There’s been a huge amount of hype about the Ukrainian Summer Autumn counteroffensive, and it looks like something finally happened. Sort of. The “pro-Russia” crowd is cheering the alleged failure of Ukrainian counteroffensive. They’re wrong, and here’s why.
From CNN yesterday, August 30:
As Ukraine ramps up its offensive to retake Russian-occupied territory in the country’s south, its forces have regained four villages and broken through Russian defenses at multiple points of the frontline in the Kherson region, according to Ukrainian officials.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky also issued a warning to Russian forces during his evening address Monday, saying it was time for them to “run away, go home,” and that “the occupiers must know we will chase them to the border.”
Well, great. Check out this breathtaking journalism from Al Jazeera:
A local resident told Al Jazeera that the counteroffensive had some initial success, but was becoming bogged down.
“The villages along the front line – these the Ukrainians broke easily. In the second line of defence there was blood spilled. I heard 1,000 Ukrainians and 1,500 Russians [were killed],” said Pantelis Boubouras, Greece’s honourary consul in Kherson, who runs a construction business in Odesa.
A guy in Odessa said he heard from someone else that 1,000 Ukrainians and 1,500 Russians were killed. Well, I’m convinced.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine (APU) in an attempt to carry out an offensive in the Nikolaev-Krivoy Rog and other directions suffered heavy losses, more than 1,200 soldiers were destroyed. This was reported to journalists in the Ministry of Defense of Russia .
According to the agency, Russian troops destroyed 48 tanks, 46 infantry fighting vehicles, 37 other armored combat vehicles, 8 pickup trucks with heavy machine guns.
Moon of Alabama has an interesting suggestion for what happened:
In my view the offensive was launched at the wrong time and with too few troops along too many axes.
Brilliant thinking, General. Look, I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Ukraine is doing the military ops they are capable of, and they were trained to do. Professional and well-equipped armies do deep attacks with concentrations of manpower, equipment, and firepower. Ukrainians don’t have the training, coordination, and logistical support for deep attacks, so they compensate with many shallow attacks. This is how ISIS fights, and how ISIS fights. This is how the Taliban fought (who won that war?).
So rather than moan that the Ukrainian offensive was ineffective so far, or a waste of time and lives, consider the reasons why people launch counteroffensives in the first place. A counteroffensive disrupts the enemy’s own offensive, inflicts attrition on their forces, consumes ammunition, fuel, and supplies, and destabilizes the territory they’ve seized from you.
Keeping a bridgehead to the western side of the Dnieper is likely crucial to Russia’s future operations since, as past experience shows, that’s an easy place to hold a defensive line. It’s politically important as well, since holding a referendum in Kherson surely requires attaining a certain level of stability, and repeated Ukrainian offensives can prevent that from happening.
I’ve been wrong a lot, but I’ve been right a lot too. It’s actually funny to see “mainstream” media catch up with me months later. For example,in December(!) last year, I wrote about an incident in which Ukrainian border security forces allegedly shot a group of refugees on video.
This is a crime that could have happened. Ukraine is a weird and violent place. The central government in Kyiv is desperate to join the EU and NATO, so doing their best to look as woke and politically correct as possible, at least when they’re talking to the Western media. But the same cannot be said for the rank and file. A large portion of their military is little more than loosely organized gangs of neo-nazis like the Azov battalion.
The more I dig into this story, the weirder it gets. Apparently (I got this from the Donbass Insider article), back on November 14, a social media account for the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security claimed that the 61st Jager Infantry Brigade is a fake. Not just that the page is a fake, but that the unit itself doesn’t exist.
In other words, just because a Ukrainian unit exists on paper doesn’t mean it exists in real life. I knew this, and a lot of other people knew this too. But the mainstream media in the West is only just now starting to catch on. An August 5 article from Forbes:
It’s not totally clear exactly how many tank brigades the army has. Maybe six. Maybe five. Maybe fewer. The Ukrainian army has a habit of keeping undermanned—practically non-existent—units on paper and occasionally touting them in the media.
So observers should look for hard evidence of a brigade in combat before concluding that brigade is real. By that standard the 1st, 3rd, 4th and 17th Tank Brigades definitely exist.
The 5th and 14th Tank Brigades, by contrast … might be mostly fictional.
I have repeatedly stated before that the Ukrainian armed forces are meant for “asymmetric” warfare on the small unit level. This includes fire support. From a July 31 article by me:
NATO extensively trained Ukrainian militants, but apparently for the wrong type of war. NATO emphasised Ukrainian proficiency at the small unit level. Nothing more than this is needed for static defense, limited counteroffensive, and partisan ops. Even fire support can be done this way, as long as it’s kept at a low level (battery or split-battery), with Ukrainian gunners using target location data fed to them from NATO networks – the gunners themselves don’t need to know what they’re shooting at, and from an operation security standpoint, it’s better that they don’t. But that’s not how the war played out. Instead, the Russians are advancing ponderously behind massive artillery barrages. Countering this requires brigades and divisions in coordinated combined arms operations. Ukrainians just don’t have that capability.
