Frontline special - the ground war in Ukraine during 2024
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. I'm Alex Dibble and I executive produce the podcast. The World in 10 is partnered with Frontline, the interview series from Times Radio, available on YouTube, with expert analysis of the world's conflicts. At the weekend, we bring you Frontline interviews in full. Here's one from this week. I hope you find it interesting.

Hello and welcome to a special edition of Frontline for Times Radio. I'm James Hansen and today we're looking back at 2024 in the war in Ukraine and focusing in particular on the ground war over the past 12 months. Joining me, one of our regular guests here on Frontline, former Colonel Philip Ingram MBE, former NATO planner and military intelligence officer. It's always a pleasure, Philip. First of all, how would you summarise the ground war in Ukraine over the past 12 months?

From a tactical perspective, I think we're almost in a stalemate position. But it's been fascinating as it's moved from one side having the initiative

back to the other side, having initiative to the initiative been taken back again. But that's purely from a tactical perspective. We have to recognize that the ground war has also been going on in depth. So into Crimea, into Russia. And that is at the operational level and attacking into the strategic level. But it is hitting ground targets. So, you know, I'd count that in as part of it. And that's that's a different matter.

And of course, at the start of the year, something that caused immense frustration for Ukraine was the delay in the big package. I think it was $60 billion worth of military aid from the US. It got held up in Congress. It wasn't eventually approved until, I think, April. And then most of it wasn't delivered until the summer. In terms of what we've been seeing on the ground, how much of an impact did that have? How much did that undermine the Ukrainian war effort? It had a massive impact. And we have to go back to before 2024. The Ukrainians launched their

long-awaited counteroffensive as we came into the year. We'd got the winter where we were anticipating things easing off, but the counteroffensive hadn't taken the big chunks of territory back in the way that people had expected after their previous taking back, you know, Hearson and Harkiv in big chunks of territory. And there was a lot of

bad press for the Ukrainians and criticism of their ability to fight forward. And then the $60 billion, a lot of that was needed to release simple things like ammunition, artillery ammunition, as well as equipment, as well as more capital support, but release that from U.S. stocks

so it could go forward. And we had reports coming through the air of the Ukrainians not having enough shells for their guns, and their guns only been able to fire a few shells a day, whereas the Russians were able to still fire in hundreds, if not thousands a day in different areas. And that had a direct impact on Ukraine's ability to maintain the front line as it was, and allowed Russia to start to regain the initiative in certain areas. And Russian tactics have...

tweaked through the year. They're learning the lessons of how they're getting things wrong and they're adapting that. They're adapting it in a way that in modern warfare is horrific because it costs human life and they don't care about it. Have we seen any significant shift in the tactics being used by Ukraine? And, you know, I'm thinking in particular about when there was a change in the military command and when General Zaluzhny left and he's now the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK and when General Siersky took over. Did that...

with any change in tactics? Not immediately. And Sersky took over. He's spent a lot of his time, and really we didn't see any initiatives coming out of him to start with. And then all of a sudden we had the incursion into Kursk. And that is something that he will have planned with General Badanov because he's taken his time to try and understand what is wrong on the front line and how you can then draft

try and dislocate the Russians, regain the initiative, and try and force the Russians to do something different. And of course, Badanov is the head of the GUR, the Ukrainian Military Intelligence. He's the one that's been having the success at the operational level and in depth with special operations, executive type operations. And that is having a significant impact on the Russians. But the immediate change in command

I think it was right and proper that he spent some time looking at what was going on because the Ukrainians are... They don't have the optimal force packages for what was tried in the counteroffensive beforehand. They don't have the ability to put a proper armoured formation to punch through the defensive lines that the Russians have got in there. And those defensive lines, you're putting them into context...

