Following the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive last summer, the Biden administration is recalibrating its strategy and has abandoned hopes of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) retaking any territory in 2024. Instead it recommends a switch to a more defensive stance to buy time for Ukraine to rearm itself and replenish its forces, the Washington Post reported January 26.

The war in Ukraine has reached a stalemate where the AFU has made almost no gains and Russian forces have recaptured as little as 50 km, according to the most recent frontline reports.

“It’s pretty clear that it will be difficult for them to try to mount the same kind of major push on all fronts that they tried to do last year,” a senior administration official told the Washington Post.

The idea now is to enable Ukraine to hold its position on the battlefield for now, but “put them on a different trajectory to be much stronger by the end of 2024 … and get them on a more sustainable path,” said the senior official, one of several who described the internal policymaking on the condition of anonymity, the paper reported.

The plan also includes additional air defence to create protective “bubbles” around Ukrainian cities beyond Kyiv and Odesa that would allow key parts of the Ukrainian economy to recover and increase export earnings.

As bne IntelliNews has reported, the US policy has been from the beginning not to ensure Ukraine’s victory in the war with Russia, but to “put Ukraine into the strongest position possible when inevitable negotiations begin,” the White House has said on multiple occasions.

That rhetoric has now been toned down. In December, US President Joe Biden changed from supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes” line to “as long as we can.” In the latest statements reported by the Washington Post the “as strong a position as possible” line has also been watered down to getting through 2024 and then putting Ukraine on “a new strategic path.”

With Western financial and military aid having become snarled in internal wrangling and ammunition supplies already running low, analysts all agree that 2024 will be a very difficult year for the AFU. Biden warned US law makers in early January that if they didn’t approve the $61mn aid package currently tied up in Congress, Ukraine “could lose the war in a matter of weeks.”

A senior US official admits that Ukraine is now incapable of replicating the extensive offensive operations of last summer and Bankova has already put the AFU on a defensive footing. The Kremlin could try to take advantage of the flagging Western support and may launch its own counteroffensive in the spring, according to military analysts.

Ukraine’s less assertive military strategy doesn’t mean it will not engage in offensive operations, but the tactics are likely to change. In what appeared to be an early sign of that, Russia’s oil industry is now under threat by new Ukrainian long-range drones after a series of strikes in recent weeks did considerable damage to several refineries in western Russia.

The new US plan is a shift towards a sustainable strengthening of Ukraine's military and economic framework by the conclusion of 2024. That includes building up Ukraine’s own arms production facilities to make it more self-sufficient in materiel. That effort was kicked off with a conference last autumn, when Zelenskiy called for turning Ukraine into a military production hub.

After dithering for almost two years, the West has also finally started to invest into new arms production capacity so that it can increase supplies to Ukraine, but that capacity will only become productive in 2025, say experts.

The Nato Support and Procurement Agency concluded a deal two weeks ago to procure $1.2bn worth of shells on behalf of allies who will either pass shells to Ukraine or use them to refill their own arsenals. And the EU Commissioner said Europe will produce around 1.3mn to 1.4mn shells by the end of 2024. “We need to make sure that most of this is coming to Ukraine, in priority, because this is where there is an urgent need,” said EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton during a visit to Estonia in January.

Eric Ciaramella, a former CIA intelligence analyst and now a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Washington Post: “I think the Ukrainians are realising there is no silver bullet, having seen a million-dollar tank destroyed by a $10,000 mine” during the counteroffensive.

The Western military and financial aid is unlikely to halt completely, but there is a general recalibration of war goals amongst the Western allies that are digging in for a long war, despite recent reports that Putin is signalling he is ready for peace talks.

Kyiv is currently negotiating with several Western partners, including the US, France and Germany, on ten-year security deals that will provide weapons and money, but not an obligation for partners to commit troops to the conflict. Kyiv has already signed the first of these security deals with the UK on January 11.

The linchpin of this strategy, however, hinges on the United States, Ukraine's most significant benefactor of funds and military equipment and the orchestrator of this multilateral backing. And the problems that the Biden administration has been having getting Congress to approve a new aid package for Ukraine throws the whole new strategy into doubt.

Europe has already overtaken the US as the biggest financial and weapons donor to Ukraine, but without US participation, supplying Ukraine will become a greater challenge.

Zelenskiy is less unsure about what the end of US support would mean. “We wouldn’t survive without US support, it’s a real fact,” Zelenskiy said in a television interview last week.