In Ukraine back in April, after it became obvious that the initial Russian plan of a quick decapitation of the Ukraine government and military had failed, the Russians decided to withdraw from the NorthEast and Northern parts of the country, giving up on taking the capital of Kyiv and sending their forces into the SouthEast and Southwest to hold the gains made there and enlarge them.

Russophiles immediately proclaimed that this was a “feint” designed to overwhelm the Ukranians in the Donbas. I doubted that, having already pointed out a month earlier that:

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.

Shelled Ukrainian fields

Which is exactly what started to happen in the Donbas. Swamping areas with artillery fire, moving in troops, and then moving cautiously beyond the captured areas, taking care to stay within range of resupply. But that kind of movement takes time, and was never going to create the conditions for a fast, significant advance. What you saw was a lot of stuff that looked like the Western Front in WWI, or more pointedly what was seen on the Eastern Front in 1944-45.

But you’d have to ask how much actual military damage was being done to the Ukrainians as opposed to their fields.

The primary focus of Russian artillery is what can be seen from the front lines. It looks like the proliferation of MANPADS is preventing Russian drones from operating beyond the Forward Edge of the Battle Area (FEBA). Without drones and with what appears to me minimal electronic warfare capability, Russian artillery can’t hit targets deep behind the lines. Instead, the Russians are swamping areas with artillery fire and moving cautiously beyond them, taking care to stay within range of resupply. This kind of movement takes time, and it will never create the conditions for a significant advance.

The long-standing practice of Dedovshchina

Given the documented failure of Russian Army logistics (March 24) there was never going to be a repeat of the mad dash to Kyiv or anywhere else. Then there were the problems with the men of the Russian Army themselves:

The Russian army has always been brutal and clumsy, with senior officers treating troops as cannon fodder and not caring about their lives, which is not unique to the current iteration of the Russian Army.

But that can be overcome to a degree if you have a decent mid-level officer corps and a NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) level to lead men in close quarter combat. However, that’s not what has happened in the last decade of trying to transform the Russian Army. Read this Twitter thread about the experiences of ordinary officers like Dr. Andrei Ivanov and Lieutenant Kirill Olenyev for another insight into why their Army has adopted WWI tactics:

Lieutenant Kirill Olenyev, a logistics officer, found himself in a similar situation. He was posted to a unit in Yoshkar-Ola but found himself being used for menial labour, prompting his decision to quit a year later. Olenyev’s pay was low, he had no free time, and his duties were limited to shoveling earth, cleaning his unit’s area and mowing the grass – things for which, he noted, he did not need to spend five years studying at a military university.

Without officers like that you’re left with troops that are poorly led, take no initiative and simply follow orders, which then requires more senior officers to get involved – which is why so many generals have been killed in this war.

Moreover ordinary soldiers weren’t told anything about why they were fighting Ukrainians except that they were Nazis and the local civilians would welcome them with garlands of flowers for having saved them: a story that was never going to hold up when they got into combat and saw who they were fighting and killing! Soldiers who were brothers of the soil basically – and no flowers from the civilians.

But the modern age has also added corruption to the Russian Army’s problems:

  • Units full of ghost soldiers where officers would declare they had 500 men, when they only had 350 and pocketing the pay difference.
  • Troops who never trained properly because corrupt officers and contractors were selling the fuel and equipment allocated for exercises on the black market.
  • Helmets made in 1945, because corrupt contractors simply did not make the new ones that were paid or even delivering dirt-cheap fibre glass ones.
  • Russian body armour using cheap steel plates instead of kevlar.
  • Forty year old rations inside packages stamped “manufactured in 2020”.
  • Contracts being pushed beyond the legal limit in order to retain soldiers.
  • Most of their reserve tanks long since stripped of anything valuable.

All of this has added up to very low morale and soldiers that do the bare minimum in order to stay safe before bugging out rather than fight. As you can imagine, if they survive their contract, they’re not re-enlisting for another.

But occupying artillery soaked land can work even with this model. Ground was being slowly gained in Southern Ukraine and in a war of attrition it’s the big boy that wins – eventually – or so the thinking went in many places other than just Russia:

Vladimir Putin bets he can throw in more men and more shells than Ukraine and its Western suppliers can match. He is quite willing to “win” by laying waste to eastern Ukraine even if it means losing three Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian.  When war becomes such gridlocked carnage, each side looks to new game-changing diplomacy, strategies, allies, or weapons to break the deadlock.

For Putin, such escalation means more flesh, steel, and explosives. His country is 28 times bigger than Ukraine, and over three times more populous, with an economy 15 times larger. As for Putin’s financial reserves, the Western oil boycott means increasingly little to him when 40 percent of the planet’s population in India and China are eager to secure near-limitless Russian energy. 

Strangulation then from April to August, and there’s only one way to break that; an offensive. The real question was whether a Ukrainian Army – derived from the old Red Army and equipped with much the same weapons – would be able to pull that off any better?

Turns out that they could and a big part of it was the key phrase, “game-changing weapons“. As that article by Strieff above points out, the West began sending modern artillery (the US M-777), self-propelled artillery (all 155mm stuff) that was farther reaching and more accurate than the Russian weapons, plus the US M-270 Multiple Rocket Launch System and the M-142 HIMARS artillery rocket system. They also started training the Ukrainian troops to use them and loaded them with ammunition, including the GPS-guided M-982 Excalibur round. Excalibur can hit targets as much as 40 miles away with about 2 meters accuracy.

