If Russia isn't ejected from Ukraine, Russia can regroup and advance their logistics line forward through conquered territory. And then conceivably repeat their 2022 invasion in a few years if the casualties don't deter them. The logic of Putin's statements requires the conquest of Ukraine. His political survival might require victory soon.
Grabbing territory and then ending the war, exploiting Western fear of escalation, ratchets Russian control a little more. I've outlined, in Military Review, the far more deadly problem for Taiwan of ending a Chinese invasion campaign with Chinese troops still on the island. Indeed, China may think that the scale of Russia's casualties indicate that China could afford those loses for such a gain.
And it is significant for Taiwan that as Ukraine contemplates counter-attacks, the talk in NATO is of providing Ukraine with more than infantry anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. Now the talk is to add heavy armor and artillery, with aircraft seemingly more possible now. As I've argued, so-called asymmetric weapons are good for inflicting losses but if the enemy accepts and absorbs those losses it may still advance and take territory. The big items become important for driving the enemy back, as I argued in that article and on TDR repeatedly.
But before we reach that stage of a long war, Russia will try to win on the battlefield on a more narrow front:
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Russian President Vladimir Putin has “probably given up” on trying to capture the capital city of Kyiv, as Russia has shifted its focus to eastern and southern Ukraine.Russia is putting the commander of the Southern Military District in charge of the campaign. Does a focus on a more narrow front mean Russia has a lesser goal? Russia may still think a narrow front battlefield victory can win this war. Especially if Russian troops can isolate and destroy Ukrainian brigades in that eastern Donbas salient. Or maybe the focused offensive will be another ratchet forward on taking more territory, with lessons learned for the next round in the future.
If the first four weeks of Russia's invasion of Ukraine were the equivalent of Nazi Germany's broad invasion of the USSR in 1941 that failed to reach all objectives or knock out the target, Russia is regrouping for the next offensive. But like Germany in 1942, resources can only support a narrow southern front. Will Russia in 2022 reach the figurative Caucasus oil fields and pave the way for Russian victory? Or will the drive founder on a Stalingrad? With dire results for Putin?
The ISW update for late yesterday showed Russia making gains in Mariupol but not elsewhere:
But first the Russians have to begin that offensive. Will it be after a build up or will Russia just throw already damaged units into the line as fast as possible?
UPDATE: Cataloging what the Fuck-Up Fairy did to Russia's invasion. And again, I think calling up ex-soldiers who have been out since 2012 is going to cause more morale problems than combat power.
UPDATE: No such thing as "collateral" damage: "Having lost their military effort Russia is concentrating on devastating the Ukrainian economy, even though Russian acknowledges their military operations were unable to overcome the Ukrainian defenders." I thought the invasion might look like this. I was wrong. But it is ending up this way.
UPDATE: Does Russia have the ammunition stockpile and production capacity to sustain heavy artillery and air bombarment?
UPDATE: A German company will send 50 upgraded Leopard I tanks to Ukraine. The tanks are old and don't have the protection of modern tanks but they'll help.
UPDATE: Ukraine keeps reporting the Russian attack in Donbas is coming soon. Are the Ukrainians trying to provoke Russia to strike before ready by raising expectations of Russian capabiltities?
UPDATE: Russian air strike continue in central Ukraine.
UPDATE: I don't see how it is possible that half of Ukraine needs mine clearing given that Russia came nowhere close to advancing far enough to get to that percentage.
UPDATE: I've read from several authors that the more open terrain in the south will favor Ukraine when the Russian offensive opens up. That's crazy. Broken terrain always helps the defense and open terrain helps the offense. I certainly hope Ukrainian engineers are building fallback positions. And that Ukraine is preparing counter-attacks into the flanks of any Russian advances.
UPDATE: The claim that Ukrainian defenders in Mariupol are almost out of ammo may be false.
UPDATE (Tuesday): Yesterday's ISW update. A new Russian overall commander might help but doesn't by itself resolve Russia's problems. Russia continues to attack in the Donbas region while moving up reinforcements from the ex-northern front. Mariupol amazingly holds on. Did Russia use chemical weapons there? But define "chemical weapon." Could have been tear gas, I suppose. If any were used.
