UPDATE: Wednesday, Feb 8, 2023 · 12:15:22 AM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
Meanwhile, in Propaganistan …
RT story claiming Ukraine wants to surrender
That’s right. Russian state media is pushing a narrative that Ukraine would love to quit and see the nation divided “like Korea,” but Russia just won’t do it because they’re winning so winningly. And if you’re interested in that “Ukrainian losses” story off to the right, not only is Russia claiming that Ukraine lost 6,500 soldiers in January, Russia also says they downed 26 Ukrainian fighter jets along with seven helicopters. Then they took out 341 tanks and 40 MLRS. That’s about 2 Ukrainian Air Forces and 90% of all documented Ukrainian tank losses. In a month. So … impressive.
UPDATE: Wednesday, Feb 8, 2023 · 12:05:23 AM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
As Russia has managed advances around Bakhmut in the last two weeks, their planning an execution has become less effective, and more apparently desperate. To the extent that what looked like it was going to be a swift conclusion has turned into a drawn out series of errors and misfires, generating enormous numbers of Russian casualties.
UPDATE: Tuesday, Feb 7, 2023 · 8:24:21 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
What’s on the way to Ukraine when it comes to tanks. Note that this is far from all the tanks that have been mentioned. In fact, it’s about 100 Leopard 2s and 200 PT-91s short. This is what’s been confirmed , rather than just talked about (including what is expected to be confirmed today).
Western tanks headed to Ukraine
| Tank |
Number |
Manufactured in |
First Arrival* |
| Challenger 2 |
14 |
United Kingdom |
March |
| Leopard 2A6 |
19 |
Germany |
March |
| Leopard 2A4 |
18 |
Germany |
March |
| Abrams M1A2 |
31 |
United States |
August |
| Leopard 1A5 |
100** |
Germany |
N/A |
Updated / Remanufactured Soviet-designed tanks
| Tank |
Number |
Arrival |
| PT-91 |
30*** |
March |
| T-72M |
30 |
March |
| T-72EA |
35 |
N/A |
* Estimate date of first tanks arriving in Ukraine based on current schedule for training and production.
** While a total of 187 tanks are likely to be approved for transport, only 100 appear to have been donated to Ukraine at this point.
*** As many as 240 T-72 tanks have been discussed by Poland, but it’s unclear how many are upgraded to the PT-91 standard and only 30 are promised for now. Deliveries were said to begin “very soon,” as this tank will not need all the training of the Leopards / Challengers / Abrams.
UPDATE: Tuesday, Feb 7, 2023 · 4:59:52 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
Germany has reportedly approved the release of 187 older Leopard 1 tanks to Ukraine. These are still highly capable tanks, with higher mobility and gun handling than a T-72 or T-80. The tanks being considered for Ukraine have the A5 upgrade, which included thermal imaging, an updated fire control system, and support for new armor-piercing rounds. However, compared to the Leopard 2 or Challenger 2 (or even the T-80), it has armor that’s much simpler and could be easily penetrated by the lastest generation of anti-tank weapons. It also has a 105mm gun that’s going to require a different ammo chain than other main battle tanks on the way.
There’s been widespread suggestion that this tank is likely to become a second-line tank, providing infantry support, rather than being positioned at the “tip of the spear.” Still, that’s a vital role.
88 of these Leopard 1 tanks are coming from manufacturer Rheinmetall, with another 99 from the company Flensburger Fahrzeugbau Gesellschaft. No timeline is currently available for how soon they’ll be released to Ukraine or how the training and logistics chain for this tank will be handled. There’s some question about whether all of the 187 tanks in storage can actually be restored to battle ready.
A funny thing happened on the way to Russia’s capture of Vuhlendar, Siversk, and even Bakhmut. The thing that happened is that they … didn’t happen. Or at least they certainly haven’t happened yet. What has happened is a jaw-dropping loss of Russian forces that have generated the highest body counts, and equipment counts, since the opening days of the war.
On Monday, Russia made no notable gains at Bakhmut, no notable gains north of Bakhmut, and no notable gains south of Bakhmut. Fifty kilometers to the north, there doesn’t seem to have been any change around the city of Kreminna. That includes Ukrainian forces still reporting to have repelled advances in the area of Kreminna and around Shypylivka to the south. There are also doubts about previous reports of Russia advancing north of Kreminna. That “big push” in Zaporizhzhia turned out to be a complete illusion, and at Vuhledar … we’ll get to that in a minute.
But the question for the morning has to be: Has Russia’s new offensive already fizzled?
UK Ministry of Defense believes Russia is short of material and men to make it offensive work
According to the Ukrainian ministry of defense, Russia is now engaged in five simultaneous offensives in Ukraine. One is near Kupyansk, where Russia claims to have occupied the village of Synkivka in the last few days. The second is in that stretch between Kreminna and Lyman, where reported Russian assaults were repulsed. The third is the expansive effort around Bakhmut. The fourth is the endless effort to move the line by a single meter down near Donetsk, with most of the focus on the town of Avdiivka. The final area of attack is more general, with multiple attacks along the southern end of the line from Orikhiv to Vuhledar.
The one day losses for Russia on Monday are jaw-dropping
By best estimates, Russia now has somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000 men under arms in Ukraine, with all of that force spread along a front that’s now reduced to only about 500 kilometers of contact along the land, and another 350 km in which the forces are facing off across the wide Dnipro River. There aren’t enough Russian soldiers in Ukraine to stand shoulder to shoulder, but if they stretch out their arms, they could hold hands along the front. That’s in spite of losses that are certainly over 100,000 (Ukraine estimates 130,000 Russian soldiers killed).
