Today we spent the whole day with our warriors; it is very useful to hear from those who are going into battle what exactly is lacking – address by the President of Ukraine

4 September 2023 – 23:34

Good health to you, fellow Ukrainians!

Today we spent the whole day with our warriors. Combat brigades in Donetsk region. The 109th separate territorial defense brigade, the 110th separate mechanized brigade, the 36th, 37th, 38th brigades of our marines, the 79th airborne assault brigade, the 53rd mechanized brigade, and the 59th motorized infantry brigade. Each of them is powerful. I am proud of all of them. And thank you for your sincerity, guys! Zaporizhzhia direction. The 148th separate artillery brigade, the 82nd airborne assault brigade, the 71st separate hunting brigade – thank you for your service! To all of you!

It is extremely important to support our warriors, to communicate with the brigade and battalion commanders. It is very, very useful to hear from those who are going into battle directly what exactly is lacking, what exactly is enough and what exactly needs to be changed. Everything the warriors talked about will be issues for the participants of the Staff. Especially regarding electronic warfare – we heard everything, guys.

I awarded our military doctors and thanked the staff of the stabilization points – they are great people who save heroes, restore lives and strength. It is a true Ukrainian, Cossack, spirit when the guys recover from their injuries and return to their positions to join their brothers-in-arms. And destroy the occupier again. It is an honor to thank such warriors!

I honored the bravery of our warriors with more than 50 awards. I presented “Gold Stars” to the Heroes of Ukraine – Major Oleh Dmytruk, Air Assault Forces, and Colonel Viktor Sikoza, Marines. Thank you, warriors!

All such awards, all honors are symbols of Ukraine’s success, proof of the strength and indomitability of our people.

Glory to all who fight for Ukraine! To everyone who works for our Ukrainian strength. To everyone in the world who constantly helps us! Who stands with us! And thank you personally for the chevrons, our guys, girls – all the warriors, thank you for the flags today. I will cherish it all.

Glory to Ukraine!

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1698786725382726129

Minister of Defense Reznikov did the classy thing and submitted his resignation today.

https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1698588926854692952

Lviv:

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1698773202300764168

The annual Lviv Half Marathon was suspended last year due to the war. But last Sunday, the runners again took to the streets of this city. This year’s marathon had a goal to raise funds for the “Unbreakable” foundation, in particular for the rehabilitation of children who lost their limbs during the war. Among the runners was 12-year-old Yana Stepanenko, who lost both legs during last year’s russian missile attack on the Kramatorsk passenger station.

https://twitter.com/maria_avdv/status/1698443518836903998

‘Just starting to run, it’s a bit daunting because I’m not quite used to it yet. But I want to support kids who’ve lost their legs and can’t run.’ Yana, courageous 12-year-old lost both her legs when Russian missile hit Kramatorsk station. Her mother also lost a leg.

We can’t fail these children.

Kharkiv:

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1698802889127239798

61 groups at 5 metro stations.
In Kharkiv, a city of a million people located not far from the border with Russia, which has been shelled almost daily since the beginning of the war, underground schools have started the school year. No educational institution in the city has such reliable shelter as the subway. Children will be safe here.

Verbove:

https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1698766384518340875

Romania:

https://twitter.com/maria_avdv/status/1698610200775696667

Prescott Cactus has sent along the reporting with the details that Russia may have committed a Schroedinger’s missile attack on Romania.

Reuters, relying on Ukrainian sources, says Russia did strike Romania, but the Romanian sources say they didn’t:

KYIV/BUCHAREST, Sept 4 (Reuters) – Ukraine said on Monday Russian drones had detonated on the territory of NATO member Romania during an overnight air strike on a Ukrainian port across the Danube River, but Bucharest denied its territory had been hit.

Reuters could not independently verify either account, a rare report of stray weapons from the war in Ukraine hitting a neighbouring member of the Western military alliance.

Moscow has conducted long-range air strikes on targets in Ukraine since the start of its invasion last year. Since July, when Moscow abandoned a deal that lifted a de facto Russian blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, it has repeatedly struck Ukrainian river ports that lie across the Danube from Romania.

Russian launched its air strike hours before President Vladimir Putin was due to discuss reviving the Black Sea deal with the deal’s sponsor, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.

“According to Ukraine’s state border guard service, last night, during a massive Russian attack near the port of Izmail, Russian ‘Shakheds’ fell and detonated on the territory of Romania,” foreign ministry spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko said, referring to Iranian-made drones.

“This is yet another confirmation that Russia’s missile terror poses a huge threat not only to Ukraine’s security, but also to the security of neighbouring countries, including NATO member states,” he wrote on Facebook.

