Four months into Russia’s special military operation, let’s review what’s happened so far in the information battlefield. I have a theory about the ongoing Battle for Donbass.
My statements in previous posts are apparently true. Ukrainian forces are adequate for static territorial defense, however, they have not shown any signs of largescale maneuvers beyond battalion-sized units. Here are the reasons why:
Reason 1: Catastrophic losses in vehicles and supplies, particularly fuel, has severely limited their mobility.
Reason 2: Ukrainian troops have proven themselves to be a NATO-quality force, which is an impressive achievement in 8 years. However, they had insufficient time and resources to conduct training exercises necessary to develop the skills needed for combined arms warfare involving tens of thousands of people.
Reason 3: Existing veterans have been given no reprieve from frontline action since mid-February, for many of them even earlier (remember, these guys were in the trenches long before any Russians showed up on Feb. 24). New conscripts and mercenaries are funneled straight to the front with no time to train or integrate with their new units. New weapons from NATO are also pushed to the front where they are immediately exposed to enemy fire and attrition.
I try to be less critical of Ukrainians, but I don’t have much to work with, either. Russian “propaganda” gives me plausible and coherent explanations for what they are doing, but from the pro-Ukraine/pro-NATO side I get nothing but gibberish. I don’t accept “Ukrainians are European superhumans and Russians are subhuman orcs” as a coherent explanation for their alleged successes. A few dozen antiquated guns and APCs from the 1970s aren’t a plausible explanation either. It’s so bad, I have to go to Russian sources for explanations of Ukrainian successes, which is just sad.
One very obvious and important Ukrainian success is their ability to keep even a few aircraft in the air this late in the war. Russia would have us believe that these are mothballed planes being brought back into service thanks to spare parts from Poland, all done in the safety of some airfields in western Ukraine. I don’t know if that’s enough of an explanation, but it’s far more than I got from the Ukrainians.
Ultimately, I still don’t understand Zelensky’s strategy of deliberately pouring irreplaceable soldiers into a three-sided cauldron. Donbass isn’t friendly territory by any stretch of the imagination, and whatever benefits there are to holding it couldn’t possibly justify the losses. Some readers on my blog have made the claim that it is a four-sided cauldron and Ukrainian troops simply can’t escape. No, this is obviously not true. If it was true, Ukrainians wouldn’t be able to send new weapons there, obviously. If they can get more men and equipment into the cauldron, they could also get them out. So why don’t they?
I searched for historical to compare this to, and the best I could find was the Battle of Verdun in WWI. Imagine this battle, but with the Russians as the Germans, and the Ukrainians as the French. Verdun was of vital cultural and morale significance to the French, so the Germans believed they could turn it into a “blood pump.” They would attack, quickly seize advantageous positions for artillery, and provoke the French into suffering huge losses in failed counterattacks while suffering very few losses themselves. From Wikipedia:
Using the experience of the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915, the Germans planned to capture the Meuse Heights, an excellent defensive position, with good observation for artillery-fire on Verdun. The Germans hoped that the French would commit their strategic reserve to recapture the position and suffer catastrophic losses at little cost to the Germans…
Great emphasis was placed on limiting German infantry casualties by sending them to follow up destructive bombardments by the artillery, which was to carry the burden of the offensive in a series of large “attacks with limited objectives”, to maintain a relentless pressure on the French. The initial objectives were the Meuse Heights, on a line from Froide Terre to Fort Souville and Fort Tavannes, which would provide a secure defensive position from which to repel French counter-attacks. “Relentless pressure” was a term added by the 5th Army staff and created ambiguity about the purpose of the offensive. Falkenhayn wanted land to be captured from which artillery could dominate the battlefield and the 5th Army wanted a quick capture of Verdun. The confusion caused by the ambiguity was left to the corps headquarters to sort out..
