Today was rough, with too many gruesome pictures of dead civilians in liberated towns. The United States warned that Russia had kill-lists of people they wanted eradicated once they took control, and apparently it included even small town mayors. In one little settlement, the mayor was murdered along with her son and husband—the latter tossed into a sewer to bloat and decompose. It’s always dangerous to dehumanize an enemy, but you really do have to wonder what kind of people would report to this wanton cruelty. They didn’t even carry off their own dead, like the paratroopers rotting in Hostomel from the first days of the war. It’s unfathomable. Carting off war loot was more important to them.
NASA FIRMS satellite imagery shows a near-continuous line of fire from Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, all the way down the Donbas front lines, to Mariupol in the southeast. There’s also a curious amount of fire north of Russian-held Melitopol, but if there’s combat happening there, it’s not being reported by anyone. On the ground, little changed beyond confirming that Russia has indeed pulled out of northwest Kyiv, and continued clearing out around Chernihiv.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in his Saturday night address that Ukraine wasn’t allowing Russia to withdraw quietly, shelling them on the way out. There are certainly dozens of photos online of destroyed and abandoned equipment in the area. (Interestingly, FIRMS imagery doesn’t show any fires in the area, so I’m guessing that most of it is from a couple of days ago.) This wasn’t a cease-fire, and that wasn’t a withdrawal from the war. It was a tactical retreat from a lost-cause area of attack, so they can regroup and refocus on their new goal—the conquest of the entire Donbas region and holding on to their land bridge to Crimea. Every tank and soldier destroyed on the way out of that Kyiv region is one less tank and solider laying siege on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk—the next big battlegrounds as Russia consolidates its gains around Izyum.
Ukraine has held strong west of the purple separatist territory because of an elaborate network of defensive trenches. That’s why Russia wants to encircle those defenders in a pincer maneuver, surrounding them from the north and south. From the north, they were stuck at Izyum for weeks, but finally broke through two days ago. In the south, they’re getting chewed up in Mariupol.
However, as tough as Izyum was for Russia, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk will prove to be tougher nuts to crack. Izyum was a town of 47,000. Sloviansk is larger, 111,000, and Kramatorsk, the regional capital, has a population of 157,000. They’ve also had a lot of time to dig in, building the very kinds of entrenchments that have proven successful on the Donbas front lines.
Russia can always choose to bypass those cities and race south, but we saw how that worked out in their ill-fated and now-abandoned northern and northeastern fronts, where bypassing Kharkiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv allowed Ukrainians to shred Russian supply lines behind the front lines. And unlike the north, where the Russian border provided some flank protection, over here they’d be exposed to attack from both sides.
Attempting pincer maneuver bypassing key cities opens up that attacking force to attacks from both sides.
Attempting such an exposed push over barren open terrain, through 160 kilometers (100 miles) of hostile territory seems suicidal. That hasn't stopped Russia before, but it does seem they are trying to reset. Four axes of attack were too much? Okay! Let’s go down to two! Hmmm, I wanted to come up with two more examples, but I’ve got nothing. Maybe “avoid long unsustainable and indefensible supply lines” can be added to the list.
There are currently two big unknowns as we brace for this second phase of the war.
1. How many new Russian troops can Russia actually commit to the east?
There are over 100,000 Russian conscripts about to be released, many of which are in theater. We know many were being coerced into signing contracts, but word seems to be getting out—signing the contract is a death sentence. Back in Russia proper, there are multiple reports of entire units quitting their contracts. Turns out, absent a formal declaration of war, which Russian dictator Vladimir Putin weirdly refuses to do, there is no legal way for authorities to force anyone to the front.
Meanwhile, many of the units pulled out of the Kyiv area have been decimated, and either need to be backfilled with new bodies and equipment, or smushed together with other broken units. Regardless which way they go, those units won’t be as effective as originally constituted. And they weren’t that effective to begin with.
And even if they get new troops to that front, how is that helpful if they can’t manage to coordinate major combined arms maneuvers? Here is the result of a recent Russian assault of Ukrainian defensive lines in Donbas:
You have well-entrenched Ukrainian forces and supposedly hundreds of tanks at your disposal, and you make full-frontal assaults with … these piddly forces? Ukraine General Staff claimed that they had repelled nine separate attacks on the Donbas front over the last 24 hours, destroying 8 tanks and 44 other armored vehicles. That’s an average of six destroyed vehicles per attack, so they keep sending these inadequate probes against a brick wall, time and time again. What if Russia had massed all that armor in one place for one assault? Crazy, right?
You never see Russia operate with overwhelming force because they simply can’t coordinate it. Six weeks into the war, this is still true: “Individual Russian attacks at roughly regiment size reported on March 8-9 may represent the maximum scale of offensive operations Russian forces can conduct on this axis at any one time. ” A regiment is two BTGs, or 20 tanks and 80 armored personnel carriers (APC). That seems like a lot on paper, but Ukraine has repeatedly and consistently repulsed all direct attacks. Remember, Kherson wasn’t taken in combat, it was sold out by its traitor mayor, police, and security heads. Mariupol still hasn’t fallen, despite being besieged for six weeks and razed to the ground.
2. Where will Ukraine redeploy its forces?
Like Russia, Ukraine deployed its best forces around Kyiv. Unlike Russia, Ukrainian forces survived mostly intact. So what now? There are several critical needs. They can shore up the Donbas front. A nice, hard counterattack to retake Izyum would reverse what took Russia weeks to accomplish. Or how about heading up to Kherson and pushing east, cutting off the main route from Russia back into Ukraine—a key resupply line for the Donbas front?
Maybe they can head south and make a serious push toward Mariupol to try and break the siege. Odds are good Russia would be ill-equipped to handle pressure from outside the city, given how slowly they’re moving inside it.
Or what about Kherson? By liberating Kherson, Ukraine would be able to once again dam a key water supply for Crimea, putting severe pressure on the peninsula and giving Ukraine a bargaining chip for negotiations. It would also shatter Russia’s southern flank, and open up the approach toward Melitopol to its east (and beyond that, Mariupol). Also, bye-bye land bridge.
I don’t envy Ukrainian war planners. The needs everywhere are overwhelming, and the resources are finite. Those NATO T-72s can’t arrive soon enough.
On a personal note, I’m technically on vacation right now, the last spring break before my son heads off to finish his military training (including Ranger school). I’m going to try and write at least one of these per day, but I’m also going to try and be present for my kids. It certainly feels like these moments will be increasingly rare moving forward. So please understand if I miss a few days over the next week.