They're the strongest defensive lines we've seen in any conflict at any time ever. And those are the Suvarican lines with the tank traps and the trenches and the minefields and everything else in different layers that's through. And that requires any armoured force that punches into it to be able to dominate the ground in a way that it stops it being interfered by enemy artillery, stops it being interfered by enemy air forces,

um, and aviation. And the difference is aviation is helicopter, um, uh, uh, forces, uh, that, that are there. Um, and then gives you sufficient engineering, um, an armored engineering capability to punch through those defenses so that you can then allow your fighting elements to safely get into, um,

the enemy territory and you spread out and push the enemy away. Ukrainians didn't have the ability to do any of that. And part of that's down to the lack of the resources, the $60 billion that was held up for U.S. domestic political reasons, not for anything else. The lack of the equipment that's in there. The Ukrainians just simply don't have enough

armoured engineers to be able to get through what there is there. They're still learning how to fight formation armoured tactics at the sort of level where you'd need to do that. But they didn't have the ability to create the local air superiority bubble. So whenever they tried that beforehand, and we saw the first rush with Western...

tanks and other armored vehicles when they first got in. And we lost a number of them in the first few days. And that was down to Russian air and Russian aviation being able to interdict it. And the Ukrainians had no response to that. So I think it was right and proper that new commander sits back, and Sersky looks at what it is that has gone wrong, and designs deliberately his operations in the future.

Part of that and part of the factors that come into that are making sure he's got the wherewithal, the equipment, the training, the integration of the tactics between the different layers to allow him to get that bubble. And that certainly hasn't appeared through 2024. A lot gets made of the incremental gains that Russia has made in the East. How much significance should we place on them?

I don't think we should place a huge significance on it. I think we should be cognizant of it and keep monitoring it because any progress is something that is giving Putin an advantage. And when it comes to morale on the battlefield and therefore the morale that goes up into the Ukrainian people and the level of political resolve that you get not just inside Ukraine, but then from international support, that is being used to suggest the Russians are winning.

They're advancing slowly, but the cost is massive. Throughout 2024, UK Defence Intelligence has estimated that the Russians have lost between 1,400 and 1,600 soldiers a day.

Every day through 2024, they've lost tens of pieces of equipment a day. Russian storage sites for their armored vehicles, even going back to T-55s and beyond that, are emptying extremely fast. Vladimir Putin is using his ammunition where he was in the early days of 2022. He had a

six to one ratio of what the Russians could fire to the Ukrainians could respond with. The end of 2022 or the end of 2024, we're now down to one to two. And now they can still respond with more, but they're running out of ammunition. That's why he's relying on North Korea to provide it. His defence industrial base can't keep up

manpower he's getting North Korea and he's recruiting heavily in Africa through the rump of his Wagner group that's there. He can't get the manpower to continue to meet that 1,400 to 1,600 deaths and life-changing injuries a day. And we're starting to see other Ukrainian actions, in particular the incursion into Kursk, bring greater visibility of what's going on into the

the Muscovite type and St. Petersburg type Russian people, where they're gaining more of an understanding of what's going on. And people are starting to question things. That, combined with sanctions biting and everything else, has effectively got Putin on the back foot. So it's easy for us from a commentary perspective to say, Russia is gaining ground on the front line, therefore Russia must be winning.

And I liken it back to the Vietnam War. The Americans won every tactical battle that they fought in the Vietnam War. The front line are tactical battles. America didn't win Vietnam. And therefore, this conflict is not going to be won on who gains most territory from a tactical perspective. That will influence what happens when the negotiations eventually happen. But it's not going to win or lose the war.

It's a really interesting conversation around the Russian casualty rates, which, as you explained, Philip, is enormous. But to what extent is it sustainable? Because I suppose you could say any casualty rate is sustainable until it isn't. And OK, they're managing to use these North Korean troops, even troops from Africa and indeed the Middle East. The Yemeni Houthis are now providing troops for the Russians, which is quite something.

But could 2025 be the year in which the supplies run out and maybe there are political risks then for Putin if he has to launch a fresh wave of mobilisation? Yeah, well, I think we've seen 2024 be the year where he has got sustainability problems. And that's why we're seeing the Houthis in, we're seeing troops from Africa, we're seeing North Korea being used.