UPDATE: Is a Russian offensive imminent? "For more than a week now, the Russian military has been repositioning its forces in preparation for an all-out assault on eastern Ukraine in the Donbas region." Russia is moving depleted and demoralized units. Will Russia take the time to repair them? And can Russia sustain an offensive within the restrictions of the "special military operation" fiction that denies Russia launched a war?
UPDATE: What will Russia's offensive look like?
"We are looking at a slow war of attrition," says Snetkov.
"The Russians will be focused on grinding down Ukrainian positions and infrastructure."
She says Putin will attack from the north and from Mariupol, in the south - piling on pressure to extract concessions.
Really? Putin will commit to a war of attrition despite Russia's heavy casualties already? Russia is going to apply pressure to get "concessions"?
BS. Russia will ramp up firepower to kill more Ukrainian troops and civilians. But Putin isn't a nuanced Westerner who has moved beyond the simplistic notion of victory. He'll try to win. It may be unlikely depending on how soon Russia attacks and how both sides use a pause before a general offensive in the south. But it will be an effort to win.
UPDATE: The latest ISW update: "The Russian military has continued to conduct small-scale limited offensive operations on the Izyum and Severodonetsk axes and has not yet gone over to a better-resourced or broader offensive campaign." Russia is moving troops into the Donbas region and working on logistics to support an offensive. But rather than wait for major reinforcements, Russia is continuing smaller scale attacks that suffer significant losses.
UPDATE (Wednesday): Russia claims over a thousand Ukrainian marines surrendered in Mariupol. Ukraine says the marines broke through Russian lines to link up with Azov battalion troops. It is possible that the Ukrainians had to leave their more severely wounded behind to surrender.
China is not assisting Russia economically, unless it benefits China. To do otherwise would be expensive, reward Russian bad judgment and imply Chinese approval of the Ukrainian operation. With no Chinese economic lifeline available, Russia is under more pressure to end the Ukraine operation as soon as possible.
Can Putin afford to end the war ASAP but without victory? Will that push Putin to a risky last gasp for victory?
UPDATE: The U.S. backed out of supplying helicopters to Ukraine.
UPDATE: But this story says new America military aid will include helicopters.
UPDATE: The latest ISW update. Small-scale Russian attacks in the east while continuing to gather more troops. Russia's claim of a large Ukrainian surrender is probably false. U.S. intelligence thinks Russia has 55 battalion tactical groups "fighting" on the southern front, which I guess stretches from Kharkiv to Kherson. Does that include local Donbas allies? Or is that only Russian units? Does that include units in reserve?
UPDATE: Something happened to the Russian Black Sea fleet flagship. Accident or Ukrainian attack?
UPDATE (Thursday): I wonder if the crew of Moskva will be used as replacements for Russian naval infantry combat losses?
UPDATE: Yes: "Ukraine needs the offensive capability to liberate the Donbas and threaten Russian control of Crimea."
UPDATE: America's latest arms package, including 200 M-113 armored personnel carriers, 100 armored Humvees, 11 helicopters, and other weapons, equipment, and radar.
UPDATE: Supplies ... from the sea: "Russian Navy ships in the Black Sea are currently resupplying troops in Ukraine instead of playing an offensive role, a senior [U.S.] defense official said Monday."
Ukrainian offensive to eject Russia (probable fail that uses up Ukraine's reserves of men and ammunition);
Russian offensive in south to break Ukraine's army in the east (likely Russian fail and at the cost of wrecking Russia's military even more);
War of attrition (would Russian bombardment or Ukrainian insurgency/irregular warfare behind Russian lines be more damaging? Would this risk escalation and new combatants, or would it peter out into a frozen conflict?). Putin will claim a victory with territorial gains if he can, despite the price.
And he'd be right, I think, on a purely bilateral sense in regard to Ukraine. Because the new front line would become the starting point for the next invasion.
But option one is too broad. I still think a Ukrainian offensive in Kherson alone could do some serious psychological damage to Russia's army by inflicting a local decisive defeat that destroys and captures Russian troops while taking back significant territory.