Austrian painter, err, writer, Tom Cooper recently admitted this in an August 14 post on Medium:
However, that is a twin-edged sword: de-centralised command of the ZSU means that ‘every little Napoleon’ on the battlefield can call an artillery strike. This in turn means that operations of Ukrainian artillery frequently lack coordination: because of the Russian superiority in artillery is resulting in frequent artillery duels, Ukrainian artillery units are usually operating spread over large areas, often in very small detachments (one, two, three pieces maximum); and, if then ‘every sergeant’ calls for artillery support, these detachments are spread even further, often outside the control of their unit commanders, and each is shooting at something else. Unsurprising result is that the coordination is lacking: it happens much too rarely that multiple artillery units are targeting the same concentration of the Russian artillery. Things are not getting better when higher ranks then feel forced to withdraw all artillery of specific units because they need it somewhere else….
So, at the end of the day, don’t overestimate what the Ukrainian army can do, but don’t underestimate it either. Saying the Ukrainians are “attacking on too many axes” is just silly.
Featured Image Source: My own photo from ARMY 2022
Ian Kummer
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You are kinda right, Ian, Ukrainians are capable of disrupting and provoking. That’s what they were essentially doing from 2015 til February. But this offensive is a waste of resources. In a few months time the Kherson frontline will be much further to the North and the province will be stabilized. This is just a temporary inconvenience at the moment, and a good indicator how deeply the Ukrainian AF is worn down. Actually, the Ukrainians should’ve given up the whole East early in the conflict to be able to mount any meaningful resistance along a much shorter frontline. The Donbass people militia did something like that when they withdrew from Slavyansk. Whatever they say about Strelkov nowadays, that was a brilliant move that time that stabilized the front.
Thanks for stating realities that encompass the duration of the degeneracy.
1. Girkin/Strelkov did not “straighten the line”
What he did was akin to giving up half of fortress perimeter and then only defending the other half of the perimeter. But you know, ledt half of the circle is THE SAME length as its right half, just the curvature is not backward instead of forward. And the inenr part of th circle is lost.
2. Girkin made it without warning his peers, basically he opened all the Donbass defenders to unexpected Ukranian strikes into their sides and backs. Ukrainians did not explore it, but they had this opening given to them by Girkin.
3. Girkin made a lot of fuss how DPR ministry of Defense failed him and needed purges. Little problem, before that “brilliant move” he boaseted how he perosnalyl was DPR minister of defense. So basically it was his own ministry that failed him. And his then demands for criminal trial should mean that Girkin the DPR MoD sholuld had been court martialled for failing Girkin the frontline warchief. He did not honestly complete this punishment, don’t know why.
4. He freed a lot of Ukrainian army units that were anchored by the siege of Donbass. He did it at the time Donbass was preparing their first counter-offensive all along the borderline (do you even remember 2014 maps, where Ukranian “boa” was encroaching between LDPR and Russia?). He did it when Donbass critically required Ukrainian army would have no reserves to blunt the counter-offense and to de-block encircled Ukrainian forces. Basically, he tried to preempt and sabotage the DPR counter-offensive. And he, partially, succeeded. About half of encircled Ukrainian forces were de-blocked and broken out.
5. His armored vehicles (BMP), artillery (the famous two Nona cannons) and air defense (MANPADs) were famously donated to him by Ukrainian Army. It was the rage of then TV news. The unit who did it never faced any punishment. Lot of talks and curses and accusations in then Ukraine, but no any real persecution.
To top it, Girkin’s media promotion was some distubingly cultist thing. It was unhealthy to say least.
> 1. Girkin/Strelkov did not “straighten the line”
Yes, he did. Slavyansk was about to fall anyway, and they knew that. Your “semicircle” argument contradicts the maps I saw that time, the front line shortened considerably.
> 2. Girkin made it without warning his peers,
BS, at least according to what was the common knowledge that time. The withdrawal was extremely well organized just before the (sadly inevitable) fall of Slavyansk, and it caught the Ukrainians completely off guard. Basically they saw the enemy disappearing overnight. In the Hungarian press (what I read that time) they were talking about the rebels giving up territory without any fight.
> 3. Girkin made a lot of fuss how DPR ministry of Defense failed him and needed purges.
No, this was about an attempt by the Donetsk leadership to give up Donetsk following the Kharkov scenario. Girkin actually stopped this.
