Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
- US intelligence believes Ukraine won't reach the key city of Melitopol, The Washington Post reported.
- Melitopol is a strategic hub that allows Russia to control occupied areas of southern Ukraine.
- Retaking the city is a landmark goal for Ukraine's counteroffensive.
US intelligence officials don't think Ukrainian forces can reach the strategic southeastern city of Melitopol, believing that one of the key goals of the counteroffensive is going to fail, The Washington Post reported.
This is according to unnamed people from within the intelligence community who were familiar with a classified forecast, who spoke to the Post. Insider was unable to independently verify the report.
The assessment, per the paper, is based on Russia's massive defensive preparations, which involve hundreds of miles of minefields and trench networks to thwart Ukraine's advances.
Republicans and Democrats have been briefed on the contents of the assessment, prompting recriminations from both those who have criticized the extent of US military support and those who called for more, the paper reported.
Patrick Bury, a senior lecturer in security at the UK's Bath University, told Insider that the reported assessment is one he shares.
A breakthrough, albeit with changed tactics, is not out of the realms of possibility, Bury said. "But the longer we stay in this kind of thing, the chances of a knockout blow become more remote."
"It doesn't mean they're not going to get somewhere, but obviously time is ticking away," he added. "And at what point does it just become clear that it's not working?"
Melitopol was one of the first cities to fall under Russian control during the full-scale invasion that started in February 2022, and it is now a key objective in the counteroffensive.
The city sits almost at the center of a wide swathe of land in occupied southern Ukraine, much of which is bordered by the Azov Sea to the south and the Dnipro River to the north.
Melitopol is also the meeting place for a web of captured roads and railway lines through which Russia transports troops and supplies to the front lines from Crimea, which in turn is connected to Russia via the Kerch Bridge.
Reaching and even retaking Crimea is a hallowed objective in Ukraine's counteroffensive, with the peninsula under Russian occupation since 2014.
But a Wall Street Journal analysis in early August mapped a dense, overlapping series of Russian fortifications between the Dnipro and Melitopol, and lining the main route to the city from the north. Ukrainian troops are trying to push through these deadly lines from the town of Robotyne, 50 miles to the north, per The Washington Post.
The density of Russian minefields has been described as "insane" by Ukrainian defense official Oleksiy Danilov, who said in a televised address that as many as five mines per square meter have been laid across the 600-mile front line.
The situation has prompted a change in tactics from Ukraine since the outset of the counteroffensive, which initially saw it lose key Western-supplied equipment, including battle tanks and a sizable proportion of the Bradley infantry fighting vehicles sent from the US.
Ukraine has switched to pummelling the Russian lines with artillery fire, before painstakingly attempting to move forward with infantry and sappers. The approach aims, in part, to preserve heavy vehicles, but has proved much slower than Ukraine and its allies hoped.