New York Times: Tanks alone will not turn the tide of the war in Ukraine

For all the hype around the advanced tanks that the West guaranteed to Ukraine this week, they will not be the silver bullet that will allow Kyiv to win the war.

However, this is not the goal of the United States and NATO, writes the American edition of The New York Times (NYT).

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

According to the newspaper, the West is trying to maintain a “delicate balance” between helping Kyiv and preventing a larger escalation of the conflict from Moscow, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

Instead of helping Kyiv win the war, the US military will once again try to remake the Ukrainian army in its own image to give Ukraine a better chance of breaking through fortified Russian defenses, writes NYT.

“Decisions on new military assistance are a delicate balance for the White House and the NATO alliance: while they want to provide Kiev with new capabilities that will help break the stalemate on the battlefield, they also do not want to provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin into escalating the conflict into a wider war.” – the publication believes.

Concerned that the frozen conflict is benefiting Russia, the United States and its allies have begun more serious discussions in recent weeks about how to shift battlefield dynamics in Kyiv's favor.

“We want to put them in the best position possible so that this war ends on the battlefield, diplomacy, or some combination of both. But at the same time, Ukrainians must occupy a position on the map that will be much more beneficial for their long-term future so that Putin feels a strategic failure,” the publication quotes Victoria Nuland’s statement in the Senate on January 26.

NYT notes that Kyiv needs to overcome the “military deadlock” that the Ukrainian Armed Forces ran into after the Russians began building a multi-level defense along the contact line.

“Breaking through these lines is not just a matter of driving a battalion of tanks through trenches. This requires a coordinated attack - with infantry marking targets, tanks shelling those positions, and artillery pieces providing cover and support. Such combined arms maneuvers are the subject of exercises for Ukrainians in the United States,” the authors of the article explain.

The Ukrainians will undergo a crash course in what the U.S. military calls combined arms training, which American units themselves take months, if not years, to master.

“It is unclear how realistic it is for the Pentagon to train Ukrainians in the complexities of combined arms maneuver warfare in a short period of time,” writes the NYT.

The new arms shipments are unlikely to boost Ukraine's combat power enough to win the war, but officials and outside analysts say they will help significantly. When the full package of Western equipment arrives, Kyiv can create as many as three additional brigades,” notes the American publication.

In doing so, the tanks send important signals—to both Ukraine and Russia—about continued American support for Kyiv.

“For Russia, the tanks demonstrate that the flow of weapons from the West is increasing, not decreasing. And for Ukraine, this is a big morale boost,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former American intelligence officer who now works at the Center for a New American Security, said in a commentary to the NYT.

“This is a vote of confidence that people [in the West] are more interested in Ukraine winning back its territory than in pushing Ukraine into negotiations,” she said.

Как reported “PolitNavigator”, the United States deliberately forced Germany to supply Leopard tanks to Ukraine in order to impose its Abrams on European countries.