And Putin has just been embarrassed in the Middle East in support for Syria. Now, that'll give him a little bit of manpower, not much whatsoever coming in. We're also hearing stories of other specialist military personnel being used as infantry in the front line. So some Air Force personnel, there's been stories. Now, these are unconfirmed, but there's likely to be an element of truth in them.

And we're hearing stories from individuals in the frontline who they're not getting trained before they're put in and they're being pushed out into these meat grinder operations where they're just being killed. They're advancing because there's so many of them coming in waves that the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition and therefore have to abandon their positions because the next wave is running over the bodies of those that have been killed by the Ukrainians and just getting into that position.

So that's completely unsustainable. I think 2025 is going to be a massive turning point for Putin. And it's where we're going to start seeing the first cracks in the wider political support he's got.

The true extent of the impact it's having inside Russia and the true extent of his ability to sustain it is very difficult to calculate at the moment with the reports that are coming out. So I would hope that 2025 will be the point where we start to see the Russian support at the political level, but their military support on the front lines collapse dramatically.

That will be aided if Ukraine can carry out a number of other different operations like they attempted with Kursk. But how sustainable Putin is and what other support he's going to get from elsewhere is difficult to ascertain. So I think 2025 will, if it doesn't collapse, then we'll certainly set the conditions for it to collapse. But this is going to go on for a long time yet.

You mentioned Kursk. We can't look back over the past 12 months without mentioning what happened in August with the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk Oblast of Russia. How significant a moment was that? And is it too early to judge it a success?

It was a hugely significant moment. And I think it's not too early to judge it as a success. It was a massive success. And the reason why I'm saying that is, if we look at what was happening then, we've got General Sersky had come in. He'd taken over. The Russians were still advancing, albeit slowly, but they were still taking some of the, what again...

commentators describe as cities or large towns. They aren't. They're little villages. They're tiny little things. And most of the civilian population have been out of them anyway. And the Russian approach is to destroy everything, meat waves of troops to go through. And the Ukrainians are forced to fall back. But they're achieving that. And I think Sersky...

as he was doing his review, recognised that by continuing to reinforce this, defending against these meat grinder operations isn't going to dislocate the Russians in any way, shape or form. And therefore, he had to do something different. And I think...

This had been tested beforehand because we'd seen a couple of small incursions by the Russian Legion, which are the Russian nationals who fight for Ukraine, into Russia, into the Belgorod region of Russia, where they went in for a few days and then came out. That's testing what was going on. That was probably preemptive to this. And then we had the much larger incursion into Kursk, and that dislocated Kursk.

the Russians. The Russians didn't know how to respond to that. The Ukrainians, because of the size of formation they put in, there's only so far that they could go without overstretching themselves. Because if they'd gone too far and kept advancing, which they probably could have done, but that have overstretched their supply lines, that would have made it easier for the Russians to interdict that and to get to position to push them out. So they've got to a point where they've put up their defences, they're holding ground.

They were hoping it would force the Russians to take troops away from the front line in the east. And this is where the Russians made the right decision. They didn't. They haven't taken them around. They've generated other forces through other means to, A, defend against the Ukrainian advance and now to start to push back against it. But that took them, what, five months? Yeah.

to do that before we started to see the Russians actually beginning to hold things up. And what it did do from a bigger perspective is it gave the Ukrainians for that period of time the initiative back. They were dictating what was happening

Not on the front line in the east, but the Russians were nervous about what was happening there because they're having to reallocate some resources. But what was happening in supporting the front line in the east and what was happening from a political perspective and how the Russian people got to know about what was going on because other parts of Russia were now under Ukrainian control.

And then from an international community, the international community were going, oh, that's a bold move. And there was debate as to whether Zelensky should have been criticized for it because was it legal or was it anything else? It was a very bold, very necessary, the right military move to make. And let Sersky, I think, stamp his authority on the design of the battlefield. And it wrestled the initiative back at that operational level, which I think was critical.

