The long awaited counter-offensive is finally underway, but is clearly in the first phase where Ukraine’s forces are probing Russia’s defences looking for weaknesses. The main force of reserves and Nato supplied weapons have not been deployed and even the main direction of the attack is not clear yet.

Reports are pouring in of battles, with both sides claiming victory. There are videos of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) raising flags over recaptured villages from Kyiv and widely shared photos of a destroyed Leopard 2 tanks along with half a dozen US-made Bradley APCs.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was on telly yesterday meeting military bloggers and claiming that a third of the Nato weapons had already been destroyed. That was followed by reports from Western officials admitting that “Ukraine is taking significant casualties and making slow progress towards the Russian main line of defence” on June 14.

But all of this must be taken with a big pinch of salt. The main assault has not begun and the real fighting is yet to start. At this point both sides are still at the “shoving each other and saying “you wanna know?” stage of a fight before the first real punch is thrown.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is taking a huge gamble with this counter-offensive. It has to go well. The AFU must smash through Russia’s lines and rout the defenders. He needs to have a repeat spectacular success like last autumn's feint towards Kherson and hammer blow in the Kharkiv region.

Ukraine is entirely dependent on Western supplies of arms and money. If the counter-offensive runs into a brick wall of Russian resistance and suffers heavy losses, it will deplete the stockpile of Western weapons it has been building up and it is already suffering from a shortage of manpower.

The big change in the counter-offensive is that until now Ukraine has been the defender and the logic of war says the defender has the advantage. However, now Ukraine is going on the assault, military orthodoxy says that you need to outnumber defenders by five to one to be effective. Ukraine does not have those numbers. Moreover, until recently it was largely given predominantly defensive weapons with which to fight, not the offensive weapons Zelenskiy has been begging for.

A failed assault will delete Kyiv’s limited stockpile of weapons and men. It will also leave Ukraine vulnerable to a Russian counter-offensive. Russia outnumbers Ukraine three to one, so any kill ratio of less than 3:1 actually weakens Ukraine, even if the Russian death toll is twice as high. Russia’s economy is now fully on a war footing, is enjoying a war boost and is fully funded for at least two more years, albeit running a deficit and growing weakly. Putin can afford to wait Zelenskiy out.

And it seems that no one expects Russia to collapse under the weight of Ukraine’s counter-offensive. The unspoken policy here is simply to deliver Russia a punishing body blow, as hard as possible, that will force Putin to the talks table and then call for a ceasefire while Ukraine has the best possible negotiating position.

Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a press conference with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on June 14 that Ukraine has to grab back as much territory as it can so that it will have “a better position at the negotiating table.” There was no mention of “Ukraine’s victory.”

It appears that while the Nato allies will never say so out loud, there is no belief that Ukraine can actually win this war. So it is only a matter of time before the West cuts off the aid and forces Zelenskiy into talks with Russia.

Personally, given Russia's famously bloody mindedness and little respect for human life, this policy, that assumes a risks/reward calculation by Putin, seems to me as extraordinarily naïve.

The White House has made it plain with numerous isolated comments, its strategy is simply to give Zelenskiy the strongest hand it can in those talks whenever they happen. If the West were serious about seeing Ukraine win, it would have armed Ukraine with all the weapons it has now on day one of the war, and not trickled increasingly more powerful weapons into the theatre over the course of 16 months – and some of the most powerful, like the F-16s, are not due to arrive until the autumn at the earliest, long after the counter-offensive will be over. As Russia has suddenly been making much more use of its airpower than at any time since the start of the war, those F-16s would be incredibly useful now. And Zelenskiy has been calling for planes since the first weeks of the war.

Delivering another rout is going to be extremely hard. The Kharkiv offensive was such a success as the Kremlin blundered by drawing off some 20 battalion tactical groups (BTGs) from Donbas to protect Kherson, leaving the lines in Donbas thin and lightly defended. Since then Russia has shortened the line by withdrawing back to the left bank of the Dnipro and added 300,000 conscripts to the ranks.

And it has had eight months to dig in. The New York Times (NYT) wrote a detailed report about the deep and multilayered defences last week, with a lightly defended “trip wire” first line designed to alert command of an attack. That is backed by a landmine field beyond which is sophisticated anti-tank measures and much deeper and better protected trenches. The Leopard that was blown up reportedly ran into one of these landmine fields. The Nato weapons are powerful but not invincible. And the Russians have not been idle in the last eight months.

A lot rides on the events of the next few months. Ukraine fatigue is not manifest yet, but it is there in the background. The war continues to escalate and the polycrisis it is fuelling has not gone away. Even the EU grandees admit sanctions have run their course and have not hurt the Russian economy anywhere as badly as was expected. The passage of the eleventh package that is supposed to improve the enforcement of the previous ten has got bogged down in bickering over exemptions. The whole clash with Russia is looking more and more like a stalemate.

The hope is that the counter-offensive will tip the scales decisively in Kyiv’s advantage. But if it fails then the calls for an end to what is a manifestly unwinnable war will start to rise.

I sincerely hope the counter-offensive goes well. Russia’s military morale is so low and its command so bad there is a chance of a catastrophic collapse. But it remains unlikely. Ukrainians have not only proved themselves to be heroic in the classic sense, but also wily, innovative, resourceful and determined to an unbelievable degree. But to gain from the counter-offensive they will also need a lot of luck.