Nikolenko published a photo showing flames of an explosion visible from across a river. Reuters could not immediately verify the vantage point of the image.

The Romanian Defence Ministry said Romania was not hit.

“The ministry of defence categorically denies information from the public space regarding a so-called overnight situation during which Russian drones would have fallen in Romania’s national territory,” it said.

“At no time did Russia’s means of attack generate direct military threats on Romanian national territory or waters.”

In Washington, the U.S. State Department said it was aware of reporting on the matter but referred queries to Romania’s government. The Pentagon declined to comment.

Daniela Tanase, whose house in the Romanian village of Plauru overlooks Ukraine’s Izmail port across the river, said she was not aware of explosions on the Romanian bank but could not say for certain.

“We heard the drones, the booms and the air defence systems across the river,” she told Reuters by telephone. “We saw a light in the distance from our window, it was raining last night.”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports, based on the Romanian sources, that Russian missiles definitely did not land on Romanian soil:

Romania’s Defense Ministry has “categorically” denied a Ukrainian Foreign Ministry claim that at least one Russian drone launched during an overnight attack on a Ukrainian port fell and detonated on Romanian territory.

Kyiv said on September 4 that Russia launched the air strike on Ukrainian port infrastructure, and one of the drones hit across the Danube River in the territory of NATO-member Romania.

The Romanian Foreign Ministry, however, said the information released by Ukraine was false.

“The Ministry of National Defense categorically denies information from the public space regarding a so-called situation that occurred during the night of September 3 to 4 in which Russian drones allegedly fell on the national territory of Romania,” it said.

Romania said that it monitored in real time the situation both during the night from September 3 to 4 and the night before.

“At no time did the means of attack used by the Russian Federation generate direct military threats to the national territory or the territorial waters of Romania,” the ministry said.

It added that measures to strengthen defenses on the eastern flank had been taken.

Yarrow sent along this Max Boot interview BG (ret) Mark Arnold about the Ukrainian offensive, doing business as the counteroffensive, which is underway. Here are some excerpts.

Some U.S. military officials appear astonished that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has not made a rapid breakthrough — and, through anonymous quotes to the news media, they are laying the blame on the Ukrainian military. Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Arnold, by contrast, isn’t the least bit surprised at the slow pace of the advance — and he’s blaming the Americans, not the Ukrainians.

Arnold, a cheerful former Special Forces officer with three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, has spent extensive time near the front lines advising the Ukrainian military (at his own expense). He has come away impressed by the professionalism and élan of the Ukrainian army — while also cognizant of the limitations of the training and equipment they have been provided by the West.

I first met Arnold in Kyiv in May. Even back then — weeks before the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive — he was telling me that the Ukrainians would not be able to make a breakthrough this year. However, he was — and remains — more optimistic about the prospects for decisive operations next year.

After getting back from Kyiv, I have kept in touch with Arnold and have found him a consistent font of realism. Back on June 23, at the very start of the counteroffensive, he emailed me: “I remain very skeptical that a decisive battle will occur this year that makes a material effect toward Ukrainian victory. That can happen next summer when the majority of maneuver equipment arrives from NATO into Ukraine.”

More recently, he has lamented to me: “The Ukrainians lack the mobility equipment necessary to breach high-density minefields and obstacles. U.S. Army mechanized infantry and armor battalions have tanks with antitank mine blades and heavy rollers in each company team. The Ukrainians do not.”

Last week, Arnold emailed me: “If you add all the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Leopard 2 and Challenger 2 tanks, and other equipment, the Ukrainians could outfit only one brigade. Only six battalions of the ~350 battalions in the ground forces have been trained in combined arms by NATO.” That simply is not enough, he said, “to move the needle.”

The Ukrainian attackers are further hindered because they lack, as he noted, air superiority. In many instances, Russian attack helicopters have targeted Ukrainian armored units as they were trying to clear minefields, slowing their advance to a crawl.

While some in the United States criticize Kyiv’s conduct of the counteroffensive — which appears to finally be gaining some momentum as the Ukrainians breach the first line of Russian defenses in the south — Arnold does not. “The U.S. military would be hard-pressed to achieve much better results without air dominance and long-range artillery systems,” he told me. “So, I am pleased with the progress the Ukrainians have demonstrated to date.”

Arnold rejects many of the specific criticisms being made by the Pentagon, including the charge that the Ukrainians have diverted too many resources to Bakhmut in the east. He argues that the offensive there “has not consumed large volumes of mechanized equipment” and that “Ukrainian operations in multiple geographic areas are essential to tying down Russian military resources and defending Ukrainian ground in the northeast.”

