The War of the Trains, continued
by Carlo Graziani
Part 1, Prologue, set up some necessary scenery for the drama that follows, and ended like this:
The UA and the Ukrainian government have, by necessity, employed a weapon that weaker parties traditionally turn to in wartime: deception. As we will see, they implemented a program of deception that paid dividends to a degree at least matching the spectacular successes that the British, and, later, the Western Allies, achieved in WWII. That is the story to which we turn next, as we take up a chronology of the war.
The map below reproduces the one shown in Prologue, and will be needed for reference several times in what follows. I assembled it from the excellent personal railroad site of Yuri Popov, a physics instructor at the University of Michigan, to display the rail connections from Russia to Eastern and North-Eastern Ukraine. Note one conspicuous feature: there actually aren’t that many available connections between Russia and Ukraine.
A War In Four Acts
The chronology of the conflict splits up rather naturally into four phases.
Act I: The Initial Four-Theatre Assault (24 February—6 April)
The Russians launched their assault on four distinct theatres beginning on 24 February: Kyiv was assaulted from Belarus; Kharkiv from Belgorod; Eastern Ukraine from the Russian-controlled rebel areas in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts; and the south—the Azov and Black Sea coast areas, Mariupol, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Mikolaiv from Crimea, with Odesa clearly threatened: the intention of this latter axis evidently not just to create the long-desired “land bridge” from Russia to Crimea, but to reach clear across to Moldova, cutting off any rump Ukrainian state from sea access, leaving it to wither on the vine for easy later pruning.
As we all know, the southern effort was the only one rewarded with anything like success. Kherson surrendered on March 2, a major political accomplishment for Putin’s “Special Military Operation.” Elsewhere, however, things began going sideways immediately. Mariupol was invested, but continued resistance at the iron works tied up (for foolish politically-inspired reasons) military resources needed elsewhere until the final surrender on 17 May, 10 weeks after the invasion began. Zaporizhzhia and Mikolaiv were never taken, and Odesa was never seriously threatened by land.
Kyiv and Kharkiv actually repelled their respective assaults, the former preserving the country from decapitation, the latter, as noted in the Prologue, preserving Ukraine’s ability to wage war effectively by allowing it to use its own railway network as interior lines of communication, while forcing the Russians to move around the country’s periphery. The effort in the Donbas basically just fell down. By late March, the Kremlin had to confront the ugly reality that its grandiose invasion plan had failed miserably and humiliatingly, and its forces around Kyiv were being mercilessly pinned by Ukrainian antitank missiles and destroyed by Ukrainian artillery. Facing fearsome losses, the Russians decided to withdraw from Kyiv and Kharkiv, regroup, and re-scope the plan. The new objective would be more modest, but, they were certain, achievable: pinching off the Ukrainian salient in the Donbas, and securing the more Russian-speaking oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk for annexation to Russia.
Act II: Race to the Donbas (7 April—9 May)
By 6 April, the Russians had completed their withdrawal from Kyiv, and entirely halted efforts to enter Kharkiv, focusing instead on transferring as much combat power as remained in those theatres eastward from Kyiv, and south from Kharkiv, so as to consummate a “classic” of maneuver warfare: the Cannae-style envelopment that has so mesmerized, attracted, and ultimately frustrated so many commanders in history, and which was certainly beyond the meager abilities of the Russian STAVKA. The intention was to force a pincer south from Izyum, while at the same time striking north from Donetsk City, the two pincers meeting more or less at Slovyansk and trapping the greater part of the UA in the salient bulging eastward from Donetsk Oblast into Luhansk Oblast. To the names of famous commanders such as Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, and, presumably, Zhukov, entries for Shoigu and Putin were being prepared, not necessarily in that order.
Among the many problems with this high-concept plan was the fact that many of the units needed to carry it out had been very roughly handled by the UA, and needed rest and refit, for which there was no time as they were rushed around the periphery of Ukraine’s territory. The holding of Kharkiv paid a vast dividend now, as the UA was able to exploit its interior lines of communication to rush its forces to plug the gap in neck of the salient well before the Russians were ready to start ponderously forcing their trap closed. As it turns out, much planning had gone on for scenarios much like this one since 2014, and systems of communication trenches and prepared firing positions resembling WWI lines were already in place, waiting to accept the onrushing UA troops.
There were pitched infantry, artillery, tank and air/counter air battles, but the basic top line story is this: The UA stopped the Russian envelopment maneuver cold. It went nowhere, perhaps predictably (in retrospect, at least). Putin and STAVKA must have been frustrated beyond their powers of expression, even in the powerfully expressive blasphemous vulgarity for which the Russian language is justly famous. Meanwhile, the UA began pushing the Russians back from the Kharkiv suburbs at the end of April, and by 9 May Russian efforts were concentrated on preventing the UA from reaching the border north of Kharkiv. A new, new plan was clearly needed.
Act III: “Watch This Hand…” (10 May—1 August)
(1) Eastern Front
The “new, new plan” that STAVKA devised, after an operational “pause” of a week or so, may have been the only good idea that they had in the entire misbegotten campaign. They decided to go to the Russian army’s one true strength: stolid, grinding, massive, concentrated, artillery-forward assault, pulverizing everything in its path, forgoing fancy maneuvers beyond the Army’s capacity. Gathering much of their eastern strength in Luhansk Oblast, they drove it towards the city of Severodonetsk, an important road crossing on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets river, itself a major geographic feature of the Donbas plain.