It hasn't had the effect that he wanted, but then the enemy don't follow your plan. So the Russians won't have read his plan. They probably did because they're very good in the intelligence game. But then went, we're not going to do what he says. I think what has happened with the Ukrainians is...

Because, or since then, is because the Russians didn't react to that. What Sersky hasn't done or hasn't got the wherewithal to do is to then follow through with something else and something else in relatively quick succession to retain that initiative. So we've seen them go into Kursk, stop, retreat.

allow the Russians to build up a capability to attack back against them. The Russians started to do that and now we've got into that stalemate position again or maybe the Russians are advancing very slowly from a tactical perspective. I would expect Sersky and Badanov

to do something else. I was hoping that they would sequence this. That would be phase one of a number of different operations. I'm hoping they will be sequencing this early in 2025 so that they can continue to keep that initiative. They have to regain it again. And do you think the only reason they haven't is a matter of resources?

I think it probably is down to resources. We keep seeing the Russian casualty figures. We don't see the Ukrainian casualty figures. Zelensky made a statement in the last week or so about casualty figures, and I think they were probably a very low estimate. If the Russians are losing...

1400 a day, the Ukrainians are probably losing five, 600 a day. And it's a much smaller country and they're not recruiting outside at the same levels that the Russians are. And we're in a game of sustainability. Logistics will, and as part of that logistics, the defense industrial base that's supporting everything will win or lose this conflict.

And part of that is the sustainability of manpower. Now, the Ukrainians are very reluctant to reduce their recruiting age down to 18 because they want to keep their younger adult men in a position where you can sustain the population of the country. And they're very reluctant to go down to that. But they may have to.

They're in a war of national survival. But I think what we fail to recognise in the West and a lot of the political commentary that's coming out, they're not just in a war of national survival. They're fighting a war for us when it comes to European and international survival. And, of course, the geopolitics is going to dominate in 2025 with the return of Donald Trump and speculation about possible peace talks. If you park that to one side, which is a big thing to park, but if you just park it for one moment, if we assume that the ground war continues...

What do you think we may see over the next 12 months? Well, I think it's a fair assumption that the ground war will continue, no matter what we've heard from Donald Trump. And it's interesting, we might get into that. But we're going to see more of the same until one side or other takes that initiative forward.

back again. Now, the Russians are adapting their tactics. They're adapting their tactics in the front line. They've brought in their meat grinder tactics. They've changed the way their squads fight because they've run out of equipment. They're running out of experienced troops, experienced commanders. And we're seeing adaptions in the way they deal with things. And they're overwhelming the Ukrainian defenses. The Ukrainians are adapting their defenses. But we have to recognize the massive, massive size of

of the frontline that they're trying to defend against. This is the equivalent of Aberdeen to London, if we were putting it in UK terms. That's massive. That is very, very difficult for any military to be able to defend against because if you're being attacked at all different levels, you're spread very thinly. So we're likely to see...

In that eastern part, no massive changes, I think, in the front lines until I suspect we will see the Ukrainians planning potentially some form of armoured manoeuvre, armoured formation manoeuvre, mid-summer-ish kind of thing.

against the Russians. But that will only happen if they get additional armoured engineering resources and they get additional air power that's in. And this is the infamous F-16s that started to come in through 2024. But the need to have sufficient capability to be able to properly push the Russian Air Force and aviation forces back

and to provide that tactical support to troops on the ground so that they can get through the defenses in a way that they're not being destroyed on the defenses by the Russians in direct and indirect fire against them, which is how defenses should be.

Whether they're going to have the wherewithal in 2025 to do that or not, I don't know. I suspect what we'll see through 2025, again, are more daring operations like Kursk from Tsirsky and Bodanov to try and dislocate the Russians again. Whether we'll see just one as we have with Kursk or whether we'll see several and have them properly linked, I would hope there will be several and have them linked again.

