Ukraine, NATO Must 'Grind' Through 2024 to Beat Russia

Ukraine and its Western partners face a "grinding" 2024 in pursuit of long-term victory over President Vladimir Putin's Russia, according to one senior defense official on NATO's eastern flank.

Kusti Salm, the permanent secretary at the Estonian Defense Ministry, told Newsweek in an interview that the coming 12 months will be hard for Ukrainians as Kyiv tries to stave off fatigue and distraction in the Western world.

"2024 will be difficult," Salm said from Tallinn, around 120 miles from the border with Russia. "They need to assume the defensive; they need to grind it out."

Ukraine's survival in early 2022 was an unexpected success. Russia's formidable—at least on paper—armed forces were expected to sweep away President Volodymyr Zelensky's military and government, but floundered on the outskirts of Kyiv. Since April 2022, Ukraine's continued existence has not looked much in doubt. But its future shape still is.

Kyiv has been somewhat a victim of its own success. Successive battlefield victories in Kharkiv and Kherson in the fall of 2022 raised hopes of an imminent Russian battlefield collapse. But 2023 has punctured that enthusiasm, Kyiv's long-awaited summer counteroffensive in the southeast of the country having ended in costly failure.

Now, as the winter freeze settles over the 600-mile front and Russian munitions rain down on Ukrainian cities, talk is again turning to peace talks and territorial concessions. Putin appears set on outlasting his Western enemies, convinced that his Russia is stable and wealthy enough to weather the storm.

"We just need to keep on grinding, to convince Putin of the opposite," Salm said. "He should know it by heart. We are bigger and stronger, we have many more ample other options to influence him...The world is watching, and at the end of the day the world is aligning with the winner."

Newsweek has contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry by email to request comment.

European and American partners are still spooling up their military industrial capacity to meet Ukrainian demand, but the process has been slow; as has the delivery of advanced weapons systems that Kyiv thinks can break Russia's defensive lines.

"Time heals some of the problems that we have in the short term," Salm said, referring to a lag in weapon and munitions production that have left military warehouses "empty," in Zelensky's words.

"We are on course to get to the 1 million a rounds per year manufacturing capability both in Europe and in the U.S, that's a fact," Salm said. "Now, manufacturing 1 million rounds a year and getting 1 million rounds delivered in a year are two different things, at least in the short term...But it will get better."

"If you manufacture more, delivery times will get better, the competition will get larger, and the prices will become more attractive, supply chains will become wider, and the problem will be solved, eventually."

For the time being, Salm said, Ukrainians must hold the line. "The only way to grind this out is to have a positive outcome at the end of the road," Salm added. "If you start grinding something out without understanding the outcome, then it's a dead end."

Ukraine is facing a battlefield "stalemate," according to commander-in-chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, if not yet a dead end. Kyiv's failed 2023 offensive is "a problem," Salm said, though does not mark the end of Ukrainian capability.

"Success gives birth to success, and failures give birth to failures," the official explained. "The strategic idea was that the strategic offensive will be a success, you will put the Russians at gunpoint, they will be incentivized to go for negotiations."

"History will tell. I think the soup is still too hot to eat right now...But the truth is that it didn't materialize."

"But the flip side of this strategy was not that if it failed, we would give up. That was definitely not the plan. We should get ourselves out of this blame game—that's not going anywhere—and get ourselves back to the winning trajectory."

Salm and his colleagues in Tallinn are among the most resolute advocates of full Ukrainian victory. For Estonia, the war has brought temporary respite along the Russian frontier. Elite Russian units intended as the tip of Moscow's spear in a future hypothetical invasion of the Baltic states have been redeployed to the hellish battlefields of Ukraine, where they have suffered severe casualties.

The Estonian Defense Ministry expects the Kremlin to continue its high casualty offensive approach into 2024. Attacking Russian troops will have to contend with the defensive networks they raised to stop Ukraine's summer operation.

"They will also struggle getting over their own minefields, it's going to be difficult for them to capture new land," Salm said. "But they definitely will keep on going. The attrition rate on the offensive will be very high for them, even if Ukraine is assuming the defensive."