Very few people are directly acquainted with the thinking of the UA’s general staff, and I am of course not one of those people. From circumstantial evidence, however, we can now infer that well before this point they got sick and tired of being the Russians’ passive victims, and had begun carrying out a series of feints and deceptions with the objective of ultimately seizing the initiative from the Russians and destroying as much of their army as they could trap. Which, in May 2022, would have sounded batshit insane to any outsider watching the progress of the war. And yet the UA set out to do precisely this.
In mid- to late-May, the UA accepted the Russians’ invitation to do battle in the streets of Severodonetsk. A more knuckleheaded challenge by STAVKA is difficult to imagine. By this point, the Russian army was definitely starting to feel the manpower squeeze, and was beginning its series of increasingly madcap recruitment drives in the outer Russian provinces. Entering an urban battlespace to dispute control of each neighborhood, street by street, against a wily, determined defender, was a cognitively challenged choice—it was tantamount to throwing manpower away for no good reason. Even employing lower-quality DNR/LNR “volunteers” from Luhansk and Donetsk breakaway regions was simply wasteful here.
The UA dragged the fight out at an advantageous casualty exchange rate for as long as possible, reinforcing from the west over the highway bridge. The Russians targeted the bridge with artillery for several weeks, succeeding only in proving how difficult it is to drop a bridge with imprecise artillery strikes rained down on its deck: the efficient way to destroy a bridge is to aim direct fire at its supports. Artillery holes through the deck do not undermine the structure for a very long time, and are easily repaired.
Eventually, having exacted an expensive butcher’s bill, the UA executed an orderly withdrawal from the city. They then repeated the performance in the nearby city of Lysichansk, eliciting an outburst from Igor Girkin, a former Russian commander and nationalist milblogger, who excoriated Putin and Shoigu for allowing the UA to deliberately inflict maximum damage on Russian troops and burn through Russian manpower and equipment.
As May gave way to June, then July, the war in the east entered open fields and took on a predictable pattern: the Russians, having secured Luhansk Oblast, were determined to complete the capture of Donetsk Oblast, but were doing so at a rate of about a mile or less per week. They would pour hellish amounts of artillery on flyspeck villages, then launch combined infantry-armored probes that were often repulsed. When such probes succeeded, the UA forces executed another orderly withdrawal to another position.
There were two remarkable things about this to me at the time. One was that this is not what you expect when a larger, more powerful army is shoving a smaller, weaker one backwards. What you expect, instead, is that eventually a desperate rear-guard action falls prey to a blunder or to an enemy stroke of luck, and there is a rout. But all summer long there was no rout. Obviously there was something wrong with the “smaller, weaker” part. The second remarkable thing was that this was apparently not obvious. The UA somehow managed to play-act a part of a combatant on the ropes, sending its Territorial troops into the fight in Severodonetsk as if it were short of regular army troops, and (probably) arranging for those Territorials to be interviewed in Western media so that they could impress journalists with the dire straits that they were in, with how little preparation they had been given, and with the meager support that they had received from Kyiv. How the UA effectively concealed hidden manpower reserves that should have been in plain view to any careful STAVKA intelligence officer, as well as to well-informed Western analysts1, is a story that I expect historians will be shaking their heads over for years to come.
(2) Southern Front
Well, OK, so the UA was hiding a lot of manpower strength. They also had had some serious armor donations in March/April—220 or so T-72s from Poland and the Czech Republic. Some were probably destroyed setting up firing positions in the east, but there were no reports of big tank battles, so they were still husbanding a lot of potential offensive strength. What for?
Near the beginning of July, something odd happened. The Ukrainian government began issuing a series of PSAs announcing that a campaign for the liberation of Kherson would begin soon, that preliminary operations were in progress, and that civilians in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts should begin evacuating to Ukrainian-held territory, or start making plans to do so, or at least to make valid shelter-in-place plans. Not long after, deep HIMARS strikes at Russian command, control, and communication (C3) and logistical targets such as ammunition dumps began behind Kherson, clearly intended to soften up Russian defenses by pushing those sites back beyond the 91 km (57 mile) HIMARS M-31 munitions’ striking range, lengthening supply lines and degrading front-line control. All this was odd because the PSAs were tantamount to surrendering any hope of strategic surprise for a Kherson offensive. In fact, it looked like such an obvious feint that I was certain the counteroffensive would happen elsewhere, at Zaporizhzhia. I was wrong about that too. The UA had a much better plan.
The Russians reacted to the threat like a pack of junkyard dogs who just heard a chain-link fence being repeatedly smacked with a tire iron. Kherson was a high-value political prize, the only intact capture of the war. Under no circumstances was it to be allowed to be compromised. The Kherson zone, until that time a sleepy operational backwater, suddenly became the recipient of massive reinforcements.
Kherson is on the west/north bank of the Dnipro river, not far from the river’s Black Sea outlet2. Russia attacked Southern Ukraine from, and is supplied from, the river’s east/south bank. The Dnipro is a mighty body of water, by no means fordable by vehicles. There were three bridges that traversed it. By early August, some 25,000 Russian troops had crossed those bridges and were deploying into the triangle between Kherson, Mikolaiv, and Zaporizhzhia, launching spoiling attacks to ruin the coming Kherson offensive, and to push back the HIMARS range.
These reinforcements had to come from somewhere—remember, Russia was scraping the bottom of a depleted manpower barrel as things stood. STAVKA determined that it was appropriate to designate the region north-east and east-south-east of Kharkiv as an “economy of force” area, meaning that the threat to this region was low, and it could be stripped of forces needed in other theatres. Off those forces went to Kherson.
However, before we move on, take another look at the railroad map above. That “economy of force” theatre happens to contain the vital lifeline of the entire Russian Donbas effort: that would be the Belgorod-Kupyansk rail line. Pity if anything happened to that…
Act IV: The Axe Falls (1 August—Present).