UPDATE: Putin is throwing a "Hail Mary" to achieve a victory over Ukraine no matter how brutal Russia has to be. But if successful, Putin will need a second high-risk approach to let Russia move on from the war to a peace that ends sanctions. Would Russia wage a sub-based undeclared war on sea trade to pressure the world to ease up on sanctions, as the author suggests?
Maybe. But Putin's fleet could lose that war. And even if Western governments retreat from sanctions as a result, will companies be eager to return to dealing with Russia after all that?
UPDATE: Moskva is heading to port under her own power. Or perhaps she is being towed. Unclear.
UPDATE: From the ISW urging Western support for Ukraine to eject Russia from their conquests. Western help is needed. If Ukraine could do the job it would have counter-attacked already after Russia's offensive largely culminated. But Ukraine did not have a strategic reserve as I hoped.
But perhaps Ukraine needs to defeat the next more narrow but more brutal offensive before it can seriously counter-attack in the south.
UPDATE: Moskva sank while being towed to port. Darn. The biggest payoff from the damage to Russia's large warship would have come when the war with Ukraine is over and Putin decided that he simply must have that prestigious ship back at sea. Now that waste of money won't happen. I assume the entire crew now without a ship just became naval infantry replacements.
UPDATE: The latest ISW update. Fighting continues on the Kherson, Mariupol, and Donbas front--where Russia may be sending depleted units from the north already--but the front has not changed much. Ukrainian partisans may be active in the Kherson region.
UPDATE (Friday): Strategypage says Ukraine did indeed hit Moskva with two missiles. And somehow the Russian leadership thinks this is the superior excuse: "Russia is trying to blame the loss of the ship on massive crew incompetence rather than admit the ship was hit by two Ukrainian missiles." Does the Russian military like being thrown under the bus? Is there still a Potemkin in the Russian fleet?
UPDATE: I mentioned at the end of March that Russia has a history of mobilizing civilian vehicles for their military. It's still a thing:
Phillips O'Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, sees another "bad sign" for Russian truck logistics: its use of civilian trucks to replace military ones lost in battle.
"Civilian trucks are not made to military grade. They're not made to carry the loads, they're not made to carry the specific pieces of equipment," and in many cases cannot even operate off roads, O'Brien says.
In addition to maintenance problems and inferior capabilities in military service, Russia's civilian economy has to do without whatever those trucks did in the civilian economy. My memory is that the USSR declined to invade Poland late in the Cold War to wipe out the Solidarity movement because the Soviet economy could not survive the mobilization of all the civilian trucks needed to invade.
UPDATE: The latest ISW report:
The Russian military appears to be carrying out an approach in eastern Ukrainian similar to its failed efforts north of Kyiv in early March—continuing to funnel small groups of forces into unsuccessful attacks against Ukrainian defensive positions without taking the operational pause that is likely necessary to prepare for a more successful offensive campaign.
And Mariupol's defenders are still hanging on.
Could the Russians be that stubborn? Are they fearful of pausing even for a day their attacks to avoid looking like they are avoiding combat rather than preparing to do it better? Or are they preparing something different behind the screen of coming on in the same old way?
As I've said, pinning the main front on the Donbas front in place while pincers are prepared to isolate those Ukrainian brigades makes the most sense to me.
UPDATE (Saturday): Mud will make it tougher for Russia to maneuver off the roads until the ground dries out in the Donbas.
UPDATE: I may have been hasty in speculating that the crew of Moskva would become infantry replacements. Just how many of the 500+ crew did Russia rescue before the cruiser sank?
UPDATE: The latest ISW assessment. No significant movement of the lines. Can Russia exploit their new numbers in the Donbas given the mud and demonstrated inability of the Russians to efficiently take cities?
UPDATE (Sunday): The epic intelligence failures of February.
UPDATE: I wondered about that: "Ukraine has managed to resupply its beleaguered forces in Mariupol in very risky night-time missions[.]" I was wondering if resupply was by GPS-guided parachutes.
NOTE: War updates continue at this post.