The failure of German attacks in early April by Angriffsgruppe Ost, led Knobelsdorf to take soundings from the 5th Army corps commanders, who unanimously wanted to continue. The German infantry were exposed to continuous artillery fire from the flanks and rear; communications from the rear and reserve positions were equally vulnerable, which caused a constant drain of casualties. Defensive positions were difficult to build, because existing positions were on ground which had been swept clear by German bombardments early in the offensive, leaving German infantry with very little cover. The XV Corps commander, General Berthold von Deimling also wrote that French heavy artillery and gas bombardments were undermining the morale of the German infantry, which made it necessary to keep going to reach safer defensive positions. Knobelsdorf reported these findings to Falkenhayn on 20 April, adding that if the Germans did not go forward, they must go back to the start line of 21 February.
Knobelsdorf rejected the policy of limited piecemeal attacks tried by Mudra as commander of Angriffsgruppe Ost and advocated a return to wide-front attacks with unlimited objectives, swiftly to reach the line from Ouvrage de Thiaumont to Fleury, Fort Souville and Fort de Tavannes. Falkenhayn was persuaded to agree to the change and by the end of April, 21 divisions, most of the OHL reserve, had been sent to Verdun and troops had also been transferred from the Eastern Front. The resort to large, unlimited attacks was costly for both sides but the German advance proceeded only slowly. Rather than causing devastating French casualties by heavy artillery with the infantry in secure defensive positions, which the French were compelled to attack, the Germans inflicted casualties by attacks which provoked French counter-attacks and assumed that the process inflicted five French casualties for two German losses.
In short, this was a good plan by the Germans, but it didn’t survive contact with the enemy, for three big reasons.
-There were no tanks or mechanized infantry in WWI, leaving troops short of their objectives with no choice but to either keep advancing under disadvantageous circumstances or call the attack off altogether (equipment failure).
-Commanders had incompatible and contradictory conceptions of how to fight, and wildly overestimated the effectiveness of their weapons against the French while simultaneously underestimating the attrition caused by enemy weapons (doctrine failure).
-The Germans continued their offensive long after it was clearly a failure and were unwilling to accept that fact. As a result, they lost almost as many casualties as the French, entirely defeating the purpose of what they had originally set out to do (people failure).
Donbass is a different battlefield in a different era, with different players. So if the Russians can maximize enemy attrition while keeping their own down to a minimum, they can take as much time as they like grinding the Ukrainian army down to nothing.
While the Germans didn’t win at Verdun, it wouldn’t exactly be correct to say the French won either, since they suffered atrocious casualties for no justifiable reason. As far as I can tell, Zelensky doesn’t want to admit a tactical defeat and is throwing away his whole army. Verdun was a nine month battle, so anyone who insists that the Russian offensive has to be fast is just trying to spin the story to a “Putler lost” narrative.
Featured image source: Fachdozent and Gregroose from Pixabay.
Ian Kummer
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just a few points/takes:
there isn’t one cauldron. there are several. some are four sided, some are three because the russians are allowing civilians in crossfire zones a “corridor” out. from what i’ve read about dwindling supplies and morale, weapons aren’t getting in even after surviving the trip there.
as for the aircraft…again, what survived the initial destruction of the armed forces in february tends to get shot down the second it hits the air. S400s/S300v4s/etc are serious business and the russians control the air more or less 100% at this point. it’s difficult to hide an airfield but a few planes here and there can be concealed. maybe some stuff makes it over the western border(s) without getting iskandered but not much.
as for NATO training, a lot of it seems to be “counter-terrorism” and urban combat as opposed to fighting a “standard” war where the “enemy” isn’t a bunch of goat herders or teenagers making IEDs out of old flip phones. a few of the rare successes by the ukies have been urban and wooded areas as opposed to the open fields in the west where you can been seen by the naked eye a few miles away.
again, just my take as someone who only learns what i absolutely have to to keep up with developments.
Yes, Ukrainian forces are surrounded on three sides and being “destroyed in detail.” Flying low and fast seems to improve aircraft survivability by a lot, so I don’t know if I would be so bold as to say ALL Ukrainian aircraft dripfed to the front are being destroyed right away, though they must be suffering atrocious levels of attrition.