(1) Southern Theatre: The Dnipro Bear Trap
Beginning in July, the UA started taking HIMARS potshots at those three bridges across the Dnipro. Remember that the Russians proved at Severodonetsk that it takes a lot of artillery strikes to drop a bridge, although compared to the accuracy of the M-31 HIMARS munitions, Russian artillery rocket strikes are a bit like playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey while drunk. Nonetheless, the Russians had little trouble repairing holes at this stage, as their forces poured over the Dnipro.
In the first weeks of August, however, the UA put on a masterclass on how to drop bridges using precision artillery rockets. It turns out that with the M-31 munitions’ accuracy of a few meters, repeated strikes directly over support structures are perfectly adequate to the task of destroying highway and railway bridges. The three Dnipro bridges were out of service by the second half of August. It gradually began to dawn on the Russians that they had 25,000 troops on the opposite side of the river from their supply train, and they began to frantically construct pontoon (improvised floating, light-duty) bridges. The UA artillery happily targeted these, and anything moving across them.
On 29 August, the Ukrainian government announced that the long-awaited Kherson offensive was finally on, and the UA attacked, after imposing a strict security blackout on media reporting of its operations. The blackout seemed puzzling, at first—after all, the Russians were certain to obtain a clear picture of UA ops from their own units’ tactical intelligence officers within a day or two. The interpretation that emerged from a very lively debate among Adam Silverman’s blog commenters that culminated in a 2 September discussion thread—which I believe holds up well still today—was that a major deception operation was still in progress. That interpretation runs as follows: The Russians, having been tempted to cross the river in force and now cut off from their lines of supply, were gasping as they sucked scarce military resources over ephemeral pontoon bridges. The UA, for its part, could resupply at will from its burgeoning stock of NATO-grade equipment and ammunition, and could drive out that fleet of T-72s from the Warsaw Pact junkyards en masse. Moreover, while the strategic objective of the Ukrainian offensive was obviously Kherson, the Russians were to be kept guessing for as long as possible as to which axes of advance or geographical features might constitute the UA’s operational objectives.
And therein lies the deception. The Russians have been had. The operational objective of the offensive is almost certainly the Russian army itself. The UA has neatly turned the tables on the Russians, putting them in a situation where they are now to be ground down in a battle of attrition, as the Russians had been attempting to do to the UA in the Donbas since May. The beauty of the Dnipro Bear Trap is that it hands total control of the operational tempo and conflict intensity to the Ukrainians. The Russians cannot escape—their heavy vehicles cannot cross pontoon bridges, and all crossings are under artillery observation anyway. That army is never going home. All the UA needs to do is fight in a manner designed to provoke Russian materiel attrition, without necessarily committing to any axis of attack. The Russians will all be in POW camps or dead by some time in October, except possibly for the ones who are very good swimmers in cold water. Whoever thought up this trap is going to get an entry in that historic roll of famous commanders.
When Kherson falls, and the remains of the Russian army beyond the Dnipro is herded into camps, a shattering psychological blow will fall upon Russia, eclipsing all shocks that the Russians have absorbed in the war to date. The political effects on Russian politics, and on International attitudes toward Russia and towards the war are not calculable, but they are certain to be immense. There’s an earthquake coming, and soon.
(2) Kharkiv Offensive: Targets Of Opportunity
On 4 September, soldiers from two different UA battalion-level units uploaded pictures to Twitter from Ozerne, a village on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi-Donets, about 6 km/4 miles from Lyman. From the photos, the crossing had apparently been unopposed, and the smiling troops had the air of boys on a cheeky outing. Still, believing that Lyman was a Russian stronghold, I expected the Russians to come boiling out of there like angry fire ants, and felt sure that a pitched battle would ensue within a day.
There was no battle at or near Ozerne, or Lyman for that matter, at least not that week. Remember “economy of force theatre”? Yeah, well, we didn’t know about that at the time. However, it turns out that the UA did know about it, having presumably done a very careful accounting of where their bag of trapped Russians in the south had come from, and gotten some confirmation from local intelligence sources—it’s their country, after all. They knew that the theatre containing the Belgorod-Kupyansk supply line of the entire Russian Donbas war effort was completely defenseless. For the cost of detaching a few battalions (Michael Kofman estimated 4 or 5 on a recent War on the Rocks podcast) from their main business in the south, they could derange the Russian supply line, and perhaps entirely separate Belgorod from the theatre for which it serves as logistical hub.
This, in my opinion, was the genesis of the now-famous “Kharkiv Offensive” that captured the imagination of the world. It was supposed to be an opportunistic diversion from the main effort in the south, not the headline-grabbing blitzkrieg that it turned out to be. I doubt very much that the UA expected the thinned-out Russians to break and run away as a leaderless, disordered mob, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t plan it that way, but it must have been a very pleasant surprise, as they pushed east and, almost effortlessly, cut the Belgorod supply line at Kupyansk.
The rest of the offensive that followed was natural exploitation, although perhaps it has a purpose beyond liberation of occupied territory. This is not yet necessarily the end for Belgorod.
If you look back at the map, there is a second line farther east, terminating at Starobilsk, which can be reached from Belgorod by means of a detour north, east, then south again, of about 300 km. The detour would be a nuisance, but in Internet network parlance it adds latency rather than degrading bandwidth, especially if the Russians are willing to prioritize military supply train schedules over civilian schedules (want to bet?). So the UA may still need to push further east if it wants to be sure of knocking Belgorod’s supplies out of the war altogether. The advantage of doing so is to put more strain on the resources and scheduling at the remaining distribution hub at Rostov-on-Don, and to ensure that any failure occurring to deliveries from Rostov become critical bottlenecks to the entire Russian war effort.
