Limited advances have come with increased costs as the Kramatorsk salient remains contested. Disinformation continues, as does aerial bombardment. The story of the first hours of the invasion on 24 February is now only being told as Russian paratroopers attempted to kill or capture Zelensky.
Notable: While the Pentagon does not assess that Russia has seized control of Mariupol, the senior defense official said today that a “significant” number of Russian forces are beginning to shift from the port city to the northwest.
The shift comes as a small number of Ukrainian forces hold out in Mariupol. The Pentagon has predicted previously that when Mariupol fell, it was likely some Russian forces would join the fight in the Donbas region.
The forces leaving Mariupol so far have shifted northwest, in Zaporizhzhia oblast, the senior defense official said. That’s roughly south of the major city of Dnipro.
“They’re continuing to pound Mariupol with strikes, both airstrikes and missile strikes,” the senior U.S. defense official said. “You don’t do that if you think it belongs to you.”
As of Thursday, the Pentagon assesses that Russia has about 92 battalion tactical groups in the war. That’s up several more from last week, as Putin’s forces continue to reset units after their earlier failures and put them back in the war.
The senior defense official said that there appears to be about 20 additional battalion tactical groups that are outside Ukraine, but nearby. Their operational status is not yet clear.
The new numbers highlight a condensation of Russian units after they got sliced up earlier in the war.
There were originally more than 130 battalion tactical groups arrayed at the border. There appear to be somewhere close to 110 left.
In the Donbas region, Russia has so far had “slow,” “uneven” and “incremental” progress, the senior defense official says.
Ukrainian forces also have pushed them back in some areas, he adds.
Russian forces are now moving only a couple of kilometers per day, in what appears to be a concerted effort to not outrun their supply lines, the senior defense official said.
That’s a notable change after Russians did so early in the war & then failed repeatedly.
As of today, the Pentagon assesses that more than 1,900 missiles have been launched at Ukraine in 63 days, the senior defense official says. The majority are now landing in Mariupol and in the Donbas region.
As of today, the Pentagon assesses that 60 percent of the 90, 155mm howitzers it has committed to Ukraine so far have arrived in country (roughly 54).
That’s up from about half of the 90 yesterday.
Training of Ukrainian forces on several systems continues outside Ukraine, senior defense official says. That includes not only the howitzer, but Q-64 short-range air defense radar and the M113 armored personnel carrier.
Meanwhile,
@SecDef is meeting today at the Pentagon with his Canadian counterpart,
@AnitaAnandMP. Canada this week said it will provide M777 howitzers and some long-range, precision Excalibur rounds that can be used in them to Ukraine.
• • •
6/ In the Severodoentsk Salient it appears Russian forces are positioning to encircle the main urban sprawl of Severodonetsk-Lysychansk from the NE and SE while reducing Ukrainian defenses through massed artillery bombardment.
7/ Further south on the Donetsk-Horlivka region, expect Russian offensive action to continue in Marlinka & Avdiivka as Russian & proxy militia forces attempt to break through the Ukrainian prepared defenses along the line of contact.
8/ Zaporizhzhia OD. Russian forces have made numerous small gains over the last several days along the Ukrainian defensive line running from Vasylivka, through Huliaipole, to Velyka Novosilka. These attacks may potentially threaten Zaporizhzhia if a breakthrough is made.
9/ So far Russian actions in this area appear consistent with my earlier assessment of the Zaporizhzhia OD being a disruption zone where the intent is to fix Ukrainian forces to ensure success of operations in the Severodonetsk-Donestsk OD.
10/ An assault on Zaporizhzhia, though not immediately likely, may well be an eventual action Russian forces will take. As the administrative center of the Zaporizhzhia Oblast it is an important political objective to hold to claim legitimacy of a propped-up proxy state.
11/ Mariupol. Russian forces renewed attacks against the Azovstal Metallurgical Zone over the weekend (23-24 April), most likely to secure the M14 HWY running through the industrial Zone. Operations also continue against pockets of resistance outside the Azovstal area.