An additional take: I think Verdun is a good analogy. My sense is that much of modern combined arms warfare is similar in effect with most of the deaths caused by artillery. The Allied advances against Germany in 1918 were a similar “grinding” operation (with tanks), as was Alamein, Operation Bagration and many of the large scale WW2 Soviet offensives. Whether or not cauldrons were created seems to have been a function of political decision making and relative military competence / mobility between the two sides. In 1918 mobility was still not quite enough to create them on the western front but by WW2 it certainly was.
I agree too with the earlier comment. Not wishing to take anything away from the bravery of those who have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is not something I have done and I can only honour their service. It is clear though that what is going on in Ukraine is a totally different and much more intensive war that no modern western military has experienced since possibly Vietnam (albeit the US had air dominance) or more likely Korea and WW2 (where we also had air dominance from mid 1943 or so). This is the type of war that our grandfathers fought.
Fully agree with you on the propaganda. The Russian propaganda is what I might call “classical propaganda”: they avoid talking about their reverses and probably overstate enemy losses but what they do say is anchored in reality and tends to be approximately true. What Ukraine says is just sheer fantasy with no resemblance to reality. The social media that then extrapolates from that is amazing. There were pictures of old T62 tanks on trains which led to all sorts of speculation piled onto more speculation that this means Russia is losing and having to dig out these museum pieces from store. We now know (it seems) that the images were old ones and that the Russians are not deploying T62s.
What troubles me most though is that western generals pontificate on all this with the same gibberish that Ukraine espouses. British MoD briefings are particularly fictional. If they really believe what they are writing then I distrust their competence; if they do not believe it then they really are total liars and it will be very hard ever to trust anything they ever say again. This is a very troubling long term development for our societies; that our governments / military commands are so committed to fiction as their modus operandi. Even in WW2 (a war of national survival) the media narrative when one reviews it was normally more candid and based on reality than the current one is.
Thanks for the blog: it is thought provoking.
The Verdun analogy is interesting because in some ways, the Russians appear to be facing pretty steep casualties as well. While I loathe to accept the stupid reports about super-saiyan Ukranians, anti-war.com has estimated fairly high casualties for the Russian side (approximately 6000 KIA) using extrapolation from LPR published casualties. Ukranian casualties are higher, but possibly not by more than a factor of 2 otherwise the Russians would have advanced faster. What’s your take on anti-empire.com’s view that Russia has a manpower shortage due to its unwillingness to mobilize their conscript troops, which in turn has Russia leveraging heavily on LPR and DPR conscripts?
The task of Russia, in addition to the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine, is to leave Kyiv without access to the sea, and also to help the pro-Russian Transnistria, even if Ukraine (the remnants) is preserved. The assault on Odessa and the occupation of the entire coast will be. Without this, the operation is meaningless. Secondly, Vlad tempers his army (and there is a constant rotation there) in a real war, and also eliminates the shortcomings of his missile systems and other weapons in a real combat situation. As for conscripts from Donbass. In Ukraine, thanks to the Americans and the Ukrainian oligarchy, a civil war is going on, I have already compared this war with the civil war in Spain of the Republicans (Donbass, they did not support the 2014 coup) and General Franco (the United States and their beloved Nazis from Galicia). The war of the forces of Donbass against the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Nazi formations is very motivated, much more than that of the same Russians. So using such soldiers is very reasonable. And after 8 years of terror and genocide by Kyiv, they are fighting more harshly and cruelly than the same Vlad.
Regarding casualties, the only remaining weekly numbers I have any faith in are from DNR. (Ie not Lugansk, not Russian Federation regular armed forces, not its various offshoots like the Akhmat Khadyrov brigade, GRU special forces brigade, Wagner PMC’s, etc etc). These now total to 2k killed / 8k wounded. Extrapolations from this are hardly ever discussed. But anyway, Earlier in the war, Russian MoD was reporting numbers around 3x this, with somewhat less wounded though. Now it may be a bit higher for various reasons. Personally I think LNR would be a bit lower than DNR due to lower intensity there until the past 6 weeks. I also think Ukraine casualties that were regularly estimated by telegrammer Rybar were underestimates, in light of the sheer number of daily air/arty strikes by Russia.
