Next year could be even tougher than this last for Ukraine, forcing it to fight irregularly to hold on

• As Ukraine's counteroffensive ends, it's now bracing for a hard winter and renewed Russian advances.
• It's unclear what 2024 holds, but Ukraine could be relying on irregular, guerrilla warfare.

The Ukrainians are now on the defensive, scrambling to find men to fight, and desperate for ammunition to make sure the Russians pay in blood for every step forward. This past year was a difficult fight, and 2024 may be even tougher.

Nearly two years after Russia's full-scale invasion, the war in Ukraine appears to be at a stalemate, albeit an unstable one. Both sides have suffered heavy losses and burned through ammunition fighting a war of attrition that could come down to who ultimately has more troops and bullets to expend in battle. Some towns and territories have changed hands, but the front lines are now largely static.

The fighting goes on though. Russia has launched renewed offensives in recent months, and Ukraine has indicated it will continue to bolster defenses while launching counterattacks. Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that this war is entering "a new phase" as the winter months begin.

The future of Ukraine's war effort, though, is now perhaps more uncertain than it has been at any time since the early days of Russia's failed assault on Kyiv. After its lackluster counteroffensive and amid debates about military aid in the West, Ukraine's next steps are precarious, and operations in 2024 could look smaller and more irregular than this year.

"It's going to be extremely challenging for Ukraine to conduct a large-scale counteroffensive in 2024 because of resource limitations," Franz-Stefan Gady, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Business Insider in an interview last month, but "there's still possibility for smaller-scale offensive actions."

If that turns out to be the case, those sporadic, smaller-scale strikes could be counterattacks or possibly something similar to some of Ukraine's successful hits in occupied Crimea and behind enemy lines this year, which painted it as a scrappy and innovative underdog holding on even as its counteroffensive struggled.

These kinds of attacks definitely send a message, but they may not be the hard-hitting punches that Ukraine needs to knock Russia out.

The aftermath of Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive

Ukraine's summer counteroffensive hit a number of snags. It started late, partially due to delayed delivery of Western weapons and critical training. Behind the scenes, tensions flared between Ukraine and its NATO allies about how and where Ukraine should focus its fight. Incorrect assumptions may have even doomed the counteroffensive before it actually began, and early mistakes hurt the offensive from the get-go.

But perhaps the biggest setbacks came when Ukrainian troops, even those armed with Western weapons and ready for battle, ran into Russian defenses that were far more fortified than anticipated, filled with countless landmines, anti-tank ditches, miles of trenches, dragon's teeth anti-vehicle barriers, and booby traps.

Minefields were made even more hazardous by punishing artillery fire, the constant presence of drones, and threats of enemy aircraft, such as Ka-52 attack helicopters armed with anti-tank missiles.

Changing tactics away from a mechanized assaults led by the newly received Western armor, such as German-made Leopard and UK-provided Challenger tanks, the Ukrainians began moving forward on-foot and painstakingly removing obstacles along the way. Little ground was gained with Ukraine only gaining some couple hundred square miles of land over the course of the counteroffensive.

Ukrainian forces did manage to breach the formidable Surovikin Line, a complicated network of fortifications, in Zaporizhzhia earlier this fall. They also recently established a shaky foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River near Kherson, but experts have limited expectations for what can be accomplished there.

But far away from the front lines, as the offensive faced challenges, Ukraine also began relying on smaller, more random attacks in order to both shock Russia and impress the West.

There was, for instance, a spike in unmanned surface vehicle (USV) drone boat attacks in the Black Sea, with Ukraine employing its exploding vessels to terrorize Russia's Black Sea Fleet (BSF) and warships like the Project 775 Ropucha-class landing ship Olenegorsky Gornyak back in August, as well as important logistical and meaningful sites, like the Kerch Bridge connecting the occupied Crimean peninsula and mainland Russia.

And from the sky, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) struck critical Russian bases and assets like strategic bombers repeatedly, demonstrating Ukraine's skill and reach and Russia's failure to adequately protect its forces.