#Mariupol
12/ It is unlikely that Russian troops will storm Azovstal itself but will focus attacks on reducing the size of the defensive perimeter of the Steel Plant. There are indications that the north Azovstal may have been captured by Russian forces.
13/ The siege of Mariupol illustrates how difficult it is for contemporary military forces to exert physical and/or virtual control of urban spaces. Virtually, cell phone saturation, social media, and cloud services render virtual isolation improbable.
14/ Physically, moving from the periphery inward is problematic as complex highway interchanges, road congestion, innumerable subterranean and surface passageway access makes controlling movement difficult without a massive engineering effort to reshape the city itself.
15/ Odesa-Kherson OD. Oleksandrivka to the west of Kherson is reported to be under Russian control. Russian forces launch attacks in northern Kherson Oblast toward Kryvyi Rih. Ukrainian forces claim to have recaptured several towns along the M14 HWY toward Kherson.
#Kherson
16/ Aerospace Assessment. VKS air sorties strike multiple railway hubs in western Ukraine with PGMs to slow the distribution of western military aid further east. PGM attacks also target Odesa. It is estimate Russia has expended 1,300 PGMs in Ukraine.
17/ Ukrainian TV. It is unlikely that Russia & Ukraine will return to meaningful negotiations soon. Growing evidence of Russian atrocities & the Kremlin’s narrative of framing the war as one against “Western aggression” pushes both sides to seek a military solution.
18/ Humanitarian Impact. Ukrainian refugees total 7.1+ million with 5.6+ million in countries bordering Ukraine, another 1.5+ throughout Europe, and 7.5+ million internally displaced people throughout Ukraine (1.4+ million in eastern & 228K in southern Ukraine).
19/ There are an estimate 1,000 civilians in Azovstal, Russian forces continue to target Ukrainian civil & civic leaders throughout southern Ukraine for arrest to disrupt civil resistance to Russian occupation. Ukrainian partisan activity remains high.
20/ Russia intends to create a proxy state in the south, with a referendum planned in Kherson possibly in the first week of May. Ongoing partisan activity & civil resistance may prevent this from occurring. Recent Russian rhetoric suggests a resumption of the Norossiya project.
21/ Lethal military aid from Western nations continue to arrive to their final European debarkation point before forward movement into Ukraine. US Secretary of Defense & State meet with Pres. Zelensky in Kyiv on 25 April to discuss continue aid.
22/ Overall Assessment. Russia needs a battlefield success(es) for any hope of drawing out concessions from Ukraine. Severodonetsk must be taken to claim victory in Luhansk. Therefore, Russia will go hard for Severodonetsk and the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk area.
23/ Russian forces will likely move SE from Barvinkove to Druzhkivka just south of Kramatorsk to cut the remaining GLOCs from the west and the north-south link to Avdiivka. The push north from Avdiivka is likely meant to link-up with Russian forces in the Kramatorsk.
24/ These maps have been created by me based off the most reliable information of activity in the Ukrainian Theater of War from a variety of sources. Errors will be corrected as soon as they are identified.
25/ Information regarding Ukrainian units are meant to be general, are based on Ukrainian General Staff statements and social media posts, official Ukrainian government press releases, and local news. It does not depict current unit movements. END
• • •
As U.S. leaders speak more openly about their geopolitical goals, and Russian leaders warn of the risk of nuclear war, there are essential questions that journalists should be raising in their coverage of the war in Ukraine that they are not. Chief among them:
Is escalating what has clearly emerged as a proxy war between the United States and Russia hastening or prolonging the carnage in Ukraine?
And: What’s the best way to minimize the risk of a nuclear conflict?
Thus far, most American news coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has reflected an unquestioned conviction that the more weapons the United States and the West send the Ukrainians the better.
It may well be that continuing and accelerating the arming of the Ukrainian military is, in fact, the best of bad options, the quickest way to peace, and doesn’t increase the likelihood of a nuclear strike. But that’s a hypothesis, which should be questioned and discussed, not blindly embraced as fact.