To close that line, the UA doesn’t actually have to reach it. They just need to get to within 90 km of the Starobilsk rail yard with a HIMARS unit, or even within firing distance of, say, any 10-mile stretch of track, on a decent road with good cover, so that they can fire salvos that make rebar out of stretches of track too long to repair in a useful time. Then Belgorod can go back to being a sleepy border town. I’m sure the local civilian rail passengers would appreciate their schedules going back to normal.
Epilogue: Mobilize This
The big war news story of the past few weeks has been the Russian “mobilization” drive, which is an effort so confused and ill-conceived that I will not let a detailed critique detain us here—tune in to one of Adam’s excoriations of the matter for that, or some of the informed discussions that follow. What I’d like to note here is that at this point, from a logistical perspective, the entire Russian war effort is hanging by a thread, and it almost doesn’t matter whether their mobilization effort succeeds or fails.
Set aside the question of how the raw recruits that are being pulled out of metro stops today are to substitute for the 25,000 mostly contract servicemen (and officers) trapped west of the Dnipro that the Russians are soon going to be forced to write off as a total loss. And of where the combat experience required to train those recruits is to come from. And of whether the Russians should ask the UA nicely for their gear and ammo back, so they can equip a few of them.3
More crucially, the UA is obviously targeting their vulnerable supply rail lines, and have gotten good at it. On 22 September some genius at the Russian supply service decided to run a supply train reported to be full of T-62 tanks from Rostov-on-Don right up to a train station in Yasynuvata, a suburb of Donetsk City, less than five miles from the front line. The train pulled into town and promptly blew up. Obviously, the lessons of the war are not being widely shared among the Russian commands, because there are certainly commanders in the army who learned the hard way to KEEP THEIR GODDAMNED HIGH-VALUE LOGISTICAL TARGETS OUT OF THE 90 KM HIMARS RANGE FROM THE FRONT, but logistics and supply service commanders apparently don’t read those memos. This was not the first Russian supply train targeted by a HIMARS strike. Similarly, the explosion at the ammunition warehouse in Dzankhoi last summer, courtesy of UA/SOF, shows the attention and priority attached by the UA to rail supply targets.
My guess is that the UA wants deep interdiction of all Russian rail links into Ukraine. They’ve got Belgorod nearly off-line, and perhaps entirely off-line if tanks are now shipped to the Donbas from Rostov. Next the UA will want to cut the line from Rostov into Luhansk Oblast through Taganrog. That’s actually nearly accomplished: the border crossing of that line, the town of Vyselky, is 88 km (55 miles) from Marinka, a Donetsk suburb that is currently the site of significant fighting. This is the edge of HIMARS range, meaning that most of the line from Rostov inside Ukraine can already be targeted.
I’m sure the UA would also dearly love to knock the Crimean rail supplies off-line, targeting Kerch or Dzankhoi, or both. These are not impossible goals if the Ukrainian government can cut a deal with the Biden administration for a limited number of accounted-for, agreed-target ATACMS munitions—which have 300 km/188 mile range, and which the U.S. has so far considered too provocative and escalatory to supply to Ukraine. But consider this: a small number of such artillery missiles with warheads specialized for each Crimean target—area bomblets, probably, for rail yards, penetrator high-explosive for bridge supports—would permanently shut off all military supplies to the Southern theatre.4 Then those newly-mobilized recruits can walk, or drive their personal cars to Ukraine, and their stuff can be bused in, but the Russian army will have seen its last tank or artillery shell. And for all intents and purposes, the war will be over.
- The ruse really worked beautifully. The Russians were not the only ones suckered: Michael Kofman, an expert on military affairs and on Russian force structure, was interviewed in the War on the Rocks podcast in June. He delivered a careful analysis of the Russian manpower crisis, but then, with no comparable discussion of Ukraine’s manpower situation, or even an acknowledgment that Ukraine provisions manpower entirely differently from the way Russia does, he breezily stated “both sides have now used up their best troops.” as if there were no distinctions to be drawn between the two, and if Russia was exhausted, Ukraine must be also. I admire Kofman, and pay attention to everything he says. I point this episode out to show that lots of people were taken in, along with the Russians.
- If you are not familiar with the geography of Kherson’s situation, a quick glance at Google Maps might be a good idea at this point.
- As the meme has it, the Russians are at least likely to see some of their ammo returned. The UA operates many of the same heavy-caliber guns and mortars as they do.
- It may or may not be worth the trouble of using ATACMS strikes to sever the final two rail connections northeast and southeast of Luhansk, indicated by the red annotation arrows on the map at the top of this post. Luhansk is about 96 km / 60 miles from Bakhmut, where active—and, for the Russians, futile—fighting is currently in progress. This suggests that the city of Luhansk itself, and its rail connections, may be within M-31 targeting range very soon.
Acts of Kindness: Kids Just Make It All Better
SpaceUnit
On a very petty and pedantic note (this is BJ after all), it is not necessary to capitalize dire straits when not referring to the band.
Okay now I’m going back to finish reading.
Carlo Graziani
One more time: every writer writes a pile of text, which remains just that until an editor tells him or her what to do with it. And WaterGirl is one of the world’s natural editors. So, WG, thanks.
frosty
This is a great summary. I’m finally figuring out where everything is, and tonight I learned that Donbas is another name for two regions: Donets’k and Luhans’k. This map has been extremely helpful for following Carlo’s summary:
http://www.maps-of-europe.net/maps/maps-of-ukraine/detailed-political-and-administrative-map-of-ukraine-with-all-cities-roads-and-airports.jpg
VOR
“All warfare is based on deception.” – Sun Tzu
SpaceUnit
Well, the good news seems to be that Putin’s campaign is now defeated and desperate.