One internet commentator who seems willing to do so, Gleb Bazov (in exile from twitter and now on telegram) has this take:
With respect to casualty numbers, the only reasonable way to go here is by way of extrapolation.
DNR: 1,925 KIA, 7,969 WIA
LNR: although the primary fighting is now taking place in the Lugansk area of responsibility, Mariupol evens out the score, so I would put them at about the same—2,000/8,000.
Russia: this one is more difficult. It would be easiest simply to double up the number of DNR, but given the last official numbers published by the Russian MOD, it does not quite work. I would conservatively estimate the losses at 4,500/10,000
Altogether then, we have an estimate of 8,500 KIA and 26,000 WIA for the Allied forces as a whole, for the whole campaign.
Many of you will disagree—putting losses as either lower or higher, depending on your viewpoint, but I will stick by my estimates
———-
I would put the numbers of Ukrainian irretrievable losses (unable to continue fighting) at approximately 40,000 KIA for the army and 15,000-20,000 KIA for the National Guard, Border Guard Service. Territorial Defence (volkssturm) is another matter altogether, but many of those would be included in the first two categories, and I have no way of estimating the uncounted remainder.
I would estimate the number of wounded at a 1.5-2/1 ratio (for this war) yielding up to 100,000 WIA.
——-
Finally, the number of Ukrainian POWs in the Allied hands hovers above 10,000 now, increasing daily.
src:
https://t.me/Slavyangrad/1195
https://t.me/Slavyangrad/1196
https://t.me/Slavyangrad/1197
note also Ukraine suffers from more killed ratio, due to limited medevac
I think he’s wildly overestimating casualties for both sides. There were by all counts roughly 15,000 allied troops involved throughout the Mariupol siege. I’m supposed to believe they suffered 2/3 casualties? Also let’s remember that this isn’t Stalingrad – Mariupol is a suburb of less than 500,000 inhabitants. It’s just not that big.
There’s roughly 200,000 RFA troops in the Ukraine. Guessing (based off of traditional rifle brigade structure) 1/5 of those are frontline combat arms troops – or about 40k total. So these troops suffered 75% casualties? Mmm, not buying it.
Note that a unit is considered neutralized if it takes over 10% casualties, and destroyed if over 50%.
That’s a good way to look at it also. Comparatively more conservative estimates for Ukraine’s losses from Rybar were around 50k, of which about 1/3 kia. That data stopped like 2 weeks ago.
The reason I’m leaning higher is the number of strikes. RF reports ~100 strikes by air and long-range-missiles, and ~500 targets by artillery/mlrs. And all of these, while not precision guided, are nonetheless in the era of cheap spotter drones. Most all targets with personnel in them. Then add to that ground fighting in 5-10 towns on any given day …. We’re nearly 100 days in….
Thank you for another excellent essay. This guy has an interesting and insightful blog which I discovered a few days ago. Here is his most recent post which gives some insight into the attitude of the belligerents.
https://awfulavalanche.wordpress.com/2022/05/29/ukraine-war-day-95-a-cinderella-story-including-zaporozhie/
“I still don’t understand Zelensky’s strategy of deliberately pouring irreplaceable soldiers into a three-sided cauldron. Donbass isn’t friendly territory by any stretch of the imagination, and whatever benefits there are to holding it couldn’t possibly justify the losses.”
Precisely because it isn’t friendly, it’s the best territory to slow down Russian advance. They aren’t going to retreat from Severodonetsk until they can exploit all the civilian houses and installations available as defense positions. There’s the risk of waiting too much and finding themselves without the option to get thousands of soldiers to Lysychans’k trough the only bridge left, but that’s a problem for another day. Today, the objective is holding the line, that’s how Zelenskyy ensures US support.
Initially, especially wrt Mariopol, it appeared that Zelensky thought it politically expedient to have the Russians reduce the forces of Azov/Right Sector. The same can hardly be true for the troops now sitting in the Kessel. Is it possible the Ukrainians believe their own assessment that the Russians will run out of ammo any day now?
