Beyond the anger, there is a renewed call to see the heavily anticipated counteroffensive make tangible gains — and quickly. People want Ukrainian lands back. They want Moscow to pay. “The first thing you have to understand,” a Whitehall source recently told me, “is that the Ukrainians got all this fancy new Western kit on the promise of a big counteroffensive. They have to do it. And make it work — or more equipment might not be so forthcoming.”

Military activity is duly intensifying; the so-called spring counteroffensive appears finally to be underway. At the start of this week, Ukrainian forces attacked the area around Velyka Novosilka and Novodonetske in the Donbas region, unofficially kicking things off. But what will happen next? And what, realistically, can be achieved?

The total liberation of the occupied territories, including Crimea, is President Zelenskyy’s official position — not just because he believes it’s morally right, but because he knows that anything less allows Moscow to keep attacking. Yet a chasm remains between what the Ukrainians want and what they have the capacity to do — as they so often point out to the West.

So, rather than liberating the occupied territories, the counteroffensive’s most realistic objective is to try to split them — dividing the Russian forces fighting in the Donbas from those in the south. Key to this will be retaking the area around the city of Melitopol in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Do this and they will sever the “land bridge” that snakes all the way from Russia through the cities of Donetsk, Mariupol and Melitopol, and into Crimea. This bridge was one of Putin’s stated war aims: it allows Moscow to give some military (and thus economic and political) reality to the fiction that those lands are Russian territory. Grain now flows from Melitopol into Russia, while Russian passports flow the other way — whether the locals like it or not.

The problem with this plan, however, is that it’s obvious. Looking at Ukraine’s most successful counterattacks over the past year, deception has always been a priority (which is probably why the spring counteroffensive did not come in spring). Last year’s lightning attack around Kharkiv, that sent the Russians scuttling back across the border, was predicated on convincing the enemy that Ukraine would attack much further south. Kyiv seems well-aware of this. After Ukraine launched a multi-pronged attack in Donetsk on Sunday, Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeted out lyrics from Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence”, showing a video of Ukrainian soldiers putting fingers to their lips. “There will be no announcement about the start,” it warned.

Surprise, then, remains the order of the day. But to expect to consistently deceive the Russians is naive. The Kremlin isn’t stupid. Putin knows the continuing feasibility of his occupation rests on their land bridge. Russia is prepared.

Right now, the Ukrainians are making a series of small strikes across the Russian lines. Peppering the enemy like this does two things. First, it tests the lines for weakness. Second, it helps to disguise where a major strike will take place. The broader the range of Ukraine’s preliminary attack, the harder it is for Moscow to work out where they will eventually try to break through. This is partly why Kyiv has also been striking further south, including near the cities of Mykhailivka, Melitopol and Tomak (the latter probably with US-supplied HIMARS systems), all of which are critical to regaining access to the Sea of Azov. Russian channels on Telegram also reported increased fire and assault of positions near Zaporizhzhia.

If Kyiv can recover Zaporizhzhia — whether or not its nuclear power plant functions is another matter — it will sever the land bridge and drive its forces right up against Crimea. Such an advance would not only terrify the pro-Russians living inside the peninsula, but also those ruling in the Kremlin. Ultimately, it would give Kyiv an excellent base from which to try to capture either Donetsk or Luhansk — with the latter being the most likely. The coal mines in Donetsk create a three-dimensional battlefield that Russian forces can use to hide underground, store equipment or booby-trap with ease. The Ukrainians were able to hold out for five months in the salt mines of Soledar by doing the same thing, despite being vastly outnumbered.

The Ukrainians, though, are only half the equation. Many “analysts” on pro-Russia Telegram channels cite the abilities of Putin’s elite forces as a major barrier to a successful Ukrainian counter-offensive. The reality is not so simple. Consider, for instance, the elite 74th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, which was thrown into the heart of the fighting last May when it successfully crossed the Siverskyi Donets river. Towards the end of last month, the brigade was ordered to leave Donetsk for Belgorod, just across the border from Kharkiv, to deal with new threats there. To get there, it had to take a meandering route around the Ukrainian lines — the Russians clearly have no fresh troops to send.

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Meanwhile, there are serious doubts over how “elite” they really are. Soon after crossing the Siverskyi Donets, the forces were chewed up by Ukrainian artillery, reportedly losing over 485 out of 550 men and 80 vehicles. The Brigade is still in the field, but whoever wears their cap badge now is almost certainly not an “elite troop”.

This appears to be part of a wider trend. “In Bakhmut, the Russians recently lost not only a brigade commander, but a Deputy of Political Affairs,” a Whitehall source tells me. “When those people are there, it’s usually because the front is falling apart. The Ukrainians understand this. They’re as close as you can get to the Russians.”

Then there is the problem of ammunition. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, has spent months railing against the Russian high command, specifically Minister of Defence, Sergei Shoigu, and Commander-in Chief, Valery Gerasimov. “Their shelling rate is very low,” the mandarin continues. “It’s the Prigozhin problem writ large. They are dependent on massive bombardments — [when one calculates] the basic unit of fire for a BM-21 “Grad”, the mobile rocket launcher being used across the country, from what we’re seeing, they have enough for only three days.”