The bad news is that Putin’s campaign is now defeated and desperate.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
It really drives home just how amazing the UA is, and how vastly underestimated they were not just by russia, but most of the world too. Thank you for putting this together, Carlo!
Also, this:
made me snort with laughter.
zhena gogolia
Haha, you really don’t like TAGANROG, do you?
lowtechcyclist
Money for nothing, chicks for free ;-)
Yeah, I know SpaceUnit got there first. Didn’t take advantage, though.
SpaceUnit
@lowtechcyclist:
Mark Knopfler’s new band Dnipro Bear Trap is pretty good.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@lowtechcyclist: I kinda think this feels apropos for this war:
lowtechcyclist
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛:
Has a war ever been fought so intelligently as Ukraine has fought this one?
Seconded!
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@lowtechcyclist:
I’m no scholar on the subject, but I would reckon not. To quote the philosopher Eddie Izzard, one of the main elements of attack is the element of surprise. (Of course, she was talking about the idea of having a battalion of transvestites (her wording at the time), but you know…it’s a widely applicable notion!)
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: Some names are hard! :-)
Carlo Graziani
@zhena gogolia: Early-onset Alzheimers, I think. Sigh, fixing…
Anonymous At Work
First, thanks for this. explainer I always thought the Kherson operation was a meat grinder but intended for Russian hardware rather than personnel. Russian dependence on massed artillery involves massing their artillery. As Adam always says, it’s HIMARS o’clock somewhere.
Second, what’s the approximate TIME added (time being more important than distance here) to a resupply train to Donbas if the Belgorod-to-Starobilsk link is severed? Are we talking hours, days, over a week? Given the complete failure of the Russian trucks (& tires) to handle the muddy season at the HEIGHT of the offensive, I fully expect food and cold weather gear to begin distribution only after needed, so a week of low-to-no food is a big deal.
Third, at what point does UA try to do a sharp turn south to severe the heavy lines from the south in Zaporizhzhia Oblast to further isolate resupply to the Kherson front (not really the Kherson forces but the secondary and tertiary lines I imagine being prepared for when UA takes Kherson)? The area looks ripe for an attack and the geography doesn’t seem harsh.
Carlo Graziani
@zhena gogolia: And, thanks.
Amir Khalid
This overview of the war from a logistics/supply perspective was very enlightening. I give it five stars out of five.
Mike in NC
Really enjoy these posts by Carlo.
Jay C
Excellent Part II, Carlo – thanks!
What strikes me as amazing, from your analyses, is how really poorly the Russian military has handled basically every aspect of the Ukraine invasion: its flaws and shortcomings can’t have been completely overlooked by Western analysts, but that they would flail and fail as badly as they have has to have been a shock. A good one, of course, but still surprising.
Anonymous At Work
Separate concern/question from my armchair: Pulling back the lines near Kherson obviously tightens the spacing of troops and materiel, preparing them for HIMARS strikes. What’s the counter for a total withdrawal into Kherson and openly using the remaining civilians as literal human shields? A sudden collapse of RU forces is great unless it makes uncontrolled soldiers panic and attack civilians.
m0nty
Excellent post series, Carlo.
Carlo Graziani
@Anonymous At Work: If Belgorod is totally out, I would say it’s panic time for the Russians. Their direct line from Rostov is almost entirely in HIMARS range now. Arranging for an alternate through Luhansk is not merely a train scheduling problem: they also need to re-route and dispatch trucks, figure out delivery routes, which are now much longer, figure out fuel, etc. All in a highly dynamic battle. The short summary is “fucked”.
When the supply lines break down suddenly, the walls start closing in.
Amir Khalid
The winter cometh in Ukraine. I’m curious to know how the cold weather will affect troops on the ground on both sides, particularly given that the Russians will be scrambling to find winter gear, on top of their other logistical challenges. Putin might not like to be told that his doodz are surrendering to Ukraine just for hot meals and a warm cot in a POW camp.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Amir Khalid: Yeah, I have a feeling Ukrainian troops will be much better prepared for the cold weather. I mean, considering their government actually cares whether or not they survive. Not something the occupiers would understand…
HinTN
@lowtechcyclist: They’ve had eight years to figure out how they wanted to defend their country and to plan/train for it. They did their work well.
Carlo Graziani
@Anonymous At Work: Spite artillery strikes on Kherson from the south bank of the Dnipro as the UA advances into the liberated city are a very legitimate concern. There have been counterbattery radar tech items on recent US-Ukraine assistance drawdown items that I hope will provide the capability to shut that shit down, at least to some degree.
pacem appellant
The history of warfare and tactics is far afield from my hobbies and interest. And yet, in these times, needs must. Thank you Carlo for penning an amazing and digestible piece for the layperson (i.e. me). I read every new piece of Ukraine news with bated breath, hoping to glean how much closer we are to ending Russia’s reign of terror.
While I’ve been forced to learn jargon like salient, bridgehead, and culmination. To compensate, where it does intersect with prior areas of interest is in the language and writing of Ukraine, I’m getting more practiced at least in being able to read Cyrillic, and Ukrainian specifically, if only to be able to read the maps that war bloggers are posting so frequently as the theater changes from day to day.
pacem appellant
@Anonymous At Work: From what I’ve read at the Great Orange Satan, AFU doesn’t need to attack Kherson any time soon. With their supply lines cut off, the poor saps trapped there will run out of ammo and surrender/starve soon enough.