I suspect that the Ukrainians will have only the ability to do one again and they'll choose their time and space to try and dislocate Putin. And that will be linked to what's going on geopolitically. Well, just finally on the geopolitics, obviously we've been focusing mainly today on the ground war, but let's talk about the geopolitics just to finish. Let me put a scenario to you, Philip, and see if you buy it. I think there is a chance that in the new year, Donald Trump takes office and

He tries to pressure Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, but Putin will not feel in a position to acquiesce to the demands that Trump is making. Trump will be very conscious of the fact he doesn't want a repeat of Joe Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. He doesn't want something equivalent happening on his watch.

And he will also be conscious of the fact that Vladimir Putin has been weakened by recent events in Syria. And he will be sensitive to the charge that he is somehow Putin's lapdog. And so he may react angrily to Putin refusing to come to the negotiating table and as a result, ramp up arguments.

arms for Ukraine. Do you think that's viable? I think that's very viable. I think that if you had to ask me what was probable, I'd say that's probable. And if you look at what's going on at the moment in the diplomatic maneuvering before Trump takes over on the 20th of January, the conditions are being set for that. Trump has talked to Putin and talked to Zelensky. Zelensky's response is to come up with a plan.

to go to Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate and present that plan to him and go through it. And as part of that plan that's come out in the reporting of it, he said, I'd be willing to give up some of the territory temporarily if it stops the fighting so that I can then get that back diplomatically in the future. And therefore, he is being Mr. Cooperative when it comes to Trump's idea of the big negotiated settlement.

Putin, when the phone call went in between Trump and Putin's team, through Peskov denied, that's his spokesman, denied that phone call had ever happened. And then immediately after that, we started to see across Russian national television naked pictures of Melania Trump plastered everywhere. We have to look at Putin's psyche. Putin's psyche as an old intelligence officer, that broadcast across Russian national television of Donald Trump's wife,

Was him threatening him and turning around and saying from a petulant perspective, I didn't like our conversation. It didn't go the way I expected it to go. And now I'm going to threaten you. Trump's

not going to listen to that. He's going to respond really quite angrily to that. And I think we're going to see a ramping up of his rhetoric in trying to push Putin, and especially as he will see that Putin is now on the back foot when it comes to what's happened through Syria and elsewhere. And you'll see that putting pressure on him as the ability to put pressure on Iran, the ability to put pressure on China and elsewhere, because he knows how much China will have invested. And Trump and China don't

don't work well together. So whilst Trump's got the diplomatic and the geopolitical initiative on this, I don't think he's gonna let it go. Meanwhile, we've got Zelensky turning around saying, "I'm willing to, I'll do what you suggest and everything else." And Trump will then have to turn around to think and say, "Okay, you're being cooperative. You're not being cooperative. I need to teach you a lesson.

The safest way to do that without putting American lives at risk is to give you additional resources. And it wouldn't surprise me if Trump gives him a huge package to really hurt Vladimir Putin in some way.

Trump may tie that in, and here's where I'm speculating a little bit, into further pressure on NATO or on European nations. Yes, up your investment. And get Europe to up its investment. And that may turn round, and here's where I'm going to stick my neck out a little bit, into him suggesting that European nations...

physically put troops into the western part of Ukraine to free up Ukrainian troops that are protecting against the Belarus border and elsewhere so that they can go forward to the east and then impose over that part of Ukraine a no-fly zone.

Because I don't think Putin would have the ability to respond to that. And that would force the West to then start to look at its defense expenditure and elsewhere. And Trump's already making noises about native nations that aren't contributing their 2%. And I wouldn't surprise him if he ups that 2% to 2.5% or 3% as a requirement, because that's still less than the Americans are putting into their defense budget.

And again, Trump will be cognizant of there are three major conflicts around the world that are brewing. We've got Europe with Russia, Ukraine. We've got the Middle East, and we don't know where that's going to go.

We've got a brewing threat down in Southeast Asia with China's expansionism and things around Taiwan. And that's America's backdoor. That's where their primary focus is. They don't want to be taking on from a world policeman's perspective all three. And therefore, I think Trump will force Europe to step up and take a greater lead on one of them. And the one is Russia-Ukraine. Philip, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us again on Frontline. Thank you. Thank you.

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