And in the meantime, Ukraine is being destroyed. Civilians are dying, refugees are fleeing for their lives, untold damage is being done to Ukraine’s infrastructure, and young men in arms are killing each other.
It’s time now for journalists to talk and write about at what point the goal of punishing Russia could diverge from the goal of bringing peace to the Ukrainian people as expediently as possible — and what the West should do if and when that happens.
For instance: If there’s a way for Vladimir Putin to save face and end the war more quickly, would that be palatable to U.S. officials who are now committed to a weakened Russia, if not to regime change?
The New Republic’s Walter Shapiro has been one of the few media figures to raise some of these issues. “Even with enhanced weaponry… being sent to Ukraine by the United States and NATO allies, the only certainties are more death and destruction,” he wrote last week. He urged more attention to “the conundrum of whether America is willing to grant Putin any reward for his morally indefensible war and the war crimes that have gone with it.”
And we should be openly raising questions about how to make sure this conflict doesn’t go nuclear. Nothing’s more important than avoiding a nuclear war. And while succumbing to nuclear extortion feels very wrong, if the fate of the world is at stake, it’s only common sense.
There is, of course, plenty of precedent for the media failing to ask the right questions at a time of war. The reflexive commitment to the more-weapons view at our major news outlets is, unfortunately, reminiscent of their gullibility and culpability in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
responsiblestatecraft.org/...
Russian propagandists have already begun to prepare their audiences for World War III
Margarita Simonyan offers a World War III and nuclear strike as an alternative to losing #Ukraine.
Many of us who analyze the Russian military for a living have been shocked to see Russian forces fumble the way they have in Ukraine. There are already some heated calls for analytical accountability, most prominently from Eliot Cohen and Phillips Payson O’Brien, into how the body of Russian military analysts could have gotten the Russian military so wrong. There is no doubt that the Russian military has performed much more poorly than most anticipated and it is important to understand why. However, observers should beware of drawing simplistic, overarching conclusions about Russian military power writ large.
One can lump Russian military failure into two large categories: those that are contingent to the current conflict and set of circumstances surrounding the invasion, and those that are inherent to the Russian military. Based on my experience as an analyst of the Russian military and former member of the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration, I focus here on the former: those contingent political factors that have contributed to the Russian military’s poor performance. I plan to follow this up with another article on those failures inherent to the Russian armed forces.
[...]
There is a lot of speculation about how the rest of the Russo-Ukrainian War will unfold. Will this turn into a long, drawn-out stalemate in the east, or will Russia be able to recover from its initial failures and take advantage of its new operational situation and achieve the Kremlin’s revised strategic objectives? What is Ukraine’s strategic goal, now that it has survived Russia’s ham-fisted attempt to snuff out its existence? Motivated by its recent victory in defending Kyiv and blooding Russia’s forces, will Ukraine attempt to drive Russian forces out of the east entirely? Perhaps in the weeks or months ahead Russia will have an exhausted military that culminates without achieving even Putin’s minimalist objectives — whatever those may be. As Cathal Nolan notes, it is often “exhaustion of morale and materiel rather than finality through battles” that decide the outcomes of wars.
Russia military analysts have their work cut out for them in explaining the early failures of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I have attempted to provide an explanation for how some of the contingent political factors contributed to the Russian military’s poor performance. A portion of the failure is a result of incorrect political assumptions that limited military planning and operational expectations. But this does not explain nearly all of the failures. What appear to be inherent weaknesses in the Russian military and in need of further analysis are the clear lack of effective command and control, an overly timid air force, and poor tactical performance on basic unit-level skills, to name a few. The obvious second half of this analysis is the performance of the Ukrainian military. While this article has focused solely on Russian operations, the successful Ukrainian operations to halt Russia’s attempt to seize most of Ukraine needs detailed study.
warontherocks.com/…
"BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday that Finland and Sweden would be embraced with open arms should they decide to join the 30-nation military organization and could become members quite quickly."