How big is Ukraine’s military? It’s hard to tell. A decent estimate places the total around 240,000, with about half of that number away from the front, either undergoing training or keeping an eye on potential Russian lines of attack from Kharkiv to Kyiv. The Ukrainian military reportedly still has more volunteers than it can train at any given moment, but there’s no doubt it’s also suffering some horrendous losses at the front. On any given day, the largest number of images arriving from Ukraine are the funerals of Ukrainian soldiers.
Right now, Russia may be at its greatest advantage in men along the front line since shortly after the opening days of the invasion. And, since Ukraine doesn’t yet have longer-range missiles with which to harass their movement, Russian forces should be able to maneuver behind the lines, massing troops for an assault on any place where Ukrainian forces are stretched thin.
And maybe it will. Maybe tomorrow Russia will come surging out of Kreminna, or send for the 30,000 men reportedly massing near Mariupol, or finally break through the lines where it’s been spinning its tank treads near Donetsk since the invasion began. Maybe. But right now, that assessment from the U.K. Ministry of Defense certainly looks accurate—Russian leadership is demanding advances that Russian forces on the ground can’t deliver.
Abandoned Russian tank between Lyman and Kreminna
Even though kos already covered it last night, it’s worth looking again at the latest debacle around Vuhledar, because it’s a prime example of what’s happening when Russia tries to overreach.
At this point, when anyone talks about the game Warcraft, the first thing that comes to mind is the expansive online roleplaying game. However, that’s not where things started. The original game appeared in 1994 (it was released on my birthday, and yes, I bought it), and it was a real-time strategy game in which the forces of humans and orcs faced off in a series of battles. It wasn’t the first real-time strategy game, or even the first to support multiplayer over a network. But it was well done, with a slick combination of easy-to-pick-up game mechanics and fairly deep strategy. It was a big success, and quickly spawned a sequel that was released just one year later.
One of the things that made these games popular is that they were not only easy to play, but easy to modify, and one of the modifications that came out breathed new life into the games at a point when most players had just about wrung all the possibility from the boxed product. That new innovation was tower defense.
In tower defense, one player represented the human forces and was charged with defending a fixed position on the map. From the other side would enter endless hordes of orcs, who would charge head-on toward that target, more or less following the same path every time. The job of the human player was to simply place defenses along that route—machine guns, artillery, flame throwers, bombs—so that the advancing orcs went down as fast as they spawned. As more and more poured onto the field, action could become frantic. But the careful placement of those defensive positions could simply take down an almost unlimited number of forward-marching orcs.
Former orcs and defensive towers from Warcraft 3
In a tower defense, the key is simply getting the right defensive emplacements in the right places, then waiting for those orcs to fall. But what makes it really possible to defend against such lopsided numbers is knowing that the brainless opponent will follow the same path again. And again. And again.
Something very much like this.
What are those Russian forces doing? Well, the ground is soft and muddy. So they’re driving up the road in convoy. This is the same road where the last two major assaults on Vuhledar were destroyed. Ukrainian forces don’t so much have to defend this road and just … press the trigger. They’re already pre-aimed.
In some ways, this is a replication in miniature of Russia’s biggest defeat so far in the invasion: Those “40 kilometer convoys” that were supposed to crush Kyiv. Lining up slow-moving vehicles and parading them past ambush points was a big part of why Volodymyr Zelenskyy is still in his home, and not leading a rag-tag militia in Ukraine’s western mountains.
Campaign Action
If the two forces were meeting on even ground, fighting off in some theoretical nose-to-nose battle, Russia might quickly capture Vuhledar. Somewhere, there is absolutely some general fuming that they have sent more men and more armor to capture the town that Ukraine has in position, so why don’t they have it? Because this isn’t a battle. It’s a tower defense. And in a tower defense, sheer numbers of opponents only matter if you run out of bullets.
This is also a pretty good explanation of why Ukraine has not made that final charge for Svatove or Kreminna. With current conditions limiting the approaches to trying to bring in lines of forces at a few points, any of them could end up with the kind of losses Russia is seeing a Vuhledar. Ukraine isn’t going to do that. It’s certainly not going to do it over and over.
These days, the follow-up to Warcraft—a game called Starcraft—is more famous among real-time strategy fans. It’s the games of that series that spawned the first international video gaming leagues and introduced the world to the infamous “zergs” that try to take down enemy positions with sheer numbers. The tactic is so well known, that Russia’s human wave attacks at Bakhmut and other locations have become known as zerg attacks. The term has even entered into official dispatches from military officials.
But before there were zergs … there were orcs, which seems completely appropriate to what’s happening at Vuhledar.
Ukrainian emergency workers have unfortunate experience in digging civilians out of buildings that collapsed in one horrific instant.
What does it say about the Russian military that not only has a major portion of the front been handed over to Wagner, everyone wants in on the game? This is just one of several such announcements.
Wealth, plunder, and a tough guy reputation without coming near the battlefield.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is living the Russian dream, and everyone wants in.
Just about the only thing Russia hasn’t lost over the last couple of days was aircraft, largely because the attacks going on seem to have little to no air support. But it looks like the U.A. is going to have to update that number for downed Russian planes.
Sometimes the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has too much fun with these videos.
Markos and Kerry are joined by University of St. Andrews Professor of Strategic Studies, Phillips P. O’Brien. O’Brien, an expert in military history, explains how we got to where we are right now, what is unique about the world’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the parallels between the conservative movement’s isolationism in World War II and now.