However, there is no doubt that desperate Russian troops will take out their hopelessness on civilians, which is why I hope they starve sooner than later to limit casualties.
Ol_Froth
Lincoln and Grant both understood that the objective of war is to destroy the enemy’s ability to fight. Seems like the Ukrainians know that too.
Anonymous At Work
@Carlo Graziani: Less concerned about that. More concerned about the surviving 10000 or so RU forces huddled in city with little food, walls closing in, and no officer/NCO corps controlling them since the field officers have buggered off across the river already. And a bunch of Ukrainian “meat shields” at best, “stress relief meat bags” at worst.
pacem appellant
@Amir Khalid: Don’t worry. No one will tell him. And UKR is already running videos of this happening on social media. Whether it’s propaganda or real doesn’t matter. Cold hungry troops aren’t going to be picky.
Anonymous At Work
@Carlo Graziani: So, rail linkages between Belgorod and Rostov are that bad? We’re going to see panic? As long as RU forces panic with a clear line of retreat to the Russian border, that’s fine (plus/minus field officers who forgot to wear triple-layer full body armor). My concern on Kherson is that lines of retreat were mostly destroyed already.
Gin & Tonic
@HinTN: Eight hundred years.
Another Scott
Thanks Carlo, this is an excellent part 2.
I wonder if the sinking of the Moskva by 2 Neptune missiles (280 km/170 mile range) shows that Ukraine could drop the Kerch Straight Bridge almost anytime she wants? Maybe having VVP think that he needs to send reinforcements to Crimea that way is another bear trap??
It looks like russia has tried to protect the bridge using radar reflecting decoys so unless the Neptune seeker has countermeasures, maybe HIMARS would still be better. But it’s a long bridge with lots of vulnerabilities so maybe the Neptune would still be a decent tool. Dunno.
Thanks again.
Cheers,
Scott.
Carlo Graziani
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: I find that a metaphor with a good visual in it really helps me with these things. I’m glad you liked that one, I smiled too while I was writing it.
Gin & Tonic
Thanks for a comprehensive post, Carlo.
zhena gogolia
@Carlo Graziani: Yay!
YY_Sima Qian
Outstanding! Very comprehensive review of the war’s progression so far, & completely agree!
I recall you were thinking the Western sanctions would end this war by year’s end, after wrecking Russia’s economy. I wasn’t even as sanguine as that. We (& most people) have all seriously underestimated the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ prowess, 1st at the tactical level, then at the operational level, & more recently at the strategic level.
It’s not going to be all cakewalk from here on out. There are more than a few videos out of the Ukrainian Army taking significant losses in recent engagements, & not just Russia propaganda videos. However, the momentum is decisively in Ukraine’s favor, & I can’t think of any rabbit that Putin can pull out of the hat to change that.
It’s going to be hugely embarrassing for Putin to annex the 4 occupied oblasts via sham referendums, only to quickly lose them in the coming months. In theory, a hundred thousand recently mobilized draftees (most of whom should have had prior service experience) could be of some use manning defensive positions. For offensive maneuvers they would be fodder. However, these draftees would have very low morale, & I don’t think they will be adequately supplied through winter, due to both deliberate Ukrainian actions as outlined here, & due to Russian ineptitude.
Putin’s war of choice has really turned into a self-inflicted disaster. Prior to the invasion, Russia was punching well above its weight & a threat/nuisance that could not be ignored by the West. Now the whole edifice is coming undone. Even if he stays in power, he will be left to bluster about nukes & going hat in hand to other (non-Western) powers.
Carlo Graziani
@Another Scott: I don’t know that much about the Neptune, but I’m very sure it’s terminal guidance is very different from ATACMS (GPS-based) since it would have to be specialized for mobile targets. My guess is radar guidance, and “go get that very big blip” is an easier wartime weapons development program than an ATACMS-adjacent program for a country like Ukraine.
On the other hand, I have $100 that says that by 2024 at the latest they will have their own 300 km range GPS-guided missile.
frosty
@Carlo Graziani: Yeah, the junkyard dogs and the chain link fence made me laugh when I read it. Great visual!
zhena gogolia
@YY_Sima Qian: He should have stuck to the internet bullshit and stayed his ass at home.
Carlo Graziani
@zhena gogolia: WG has helped me fix all the bad Chekhov birthplaces now. My face can resume its usual hue.
charon
How the war ends, maybe – by Timothy Snyder:
https://snyder.substack.com/p/how-does-the-russo-ukrainian-war?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=auto_share
Too long to blockquote from meaningfully.
charon
@charon:
I’ll take a shot at the end portion of my linky:
Anonymous At Work
@YY_Sima Qian: I think the mobilization resistance will break the back of the Russian economy. Until now, it was Somebody’s Else Problem. Now, every working male that isn’t corrupt will be a target and a lot MORE of productive capacity will be taken off-line. Either people fleeing (almost a million eligible men, last I saw) or people hiding at home.
zhena gogolia
@charon: Very interesting analysis.
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: I think we are now in a situation where every forecast is hazardous. There is just too much forseeable instability in the outcomes. Most of it, in my view, is in Russia losing its mind over losing the war, and not having any plausible political or military options to alter outcome for the better. I have no idea what is going to happen, and only a feeling for what the plausible range of possibilities is.
Jay
@YY_Sima Qian:
Dimitri(War Translated) on Twitter has been translating RU Telegram channels, Video, phone calls and text messages.
