One of the best blogs to use for following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is this one:

Institute for The Study of War

They have a series of posts under the category, Ukraine Project, which includes a daily assessment which is detailed, sober in its language and analysis and packed with a stack of links to military sources, many in Russian and Ukrainian. The latest is Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 9. (I may actually add this to our list of blogs on the NM sidebar). Here’s a small sample:

Russian operations to continue the encirclement of and assault on Kyiv have likely begun, although on a smaller scale and in a more ad hoc manner than ISW expected. The equivalent of a Russian reinforced brigade reportedly tried to advance toward Kyiv through its western outskirts and made little progress. Smaller operations continued slowly to consolidate and gradually to extend the encirclement to the southwest of the capital. Russian operations in the eastern approaches to Kyiv remain in a lull, likely because the Russians are focusing on securing the long lines of communication running to those outskirts from Russian bases around Sumy and Chernihiv…

Plus maps like this. (click to enlarge)

There’s a “key takeaways” set of bullet points if you don’t have time to read the whole thing for that day.

It’s now been well noted by even the MSM sources that Putin and the Russian military must have been planning on a quick, lightweight attack that would quickly capture the major cities, especially Kyiv, resulting in the Ukrainian government collapsing and running. That assumption is based on the initial observations that paratroopers tried to take over airfields and airports close to the major cities so that heavier equipment and more troops could be flown in to hold the places, while other units raced across the border towards those cities to link up. A 2022 version of the strategy used in Operation Market Garden in 1944 (see the book and movie, A Bridge Too Far).

Perhaps Putin and his generals should have studied that operation, because it’s become apparent to everybody that the clever strategy has failed as it did then (it almost failed for the Germans in Crete in 1941 but they managed to hold Maleme Airfield. Even so their casualties were so high that they never attempted a large-scale paratroop attack again).

The initial failure was simply because the Ukrainian military stood and fought, and did so intelligently. Knowing the airports were the key they hit the Russian paratroopers hard and maintained control.

Even so, the onrushing heavy units of the Russian Army were expected to get to the cities and take them anyway relatively quickly. It would just be a little tougher.

But that hasn’t worked out either, and the reason has less to do with the terrific amounts of damage being inflicted on the armoured columns by Javelin missiles and the Baykar Bayraktar TB2 drones supplied by Turkey (to be followed also by the KARGU Loitering Munitions System), than it does with the failure of Russian logistics. You can watch that 20 minute video at your leisure but the key points are these:

  • Russia has a 30,000 strong military rail organisation and rail has always been its primary supply method.
  • But Ukrainian forces destroyed all rail links between the two countries, meaning that inside Ukraine they’d have to rely on trucks.
  • Russia doesn’t have enough trucks. A large percentage of truck transport was dedicated to rocket resupply, not fuel and food.
  • The trucks can’t support combat more than 90 miles from supply dumps.
  • Russia only had 3-5 days of supplies when they invaded.
  • When those ran out, they were screwed.
  • Russia’s military works on a “push” logistic system rather than a “pull” system used by the U.S. military, meaning it’s not very flexible (central decisions on ammo vs. food and fuel).

This map is also a good exploration of the importance of rail to the Russians.

It would not have helped that Russian forces are relying on analog, unsecured radio communications rather than scrambled digital channels, and Ukrainian forces are listening in and jamming.

Unmentioned in the video is that it appears – especially with that 60 km-long military column stuck outside of Kiyv for days now – that a large number of the trucks simply ran out of fuel. Not a good look when your tanks have already run out. Many other trucks simply got stuck when they went off-road to try and get around the others: it’s the Season of Mud, just as the Germans found on their way to Moscow in 1941.

Just imagine what it will take to straighten out that mess; working from back to front to pull a truck or tank out of the way, then the next and the next, until you get to the front with (hopefully) full fuel trucks and then working your way back so that the whole column can then move forward again. Pulling vehicles out can also damage them.

Then there’s the Russian Air Force. Where have they been? Well the answer is that after an initial burst of bombing and strafing runs across Ukraine, not much has been seen of them:

One of the greatest surprises from the initial phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the inability of the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) fighter and fighter-bomber fleets to establish air superiority, or to deploy significant combat power in support of the under-performing Russian ground forces. On the first day of the invasion, an anticipated series of large-scale Russian air operations in the aftermath of initial cruise- and ballistic-missile strikes did not materialise. An initial analysis of the possible reasons for this identified potential Russian difficulties with deconfliction between ground-based surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries, a lack of precision-guided munitions and limited numbers of pilots with the requisite expertise to conduct precise strikes in support of initial ground operations due to low average VKS flying hours. These factors all remain relevant, but are no longer sufficient in themselves to explain the anaemic VKS activity as the ground invasion continues into its second week.

This article goes on to look at some of the possible reasons and dismisses all but one,

[That] the VKS lacks the institutional capacity to plan, brief and fly complex air operations at scale. There is significant circumstantial evidence to support this, admittedly tentative, explanation.

They give three reasons that I’ll summarise:

  1. They only fly small formations, both in training and in combat (Syria). Single, paired and (rarely) four-ship formations. Their commanders and systems are not geared for large-scale waves of attacks.
  2. The pilots get about half the training time that Western pilots do and lack the simulators that allow training for large-scale attacks and complex strike pakages. (“[NATO] pilots are rigorously trained to fly complex sorties in appalling weather, at low level and against live and simulated ground and aerial threats. To pass advanced fast jet training they must be able to reliably do this and still hit targets within five to ten seconds of the planned time-on-target“)
  3. If the VKS were capable of conducting complex air operations, it should have been comparatively simple for them to have achieved air superiority over Ukraine by now. There’s no reason why they would not want to do that. So why haven’t they?

The article does not note that the VKS is also not deploying any high-altitude precision bombing, which was a mainstay of the US effort in Iraq and Afghanistan; planes cruising around on low power above 10,000m, dropping JDAM bombs as called in by troops on the ground. Again, the rather shocking conclusion must be that they’re not capable of doing that either. Which means “iron” (or dumb) bombs: which means low-level attacks.

And while staying low also avoids Ukrainan SAM systems it just exposes them the MANPADS like the Stinger missile, resulting in things like this =>

That is a Sukhoi Su-30SM, among the best of the Russian fighters and not something to be wasted by one guy with a Stinger.

Now Russia does have the capability to set up the infrastructure for a longer war, but that’s going to take time, possibly too much time for Putin. The failure to quickly achieve its objectives may see it resort to more … traditional Russian tactics where they’ll stand off from targets and hit them with artillery and rockets, keep firing until there’s no longer even rubble to bounce, and then occupy the place.

Which brings up one final problem. What will occupation even mean when scenes like these out of the “occupied” town of Kherson are repeated across the Ukraine? You can check out the link for a collection of such videos but here’s just one.

That is not control, let alone victory, and it’s yet another example of a Putin assumption (or belief of his own bullshit) that’s not worked out, which is that Ukranians would welcome their Russian saviours as they did in 1944.