The Tannenberg Scenario

The WWI Battle of Tannenberg, fought between Russian and Germany in 1914 at the start of the war resulted in the Russian Second Army being almost completely destroyed and was followed by battles in the surrounding areas that then wiped out most of Russia’s First Army.

This led indirectly to the fall of the Czarist government three years later as Russia failed to recover and could only fight, at best, a holding action on the Eastern front until it all fell apart.

Here in 2023, with the slow fade of Russia’s vaunted Winter Offensive, attention is now turning to what the Ukrainans are going to do, and they don’t have much choice but to attack. Even if this whole thing ends in a settlement Ukraine simply must re-gain lost ground and inflict a clear and serious offensive defeat on the Russian Army.

The question is whether they’ll be any better than the Russian Army has been on attack, given their common heritage of everything from weapons to training to officers and chain of command?

Certainly Western militaries have been training thousands of Ukrainians for months now, and this is on top of smaller-scale weapons training going back almost a decade. The latter seemed to show in the Ukrainian Army not falling apart and being effective in slowing and then stopping the Russian invasion in early 2022, turning Putin’s 96-hour victory-fest into the year-plus, blood-soaked slog. The former showed up in late 2022 when the Ukrainians attacked on the Northern Kharkiv front and achieved successes even they probably couldn’t have expected, and that included success in strategic deception:

I’ve been predicting that Ukraine would strike first at Kherson. You’ll also know I’ve consistently referred to the Kharkiv front as a backwater. The Russians agreed with my assessment. They moved about 20,000 troops from the Kharkiv front to Kherson and promptly emplaced them north of the Dnieper. This left the Kharkiv front defended by the highly unreliable Luhansk People’s Republic army (quisling Ukrainians) stiffened with a mixture of paratroopers (VDV), riot police (OMON), and riot police SWAT teams (SOBR)
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When the Ukrainians hit them with fresh, well-trained, well-equipped formations, the front dissolved.

In fact the Ukrainians moved 50km in one day at one point in the battle, and this caused the Russians to begin pulling troops out of Kherson as well and at that stage things began to turn into a rout, as described by Austrian Army Colonel Markus Reisner:

“And then something happened that has always happened in history, but which is always difficult to predict: Panic broke out on the Russian side. The Russians tried to bring in reserves, but the Ukrainian advance was too fast
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Not only did we see the combination of main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers and mobile artillery, but also many small, highly mobile units that could advance very quickly. Above all, they quickly advanced into the towns and hoisted the Ukrainian flag there. These images increased the panic among the Russians
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The Russians, too, were apparently afraid of being surrounded by the Ukrainians, so they left their heavy equipment behind and retreated to the east with light vehicles as quickly as possible.
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The breakthrough at Balaklija should go down in history”

It was impressive stuff and it led to some very unhappy voices back in Russia with Pro-Putin Russian bloggers bitterly denouncing the military and even Putin himself for the sorry state of affairs that had led the Russian military to this low point, while Western analysts asked the same uncomfortable questions, as in this thread:

1/ Did a culture of institutionalised lying contribute to Russia’s recent disaster east of Kharkiv, by giving its senior commanders a distorted and false picture of the true situation on the ground? Reviewing the evidence…
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2/ While reading Russian soldiers’ personal accounts from published intercepted phone calls and personal accounts, I’ve seen one point mentioned repeatedly: Russian army officers frequently lie to their superiors about their unit’s status.
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23/ Russian milbloggers have condemned such false reporting. The Telegram channel Zа (V)Побѣду (“To (V) Victory”) commented on this issue, which was said to be a problem on the Kharkiv front, a few days ago.

In just two weeks, Ukraine liberated some 2,500 square kilometers, which must be seen in the context of the 125,000 square kilometers Russia previously held in Ukraine. But as with Ukraine’s failure to collapse a year ago, what counts is not the land but what it means for them to have done so well against the supposedly formidable Russian Army. It’s also meaningful to see the type of Russian soldiers lost:

The Russian command has used the fighting forces of the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics as cannon fodder. By doing so, they have lost thousands of the only soldiers who had skin in Putin’s game: These fighting-age men were anti-Ukrainian by definition — and committed to combat as fiercely as Ukrainians themselves. Few Russian soldiers could match their determination. When Kyiv began its counterattack, the Luhansk and Donetsk fighters had been nearly eliminated by attrition.

