Ukraine: into the end game

By Richard North - May 16, 2024

Despite the considerable number of issues that I am neglecting on this blog, and which deserve attention, I’m going to stay with Ukraine. Even though there is diminishing interest in this complex subject, I see it as one of the defining issues of the moment.

Despite that, the detail, convolutions and implications actually repel more readers than they attract, leaving the domain to a limited band of specialists and a larger but nonetheless contained community of “nerds”, with little attraction to the broader community.

That is one of the reasons why, I suspect, the media are so loath to cover the fighting on the ground – as opposed to the BBC-style human-interest pap – compounded by the very complexity, which is daunting in its own right and on which there is no agreement even between experts.

The lack of agreement spans not only the interpretation of events, where the same actions can mean different things to sundry experts, but also in the assessments of future intentions of the warring parties and their respective allies and supporters.

That much is becoming very evident in the media reports we are seeing, where so many journalists rely on their favoured experts, and cherry-pick their outputs. The result is significantly different narratives and predicted outcomes – all in the context of limited information, much of which is inaccurate or incomplete and subject to rapid change.

Picking my way though some of the recent media reports, the Telegraph is as good a place as any to start, where we see an attempt to avoid the detail by focusing on the quasi-political issues. This begets the headline: “Let us use US weapons to strike inside Russia, pleads Ukraine amid Kharkiv advance”.

Interestingly, the assumptions on which this plea is based strike at the relative utility between strategic (economic and infrastructure) attacks as war-winners, and operational and tactical power over the battlefields, directed at destroying the enemy on the ground.

In fact, most conflicts – certainly those between states – tend to have an element of both, which we saw graphically in WWII as between the strategic bombing campaign, and the land war which, in Europe, encompassed the invasion of the continent.

In Ukraine, it seems, Zelensky – conscious that his military has been unable to prevail on the battlefields – wants permission to use the long-range weapons provided by supporting nations, to hit (mainly) economic targets deep inside Russia, in an attempt to convince Putin that the costs of pursuing the war are too high.

There also seems to be an element of interdiction in his thinking, stemming from the Telegraph’s sub-heading which proclaims: “Ukrainian soldiers ‘frustrated’ at having to stand by as Putin’s soldiers build up ranks behind frontier”.

The logic here is that if the Ukrainians had been allowed to make cross-border attacks on Russian troops during the assembly phase, they could have – as the DT article tells us, have disrupted Russian plans before the actual engagement. But they could not do this because they didn’t have permission from the US government to use US-supplied weapons in this way.

There is an apparent flaw in this a argument though, as the current assault on Kharkiv is billed as a “surprise attack”, but if Ukrainian soldiers were having to stand by “as Putin’s soldiers build up ranks behind frontier”, how come the attack was such a surprise?

This notwithstanding, any halfway-serious student of war will know that huge resources have to be devoted to a strategic campaign – and even a successful interdiction programmes – which are probably well beyond Ukraine’s means, and which might be better devoted to interventions on the battlefields.

However, the Telegraph has its own expert to state the case, this one being Rob Lee, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He says that the attack from Russia into the Kharkiv oblast marked a “tactical shift” by Moscow, which, since 2022, had only launched land attacks from occupied Ukraine.

Lee in this event confuses “tactical” – which this isn’t – with the operational level and argues that “it would be prudent for the US to reconsider this policy in this case” – without necessarily considering the resource implications.

Nevertheless, one can see from this why it is so much easier to gloss over the issues, or address less taxing matters altogether, but it is also self-evident that fundamental choices have to be made by Zelensky if his nation is to survive – assuming it isn’t already too late.

Elsewhere, we see a different “expert” source cited, this time by the BBC which seems to have woken up to what is going on in Ukraine, telling us that Zelensky has cancelled all upcoming foreign trips, as his troops struggle to contain a new cross-border attack from Russian forces.

The BBC’s favoured source is the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which is cited for its observations on “several Russian and Ukrainian sources” which report that Russian forces were “using new tactics” – employing smaller assault groups of no more than five soldiers to penetrate Ukrainian positions before merging with other small assault groups to unite into a larger strike group.

This may or may not be an accurate interpretation, but Ukraine Pravda also uses the ISW to remark on the use of smaller groups, although it has “military analysts” believing that the use of these smaller squads could contribute to increased losses of Russian manpower and equipment and slow the overall pace of the offensive on the Kharkiv front.

It also cites one Russian military commentator, who previously served as a Storm-Z unit instructor, complaining that the footage of small Russian assault groups reflected poor training rather than new and effective tactics.

Taking a broader view is Jack Watling, one of the Rusi experts, cited in the online magazine National Pulse. He is cited as warning that the “outlook for Ukraine is bleak”, claiming that recent figures indicate that “Russian forces have now expanded to 510,000 troops”.

These quotes are taken from a Rusi report published two days ago, telling us that “Russia is beginning to compound its advantages”.

One thing which strikes me as a sound observation is the view that Ukraine has spent several months fortifying Kharkiv, “but storming the city is not how Russia intends to fight. The Russian target this summer is the Ukrainian army”.

This is why, territorial gains, per se are not that important, and neither are equipment losses for the Russians particularly significant. They intend to write down the Ukrainian army and thereby rob the nation of its will to fight.

Within the dissertation, though, the theme is advanced that, so long as the AFU lacks sufficient means to blunt Russian attacks along its front, Russia will be able to force Ukraine to commit reserves and then exploit the axes left with insufficient troops and equipment. In other words, Watling says, so long as Ukraine lacks materiel, Russia will begin to compound its advantages, especially in terms of its superior numbers.

Watling wants the allies to “engage now to replenish Ukrainian munitions stockpiles, help to establish a robust training pipeline, and make the industrial investments to sustain the effort”. Then, he believes, “Russia’s summer offensive can be blunted, and Ukraine will receive the breathing space it needs to regain the initiative”.

That, I rather feel, is overly optimistic. Inevitably, he is talking of a programme spanning quite a period, and some pundits are arguing that it will take at least two months for new supplies of equipment to reach the battlefield in significant quantities.

Yet the crisis is here and now, and Ukraine’s equipment problem is of a lower order than its chronic manpower shortage. This, in a country where males are increasingly reluctant to join up, is not easy to solve and time is not on the side of the Ukrainians. Within two months, the situation could be irrecoverable.

For my part, I take the view that the Russians have tuned their operations to such an extent that they are able successfully match their own capabilities with the demands of the battlefield in a way that the Ukrainians have not been able to counter. Aided by a number of technical innovations and weapon enhancements, Putin has been able to take the initiative and is set to keep it.

To that extent – insofar as it is possible to predict – I would not be surprised if we’re moving into the end game. It is no longer unrealistic to think in terms of a Ukrainian collapse. But what might be even more difficult to predict is the nature and extent of the political fallout, which is likely to be with us for a long time.