Western hesitance to provide Ukraine with heavy weaponry and training provided Russia with “more time than they needed” to fortify their lines, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“We did plan to start it in spring, but we didn’t because, frankly, we had not enough munitions and armaments and not enough properly trained brigades — I mean, properly trained in these weapons,” Zelensky said through an interpreter during a virtual appearance Friday before the Aspen Security Forum. “Because we started it a bit later on … it provided Russia with time to mine all our lands and build several lines of defense.”

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Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials maintained a collegial tone at the forum, just weeks after the Ukrainian president’s open dissatisfaction with NATO’s ambiguous promise to his country cast an cloud of acrimony over the Vilnius Summit. Yet a leitmotif of uncertainty about the lack of progress of the counteroffensive drew Zelensky to warn against an overeager demand for results.

“Yes, I do understand that it’s always better to say victory comes sooner, this is what we also want, but the question is the price of this victory,” Zelensky said. “So, let us not throw people under tanks, literally. Let us plan our counteroffensive as our analysts and our intelligence suggests.”

U.S. and European officials have tried to strike an understanding note throughout their discussions of the Ukrainian efforts amid a miasma of trans-Atlantic anxiety that President Joe Biden and congressional leaders will falter in support of Ukraine as the 2024 election season unfolds.

“Look, these are still relatively early days. We have said from the start, we’ve known from the start that this would be hard going,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier Friday. “The Russians have laid significant and serious defenses when it comes to mines initially. The Ukrainians are working their way through that. I believe they have what they need to be very successful.”

Much of equipment arrived far later than Ukrainian officials first hoped. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for instance, declined to authorize the transfer of Leopard tanks until Biden promised to pledge U.S.-made Abrams tanks. That protracted conversation drew to a conclusion in January — weeks after France and the United Kingdom unveiled their respective decisions to provide light and heavy NATO-designed tanks and nearly a year after Zelensky began to “express a need for tanks” and other heavy arms in anticipation of this clash.

“If you watch what they’re doing, they’re doing this carefully. This isn’t a thing that happened like with the Russians when they marched in Kyiv [and] bogged down … really, truly bogged down,” Sen. James Risch (R-ID) told the forum. “They’re testing here, they’re testing there. They don’t have the manpower that Russia has to be able to throw it all at one place at one time.”

Even that probing process has been hampered by delivery time frames. “They had a lot of mines on our fields, [and] because of that, [we’ve maintained] a slower pace of our counteroffensive actions,” he said. “I would like to draw your attention — this is not to complain but just to tell you — that we did lack enough of demining equipment. Now we are being held by our partners.”

Risch, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee and a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, argued that the United States has a moral and strategic obligation to aid Ukraine under the Budapest Memorandum. That now-infamous 1994 agreement saw Ukraine relinquish the vast arsenal of nuclear weapons that it had inherited from the late Soviet Union in exchange for security assurances from the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom.

“I’m tired of hearing about escalation. … I want Putin to wake up in the morning worried about what he’s going to do that’s going to cause us to escalate instead of us wringing our hands and saying, ‘Oh, we can’t do that,’” Risch said, referring to the widespread perception that Biden team’s support for Ukraine has been constrained by fear of Russian retaliation. “Look, everything I said they should have done at the beginning, they’ve done now. God bless him. I wish he had done it a year ago.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan rejected that line of criticism as one of “two caricatures” that distort Biden’s posture on aid for Ukraine.

“We have been prepared to take risks, and we will continue to be prepared to take risks to provide support to Ukraine,” Sullivan said. “On the other hand, there’s a caricature that says, ‘Don’t worry at all. Don’t even ask the question about what Russia might do.’ … It is responsible for every member of NATO and for the United States to think about the Russian reaction when we choose to do something because that matters for our security matters for global stability. So, don’t be paralyzed by it. Consider it and then make decisions accordingly. That is the clear and systematic way that we have approached the question of a security assistance to Ukraine.”

Sullivan also added that he thinks the Ukrainian approach retains a strong potential to yield a major breakthrough.

“Ukraine has a substantial amount of combat power that it has not yet committed to the fight, and it is trying to choose its moment to commit that combat power to the fight when it will have the maximum impact on the battlefield,” Sullivan said. “And we are in close consultation with Ukrainians on the conditions for that. But ultimately, that’s a decision they will make, and it is at that moment … that we will really see what the likely results of this counteroffensive will be.”

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Zelensky, who made a point to “thank all of our partners,” mentioning Biden by name, implied that this moment could be in the offing.

“We are approaching a moment when relevant actions can gain pace,” he said, “because we are already going through some mines locations, and we are demining these areas.”