Ukraine: gradually then suddenly
By Richard North - October 1, 2024
That the war would be over by Christmas was the famous slogan of 1914, with volunteers rushing to enlist, anxious that they might miss the action. And we all know how that ended.
With the Ukraine conflict in in its third year, though, there is now a distinct possibility that the fighting will not run into a fourth, the military decision falling in favour of the Russians. That will not be “victory” in the ordinary sense of the word. Rather, a cessation of active hostilities as two punch-drunk foes survey the wreckage around them and consider what to do next.
Although I am not seeing any bold pronouncements to that effect from any of the serried ranks of self-important commentators and analysts, this is a necessary conclusion to be drawn from several strands of evidence, one of which is embodied in a recent article in the Financial Times, which reflects similar commentary from other sources.
The FT article is headed: “Ukraine’s new infantry recruits ‘freeze’ in face of Russian onslaught”, with the sub-heading expanding on the theme, telling us that: “Inadequate training, burnout and rising age of soldiers affect survival on the battlefield after conscription drive”.
In essence this is nothing more than a more detailed exposition of the comments I’d picked up from Ukrainian MP Mariana Bezuhla, explored in this post and this, painting a picture of “chaos” in the Ukrainian army.
Says the FT, Ukraine’s troops and their commanders are growing concerned over manpower problems, particularly the quality of new recruits and the speed at which they are injured or killed in combat. The Ukrainian infantry, it adds, “is most acutely affected”. Its troops are grappling with exhaustion and flagging morale, leading some to abandon their positions and allow Russia to capture more land.
But closely echoing Bezuhla’s complaints, the paper writes that, after the recent wave of conscription, every field commander is emphasising the inadequacy of the training.
Where Bezuhla says of the recruits: “These are mostly middle-aged people, primarily those who couldn’t ‘settle things’”, adding that “in the overwhelming majority of training centres, the instructors do not have combat experience”, we get the FT citing four commanders, a deputy commander and nearly a dozen soldiers from four Ukrainian brigades.
All of these tell the FT that the new conscripts lack basic combat skills, motivation and often abandon their positions when they come under fire. Mykhailo Temper, a battery commander in the 21st battalion of Ukraine’s Separate Presidential Brigade, adds to this, saying that: “trainers themselves don’t have real battle experience so they aren’t teaching what the newbies need to know to fight and, more importantly, to stay alive”.
A deputy commander in Ukraine’s 72nd mechanised brigade, the formation fighting the losing battle in Vuhledar, complains that conscripts are still receiving “Soviet-style” training, where “the army just passes everyone with good marks and sends them to the front”. New troops rarely practised with live rounds because of ammunition shortages, he adds.
“Some of them”, he says, “don’t even know how to hold their rifles. They peel more potatoes than they shoot bullets”, explaining that he had bought paintball equipment to replace rifles and live rounds so that new recruits could get more practice without wasting precious ammunition.
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky, we are told, is said to have ordered improvements to the quality of training for new recruits by selecting “motivated instructors with combat experience”, but – three years into the war – is only now raising “the possibility” of setting up an instructor school.
A commander of an artillery unit is dismissive of Syrsky. He says that the deaths of tens of thousands of experienced soldiers over the course of the war were taking a toll: “If there are not enough people to fight, there are not enough people to teach”, he laments.
Add to this the pessimistic picture painted by the Economist, which details how the losses of skilled soldiers have been stacking up, and there is more than enough evidence to suggest that the Ukrainian army has overwhelming problems.
This brings us to the second strand, the situation on the ground, where – in one of the later developments – we learn that the battle for Vuhledar is almost over. Multiple sources, including the one cited are reporting that the Russians have entered the town from the west and south and Ukrainian resistance is limited to the central “citadel”.
Amazingly, even the Telegraph has picked up the news, reporting – contrary to David Axe’s misguided view – “Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers ‘trapped’ after Russia surrounds fortress city in rapid advance”, adding in the sub-heading: “Evacuation routes out of c, towards the southern edge of the frontline, have been cut off and essential supplies are running low”.
It’s good of the Telegraph eventually to catch up with a situation which has been coming to a climax over the last few weeks, but that is more than The Times has done. The “paper of record” has yet to acknowledge this unravelling disaster.
And disaster it is, as the Telegraph points out. With the strategic town encircled, one unnamed soldier, via the paper, tells us that it was too dangerous for Ukrainian armoured personnel carriers to drive towards friendly lines because of Russian artillery and drone attacks.
Instead, individual units were trying to quietly slip out of the Russian encirclement at night, in fighting retreat formations. “On average, if 10 people leave the city in groups, four to six make it out”, the soldier says.
Even Zelensky, in his nightly report on Ukrainian TV has been forced to admit that the situation is “very, very difficult”.
But if Vuhledar is at the epicentre of the storm, this is only part of Zelensky’s problems. In a useful tour d’horizon, the New York Times published yesterday an article headed: “After U.S. Trip, Zelensky Returns to an Enduring War”, with an outline of the main Russian attacks on the Donbass front.
The paper also cites Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at the government-run Institute for Strategic Studies in Ukraine, who says that Russian troops had “improved their encirclement tactics” (another failure to identify operational art) and are pushing through weak points in Ukrainian lines with small squads. This, he says, “has increased the tempo of their advances”.
Bielieskov claims that Russia currently does not have the capacity to launch large-scale offensives, an assertion that doesn’t fully square with a Ukrainian report that Russia has transferred up to 5,000 soldiers towards Vuhledar, a process described by Ukrinform as “replenishing forces”.
Anyhow, the broader point is that Russia is maintaining the pressure on the Ukrainians, as the NYT reports in a separate article that Putin’s forces are mounting as many as 200 assaults a day in a bid to break the remaining Ukrainian strongholds.
Then there is the Kursk incursion, and while the Ukrainians have had some local successes, the indications are (from multiple sources) that the Russians are back on the offensive and are intent on rolling up the Ukrainian lines.
Several times, I have drawn parallels between this campaign and the 1942 el Alamein battle where the attack involved a lengthy period of what Montgomery called “crumbling”, during which there was very little observable progress, before the final breakthrough and the defeat of the Axis army.
On an extended timescale, this is analogous to that of the Russian operations and, with the end of resistance in Vuhledar only a matter of days, one senses that the Russians are close to a breakthrough against an over-extended and demoralised Ukrainian army.
The one thing one is schooled to expect, though, is that everything takes much longer than predicted, so we could still see the Russians battering Ukrainian lines well into the new year. But, to misquote Ernest Hemingway, armies lose wars in two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
And the remarkable thing about sudden events is that they tend to be sudden.