As even this Russian expert was noting in early August, such weapons would make a difference. Ruslan Pukhov is the director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies and closely affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Defence – emphasis on artillery:

The SMO once again confirmed the thesis that you can launch hundreds, thousands of unguided projectiles, which are cheap, but all this power is levelled by two guided missiles that accurately hit the target. Two missiles, with all their high cost, will solve more problems than thousands of unguided ones.
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Moreover, we have a lot of 122-mm howitzers, which generally fire for only 13 km. Modern Western artillery is more long-range – first of all, we are talking about 155-mm howitzers with a barrel length of 39 caliber, and especially 52 caliber – the latter have a range of up to 40-41 km. The problem of the USSR and Russia lagging behind in the range of artillery fire has been obvious since the eighties, sadly.
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In essence, in an offensive they have the same tactical problems as the Russian side – the attacking forces are usually few in number, they come under fire from artillery (which usually cannot be suppressed) and quickly roll back or are unable to hold the newly occupied positions, armoured vehicles are struck massively. Let’s see if the Ukrainians turn out to be something more in this regard.

Through August there were many reports that this new artillery and the HIMARS systems were starting to take out Russian ammunition dumps and artillery positions far behind the frontlines, effectively pushing their artillery back to where they couldn’t cover the troops as well. They were also used for attacks on key road and rail bridges. There were also attacks by Ukrainian partisans and or Special Ops units far behind the lines – especially two seperate attacks on the Saki airbase in Crimea, which destroyed a few planes and forced the others to move to bases even further in the rear, making their support even more fragile.

It all added up to what is called “shaping the battlefield”; preparing the ground for an attack. The final cherry on top was that the Ukrainians seemed to have pulled off their own feint – a real one this time – with President Zelenski openly talking about an offensive in the South against the so-called Kherson Front, causing the Russians to move troops there in preparation, including pulling them from the Kharkiv Front in the North. Most Western observers figured that the latter was a backwater.

Turns out that it wasn’t and as a result, when the Ukrainians hit it on September 6 with fresh, well-trained, well-equipped formations, the advance was everything the Russians had not been able to achieve. At one stage they moved 50 kilometres in two days. Given the amount of propaganda that any war involves – and with the prevalence of Social Media this war pushes it hard – I did not want to comment until the dust had cleared. But by the 10th there was no doubt about the advances, with photos appearing showing Ukrainian troops in cities far behind Russian lines, including the vital road and rail link of Kupyansk, which had been discussed as a goal but likely not a doable one.

Russia abandoned it on Sep 10. With that news and then reports coming from the Pro-Russian Telegram Channel Rybar of the towns of Oskil and then Lyman, well to the South of Kupyansk, falling, it was clear that the Russian front was not just retreating but collapsing, abandoning large amounts of equipment – some of it state-of-the-art.

There seemed to be no massed artillery fire in defence, nor support from the Russian Air Force. Given the “shaping” operations described above that should not have come as a surprise.

The final denouements started with official statements from the Kremlin about a “re-grouping” and an “organised withdrawal” from the next big town of Izyum to defend the Donbas. This did not fool people like the Russian ultranationalist Igor Girkin, who openly attacked the Russian military, followed by military bloggers and talk show guests. Finally the Kremlin made it official:

The Kremlin acknowledged its defeat in Kharkiv Oblast, the first time Moscow has openly recognized a defeat since the start of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Kremlin officials and state media propagandists are extensively discussing the reasons for the Russian defeat in Kharkiv Oblast, a marked change from their previous pattern of reporting on exaggerated or fabricated Russian successes with limited detail. The Kremlin never admitted that Russia was defeated around Kyiv or, later, at Snake Island, framing the retreat from Kyiv as a decision to prioritize the “liberation” of Donbas and the withdrawal from Snake Island as a “gesture of goodwill.”
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Kremlin sources are now working to clear Putin of any responsibility for the defeat, instead blaming the loss of almost all of occupied Kharkiv Oblast on underinformed military advisors within Putin’s circle.

After two weeks Ukraine has recovered some 3000 square kilometres that it took the Russians four months to obtain. In the face of setbacks Russophiles have often proclaimed, “Look at the maps”, showing how much of Ukraine they occupy.

Yeah! I’m looking- from March 9 to Sep 13.

This war is not over by a long shot, but it’s even less of a foregone conclusion now than ever. The Ukranians have not been able to maintain this tempo since Sep 13/14, as expected when logistics supply lines are stretched and sheer battle exhaustion and machine wear and tear hit, though they may be able to continue to advance slowly.

Were everyone honest with themselves, I think the Ukrainians are probably just as surprised by the outcome of the Kharkiv offensive as the Russians. The difference is that the Ukrainians will come out of this with high morale and increased confidence in their equipment, tactics, chain of command, and themselves. The Russian units that were mauled over the past week and a half will take months to recover, perhaps never.

The next big questions: what can the Russian military do in response, and what can Putin do?