Just last week the Zelensky introduced a bill to the Rada that would confer special rights to Poles in Ukraine. It seems that Poland and Ze are setting the groundwork for an annexation/union of what may be left of Ukraine.
Could it be that Zelensky’s strategy of sending men and material to their destruction in the Russian maw in the East makes sense if his goal is to ripen Ukraine for partition. As I understand it, the motivating ideology of Ukraine is antipathetic to Poland as well as Russia. If the Poles expect to seize Western Ukraine after the Russian advance stops, a heavily degraded Ukraine army would suit them more than a re-constituted Western armed force held in reserve by Zelensky.
I think Zelensky has chosen his new masters and is doing them a service. Along the way to his payday he gets to rid himself of those fervent Ukrainian fascists that once threatened to hang him. They’ll be done in by the Russians in the east, or the occupation forces of Ze’s Polish patrons when they retreat west.
Journalism is art of laser-focusing on details that matter.
https://aftershock.news/sites/default/files/u21540/%D0%90%D0%97%D0%9E%D0%92_1.jpg
FFS…
OTOH, some helicopters showing off video 😀
https://www.yaplakal.com/forum28/topic2452548.html
Russian trolling is on another level. We might as well give up now
I like the reasoning. “Nazi imagery is bad because the Ruskis use it as propaganda”
Yeah… that was some second level honesty, from somewhere above mortal realm.
Meanwhile British MSM run sceduled Married with kids installation.
https://aftershock.news/sites/default/files/u16447/photo_2022-06-01_14-15-04.jpg
Endearing, ain’t it?
Ukraine will win! It absolutely would prevail now!!!
This all is so f-ng surreal…
There is another rather nasty aspect to the subject of this article. Ukraine has, of course, an ethnic divide. Within its armed forces there appears to be a gradient of privilege, which is normal enough. Among other things though, it is based on the East-West divide. The lowest regard for the fate of conscripts would be for those plucked from the Eastern half of the country – i.e. those who are both (1) poor and unable to pay the $3-5K bribe, and (2) more likely of Russian origin. They will be the first choice to end up minimally equipped in the trenches.
As far as the ability of the Ukraine army to inflict casualties on advancing Russians, that is not so much a function of the most basic trench infantry. Men for that role are essentially limitless in supply, even if not a single one is there voluntarily but at gunpoint. The offensive units who might possibly do something like ‘combined arms maneuver’, and the SOF and artillery crews who actually inflict the damage … those are being at least somewhat conserved.
The trench infantry, however, in this war seems to function just as speed-bumps. So that Ukraine’s artillery crews have time to inflict damage on advancing RF forces before they get forced back or taken out. The marginally higher-status conscripts from West ukraine will, if the situation allows, get slightly less suicidal assignments. This is guided by the shamelessly racist (esp. vs Russians) Azovites embedded in the officer corps, who in the VSU often do the role of the military commisar of the WWII era soviet army.
The end state here, which I think is a conscious decision on the part of the Azovites, is that the manpower of Eastern provinces of Ukraine will be severely depleted, leaving cities such as Kharkov less likely to resist Kiev’s control in the way that Donetsk and Lugansk have.
I have suspected for some time that Severodonetsk is an example of what Eward Luttwak calls an overly successful defense. (He uses Verdun as one example of it.) If the defenders hold the ground it will be at an exorbitant cost in men and materiel. If they lose it, the resulting losses will be much heavier than if the position had fallen quickly or been abandoned. On the other hand, claiming that Zelensky is wasting his army there assumes that a withdrawal could be successfully executed. Given that there are only a couple of major roads, if that, open out of the salient, a retreat under air attack could turn into a Kuwait style “highway of death”, if you remember that one. The time to be out of that place was likely before the spring thaw.
Commentary about this war has been a reminder that denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. The Putin fanboys have been in denial about the fact that the Russian war plan miscarried badly, and the Russian forces underperformed. They did in Finland in 1939 as well. And in Grozny. The Russian army has a spotty track record for offensive operations at the start of a war. The Zelensky fanboys have been in denial about Ukraine’s probable long term prospects. However much hardware we ship them, it’s still Ukraine against Russia.