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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-101
Last weeks posts on Moon of Alabama:
Middle East:
Ukraine:
Russia:
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Other issues:
Gaza:
ISIS:
Baltimore Key Bridge:
Watching the livestream and reading through the status reports I fail to detect any sense of urgency. The main clearing effort for now seems to be in an area that is irrelevant for reopening the main passage to the port. – b.
Empire:
Ruslan Pukhov, Director of Moscow’s Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, on the lessons from two years of the SMO:
From “Special” to “Military” (Russia in Global Affairs, Ruslan N. Pukhov, April 1, 2024; published in Russian on February 23, 2024)
Failed “Operation Danube”
We can retrospectively conclude that Russia initially planned an operation that was primarily “special” and only secondarily “military,” as it intended to achieve its goals without large-scale hostilities or organized armed resistance. Future historians will have to explain why Moscow considered this feasible, even though the Ukrainian army had been waging a continuous “minor” war in Donbass since 2014.
The initial SMO plan is actually quite familiar, as it copied Operation Danube, the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. Analogously, the SMO envisaged the capture of Kiev’s airport, the deployment of paratroopers there to seal off the Ukrainian capital, and rapid advances of numerous armored and mechanized units to surround major cities, which would then be quickly pacified by light units, special forces, and intelligence services.
But Operation Danube and the February 2022 campaign differ not only in the strong resistance that the Ukrainian political leadership and armed forces put up. Operation Danube was carried out by a powerful group of Warsaw Pact forces that vastly outnumbered the Czechoslovak army, while the SMO was conducted in a country much larger than Czechoslovakia, using a limited contingent of about 185,000 troops (although this included most of the Russian Ground and Airborne Forces), or about 140 battalion tactical groups (BTG). Even including the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Militias (about 110,000 more personnel), this force was still outnumbered by the Ukrainians, already partially mobilized. The mobilization of first-category reservists, which began in Ukraine the day before the start of the SMO, summoned—within just several days—150,000 servicemen with combat experience in Donbass and filled the ranks of the key first-line brigades, thus tipping the balance and putting Russia at a complete disadvantage.
In such conditions, the outcome of the first stage of the SMO was determined solely by the balance of forces. The Russian troops, spread over eight different axes of attack, were quickly stopped and forced to fight a numerically superior enemy.
In the north, moving from Belarus through the Pripyat swamps and from Russia through the Sumy and Chernigov Regions of Ukraine, the main assault groups reached Kiev, but could neither surround (let alone occupy) it, nor protect their overstretched lines of communication. The landing at Gostomel Airport, facing fierce resistance and heavy shelling, turned from a bridgehead into a bloodbath. In the Kharkov region, the Russian troops were stopped both at the city’s approaches and on the nearby border. Attempts, by hastily mobilized and insufficiently equipped DPR and LPR forces, to eject Ukrainian troops from the lines where they had been entrenched since 2014, proved futile. The inability to suppress Ukrainian air defenses dramatically limited the effectiveness of Russian aviation , depriving Russia of one of its key advantages.
Success was achieved only in the south, apparently due to Russia’s sleeper-agents and supporters among the local population. Meeting minimal resistance, Russian troops from Crimea seized the Kherson and southern Zaporozhye regions within several days, reached Mariupol in the east, and pressed the advance towards Nikolayev and, bypassing it in the north, towards Odessa. However, the Russian troops failed to take control of these two main cities on the Black Sea. Landing ships manned with marines, brought together from Russia’s three European fleets, were stopped by mines and “unexpected” Ukrainian-made Neptune antiship missiles. On land, Ukrainian troops quickly recovered and stopped the Russians (which had owed their success mainly to surprise) at Nikolaev and Voznesensk, and by mid-March pushed them back to the borders of the Kherson and Nikolayev Regions.
Russia found itself in a state of large-scale war on a long front line, facing a quantitatively superior and well-armed enemy that was assisted by all the Western powers, which imposed unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia and began providing massive and ever-greater arms supplies to Ukraine.
