After Biden and Putin’s speeches, the war’s focus will turn to military offensives

Ukraine, readying a potential push to retake territory in the east and the south, has spent the winter months training its fast-growing military in advanced weaponry and preparing for deliveries of even more lethal arms. In Germany, U.S. troops are training Ukrainian forces in “combined-arms warfare” using artillery, tanks and armored vehicles, while in the U.K., British forces are teaching Ukrainians to fly NATO-style fighter jets and command Challenger 2 tanks.

Russia, too, has tried to exploit the winter letup, using the time to mobilize hundreds of thousands of conscripts, prisoners-turned-mercenaries and other troops in a bid to replenish a military force severely depleted by a year of war. The U.S. Defense Department estimates Moscow may have already lost half its battle tanks.

Now, as the Kremlin aims to show the fight is not over, it appears to have set its sights on capturing the remaining Ukrainian-held areas of the eastern Donbas — an area Putin has already claimed to have annexed but does not fully control.

All the while, Ukraine’s backers from Brussels to Washington are closely watching one another for signs of whether support for Kyiv is waxing or waning, whether U.S. Republicans will balk at continued military aid as the war drags on, whether cold feet in Paris or Berlin may renew a push for peace and who will move first to provide even deadlier weaponry amid persistent fears of escalating the conflict into a world war with nuclear-armed Russia. 

Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu of Estonia, a NATO member on Russia’s doorstep, said Western allies remain in lockstep with Ukraine’s position that it must not bargain with Moscow for its own sovereign territory — resolve he said he hoped would persist in year two.

“But we have to admit that without stronger and more vital Western countries’ support, Ukraine will not win,” Reinsalu told NBC News.

Fast advances in Russia’s offensive could increase concerns about the Western alliance’s staying power as the war enters its second year. To Putin’s chagrin, Western fears that the war’s mounting costs and reverberations from economic sanctions imposed on Russia would erode support for Ukraine have so far not been borne out.

In Kyiv, Ruslan Stefanchuk, the speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, said the more pressing concern should be that “Ukrainian soldiers who defend Europe with their shields don’t get tired.”

“Otherwise, all other European people and nations will have to get tired of the war,” Stefanchuk said, suggesting that if Ukraine is defeated, other Western militaries would be forced to fight Russia themselves.

Yet the war’s economic toll continues to climb, as Europeans struggle through a winter of record-high energy bills and a cost-of-living crisis attributed partly to the war. In the U.S., a group of Republicans in the newly GOP-controlled House is calling for an immediate stop to U.S. assistance to Ukraine, as a new Associated Press-NORC poll shows support among Americans for arming Ukraine has fallen from 60% in May to just 48% this month.

“We know that some of the people, especially the Republicans, are a little more hesitant in terms of the amount of help provided to Ukraine,” Adrian Kubicki, Poland’s consul general in New York, said in an interview. “This is actually our job, our diplomatic job: to convince them that this is the only choice and there is no alternative.”

In hope of staving off any further fatigue, Biden and other Western leaders gathering in Warsaw this week are aiming to drive home the stakes of continued investments in Ukraine’s defense, arguing that a Russia unchecked in Ukraine will be a Russia undeterred elsewhere.