There are a host of other problems, too. “We’re seeing some ancient kit; so, is Russia holding back their best stuff in case of a broader war with Nato or are they simply out of things later than a T60 [tank produced by the Soviets in 1941-42]? And they’ve changed conscript regulations. They can now call up people with Type 1 diabetes, in a country of 150 million people. Just how desperate are they?”

And yet, despite the chaotic and largely ridiculed nature of Moscow’s partial mobilisations, it got the extra forces it wanted. While Western weapons flow into Ukraine, Russia is largely self-sufficient and, more than a year later, its lines still hold. And the troops populating them know a fierce battle is coming.

Yesterday morning, I spoke to a young waiter. “Smells like counteroffensive today,” he said with a grin. By the afternoon, word reached me that more offensive operations were beginning in the east. The people here are angry and increasingly expectant. “Time to advance!” said Dasha as we finished our coffee. Like most Ukrainians, she wants both revenge and progress — anything less would be a disaster.

Of course, until an operational reserve is built up and offensives can be launched, frontal forces are absolutely necessary, whether to resist an advancing enemy or to keep attacking the enemy, so that it cannot withdraw its frontal forces to build up its own operational reserve. But frontal forces can only fight by attrition, First World War-style, to kill and wound enemy troops in front of them. And an entire war fought by attrition alone must last for years, killing and maiming troops on both sides until one side or the other gives up because of sheer exhaustion.

That is what happened on November 11, 1918, when Germany surrendered, even though not one Allied soldier had entered German territory, which remained almost undamaged in spite of the British and French air raids that hit a few buildings here and there. It was because Germany was neither devastated nor occupied after its surrender that it could go to war again just 20 years later, with catastrophic consequences. In other words, attrition is not only costly in lives, but it is also inconclusive, for it does not exhaust the will to fight.

Why is this relevant? Ever since the failure of the Russian air assault at the Antonov airfield on the first night of its invasion, which was supposed to open the way for the conquest of Kyiv and the country’s surrender, Ukraine has been fighting a war of attrition. At the cost of mounting casualties, Ukrainian frontal warfare has been successful enough to induce the Russians to withdraw from Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, to prevent the seemingly inevitable Russian conquest of Odesa, the country’s premier port, and to limit Russian advances in the most contested Donetsk and Luhansk regions, lately by holding Bakhmut in a house-by-house, street-by-street fight, in spite of relentless attacks by Russia’s Wagner mercenaries.

But the greatest success of Ukraine’s frontal resistance has occurred behind the front, with the gradual build-up of an increasing large, well-trained, and well-armed operational reserve of combat units that could be held back from combat because the frontal forces proved sufficiently strong to stop Russian advances without need of large reinforcements. It means that, for the first time since the start of the war, Ukraine’s war leaders can now take the initiative, instead of just repelling one Russian attack after another in different sectors of the very long front.

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They can therefore choose a course of action from within a spectrum of risks and possible gains: from remaining on the defensive overall while launching successive attacks to drive back the Russians in one sector after another, each a limited-risk effort; to the boldest option of concentrating all available forces for a deep-penetration offensive to scythe across the roads and rail lines that sustain Russia’s forces within an entire region. The peculiar geography of the war, dominated by the curve of the great Dnipro river, offers several choices for such a bold move, including the most ambitious: an all-out offensive from Zaporizhzhia all the way to the Black Sea at Berdyans’k, or even at Mariupol, only 40 miles from the Russian border.

Regardless of the chosen sector, unless the Russians have large forces ready to counter-attack powerfully enough to promptly drive back the Ukrainians, the result of an all-out offensive could be a spectacular Russian defeat, complete with an unprecedented number of prisoners. It might even finally provoke challenges to Putin’s direction of the war, and hence his entire leadership.

That Ukraine’s leaders can finally choose between different options is a great advance, even if the chosen option is to hold back the operational reserve until the Russians make a move of their own. This is entirely possible: the assault on Bakhmut that has long dominated the headlines has been intense but also very limited in its scope. The Russians who fought and died in the house-to-house fighting were not the military professionals of the elite forces, nor were they the deployable troops obtained from last year’s call-up of 300,000 reservists, or the units manned by contract soldiers — but rather the Wagner expendables.

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This means that there are sufficiently large numbers of uncommitted Russian forces somewhere — perhaps in Belarus, Russia itself or occupied Ukraine — to allow the Kremlin to launch its own offensive. But even that is bound to be inconclusive because only a conquest of Kyiv could be decisive, and that is now an impossibility unless the entire Russian army is mobilised for that purpose.

If there is a Russian offensive, a Ukrainian counter-offensive launched after the Russians have used their operational reserves could yield even greater results, forcing the Kremlin onto the defensive, perhaps even to the point of seeking a ceasefire. If Kyiv and the West are looking for the most plausible path to victory, this is it.