From the very beginning, the biggest challenge was Kiev, where Russian troops from two military districts ended up in a wooded and swampy area without clear prospects for their effective employment, but under constant threat to their lines of communication, which ran along forest roads through the Sumy and Chernigov Regions that were functionally controlled by Kiev. There were not enough troops to capture Kiev, or even encircle and besiege it. Overall, it was only the extreme slowness and lack of initiative of Ukraine’s commanders and military in general that prevented the situation from turning into a severe crisis for the Russian side. If they had confronted a more energetic adversary, the Russian troops near Kiev would have faced a repeat of the 1920 Battle of Warsaw.
Recognizing the situation, the Russian command ordered a pullout of the troops from around Kiev in mid-March 2022, and by April 5, they were out of the Kiev, Sumy, Chernigov, and northern Kharkov Regions. This was essentially the end of the campaign to achieve decisive victory, since its main goal was obviously the capture of Kiev. Naturally, at the peace talks in Istanbul, the Russian delegation presented the withdrawal of the troops from around Kiev and from the north of Ukraine as an “act of goodwill.” Apparently, it was this “act,” rather than Boris Johnson’s intrigues, that led to the failure of the Istanbul talks. An army’s retreat from the enemy’s capital has never facilitated a compromise peace.
Kiev considered the withdrawal a triumph of its policy of resistance and a turning point, thinking that it could drive the Russian troops completely out of the country.
This was accompanied by massive Western political and military support that reached its peak in the spring of 2022. On May 9, 2022, the U.S. Congress even passed a Lend-Lease act for Ukraine, which theoretically gave Kiev access to unlimited U.S. military aid. The West came to believe that a combination of military and economic measures could inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia, which, under favorable conditions, could lead to regime change in Moscow.
After an unsuccessful attempt at a compromise to end the war and a number of painful blows (e.g., on April 13-14, the Black Sea Fleet flagship, the missile cruiser Moskva, was sunk), Russia could do nothing but continue the military campaign, rethinking its goals and capabilities. As far as can be judged, the new plan provided for using the troops pulled out from the north of Ukraine to liberate the entire territory of the DPR and LPR and, possibly, partially encircle the enemy in left-bank Ukraine. Presumably, Moscow thought it could attain these goals by May or June. The Russian offensive in the Izyum area, started in mid-March, was stepped up in April. The initial plan was seemingly to reach the rear of the Ukrainian Severodonetsk grouping, via Slavyansk, and then press on with a more ambitious and large-scale offensive towards Zaporozhye, to be met by Russian forces in the south. Subsequently, offensive operations began in several more parts of Kharkov Region and the LPR.
However, the Russian forces faced a severe shortage of manpower and materiel. After the withdrawal of part of the battalion tactical groups for replenishment in Russia, in mid-April 2022, its armed forces had no more than a hundred depleted BTGs on the entire length of the front line, while BTGs were redeployed from the north piecemeal, which could not provide sufficient strength. Meanwhile, Ukraine launched its third wave of mobilization in March 2022 to call up the graduates of reserve-officer training departments at universities and men who had not previously served In the army, thus bringing the overall strength of its armed forces to 400,000 troops by mid-April, not counting those already in training, and to 600,000 by the end of May. Ukrainian forces thus came to substantially outnumber the combined Russian, DPR, LPR, and PMC forces, now carrying out an offensive against an even more numerically superior enemy.
The battle of Mariupol, from 2 March to 16 May 2022, was an important factor in the first stage of hostilities. The siege of the city became a harbinger of the future positional nature of the war and tied up the 30,000-strong group of “allied forces,” largely preventing Russia from building on its success in the south or advancing near Donetsk. The Russian offensive near Izyum was also slow and difficult due to the lack of numerical superiority. Instead of being encircled, the enemy was merely forced to retreat at the tactical level. In early May 2022, the Russian forces ran into serious difficulties and sustained losses as they tried to cross the Seversky Donets near Belogorovka, at which point it became clear that “traditional” methods of massing forces did not work in this war. By July 2022, after the seizure of Lisichansk, the Russian offensive had run out of steam. Almost the entire territory of the LPR and the eastern part of the Kharkov Region were held by the Russian troops, but Ukraine still controlled most of the DPR. The Russian troops could not even reach Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. The campaign had worn out the Russian force, which was basically the same contingent that entered Ukraine in February 2022, while Ukraine had commenced “permanent mobilization,” reinforcing its numerical superiority.
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Read the rest at the link.
Posted by: S | Apr 7 2024 14:37 utc | 9
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