THE RUSSIANS ARE CUTTING THEIR LOSSES WITHOUT ADMITTING DEFEAT

The New York Times reported this morning that the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that the “first phase of its military operation in Ukraine was mostly complete and that it would focus” on “liberating” (Russia’s word) the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east.

Colonel General Sergei Rudskoy of the General Staff said the Russian plan was never to storm Ukraine’s big cities or occupy the country, that the attacks across the country were simply meant to stretch the Ukrainian military thin, stretch out its supply lines and thus give Russia a freer hand in the Donbas region.

While it’s hard to know precisely what this means, there is a very good chance that - given the war news around Kyiv and Kharkiv in the past few days - the Russians are admitting that most of their military operation in Ukraine has failed or met much more resistance than was anticipated. As a result, they are now focusing on taking all of the Donbas and Lukhansk Oblasts to complete their 2014 territorial theft.

Over the past several days, there has been evidence the Russians were focusing efforts in the east where they have made the most progress. The area around Kyiv has not been reinforced while the Ukrainians have pushed back Russian positions to the east of the city and appear able to encircle the forces to the south of the city. Additionally, there is a report today that the city of Kherson, which was the first Ukrainian city the Russians claimed to have taken and occupied, is the scene of renewed urban combat. Additionally, the Russians have failed to take the cities east of Odesa, and the attack on the amphibious assault ship puts a severe crimp in their plans to mount a seaborne invasion of Odesa. That setback is reinforced by news that anti-ship missiles have been supplied to the Ukrainians, which can be used against the ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet currently off the port city.

One possible explanation is that this is the Russian attempt to declare victory and go home, recognizing the reality of the military failures without publicly absorbing the sting of military defeat. I think broadly that is what it is.

Other analysts point out that this doesn’t mean Russian troops outside of Donbas are leaving soon. The Russian Army might focus on consolidating territory in the east but hold the territory they have taken in other areas as bargaining chips for an eventual political settlement.

However, the mix of military victories and human losses suffered by Ukraine likely make ceding any additional territory past that taken eight years ago impossible for the Ukrainian government. That means the war could “end” with a continuation of the militarized standoff in the eastern regions occupied by Russian forces without any agreement.

But this announcement certainly appears to be a first step in grappling with the scale of Russia’s military failure in Ukraine, which is now too obvious to hide while they are likely unable to bring in reinforcements that are capable of turning things around. he country.

The idea that the Russian Army was just attempting to keep the Ukrainian army pinned down in other places or stretch out its supply lines seems absurd on its face.

In fact, the Russian Army has committed one of the most common military errors: they are fighting the last war. Their assault on cities is right out of the Red Army’s playbooks from the Eastern Front in World War II.

Unfortunately for the Russian Army, tanks are no longer the dominant weapon in urban warfare. In 2004, when the U.S. Marines assaulted Falluja, the force was centered around M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks, working with infantry. The Abrams was impervious to the old Soviet RPG-7 anti-tank grenades, that exploded against its armor without effect, while the tank’s 105mm gun tore open buildings that the accompanying infantry then assaulted and cleared. But by the time the ISIS forces were cleared from Mosul, tanks were not the primary weapon.

“Fire and forget” weapons like the Javelin and NLAW (New generation Light Anti-tank Weapon) have changed the urban battlefield.

When the Red Army assaulted Berlin in 1945, the defenders went after them with “Panzerfausts,” a rocket-propelled grenade that could be used by an untrained Hitler Youth as well as a Waffen-SS veteran that was the ancestor of the RPG-7, which was deadly against tanks (over 80% of Allied tank losses between D-Day and V-E Day in western Europe were due to this weapon) but forced the user to fire from a range of less than 20 yards from the targeted tank. The tanks on their own were highly vulnerable, and Marshal Zhukov was forced to disobey Stalin’s directive to send unsupported tanks into the city. Tanks operating with infantry were safe, since the infantry could spot the guy with the panzerfaust and kill him before he could use it.

But the NLAW has a range of a quarter mile, and the Javelin has a range over a mile. The first thing a tank crew - even one operating with surrounding infantry - knows that they have been targeted is when the missile hits their tank and it explodes. The soldier firing either of these is not exposed to the infantry, and may be in a building the tank couldn’t have attacked beforehand. Thus, the very expensive Russian tanks - even the old Cold War T-72s are too expensive to lose like this - are of little value in such a scenario.

Additionally, the Russians have been unable to make use of the night to cover assaults. The Russian Army does not have good night vision equipment. The Ukrainians have good gear, the most useful of which is the CLU (Control Launch Unit) for the Javelin, which uses infrared heat signatures for its “vision,” and has a range over a mile. To date, no Russian night assault attempted has been successful since they are so easily spotted by the defenders while blundering in the dark themselves.

Couple all this with the fact that the Ukrainians changed over after 2014 to the “mission control” tactical strategy of western forces, in which individual units down to the single infantryman are trained to take charge and change their attack according to the changing current situation, while the Russians use the same top-down command and control system used by Russian armies going back to Alexander I at the Battle of Borodino, a system that works so long as the attack continues to work as planned and nothing intervenes to change the situation - a system that removes any individual initiative from the troops - and it is really no wonder the Ukrainians are out-fighting the invaders.

When one couples more effective weapons and more effective tactics with better motivation (the Ukrainians are fighting for their country; the Russians are fighting to survive and get home - a situation analogous to how we lost in Vietnam), the outcomes of the past few days are really not so surprising. Napoleon put it well when he explained how the conscript armies of Revolutionary France could defeat the professional armies of the European powers, “The moral is to the physical as three to one.”

The next ten days are going to be very interesting indeed.

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