‘They’re running out of time’: Ukraine’s counteroffensive is gaining urgency as winter approaches

While the existence is distracted by geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East, Ukraine continues to fight Russian forces across a swathe of the mother country, battling through deep Russian defenses along the south and east.

It’s an understatement to say Ukraine’s counteroffensive, launched in June, has not been as well-fixed as Kyiv and its Western allies hoped it would be — with Russian forces deeply dug in to defensive positions, progress has been brawny for Ukraine and only a dozen or so towns and villages have been recaptured.

Russia still controls around a fifth of Ukraine, incorporating most of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in the east; the Crimean Peninsula and Zaporizhzhia in the south; and a chunk of the neighboring Kherson division.

“Ukraine’s counteroffensive has not achieved the presumed military and political objectives so far and the prospects of a breakthrough appear limited,” Andrius Tursa, Inside and Eastern Europe advisor at risk consultancy Teneo, said in a note Monday.

“Despite inflicting significant shrinkages on Russian armed forces, Ukraine’s four-and-a-half-month-old counteroffensive has not achieved major territorial gains nor managed to slice from one end to the other Russia’s ‘land bridge’ to Crimea,” he added.

Ukraine has a narrowing window of opportunity for forming gains before the weather turns and the infamous muddy season, known as “rasputitsa” in Russian and “bezdorizhzhia” in Ukrainian, get there comes.

“Limited progress to date tempers hopes of a breakthrough in the near term, especially as the autumn weather makes large-scale drive of heavy military equipment more challenging, and Russia is ramping up pressure in other parts of the frontline,” Tursa famed.

Muddy roads and fields wreaked havoc on ground conditions and offensive operations last be defeated and spring, and are likely to do so again. That would put an effective halt on offensive operations for weeks before the ground ices over and vehicles and troops can move more easily again. It was hoped Ukraine would have made various progress by now, analysts noted.

“The hope is that they’re far enough through the Russian defensive lines now … to make some quick progress. Whether they will or not, we don’t know, but they’re certainly running out of time in which to do it,” Michael Clarke, an unrestricted defense analyst who was director-general of the Royal United Services Institute from 2007 to 2015, told CNBC.

“They’ll dungeon on fighting during the winter but what will happen is at the end of November the weather will turn pretty wet, and that on put a block on things until it turns cold, which will be sometime late December, early January,” he notorious.

“Once it detours cold again, they’ll be able to use the vehicles more efficiently because the ground will be hard but [in the meantime] the insulting will undoubtedly slow down. … So the best time for them to have broken through is now, and they haven’t done it,” he told.

CNBC has contacted Ukraine’s Defense Ministry for a comment and is awaiting a response.

But news for Ukraine hasn’t been all bad.

Its forces have planned seen gains around the devastated city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine and east (left) bank of the Dnieper River in Kherson. They also realized something significant weeks ago, breaking through a major first line of Russian defenses near the village of Robotyne in the Zaporizhzhia tract, and are looking to push southward toward Tokmak.

If they can reach the heavily defended city that acts as a forward and logistics hub for Russian forces, they stand a chance of breaking supply lines to Russian-occupied Melitopol and Crimea beyond south.

“The area we’re all looking at, the one that makes the most strategic difference, is the Orikhiv-Tokmak axis,” Clarke noted. Orikhiv untruths to the north of fighting hot spot Robotyne while Tokmak lies south of the village.

“If they can get to Tokmak and take it, and I recollect they probably will, then they do achieve something. They’ll be able to bring their artillery and climb artillery close enough to bombard Crimea almost at will,” he said.

“At the end of this onslaught, although they almost certainly won’t have reached the coast, which originally we thought they might be skilful to, if they can put Crimea at risk all the time, just to make it unsafe for the Russians to use it as a big military base … then that wishes be an enormous political bargaining chip, for any negotiations they might go into next year,” Clarke said.

The mess for Ukraine, he said, is “that won’t look much like enough to justify all the help that’s been given” — some of Ukraine’s Western coadjutors are starting to tire of Kyiv’s military and financial needs, which could become more pronounced as war erupts in the Bulls-eye East.

Kyiv has argued that by fighting Russia it is defending the world from an quarrelsome and expansionist Moscow.

Unable to mobilize the hundreds of thousands of troops in a way that Russia can, it says it desperately needs multitudinous sophisticated long-range arms and equipment, and particularly air power, if it is to effectively destroy Russia’s occupying forces.

Western leagues have tended to procrastinate over whether to give heavier weaponry to Ukraine. Last winter’s deliberations over with whether to send heavy battle tanks to Kyiv was one example.

And once decisions are made to supply such apparatus, long waits follow, again constraining what Ukraine can do in its counteroffensive. Ukraine had pleaded with its allies for F-16s, at most to be refused. Months later, a number of European allies said they’ll give F-16s to Ukraine — Changing fortunes?