While some in the Pentagon apparently want the Ukrainians to risk heavy casualties by charging straight into the teeth of Russian defenses, Arnold believes Ukrainian commanders have made the right choice to proceed more cautiously. “Prudently valuing and expending human resources during the counteroffensive while also waiting for the majority of armor and mechanized equipment to arrive next year is wise,” he told me.

Arnold’s argument — that Kyiv can achieve even greater gains next year — runs counter to the assumption among some U.S. officials that it’s 2023 or bust for the Ukrainian advance. “We built up this mountain of steel for the counteroffensive. We can’t do that again,” one former U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal. “It doesn’t exist.”

Arnold is optimistic that the Ukrainians can break through next year — provided they get more training and equipment than they received this year. “If the Biden administration is interested in ending this war,” he told me, “then it will provide the long-range weapons (Army Tactical Missile System, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, Reaper drones, F-16s), more M113 armored personnel carriers, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Abrams tanks.”

But it’s not just a question of more weapons. The Ukrainian military also needs more training. “The Western training of Ukrainian military during the past 15 months is 85 percent basic training, 5 percent small unit leader training and 10 percent battalion training,” Arnold says. “Those efforts have trained less than 5 percent of Ukraine’s ground forces, and almost no officers at battalion level and above.” The results of that inexperience were evident in the faltering pace of the initial counteroffensive.

Arnold has been lobbying the Ukrainian General Staff and the Defense Ministry to recruit retired Western officers to train brigades inside Ukraine rather than making them go to other countries, because this will enable more units to be trained more quickly. He believes it is also essential to train corps-level staff in higher-level command functions so they can more effectively maneuver these units in combat. While retired Western officers would initially lead the training, they would be “training the trainers” so that Ukrainians could take over the courses themselves. Arnold is also trying to raise private-sector funds to expand the training and equipping of combat medics so that Ukrainian troops will be more likely to survive their wounds in combat.

“I find it frustrating, and the Ukrainians find it excruciating, that the West has the ability to do so much more to help end the war, but we’re not doing it,” Arnold told me. That needs to change. Rather than fall prey to the U.S. military’s “short war obsession” — imagining that every war will end quickly — the Biden administration would be well-advised to set up the Ukrainians for greater success in the future even if they aren’t able to achieve all of their objectives during this counteroffensive.

There is some more at the link.

And yes, I’m in agreement with BG (ret) Arnold. As far as I know I don’t know him. But I was trained and mentored by people from his community, so I find his assessment very persuasive.

War on the Rocks has published Michael Kofman’s and Rob Lee’s most recent assessment of where things stand three months in to Ukraine’s offensive.

On June 4, Ukraine launched its long-awaited offensive. The operation has proven to be a test of Ukrainian determination and adaptation. Despite stiff resistance, Ukrainian forces have made steady gains in a set-piece battle against a heavily entrenched force. Ukraine’s main effort is a push from Orikhiv, with the goal of driving south past Tokmak and ideally reaching Melitopol. If successful, this would sever Russian lines along the Black Sea coast and endanger supply routes from Crimea. The second is at Velika Novosilka, a secondary offensive operation likely aimed at Berdyansk, also along the coast. The third is a supporting offensive along the flanks of Bakhmut further to the north. Ukraine has made gains here, pinning several Russian airborne units. The offensive is gaining momentum, and much remains undecided, but three months in offers an opportunity to take stock of the operation thus far.

This has become a war of tree lines, with shifts in the line often counted in hundreds of meters. Artillery fire and drones dominate the battlefield, as small groups of infantry advance through dense minefields, field by field, tree line by tree line. Progress has been fitful and slower than expected, as acknowledged by President Volodymyr Zelensky and now former Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. However, Ukraine’s recent gains illustrate that it has worn down Russian defenses over time, leveraging an advantage in fires and long-range precision weapons to steadily press Russian forces back from their defensive positions. That said, Ukraine will need to both break through Russian lines and exploit that success to reach its objectives. Much could be decided in the coming weeks.

As we and others predicted, this kind of operation was bound to be difficult and costly. Without air superiority, a decisive advantage in fires, and limited enablers to breach Russian lines, any military would have faced similar struggles in such an operation. This is especially so against a force that had time to entrench, preparing a layered defense replete with minefields and fortifications. Ukraine’s military changed tactics, from initially trying to breach Russian lines in a mechanized assault to taking a more familiar attritional approach that achieved incremental gains. Over time this approach can work, and has worked for the Ukrainian armed forces in the past, but each battle has its own context with a different set of conditions, geography, and forces in play.