There was one today’ (amongst several), a vid by a “moblik” of 500 men in a field. They are going into the second week of having been dumped there, no shelter, no food, no water. No Officers, no NCO’s, no training. Half the “moblik’s either have no military service, are medically unfit, or mental. They were illegally* issued 23 1970’s/80’s AK’s with one mag only.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: I thought Carlo should have changed the name on the map to TAGANROG, in all caps, in your honor. :-) I was disappointed to find that he had not.
Another Scott
@charon: Thanks for this. Just as thoughtful as one would have suspected from Snyder.
Of course, leaving Ukraine would just be the start of the process of ending the war. Ukraine will want compensation, and will have a strong argument for pressing its case that russia having the UN Security Council seat is and was a mistake that needs to be fixed, among other things. It seems likely that russia is going to be much smaller in international affairs than before February 24, and that is going to weaken him even if there aren’t warlords after his head.
We’ll see…
Thanks again.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jay
@charon:
the guy who runs, Prigozhin’s Telegram channel that has been slagging both Putin and the Generals lately, was violently arrested today.
Carlo Graziani
@Jay: Did they say where?
WaterGirl
@Jay: I don’t understand the significance of that.
ByRookorbyCrook
@WaterGirl: Putin moving against someone in Prigozhin’s camp heightened friction between the two. It is pushback for the criticism of the war effort.
Carlo thank you for this educational series. I have learned a lot.
Carlo Graziani
@charon: Sounds a bit like Himmler and Goering smiling at each other as they circle warily, one hand behind their backs, as Hitler looks on and wonders whether he should encourage another dog to enter the arena…
The one problem that I have with the scenario spun by Snyder is that the only actors with agency in it are Putin, Kadyrov, and Prygozhin. But MOD has been chafing under the siloviki whip for years. And in the last Moscow coup, in 1991, the Generals played a very critical role. I doubt very much that they plan to be Putin’s playthings, if they believe him to be weakened.
charon
@Carlo Graziani:
Nice. My take on Putin is he fancies himself doing Stalin running the CCCP, but in reality he is just repeating all of Herr Hitler’s screw-ups.
Jay
@Carlo Graziani:
The Moscow IRA Garage,
@WaterGirl:
probably a warning to Prigozhin.
Jay
@Carlo Graziani:
Putin probably doesn’t see Kadarov as a viable threat. He’s a Chechen and a bit of a loose cannon. He also does not play well with others.
WaterGirl
@ByRookorbyCrook: I was asking about this. Is that what you were responding to?
Ruckus
I believe that the basically unfettered internal theft of the Russian economy has left a lot of holes in the ability of Russia to actually be the country that it maybe could have been. There seemingly are not a lot of citizens who want to risk their lives for vlad’s egotistical desires and destruction. And given that it seems that conscripting and sending people to die for him might not make this situation better, I’d bet that he will continue to bang his head against the wall till either there’s no wall or no head left. I wonder if Ukraine had a better concept of the Russian economy and citizens than the US did. War is never a good thing but being attacked by a big military that is ill trained, ill equipped with ill designed/maintained equipment, when the attacked is well trained, reasonably to far better equipped and far better prepared and actually has a concept of self defense other than stand in the way till they run out of ammo seems to be idiotic.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: Yes, we are all thinking about WMDs, but I think at the end of the day all the nuke talk is bluster from Kremlin. EU resources have already reported that in a meeting w/ a Chinese diplomatic delegation their Chinese counterparts made it clear that use of nukes would be unacceptable. Xi may not warn or rebuke Putin publicly, but I have to believe such warnings have been issued in private. I imagine India, Turkey, Israel, Brazil, etc. have done the same. Or Putin has already assured Xi/Modi that his nuke talk is bluster. If he goes back on that word no one will deal w/ him.
A Russian use of nukes in Ukraine will be a disaster for the world, China included. Use of nuclear weapons by a nuclear state against a non-nuclear state would ensure all non-nuclear states will quickly nuke up if they have the means. & if the foot crisis caused/exacerbated by Putin shutting off Ukrainian grain exports was bad, imagine a nuke detonating over Ukrainian wheat fields. & not just Ukrainian production either, consider the adjacent grain producing regions in Russia, which will suffer from fall out, too. I don’t think this is an issue the other geopolitical powers & the Global South will stand aloof from.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: What do you think covers the plausible range of possibilities?
WaterGirl
@Jay: @ByRookorbyCrook:
What does this have to do with Prigozhin? Did everyone think I was replying to Jay at #51 instead of jay at #48?
Gin & Tonic
@YY_Sima Qian: It may be fatalistic humor, but a lot of Ukrainians have already assumed a nuke will be used, and are making plans for after. A high degree of hedonism is involved in those plans.
Lyrebird
Well to get there a supply train from Bel. would have to follow the delayed north east south path Carlo mentioned and then go north and south again. Then go on a rail line that follows the Ukr – RU border. That line is probably safe from attacks now, but as soon as the Ukrainian Army reaches Svatove, that may change. I am not a pro at measuring HIMARS range.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl:
Here’s the thread:
My limited understanding is, there’s all kinds of laws about what volunteers/mercenaries can do and other laws for people drafted. Draftees aren’t supposed to be fighting outside russia’s borders. There are rules about payments and rules about gun registration and rules about documenting where war materiel goes.
If they’re not documenting anything, then they are trying to avoid all those rules and laws.
They’re basically telling those soldiers – “We don’t care about you, nobody knows you’re here, we’ll deny everything, you’re on your own, fight or die.”
That information getting out in the wider world makes it much harder for VVP’s minions to say “not us”.