> 4. He did it at the time Donbass was preparing their first counter-offensive all along the borderline
This was the “Southern Cauldron”, and this was not a counter offensive. This was the only time when Russia directly intervened, with artillery. One of the preconditions was the removal of Strelkov. He actually wrote about this _before_ it happened, he knew he would have to leave at least a week in advance. We can only guess the why the Russians wanted to remove Strelkov, there were speculations even that time. His military leadership qualities weren’t among them. My guess was a Russian fear of a socialist/communist style radicalization of the republics. The Russians didn’t even allow the republics to nationalize oligarch property for a long time. Strelkov, for all his monarchist leanings, started to catch up with this radicalization, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed this. Please note that his removal was not the only change in this direction, there were a lot of changes compared to the earlier phase. Even the flag changed. Before that they used the plain Novorossiya flag, after that came the various flags with the eagles.
> 5. His armored vehicles (BMP), artillery (the famous two Nona cannons) and air defense (MANPADs) were famously donated to him by Ukrainian Army.
Most of the early equipment came from the Ukrainian Army. Whole companies were joining the rebels. Actually, the early core of the rebel army was local units, local law enforcement. The other source of arms was the early “voentorg”, and I specifically remember an occasion when the rebels “found” a large batch of Strelas. That was before Strelkov was gone.
I have to tell you this criticism of Strelkov is a fairly new phenomenon, at that time there was nothing like that. He was a respected person even after his dismissal. I predicted (correctly, I think) that he would be pushed into oblivion in Russia. His criticism of the current war is the reason why he suddenly become a “sixth columnist”, a “doomer”, and suddenly all this BS made up about the early days come out.
Hello everyone, guys) I’m from Russia. I would like to note that, speaking about who will win, we must remember the history of Russia. We must remember the Battle of Kursk. Only then will America realize that everything that is happening now is not even a war for the scale of Russia… If America thinks that it will win with all these sanctions and arms supplies, then let it remember which army we defeated in 1941-1945… The Soviet Union then lost more than 20 million people, villages were burned, cities and entire regions were destroyed… The Soviet Union lived in conditions of total economic war all the time of its existence, and was the second economy in the world where people were confident in the future and happy. And yes, we’ve never hated anyone… we love America, its cartoons, its people, its values, its films.. But America itself has destroyed the equal friendship that we wanted… she always considered herself superior to everyone… disrespect for other countries, their culture and history, for the issues that concern them, destroyed the old order of the world… I’m sorry if it’s written incomprehensibly, this is an auto-translation.
Артем, я понимаю, спасибо!
This so-called counter offensive only allowed the Russian forces to continue their stated objectives: demilitarization (read:destroy Ukrainian hardware) denazification (read: kill Ukrainian military personnel).
It was a massacre.
Whatever the future of Ukraine, it is already decided in Moscow. And there’s nothing the West can do short of pressing the red button.
Personally i am on a fence if Ian was heavilly trolling or was devil-advocating along “this operation is not total failure, it is 10% efficiently which is infinitely better than 0% you imagine”
So i just skip it, unable to get the groove and synchronize
Sometimes I’m surprised by what readers find controversial. I assume Kiev has goals they hope to achieve from this offensive (even if it’s not clear to outsiders what those goals are), and I’m not going to assume they’re being incompetent unless presented with clear evidence of it. It’s also fair to say that Kiev’s forces are the weaker side fighting at a disadvantage. So outside of Propaganda Land, they’re going to invariably suffer heavier losses.
We don’t have enough information on the intent from either side and not enough time has elapsed to say if this offensive is a success or failure. For example: If it was a Russian goal to, say, push toward Odessa before winter, and they waste a month fighting off Ukrainian attacks – then that could be considered a success for Kiev. If it was a goal to liberate DPR by the end of August but Russia had to divert troops and equipment Southward, then yes, this could be counted as a success for Kiev.
Remember that I have repeatedly expressed skepticism that this war will continue into the winter. People also like to poo poo the political dimension of war, which to me is just silly. If, despite their heavy losses, this Ukrainian offensive satisfies their NATO handlers and results in more financial aid and weapon shipments, then yes OF COURSE that would be a success.
Well, yes, and escalation is a problem. I’m not sure Team #slavaukraini is going to gracefully accept a clear defeat in Novorossiya.
A breath of sanity, especially welcome after the increasingly unhinged postings at MoA. Kudos!
Ian,
So how does Ukraine -in any sense of the word- “win”? This is the intellectually weakest -as well as being morally reprehensible- piece I’ve read from you; it’s in ‘Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred,’ territory.
I concur! Pretty weak to try and squeeze out a “if the Ukies disrupt the RF slightly, they are winning” trope, Ian!
The only real result is the Russian cat again battering a badly wounded bunch of Ukie mice, to no good end for the Ukies!