Ukraine didn't stop there though. Ukrainian forces also launched special operations raids onto and around Crimea and used modified anti-ship missiles to hunt down Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile systems.

It also executed multiple attacks on Russian positions in Sevastopol, a major port city in Crimea home to important Black Sea Fleet maintenance and repair facilities. The strikes, made possible by Western-provided Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles, damaged the BSF headquarters and wrecked parts of a shipyard and multiple vessels, including a Russian submarine.

The apparent aim of these attacks, as experts previously told Business Insider, was to make Crimea "untenable" for the Russians, who were forced to question where Ukraine would strike next as its reach extended.

There are limitations to this approach, but the result was that Ukraine, potentially checked on the battlefield as the counteroffensive stalled, could still inflict pain on the Russians and secure wins against their larger foe with less conventional warfare.

Those irregular tactics are likely to continue in 2024

One of the next major challenges for Ukraine heading into next year, Gady said, will be figuring out how to "reconstitute its forces and regenerate combat power" while "exerting pressure on the Russians."

One way to keep up the heat while reducing other offensive operations is conducting precision strike campaigns — in other words, using long-range cruise missiles, drones, sabotage, USVs, and other methods, like Ukraine has already been doing.

That will be important as Russia pursues offensive efforts. Its renewed offensive began a few months ago around Avdiivka near occupied Donetsk, where Russia has conducted "human wave" assaults that sacrifice troops and thrown significant numbers of tanks and vehicles at Ukrainian defenses at great cost for limited gain.

But Russia is clearly pushing and testing Ukraine's defenses to exploit weaknesses, Seth Jones, director of the International Security Program and Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Business Insider, adding that there will probably be more cases of this across the front going into the new year as the Russians try to advance.

That pressure is likely going to force Ukraine to prioritize its defenses for the time being, using weaponry like its newly received US Abrams tanks to stall out Russian operations. While it may want to save those for a potential offensive next year, experts told Business Insider an operation on the scale of this year's counteroffensive is unlikely given depleted resources, manpower, and opportunity.

Jones said it's probably going to be very tough for Ukraine to fight major offensive operations, although it's possible they could take advantage of a failed Russian offensive and counterattack based on that.

That's going to prompt Ukraine to pursue other options, "which would be more like guerrilla, unconventional, and irregular operations in Russian controlled territory in Ukraine," he said.

"That's pretty standard when an opposing state will use ambushes, raids, sabotage, operations, subversion, and assassinations rather than try to fight pitched battles," he added.

The goals for these operations can be multi-faceted, but across the board, they would presumably aim to heighten anxiety about Ukraine's ability to strike the Russians anywhere at any time, hinder command and control processes, and inconvenience Russian military operations, among other things.

Such options are also likely to be cheaper for Ukraine than burning through ammo and missiles. Drones, which Zelenskyy promised Ukraine would produce one million of next year, are inexpensive and expendable, sometimes just a hobby UAV with an explosive payload attached.

But they're quite effective. "This is all part of keeping up continuous pressure on Russian forces, not just on the front," Gady said, but far beyond that.

An unclear future

As Ukraine fights an existential battle, its reliance on the Western industrial base for weapons, ammunition, and aid have been both a boon and a headache. They've certainly empowered Ukraine and upgraded much of its Soviet-era stockpile.

But it has also left it dependent on fickle partners. Without the West, there's little chance for Ukraine to hold out. Battles in Congress, even amid Zelenskyy's pleas, have shown that a few key politicians hold much of Ukraine's fate in their hands.

Over the past month, Republicans have blocked a new $111 billion aid package for Ukraine and Israel, hoping to strike a deal for stricter immigration and border control. While President Joe Biden has signaled he is willing to accept a compromise, there's little time before the end of the year to get the package approved.

Without that aid, and the West's support more largely, the resounding verdict from experts is that Ukraine will lose this war. And a win in Ukraine for Russian President Vladimir Putin likely doesn't mean he will stop there; in fact, it could mean quite the opposite.

As Zelenskyy warned just last week in a discussion with US Senators, the Russian threat will only grow greater.