That’s my impression, anyway. FWIW.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
YY_Sima Qian
@Gin & Tonic: Not at all surprising & very human. Though if a nuke did drop I don’t think there will be much hedonism at all.
YY_Sima Qian
@Another Scott: Unregistered weapons to hundreds of thousands of disgruntled minorities. That will end well.
Jay
@WaterGirl:
sorry about that.
Like most militaries, RU has policies and procedures that control and document the issuance of weapons. Under what is RU’s version of the UMCJ, not properly issuing weapons carries a possible prison sentence of 20 years. The law was brought in, during the 90’s to try to prevent ex-Soviet arsenals being looted for the illegal arms trade and the Thieves in Law.
Then there is the issue of 23 old AK’s with 1 30round mag for 500 “Moblik’s”.
Bill Arnold
@Anonymous At Work:
Related, and out of curiosity, has anyone been accusing Russians of cannibalism?
Jay
@Bill Arnold:
not yet, but Winter Is Coming,……….
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: The extreme range includes a limited civil war in Russia, fought out in Moscow, and perhaps a few other major cities, as the fragility of political control is exposed and the various factions with control over portions of the security state make bids for power.
It really depends on what kind of a shock to the system a catastrophic defeat in the war delivers, and how the country reacts. I can see the military taking the opportunity to recover lost political ascendancy, for example. That would establish another quadrant in the picture drawn above by Snyder.
Part of the problem that I have is that the mobilization thing already represents a significant destabilization of long-standing order in Russia, and is a clear signal that Putin is losing his grip on matters. If in the middle of that instability suddenly Russia gets a Tsushima-level symbolic defeat in Ukraine… well I don’t want to be the fool who makes definite predictions about what would happen.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: Your extreme range is actually pretty conservative. A collapsing multiethnic empire w/ lots of natural resources, could become a redux of Russia Civil War of the post-Revolution years, w/ multiple factions fighting against each other & against other neighbors, & w/ foreign (not all of whom, perhaps none, acting on good faith) intervention on every front. Only now w/ WMDs. The problem of securing loose WMDs will be a much greater nightmare than post-USSR.
Belarus will certainly undergo regime change in this scenario, & there will be instability in the Central Asian Republics. That is why I caution against hopes of a collapse in central authority in Russia to “remake” Russia, as satisfying as it may be to imagine. We (Ukraine included) will all have to live through the aftermath, too.
Torrey
Carlo, thank you for this very clear presentation. I appreciate all the work and thought that went into this. It’s confusing for those of us who don’t spent our time thinking about such matters, but I feel now that I have at least a significantly better handle on the development of the war.
way2blue
Thank you Carlos. These two substantive overviews of the evolution of the war not only put the ebb & flow of the battles into perspective, but also steer me toward what to watch for in coming weeks.
Mallard Filmore
@Jay:
I just searched DuckDuckGo with —>
japanese army cannibalism
Because I know the retreat from India did not go well.
Yuck.
ColoradoGuy
@YY_Sima Qian: You bring up a very good point. The Chinese leadership would be extremely averse to the Russian empire disintegrating into petty warlordism after the demise of Putin, since that mirrors China’s experience before (and during) the Japanese invasion. And Putin continues to act even more irrationally, increasing the probability of just that outcome.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: Oh, that’s an interesting take. So now, suddenly, they are handing out registered weapons. Or maybe that is propaganda, to pretend that they are following the laws.
Whomever
So this is a bit selfish, but I am SO looking forward to about ten years or whenever from now when all the really good books start coming out about this war and reading about what really is going down.
Miss Bianca
@Amir Khalid: Same here! What I know about warfare, tactics and logistics could fit comfortably on the head of a pin, but between Adam, Carlo, and the other learned commenters here, I feel like I am getting an excellent education for free.
J R in WV
Carlo, I want to join the other comments with my thanks for your hard work on this project. I will add my thanks to the commenters who have contributed a lot of information and interesting opinion and supposition about what is happening and may yet unfold in this unexpected event set in Russia/Ukraine.
Very hard (actually impossible!) (to predict what will happen when one of the major actors appears to have lost his mind or otherwise seriously gone off the rails. Other RU actors also not all there as well…
So good for Ukraine that they appear to have great leadership from the very top all down through military and civilian affairs. Trains running on time during this war is amazing!
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: I suppose my bias is due to historical experience of revolutions in Russia being strictly top-down affairs conducted by elites, more akin to violent banana republic coups than actual popular revolutions — and to my mind November 1917 fits this model as well, more a Bolshevik conspiracy than a genuine uprising. The 1991 crack-up was really a coup by Yeltsin, and a reassertion of Russian national power over Soviet internstionalist ideology. Etcetera.
So a bona-fide break-up driven by revolts against the center would be a genuinely unprecedented event in Russian history. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, but it does establish a Bayesian prior that makes it seem a bit unlikely, in my view.
Bill Arnold
@YY_Sima Qian:
It is a nightmare, but the degree depends on how ubiquitous Permissive Action Links(wikipedia, OK article) are in the Russian nuclear arsenal. Strong modern PALs are designed to be resistant to bypass by e.g. a national lab of a large country. It is said that for instance, Ukraine would not have been able to use the USSR’s weapons had they kept them; they would have had to rebuild them. There is little public information about Russia’s use of PALs (a bit more about the US); the US government obviously knows much more.
That is, if one can disassemble a few weapons (without an explosion) one can build another device, especially if it uses enriched Uranium; it would be crude (old tech!) but would still be enough to e.g. destroy a city. But using them directly? Probably not, unless one can authorize the use/activate them somehow.
Baquist
Thank you for this clear and thoughtful description – parts one and two. Much appreciated.