“I don’t need a ride, I need ammo.”
-Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, February 2022
“I don’t need ammo, I need a ride.”
– Russian Armed Forces, September 2022
Welcome back my friends, to the war that never ends.
On November 11, which we celebrate as Veterans’ Day from the Armistice of World War I in the West (in Russia, they weren’t quite so lucky), Ukraine liberated the city of Kherson, capital of Kherson Oblast, the only major regional capital that Russia managed to capture in 2022. It was a surprise how suddenly it happened. Less than three days before, Russia controlled a large territory on the west bank of the Dnipro River which comes into the Black Sea near Kherson. On November 9, Ukraine retook the town of Snihurivka, which is about 59 kilometers drive from Kherson city. And now Ukraine’s military is in Kherson’s center.
It was not expected to be this easy. Given the Putin government’s general contempt for human rights, everyone in the West expected Russia’s telegraphed withdrawal from the area to be a giant trap, with garrisons hiding in the cities to snipe at Ukrainian troops, or worse, Russia blowing the dam on the east side of the river to flood the city and delta, causing thousands of casualties. That didn’t happen, or if there are any traps, no one has seen them yet. On YouTube, the channel Combat Veteran Reacts pointed out that Russia needed to secure bridges to get people across before blowing them up to stop the enemy. With temporary pontoon bridges, they’re usually only one vehicle wide, which means you might have a max of 50 troops in an APC cross the river at a time. That would of course assume that everyone was retreating in good order. “What appears maybe to have happened is that instead of a systematic careful withdrawal that Ukraine can exploit, the Russians just… heard a withdrawal order on the TV, literally picked up their rifles, got into any vehicle, and just drove to the river.” Which, as with their retreat from Kharkiv Oblast in September means leaving a lot of military equipment behind, only worse because the earlier campaign was over more open terrain.
Since then the war has become a bit more stagnant, but as the weather worsens, Russia has tried to press for what advantage it can, mainly by pushing for the east-central town of Bakhmut, which most Western military analysts think has little strategic value. By contrast, Ukraine took not only the Kherson area west of the Dnipro, they really changed the course of the war by taking back most of the Kharkiv oblast due northeast of their capital, Kyiv. That was some time after they had managed to defend the capital well enough to make Russia retreat from their offensive there. Overall, since Vladimir Putin started his war of choice in February 24, 2022, Ukraine has taken back roughly half of the territory that Russia managed to seize at the high mark of their invasion progress.
It is the most impressive military campaign in Europe since World War II. And one of the ironies is that while Putin has tried to combine the reactionary politics of the Orthodox Church with the statism and organized power of the Soviet Union, part of Ukraine’s success is that, intentionally or not, they are doing a better job with World War II Soviet military theory than the Russians.
The Soviet approach to land warfare was called deep operation, or deep battle doctrine, and it was so called because it dealt with not only tactics and strategy but also what the US military now calls the operational level of a military campaign, dealing with the totality of both tactical and strategic affairs. According to the Wikipedia article, “It was a tenet that emphasized destroying, suppressing or disorganizing enemy forces not only at the line of contact but also throughout the depth of the battlefield. …The goal of a deep operation was to inflict a decisive strategic defeat on the enemy’s logistical abilities and render the defence of their front more difficult, impossible, or indeed irrelevant. ” In military history, the theory was most associated with Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a marshal who got executed in Stalin’s purges, but after Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded Soviet Russia, Marshal Zhukov and other generals re-developed it and put it to use against the Axis. However the first theorist to name the theory was Vladimir Trianadfillov, a Soviet general who died in 1931.
Deep battle’s emphasis on mobile warfare and encirclement resembled the Germans’ contemporary ‘blitzkrieg’ tactics (which themselves borrowed from maverick generals in Britain and France) but according to its name, went deeper in intention and results. From the article:
“Blitzkrieg emphasized the importance of a single strike on a Schwerpunkt (focal point) as a means of rapidly defeating an enemy; deep battle emphasized the need for multiple breakthrough points and reserves to exploit the breach quickly. The difference in doctrine can be explained by the strategic circumstances for the Soviet Union and Germany at the time. Germany had a smaller population but a better-trained army, and the Soviet Union had a larger population but a less-trained army. As a result, Blitzkrieg emphasized narrow front attacks in which quality could be decisive, but deep battle emphasized wider front attacks in which quantity could be used effectively.