Indeed, the positions in the Kharkiv region were manned by Russia’s regular military, fighting for cash: They folded without putting up much of a fight when Ukrainians pushed hard enough.

Now, the Luhansk People’s Republic, “apart from frontline areas, is probably empty of manpower,” tweeted Polish military analyst Konrad Muzyka, one of the most astute observers of the campaign. Fighting-age males were drafted in large numbers in the past few months, he said, meaning “there are no men to fight in Luhansk.”

Since then the whole battlefront, North to South, has seen little more than small actions, with grinding efforts especially around the Northern city of Bakhmut, although nobody knows why either side cares about that. If the Ukrainians hold it means nothing because it’s not a jumping off point to anywhere for anything as the Russians have solid defensive lines East and South. The same is true in return: if Russia took the city the Ukrainians have solid defensive lines to the West. It seems that it may just have been a glory play by Prigozhin’s Wagner group to show the Russian MoD how it’s done. Unfortunately it hasn’t gone as planned for Prigozhin, who can be found on this Tweet bitching about the Russian MoD:

Prigozhin’s drama continues: Russian MoD in a statement earlier today said any complaints made by assault forces on the lack of ammo are untrue. Prigozhin responded again by saying it was a lie, and spitting into the faces of “heroes” by MoD, committing a crime against them.

Half the fascination of this war has been watching the eruption into public view of fights between Putin supporters. After some reports that Ukraine would give up the city they changed their minds, which likely means they’re happy with the loss rate of them vs Wagner in this little meatgrinder.

Going back to the bigger picture the question is whether the Ukrainians do repeat their Kharkiv-Kherson again:

  1. Fool the Russians as to where the attack is taking place and hide their order of battle while knowing exactly the Russian order of battle and emplacement.
  2. Have effective combined arms operations maneuvering fast across country?
  3. Be able to maintain the tempo of this with logistics of food, fuel and ammunition keeping up with a moving front and putting in fresh troops to replace those lost?

Taking each question in turn.

First, the general consensus seems to be that this time the Ukrainians have to strike in such a way as to cut off Russia’s Southern troops, and that likely means attacking across some 200kms of Russian-held territory to take the city of Mariupol on the shores of the Sea of Azov.

It’s possible that they might hit further South but this is not about re-taking land as much as cutting road and rail links, which would force Russian forces in the South to withdraw to the Crimean peninsula or perhaps even give that up.

Unlike the Kharkiv-Kherson operation however, the objective is hard to hide, which is why the Russians have been busy building defensive lines against such an attack, as this map shows.

Second, a lot of the training of the Ukraine Army by Western soldiers has recently been with tanks, which are not something you need to play defense, but must haves if you’re going to attack:

Ukrainian Patriot crews are finishing their training, and those systems should be in operation within the month. Ukrainian battalions are finishing their training on Marder, Bradley, and CV-90. Challenger 2 and Leopard 2 crews are also completing their training.
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Poland and Slovakia will transfer 40 MiG-29 fighters to Ukraine.

No training needed on those for Ukrainian pilots, but do they know how to support a ground operation?

Russia has also been beefing themselves up with new tanks. Well, newly refurbished anyway…

T-54/55’s? AFKM? They’re fifty years and three generations out of date. But perhaps the important point here is that if you are going to fight a defensive battle then they’re good enough as close-in artillery support in fixed, hull-down positions. The same goes for those 300,000 conscripts: you don’t need skill in combined arms to fight from a fixed fortification.

Third, Leopard 2 and Challenger 2 tanks, self-propelled artillery and armoured infantry fighting vehicles like Marders and Bradley’s sound great – but on attack they require a lot of logistics support with fuel, ammunition and maintenance. I’ve seen almost nothing about equipping and training the Ukraine Army for that. Can that part of the Army make it all the way to the coast? Same with transporting the food, fuel and ammunition the troops need, plus rotation of them. It’s a sophisticated dance, even more so when you’re trying to do all this while smashing through solidly prepared Russian defensive lines against an Army that can certainly fight better on defence than offence.

We await the end of the famous “rasputitsa”, the season of mud that bedeviled the Germans in 1941/42 and the Russians last year, exacerbated by a warmer then normal Winter and Spring – something that may also have been a factor in the Russian non-offensive.

