed to failure.

That may be too rosy a view of the road not taken. It is possible that, even in a timeline where NATO gave Ukraine absolutely everything, the counteroffensive still failed — at even higher cost. No Western military has conducted large-scale breaching operations since the Gulf War in 1991; arguably, no army on Earth has.

Azerbaijan pulled one off against Armenia in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, but the technological gap between the two sides was so vast that RUSI judges it hard to count as a relevant example. Ukraine was attempting something no nation has successfully done against a technological peer in over 30 years, and the evolution of technology and tactics in that time may have rendered old assumptions about such operations invalid.

The conclusion is a sober one. With so much materiel lost, the chances of Ukraine launching a new concerted effort to retake territory in the near future are close to non-existent. Newly mobilized recruits are being trained and more equipment is on its way, but mostly with the hope of holding back further Russian gains, stabilizing the frontlines, and inflicting massive casualties on the Kremlin’s forces.

To create another opening like the one Ukraine briefly had in summer 2023, Western powers will need to mobilize their defense industrial bases, move towards war economies, and accept that defending Ukraine is a long-term commitment that may need to be sustained for years. For politicians in democracies — facing voters weary of war and eager for normality — that may be a hard sell. But the easy path is not necessarily the right one, and not making hard choices now may leave everyone in a much worse place.

The lessons of the failed counteroffensive are finally available to look back on; the question is whether they will be learned in time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Ukraine’s original plan for the 2023 counteroffensive?

Nine armored brigades in three groups: three to fix Russian forces in the east, three to break through the southern defensive lines, and three to push through the breach and take Tokmak. The plan then called for a drive south to Melitopol, with the unspoken hope of reaching the sea. The opening phase, up to Tokmak, was supposed to take just seven days.

What does RUSI identify as the single biggest problem on the Ukrainian side?

A lack of experienced troops. Over 2022, the Armed Forces of Ukraine took roughly 30,000 killed and missing plus many wounded, concentrated among the professional brigades that had been on the frontline since the invasion began — leaving Ukraine short of veterans by 2023.

Was the Battle of Bakhmut worth it for Ukraine?

Russia lost about four soldiers for every Ukrainian — Prigozhin claimed 20,000 Wagner dead, while the BBC and Mediazona put the figure at 19,547, against Ukraine’s 10,000 dead and wounded. But it was not a fair trade: 88% of Wagner’s losses were mobilized convicts, while Ukraine spent irreplaceable professionals it could not afford to lose.

Why does the report say Western equipment donations fell short?

Because three decades of neglect meant NATO had little to give. Ukraine received 671 tanks total, only 150 of them modern Western models like the Leopard II, against Russian tank losses of 3,267 and at least 3,000 more in storage. The donations were large as a share of national stocks but small relative to the task.

Why didn’t Kyiv simply cancel the operation and wait for more equipment?

Mainly because time was running out: every extra week let Russia dig in and feed newly trained recruits to the front. Russia had massed 105,000 men, 470 tanks, over 1,400 armored fighting vehicles, 720 artillery systems, and 60 attack helicopters, plus vast minefields and the dug-in Surovikin Lines. Planners feared their window was closing and were scared of blowing it.

Sources

1. https://static.rusi.org/lessons-learned-ukraine-offensive-2022-23.pdf