By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, December 13, 2023
Air superiority is the single most
important factor in deciding the outcome of a modern conventional war. Military
operations on land, sea, or in the air are extremely difficult, if not
impossible, for the side that doesn’t control the sky.
When the counteroffensive began in June 2023, the
Ukrainians didn’t have air superiority, and they still don’t.
It is commonly believed that a force that is seeking to
attack and defeat a prepared or fortified defender should have three times the
number of forces as the defender. This three-to-one rule is somewhat disputed or challenged, but everyone would agree
that if you are attempting to liberate territory that has been conquered by the
enemy, you would rather have a larger force than a smaller force.
When the counteroffensive began, the Ukrainians didn’t
have a larger force, and they still don’t.
The last of the Abrams tanks wouldn’t arrive until October. The Army Tactical
Missile Systems, or ATACMS, wouldn’t arrive until the same month. Ukrainian
pilots hadn’t even begun flight training on the F-16 until
that month, either. The Washington Post would later report, “Seventy percent of troops in one of
the brigades leading the counteroffensive, and equipped with the newest Western
weapons, entered battle with no combat experience.”
You could make a strong argument that in June 2023, even
if the Ukrainians were technically ready to launch the counteroffensive, the
conditions were far from optimal. You would always like to have more time to
train, and key parts of that military aid from the U.S. and its NATO allies
were still in the pipeline. (No, there is no superweapon that will turn the
tide of the war, but given the choice between having Abrams tanks, ATACMS, and
F-16s or not having them, you would rather have them.)
But by June 2023, the Ukrainians had been defending
against the invasion for one year and three months. They were up against a
clock of winter, the patience of NATO allies, and the patience of their own
people, hell-bent on kicking the Russians out of their territory and
liberating their friends and neighbors in the occupied territories. Not
launching a counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 would lead to questions of
whether it would ever come.
The Ukrainians brought only a few potential advantages to
the counteroffensive. They were fighting for their own land and their lives and
their continued existence as a country; the Russians were the invading force,
fighting far from their home. From the beginning of the war, some portion of Russia’s forces was made up of conscripts,
rather than volunteer professional fighters:
Russia’s defense ministry
acknowledged on Wednesday that some conscripts were taking part in the conflict
with Ukraine after President Vladimir Putin denied this on various occasions,
saying only professional soldiers and officers had been sent in.
The ministry said that some of
them, serving in supply units, had been taken prisoner by the Ukrainian army
since the fighting began on Feb. 24.
And because of assistance from NATO, the Ukrainians have
some technological advantages.
Still, the initial advance of the counteroffensive,
an attempt to retake the village of Robotyne, went wrong about as
badly and quickly as imaginable:
The Ukrainian troops had expected
minefields but were blindsided by the density. The ground was carpeted with
explosives, so many that some were buried in stacks. The soldiers had been
trained to drive their Bradleys at a facility in Germany, on smooth terrain.
But on the mushy soil of the Zaporizhzhia region, in the deafening noise of
battle, they struggled to steer through the narrow lanes cleared of mines by
advance units.
The Russians, positioned on higher
ground, immediately started firing antitank missiles. Some vehicles in the
convoy were hit, forcing others behind them to veer off the path. Those, in
turn, exploded on mines, snarling even more of the convoy. Russian helicopters
and drones swooped in and attacked the pileup.
The Russians are using the bodies of
their slain soldiers to hide landmines. The Russians have spread an
estimated 2 million landmines across the places where they’ve been in Ukraine;
even in places where the Russians have been driven out, dairy farmers
find that their cows are exploding:
“This is the heaviest landmine and
unexploded ordnance contamination we’ve seen in Europe since the Second World
War,” says Paul Heslop, a 54-year-old Yorkshireman who is the head of the
United Nations’ mine action programme in Ukraine. “I’ve worked in mine
clearance all over the world for 30 years, from Afghanistan to Somalia, but
feel like everything else was an apprenticeship.”
Ten miles away from Yevhenivka, in
Bezimenne — which means “no name” — villagers cannot return to their houses.
Blasted by a barrage of artillery as the Russians withdrew last year, every
dwelling is in ruins and the smell of death lingers even as birds sing. There
are almost certainly bodies under the wreckage, but the Russians planted mines
everywhere.
The amount of territory covered in Russian mines is roughly the size of the New England States.
The result is a stalemate, where the Ukrainians can’t
advance very far, but the Russians can’t, either. In a widely read November interview with The Economist,
Ukraine’s commander in chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, compared the conflict to
the trench warfare of World War I, and argued that the technology advances of
drone surveillance had created a situation where both sides can quickly
consolidate forces to rebut an attack from the other:
[Zaluzhny] went to the front line
in Avdiivka, also in the east, where Russia has recently advanced by a few
hundred metres over several weeks by throwing in two of its armies. “On our
monitor screens the day I was there we saw 140 Russian machines ablaze —
destroyed within four hours of coming within firing range of our artillery.”
Those fleeing were chased by “first-person-view” drones, remote-controlled and
carrying explosive charges that their operators simply crash into the enemy.
The same picture unfolds when Ukrainian troops try to advance. General Zaluzhny
describes a battlefield in which modern sensors can identify any concentration
of forces, and modern precision weapons can destroy it. “The simple fact is
that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing.
In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new, like the
gunpowder which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each
other,” he says.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive has not won back much
territory. But as this newsletter noted in October, the Ukrainians have
won a lot of victories in the Black Sea, which is a bit ironic as the they
don’t have anything resembling a traditional navy. They’ve forced the Black Sea fleet from its main naval base in Sevastopol,
Crimea, landed commando teams on the Crimean peninsula for
hit-and-run attacks, reopened the main port in Odesa, sunk 15 Russian vessels including the flagship Moskva,
and damaged twelve other vessels.
The counteroffensive has also killed lots and lots of
Russian soldiers. Yesterday, the New York Times reported on a
newly declassified American intelligence assessment that portrayed the war as a meat grinder for Russian troops:
At the start of the war the Russian
army stood at 360,000 troops. Russia has lost 315,000 of those troops, forcing
them to recruit and mobilize new recruits and convicts from their prison
system.
Moscow’s equipment has also been
crushed, according to the assessment. At the start of the war, Russia had 3,500
tanks but has lost 2,200, forcing them to pull 50-year-old T-62 tanks from
storage.
The T-62s were first deployed in 1961. Then again,
remember, the Ukrainians are trying to shoot down drones over Kyiv with
machine guns built in 1944 and 1961. A surprising amount of weaponry in
this war is eligible to collect Social Security:
The assessment says the Russian
losses have reduced the complexity of Russia’s recent military operations in
Ukraine.
“The war in Ukraine has sharply set
back 15 years of Russian effort to modernize its ground force,” the
declassified assessment said. “As of late November, Russia had lost over a
quarter of its pre-2022 stockpile of ground forces equipment and has suffered
casualties among its trained professional army.”
I saw on social media yesterday that the usual suspects
were dismissing these casualty figures. We can quibble over the precise
numbers, but there is little doubt that the Russian military has suffered
extremely high losses in a two-year span — anywhere from one and a half to two times the total number of U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam, with roughly the
same number injured.
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