Big picture overview: Russia attacked with 190,000 soldiers. As I’ve noted, only about 15% of an army’s soldiers actually shoot anything, the rest being support troops. So of those 190,000, only about 30,000 or so are actual combat troops.
Then, Russia took that inadequate invasion force, and attacked from four different axes—Kyiv in the north, Kharkiv/Sumi in the northeast, Donbas in the east, and Crimea in the south. We can assume that Russia didn’t apportion equal strength to all four axes, but generic math would quickly gather that 7-8,000 combat troops per axes was woefully inadequate, and Russia has diluted that fighting force even further by splitting each of those axes into multiple prongs of attack.
So even before we get to logistics, which is Russia’s other major failing, they were already catastrophically stretched thin. That is why Russia has only captured one city of any significant size thus far, and even that one—Kherson—looks to be under some threat of liberation. The hope, obviously, was that the multi-direction assault would shock-and-awe Ukraine into a quick surrender, literally overwhelmed on all sides. Instead … every side has bogged down. Things are going so bad for Russia that the Institute for the Study of War declared today that Russia had lost this phase of the war, and it was time to quit or go back to the drawing board. And to be clear, ISW, a defense think thank, wasn’t always so pessimistic about Russia’s chances.
Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated. Russian forces continue to make limited advances in some parts of the theater but are very unlikely to be able to seize their objectives in this way. The doctrinally sound Russian response to this situation would be to end this campaign, accept a possibly lengthy operational pause, develop the plan for a new campaign, build up resources for that new campaign, and launch it when the resources and other conditions are ready. The Russian military has not yet adopted this approach. It is instead continuing to feed small collections of reinforcements into an ongoing effort to keep the current campaign alive. We assess that that effort will fail.
Yesterday we wondered whether Ukraine had notched major battlefield gains around Kherson in the south, and northwest Kyiv in the north. We are still awaiting confirmation, which will be posted here at some point today. Fingers crossed for good news, though sifting through Twitter and Telegram, I wasn’t able to find any video of Ukrainian forces holding all that new territory. As of now, we can be content knowing that the city of Mykolaiv is safely out of range of most Russian artillery.
Meanwhile, Russia’s approach to reinforcements isn’t to build up an operational reserve that can then punch through weakened Ukrainian lines wherever they may arise (which at this point, would be the Donbas front). Instead, they’re doubling down on the current fracas:
The Russian military continues to commit small groups of reinforcements to localized fighting rather than concentrating them to launch new large-scale operations.
In other words, Russia is replacing combat losses in all its multiple vectors of attack, instead of trying to fix one of their core problems—the fact that their forces are stretched too thin. You see this in all the summary updates: Kyiv? Russia is on an operational pause, reinforcing its forces. Kharkiv? Operational pause as it reinforces its forces. Sumy? Same thing. Kherson? Yup. Russia is moving in Mariupol, which should fall soon, and a little bit on that Donbas front. But why not commit all those reinforcements to Mariupol, bring it down quickly, then take those newly freed forces to punch through Ukraine’s prepared positions on the Donbas eastern front? But nope, just more diluting.
Meanwhile Ukraine bleeds Russia, one paper-cut ambush at a time.
Why do people keep insisting that Russia will figure shit out and adjust its strategy based on the realities on the ground. Russia has shown no ability to learn from its mistakes and try new things. They’re too spread out? Great! They continue to dilute that strength with tier piece-meal approach to reinforcements.
But what about that no-fly-zone, some of you may still be asking. Can’t Russia still bomb Mykolaiv and other cities? Of course! But weirdly, that’s becoming a much more rare occurrence.
Russia’s (ground-based) missile/rocket stash is clearly running dry, as assaults from tactical missiles originating in Belarus sputter to single-digits per day. You’d think they’d make it up with aircraft strikes, but even those are petering out. On those last three days (March 16-18), Russia had trouble cobbling together 20 sorties. Now remember, these numbers are just from attacks originating in Belarus, so it doesn’t count strikes from Russia proper or Donbas. But the overall missile strike numbers are looking anemic:
The overall trend is headed down.
There was a great deal of fighting yesterday, given yesterday’s tallies of destroyed Russian equipment. I count 68 pieces of confirmed Russian equipment losses on March 19, for a total of 1,610. Last weekend it was 1,000. And one grim milestone for Russia:
Fun fact, Ukraine has captured more confirmed tanks (106), than it has confirmed losses (67). Today we should get a better sense of what all that death and destruction bought both sides of the war.
Sunday, Mar 20, 2022 · 2:10:47 PM +00:00 · kos
Woah this is cool:
Flooding lands for wartime defenses is a strategy as old as war. The Dutch are expert practioners, which would give them some natural defenses in a flat land surrounded by war-loving countries. In WWII, the Soviets used hydraulic warfare to slow down German advances.