Ukraine needs more air defense, mine clearing, and similar enabling capabilities. Western assistance over the past 18 months has enabled Ukraine, but it has also limited Ukraine’s options, resulting in undertrained units having to go up against a well-prepared defense without the benefit of air support. However, the challenges of this are not only due to capability and capacity shortcomings. The Ukrainian military continues to struggle with scaling offensive operations, and conducting combined arms operations at the battalion level and above, with most attacks being at the level of a platoon or company. These are important areas to address in Western training programs, as we have discussed with our colleagues in various episodes of the War on the Rocks podcast and the Russia Contingency.

There is no single answer to the challenges Ukraine faces. The problem cannot be reduced to a lack of Western tactical aviation. The more important factors remain ammunition, training, providing the necessary enablers, and effective resource management in a war of attrition. War requires regular adaptation, since few plans survive contact with the enemy, but the process of adaptation equally requires identifying what has worked and what has not. The ability to discuss these challenges openly (which, in our view, doesn’t include leaks to newspapers from behind a veil of anonymity) is what separates successful militaries from those like Russia’s, which often falsifies success and buries bad news. Indeed, a poor understanding of how Ukraine’s military fights, and of the operating environment writ large, may be leading to false expectations, misplaced advice, and unfair criticism in Western official circles.

Ukraine’s summer offensive is coming down to the balance of attrition over time, which side has more reserves, and who can better manage their combat power in a prolonged slugfest. In order to sustain Ukraine’s war effort, Washington should support Kyiv’s preferred approach, which means resourcing ammunition for an intensive fight, providing the requisite long-range strike systems, and supporting enablers. However, it should also learn from this experience, tackling long-term issues such as training, helping Ukraine improve its ability to conduct operations at scale, and transitioning to employ Western airpower along with the associated organizational changes to make it effective. It is also critical for Western countries to draw the right lessons from the development and performance of Ukraine’s new brigades to improve future training efforts. The details discussed in this article are based on open sources and our own field research in Ukraine, but do not disclose anything that is not publicly available about ongoing operations.

The offensive has thus far played out as a shaping phase, an initial breaching effort, followed by a prolonged attritional period with fitful gains, leading to the better progress seen in more recent weeks, as both sides are increasingly forced to pull from their reserves. In advance of the offensive, Ukraine spent several weeks conducting shaping operations to set the conditions for the assaults, including attacks on Russian command and control with Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles, raids into Russia’s Belgorod region, and various sabotage efforts. These were designed to weaken Russia’s ability to defend and potentially force Moscow to redirect forces away from Ukraine’s main effort. The initial axis of attack began with a localized counteroffensive around Bakhmut in mid-May, designed to draw Russian forces there by steadily pressuring the flanks. Then Ukrainian units attempted an advance along the Velika Novosilka axis in the south, followed by a push from Orikhiv farther west in Zaporizhzhia.

Ukrainian forces made gains along the flanks of Bakhmut, but the initial advances along the main axis in the south were not as successful as anticipated. In the second week, Ukraine managed to capture a string of towns running south of Velika Novosilka, but the progress afterwards there has been slow. What appeared to be the main axis of advance in this offensive, led by the 47th Mechanized Brigade south of Orikhiv toward Robotyne, also stalled early on. Most of the gains have been at the first Russian line of defense, but this is also where Russian forces had focused their defensive effort, making them particularly significant. The Ukrainian attack has created a salient that is steadily being widened. At the time of this writing, Ukrainian forces have degraded the defending Russian units, and show signs that they may have penetrated the main defensive line near Verbove, but the details are too early to assess. Ukrainian forces have recently liberated Robotyne, and pushed east of it, which represents an advance of about ten kilometers since the offensive began. The distance of advance has been similar on the Velika Novosilka axis at the furthest point.Ukraine’s initial plan appeared to be an effort to advance along several axes to reveal weaknesses that could reveal the best place to breach Russia’s main defensive belt. It is therefore likely that Ukraine sought to force Russia into a decision to deploy reserves to the front line, thereby reducing the Russian military’s ability to respond to a breach. Rather than a singular main effort, the campaign was split along several fronts to impose a dilemma.

Much, much, much more at the link!

Another Ukrainian Valkyrie and Valkyrie in Training!

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1698730611333013638

That’s enough for tonight.

Your daily Patron.

There is a new slideshow at Patron’s official TikTok. Those don’t embed here, so please click across if you want to see it.

Open thread!