“In principle, the Red Army would seek to destroy the enemy’s operational reserves and its operational depth and occupy as much of his strategic depth as possible. Within the Soviet concept of deep operations was the principle of strangulation if the situation demanded it, instead of physically encircling the enemy and destroying him immediately. Triandafillov stated in 1929:
The outcome in modern war will be attained not through the physical destruction of the opponent but rather through a succession of developing manoeuvres that will aim at inducing him to see his ability to comply further with his operational goals. The effect of this mental state leads to operational shock or system paralysis, and ultimately to the disintegration of his operational system. The success of the operational manoeuvre is attained through all-arms combat (combined arms) at the tactical level, and by combining a frontal holding force with a mobile column to penetrate the opponent’s depth at the operational level. The element of depth is a dominant factor in the conduct of deep operations both in the offensive and defensive.”
This differed from blitzkrieg and “Clausewitzian” principles of destroying enemy units in the field, which was the main focus of Germany in the two World Wars. The article states that the major example of this approach was Operation Uranus, the Soviet encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad; once the Germans were committed in the city, the weaker military units guarding the flanks were routed and the Germans were cut off from any escape. At that point the Soviets simply waited for winter and lack of supply to defeat the Germans in the city. The Battle of Stalingrad ended up capturing 91,000 Axis soldiers.
The other term used for this military approach in World War II was maskirovka (masquerade), basically deceiving the Germans as to where the Soviet offensive was going to move so that the Axis would try to defend in a different area and then the Soviets would attack at a weak point. What Americans might call “hit ’em where they ain’t.” Not unlike what the Western Allies did in 1944 when they made all their maneuvering in Britain look like our invasion of Nazi Europe was going to start in Calais (a narrower point in the English Channel than Normandy and closer to both Paris and Germany) so that the Nazi garrisons were concentrated there instead of the real invasion points (in Normandy) so that Normandy was less defended and the Allies had more time and space to expand the beach heads.
Ukraine, with its relatively small army and pre-war lack of mobile forces, is not really able to perform Nazi or Soviet style encirclements of Russians on the battlefield. But they have still been operating as much on an operational as a tactical level, with the Kharkiv offensive in particular being not so much simply engaging the enemy directly as wearing down their front and support lines before attacking so that the offensive was on their terms. As with maskirovka, the principal element was feinting moves to make Russia believe that the main offensive was going toward Kherson city. US military support was critical in this regard, as HIMARS missile batteries were used to strike behind Russian lines up to 70 kilometers, hitting critical supply and ammunition depots. Another huge factor in Ukraine’s success with deception is its greater mastery of modern information war; one Ukrainian official said “They are blind, we see everything.” Ukrainian strikes behind the lines also included attacks on Russian radar systems and the use of anti-aircraft systems to counter Russian drones and air missions. By September 6, Ukrainian forces had amassed at a focal point in Balakliia, dazing Russian forces and causing a rapid retreat. By September 9, Ukraine had reached Kupiansk, a major rail and transportation hub, undermining Russia’s ability to resupply and redeploy in the sector and contributing to the armed forces’ decision to withdraw to the Oskil river. But in October Ukraine continued the offensive and managed to reach as far as Kreminna before Russia managed to regroup and push back. In the wake of all this Russia’s forces were further deteriorated by loss of equipment, partially because of Ukraine’s rapid advance but also because Russian attempts to blow bridges frequently occured before they could get tanks and heavy equipment across, and as Russian troops simply abandoned their defense posts.
Which only brings up the point that as cunning as Ukraine’s strategy has been up to this point, its success has at least as much to do with the deficiencies of the Russian side.
Putin launched his invasion in February apparently on the assumption that Ukraine’s field defenses were just going to break, he would be able to take Kyiv, and then whatever rump government managed to hold the west of Ukraine would eventually accede to whatever stooge he wanted to impose on them. He may have thought this because President Zelenskyy really wasn’t that popular at home before the war started, or because the West hadn’t done anything to help Ukraine after Russia’s previous violations of Ukrainian territory in 2014 and after. Indeed, part of Putin’s escalation to full-scale war was his diplomatic recognition of the pro-Russia Luhansk and Donetsk “republics” on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, and the fact that Ukraine had been fighting those separatists on a low level for years despite lack of Western support should have told Putin that his “special military operation” wasn’t going to be just a three-hour tour.
A large part of this is the relative lack of presence of the Russian Air Force. Many of its Sukhoi models of close air support craft are outdated by 21st Century standards. The Ukrainians’ use of anti-aircraft batteries, even before high-level NATO support, demonstrated greater efficiency for the value than Russian offensive air and contributed to making Russian pilots “risk averse.” Part of that is because Russian craft are more reliant on unguided weapons, meaning they have to get close to the target to fire. The overall problem is that Russia’s military does not train their pilots intensively, with their flying time roughly 100 hours per year, less than one-third that of their NATO counterparts. More skilled pilots would be better able to reach “dynamic” targets and still survive.
