3 Aspects of Russia's War on Ukraine: Part 1 - a strategy at last?

Lots to think about, and I hope we can do so without some of the inanities that have popped up BTL here over the past two years.  is that overly-optimistic?  For the avoidance of doubt, nobody ever said Russia was about to run out of ammo / be terminally crippled in a couple of months by sanctions, etc etc etc …

1.  Russia adopting an identifiable ground-war strategy

Russia has of course laboured under a good many strategies: for the raising of troops; for sourcing weapons from anyone who’d sell them; for sleeving oil abroad; for stirring up FSU countries from Estonia to Moldova, etc etc.  Some of this is coherent; some of it chaotic.  I’m not concerned with them here; nor Putin’s Grand Strategy, nor his theory of victory.

So I’m looking at the ground war and Russia’s current strategy to achieve what we might infer (from their actions) to be their 2024 objective: capture the whole of the four oblasts they’ve notionally annexed, to be poised for Odessa and Kharkiv next year.  And after two whole years since February 2022, they’ve at last come up with a strategy that – insofar as you’d draw it on a map – is informed by Soviet operational art.  That’s after mounting an initial campaign that, to general astonishment, flew in the face of such well-tried doctrine: you’ll perhaps recall my critiques of their conduct back in 2022 (e.g. here and here.)

Anyhow, the diligent analysts at ISW have recently come up with this: The Russian Winter-Spring 2024 Offensive Operation on the Kharkiv-Luhansk Axis.  Their analysis is not a work of genius (and certainly not of concision), but it’s competent, and comes from genuine students of Soviet operational art.  Summarising: on a particular front, the Russians are seeking to advance along four axes that are (broadly) parallel and designed to be mutually supportive - see the second map in ISW’s briefing.

And that, folks, is the essence of the geographical aspect of phase 1 of a Soviet frontal advance.  (Where was this in 2022?)  Think of a heavy wooden club with four long, parallel nails protruding.  It’s to be whacked vigorously into the enemy, with the immediate aim of embedding nail-deep into his body of troops; breaking their front line; fixing them in position & denying them the ability to shift left, right or even backwards; and with various pre-ordained reactions planned for contingencies (like one of the nails running into hard resistance).  It’s what the first few days are meant to look like, resulting in a punctured, badly injured, immobilised foe, who’s to be finished off by what comes in phases 2 & 3, to yield a concrete territorial gain across a broad area.

But here’s the thing.  I emphasised the above description as being the geographical aspect, because there are other pre-requisites laid down in the Soviet handbook.  As noted back in ’22 (see links above), these are: speed, firepower and manoeuvre.

Let’s give the Russians of 2024 the benefit of the doubt on firepower: they have probably assembled enough, though there’s an important caveat below.  There’s also the merest hint of a bit of maneouvre going on just now, although they’ve proved to be quite shockingly bad at that to date, and Ukraine’s massed drones ain’t making things any easier for them in that regard.

But what’s really missing is the speed.  The Soviets didn’t call their front line troops “shock armies” for nothing.  Their doctrine was designed, firstly against WW2 Germans and secondly Cold War Americans, both opponents quite masterful at logistics.  Everything depends upon speed, for reasons we could go into.  And speed has been lacking on the Russian side, more even than manoeuvre, in everything we saw after about Day 3 back in Feb two years ago.

The idea that a Soviet frontal attack strategy can be made to work in slow motion is … well, it’s something the Soviets never dreamed of.  Unless some genius has come up with an innovative hybrid – and where has he been all this time? – this ain’t gonna work, provided Ukraine retains at least a modicum of military resources.  They have all the depth an army could ask for to fall back into, coupled with some very well-prepared, mutually-supporting defences (at Slovyansk and Kramatorsk), even stronger than those at Avdiivka and much more so than at Bakhmut, both of which caused such losses for their Russian attackers.  And they are just as good at chess, which is what you get when everything slows down.

There’s even a caveat to my generous concession above on the firepower dimension of all this.  Putin’s airforce, long held back in this conflict, was just starting to get into its stride when it suffered a month of serious setbacks and seems to have been withdrawn from the fray right now.  That’s big, and will be the subject of Part 2.

ND