A Ukrainian attack could come as early as April, certainly no later than May.

So what happens if the plan and the capabilities come together and they succeed in their (assumed) objectives of cutting the Russian occupation in half and re-gaining the entire South of the occupied zone?

This is where the Tannenberg scenario arises:

When Europe went to war in 1914, its armies and peoples were saddled with many myths. One of these was the myth of the “Russian steamroller.” There were widespread ideas that the Russian Army’s inexhaustible peasant manpower represented a force against with the Germans and Austrians could not possibly stand. 
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An army group headquarters, called Northwest Front, had been set up for this purpose, but it was situated too far in the rear to provide effective command and control. Nor did the armies themselves trouble to coordinate their movements, advancing into East Prussia without much concern for what was happening on the opposite flank. And both armies were troubled from the start by logistical problems
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The ill effects of command deficiencies and poor staff work were compounded by poor intelligence and lax communications security. The Russian cavalry failed in fulfilment of the only useful role remaining to it: reconnaissance. Though aircraft were available, they too failed to help commanders build up a picture of what was happening on the other side of the hill. From first to last, Russian commanders had very little idea what the Germans were doing. And to cap this sad tale of incompetence, since coding and decoding took an inordinate amount of time the various headquarters took to sending radio messages in the clear.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? But the underlying reasons for this were the real killer:

The Army of Nicholas II was clumsy and inefficient precisely because the tsarist regime itself was clumsy and inefficient. Its façade may have been magnificent, glittering—but a glance behind the curtain disclosed indolence, incompetence, indifference, corruption, and decay.

Putin admires the czars – as do most Russians – perhaps more than he ought to:

On the eve of the Russo-Ukraine War, there was much talk in the West about Russia’s decade-long military reform program, which supposedly had refurbished the Russian armed forces after years of decay and neglect. This notion was central to the widely held opinion that once the war began it would end quickly, with Russia victorious.
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The resources devoted to military reform were largely squandered due to inefficiency, incompetence, and corruption. Further, we would find that V. Putin was quite unaware of this. In a despotic state, nobody’s ever in a hurry to deliver bad news to the despot. And finally, we would find that the premium placed on loyalty left military competence at a discount.

However, even if the expected Ukrainian attack succeeds I can’t see Putin stopping this war, precisely because of the weaknesses listed above. Could he survive even a settlement – a big come-down from the victory expected a year ago – let alone a clear military defeat? Could it actually make this situation more dangerous:

Yet I also implicitly understand a dark truth: the worse Vladimir Putin’s army fares on the battlefield, the more of a threat he becomes to the entire world. It’s a counterintuitive reality, but a very serious one. This offensive is precisely the kind of development I fear might render Putin increasingly desperate, and thus, dangerous.

The moment right before his regime collapses will be the most perilous for the world, when Putin could conceivably reach for any one of his many nuclear weapons, to prevent outright military loss in Ukraine, and save himself from being toppled. After all, if Russia’s conventional forces are routed, tactical nuclear weapons would presumably become the next logical step for a regime desperate to avoid a complete military catastrophe.

There’s a very real risk of Putin doing something that is utterly insane to save his own skin. As they say, desperate men do desperate things.

That is a Russian/Ukrainian writer, Alexander Ziperovich who, while very pro-Ukrainian sounds like a sober person:

The Western world simply doesn’t have the luxury of not thinking about these issues, and working to prevent this war from spinning utterly out of control. While it’s emotionally satisfying to call for Putin’s head, that may not be the wisest course of action.

I’ve been called a naive rube and worse for calling for renewed diplomacy with Russia, but I’ll risk that label. Eventually, Ukraine must try to leverage its mounting progress on the battlefield into some kind of negotiated peace, backed by the White House and NATO. Diplomatic conduits to the Kremlin must be explored, in Tel Aviv, Beijing, Ankara; Washington should feel out whomever is still talking to the Kremlin, and see if negotiations are a possibility.

Peace must be the ultimate goal here, even as the fighting continues. In that brief window of time right before Vladimir Putin is toppled, when he could theoretically use nuclear weapons, there should be another option available to him: diplomacy.

Moral maximalism won’t end this war.

The problem here is that the West seems increasingly driven by “moral maximalism” across almost every issue.

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