That hollowness and lack of support point to an even more fundamental problem with Russia’s military. In October, a lieutenant general reported that 1.5 sets of military uniforms had gone missing. Apparently this was 1.5 million sets of uniforms that were supposed to be on record and are now unaccounted for. These were supposed to include winter uniforms. And as the Starks would say, winter is coming. Such gear as they do have is not optimized for winter and is made out of synthetic materials to save costs. Corruption is endemic in the entire Russian government, leading to a military that is more designed for the elites to profit from graft than to perform its national defense or attack purposes. “Most companies responsible for providing food to the Russian military are connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin — the patron of PMC Wagner, the mercenary organization, and sponsor of the Internet Research Agency, which has been accused of meddling in the United States elections. ” The military’s performance in the Ukraine invasion was foreshadowed by the fact that just a few days after the first attacks, Russia, the greatest fuel exporter in Europe, had army vehicles stuck on the road for lack of gas. The country uses tanks dating back from the 1980s and earlier. And of course it has absolutely no regard for information security, which is why social media has so many examples of Russian soldiers calling home from war zones. So if everyone on YouTube knows where the Russians are and what they’re doing, certainly the Ukrainian Armed Forces do.
So you have a Russian invader force that is easily monitored by Ukraine, poorly equipped, poorly organized, with no one knowing what they’re doing, no chain of command who can tell grunts what the mission is and what to do if conditions change, no one cares about anything besides getting through the day or how much they can scam from the war zone, and no one really wants to be there besides Vladimir Putin. And every day their support network is being hammered by Ukraine so it would be that much harder to hold a position once Ukraine actually advances. And then one day, they advance.
The end result was the ultimate example of “quiet quitting.”
Putin says on one hand that Ukraine is essentially Russia and there is no such thing as Ukraine, but then he forgot why you don’t want to start a war with Russia. Even if YOU ARE Russia.
Moreover, like any good fascist, Putin seems to think that that which he wishes to be so therefore is so. He seems to think that because the “traditional Russia” exists in his mind, that his country still has the tools of traditional Russia, namely an inexhaustible manpower reserve. Like, the Germans could kill all the Russians they wanted and there would still be more. That’s not the case any more, and it hasn’t been the case for quite some time. According to Wikipedia: “From the 1990s to 2001, Russia’s death rate had exceeded its birth rate, which has been called a demographic crisis by analysts. Subsequently, the nation has an ageing population, with the median age of the country being 40.3 years. In 2009, Russia recorded annual population growth for the first time in fifteen years; and during the mid-2010s, Russia had seen increased population growth due to declining death rates, increased birth rates and increased immigration. However, since 2020, due to excess deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s population has undergone its largest peacetime decline in recorded history. In 2020, the total fertility rate across Russia was estimated to be 1.5 children born per woman, which is below the replacement rate of 2.1 and about equal to the European average.” Also, in 1941, the Russian fertility rate (number of children born to each woman) was 4.6. In 1945 it was 1.92. The previously higher fertility rates did not lead to an overall population increase because of Russia’s Civil War, the two world wars and “political killings”.
This is of course why Putin invaded Ukraine with a peacetime army not nearly the size needed to subdue the population and army of Ukraine, and the failure of that was not even so much because of not having 300,000 more men but because Russia didn’t have the supplies to cover the force it did have.
Which all adds up to the fact that Russia simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to run a military the size of the Soviet Union. Heck, the Soviet Union couldn’t afford a military the size of the Soviet Union’s, which was a large part of why the Cold War ended.
Less than two days after appearing at the battlefield in Bakhmut, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy made a surprise flight (most likely unannounced for security reasons) to Washington DC, appearing at a press conference with President Biden on December 21 to petition the US government for more military support. He then appeared to a joint session of Congress, much as Winston Churchill spoke to Congress just after Pearl Harbor, the difference being that Churchill probably had less fascist sympathizers on the Republican side of the aisle. But Zelenskyy said at one point that most Ukrainians would be celebrating Christmas this holiday by candlelight, not out of sentiment, but because of Russian attacks on their infrastructure. But he continued, “we will celebrate Christmas, and even if there is no electricity, the light of our faith in ourselves will not be put out.”
It gets to a point that applies to both Ukrainians and Russians this winter, which one of the MSNBC talking heads made when they found out about Zelenskyy’s visit Wednesday morning. Quoting Napoleon, he said: “In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.”