Ukraine: muddy waters

By Richard North - August 24, 2023

It’s a bit early to tell whether Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner mercenary group, is really dead, or whether this is another of those bizarre stories that comes out of Russia and goes nowhere.

As it stands, Prigozhin is said to have been travelling in his privately-owned Embraer Legacy bizjet, on his way from Moscow to St Petersburg, when the aircraft crashed near the village of Kuzhenkino in the Tver region. Ten souls were on board, including three crew.

Some unsubstantiated reports, attributed to Wagner sources, say the aircraft’s radar transponder had been switched off and it had then been shot down by air defence fire in the Bologovsky district. This would, of course, be a tragic mistake which could happen to anybody.

Then, it could always be a case of mistaken identity – after all, aircraft are always being shot down in Russia these days so it might be difficult to keep track of precisely which aircraft were missing.

Ksenia Sobchak, a Russian television personality, stated on Telegram that she had spoken to Prigozhin’s press secretary, who had not released any information other than he had recently spoken with Prigozhin – presumably not by way of a seance.

Anyhow, as the dust settles on the affair, to be confirmed or not confirmed at the convenience of the Russian authorities – or Prigozhin himself – the story of the moment is a report in the New York Times which breaks somewhat with tradition in having the US military being critical of Ukraine’s armed forces.

Headed, “Ukraine’s Forces and Firepower Are Misallocated, US Officials Say”, the sub-head goes on to convey the view of “American strategists” who complain that Ukraine’s troops “are too spread out and need to concentrate along the counteroffensive’s main front in the south”.

We saw something of this earlier in a Washington Post piece – covered by this blog – when the paper reported that the Ukrainians had for months poured tremendous resources into Bakhmut, including soldiers, ammunition and time, but had lost control of the city and have made only modest gains in capturing territory around it.

It conceded that the close-in, trench-line fighting was different in Bakhmut from the problem of mines in the south, but observed that the focus had left some in the Biden administration “concerned that overcommitting in the east may have eroded the potency of the counteroffensive in the south”.

Now we’re getting essentially the same narrative, full frontal, from the NYT as it writes that Ukraine’s grinding counteroffensive is struggling to break through entrenched Russian defences “in large part because it has too many troops, including some of its best combat units, in the wrong places” – attributing this intelligence to “American and other Western officials”.

This thesis depends on the main goal of the counteroffensive being to cut off Russian supply lines in southern Ukraine by severing the so-called land bridge between Russia and the occupied Crimean Peninsula. That is certainly the received wisdom, although I’m not sure that this objective has ever been formally declared by the Ukrainian government.

Nevertheless, US officials – who no doubt have greater insight into Ukrainian intentions than do we – complain that instead of focusing on the main objective, Ukrainian commanders have divided troops and firepower roughly equally between the east and the south.

As a result, the officials say, more Ukrainian forces are near Bakhmut and other cities in the east than are near Melitopol and Berdiansk in the south, both far more strategically significant fronts.

We are told that American planners advised Ukraine to concentrate on the front driving toward Melitopol, and on punching through Russian minefields and other defences, even if the Ukrainians lose more soldiers and equipment in the process.

Now, one US official warns that, only with a change of tactics and a dramatic move can the tempo of the counteroffensive pick up. Another official said the Ukrainians were too spread out and needed to consolidate their combat power in one place.

This, apparently, is being taken up at the highest levels. In a video teleconference on 10 August, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; his British counterpart, Adm. Sir Tony Radakin; and Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the top US commander in Europe, urged Ukraine’s most senior military commander, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, to focus on one main front. And, it appears, General Zaluzhnyi agreed.

The NYT also notes that Radakin’s role has been especially important and not widely appreciated until now. General Milley speaks to General Zaluzhnyi every week or so about strategy and Ukrainian military needs, but the Biden administration has prohibited senior US officers from visiting Ukraine for security reasons and to avoid increasing tensions with Moscow.

On the other hand, Britain has imposed no such constraints, and Radakin has developed close ties with his Ukrainian counterpart during multiple trips to the country. Cynics might observe, though, that if the Ukrainians are taking advice from the British military it is no wonder they have adopted the wrong strategy.

Recently, the Ukrainians claim to have liberated the tactically important village Robotyne and pushed southwards to the village of Novorpokopivka, some three kilometres south of Robotyne, straddling the T0408 highway, a major attack axis for the ongoing offensive.

If confirmed, the gains would mark a dramatic increase in the pace of the Ukrainian advance, and possibly, a Ukrainian breakthrough of the first of three Russian defensive belts in the Zaporizhzhia sector.

But some analysts say the progress may be too little too late. The fighting is taking place on mostly flat, unforgiving terrain, which favours the defenders. The Russians are battling from concealed positions that Ukrainian soldiers often see only when they are feet away.

Hours after Ukrainians clear minefields, the Russians sometimes re-seed them with a remote, rocket-launched mine-laying system.

Progress, US officials believe, would have been more assured if the Ukrainians had followed American war doctrine, designating a single main effort to ensure that maximum resources go to a single front, even if supporting forces are fighting in other areas to hedge against failure or spread-out enemy defences.

Ukraine’s continued focus on Bakhmut, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war, has perplexed US intelligence and military officials. Ukraine has invested huge amounts of resources in defending the surrounding Donbas region, and Zelensky does not want to appear as though he is giving up on trying to retake lost territory. But US officials say politics must, at least temporarily, take a back seat to sound military strategy.

American strategists, the NYT reports, say that keeping a small force near the destroyed city is justified to pin down Russian troops and prevent them from using it to launch attacks. But Ukraine has enough troops there to try to retake the area, a move US officials say would lead to large numbers of losses for little strategic gain.

American officials have told Ukrainian leaders that they can secure the land around Bakhmut with far fewer troops and should reallocate forces to the south.

Unsurprisingly, Ukrainian leaders have defended their strategy and distribution of forces, pointing out that criticisms of Ukraine’s counteroffensive are often cast through the lens of a generation of military officers who have never experienced a war of this scale and intensity.

Furthermore, according to Kirill Mikhailov, an independent military researcher based in Kiev – cited in the Telegraph – the US way is a “high loss, high reward strategy. And the problem with that is that the Ukrainians aren’t sure of their equipment resupply. There aren’t enough Leopard IIs to go round”.

“The way the Soviets did it, even late in the Second World war, they would be down to 50 or 30 percent of tanks but they’re sure they’re getting new ones in a month or two. They could afford these big armoured breakthroughs”, Mikhailov says.

The same thing was true of the Western allies, which is one reason comparisons with the battle of Normandy are misplaced: in 1944 the allies were churning out tanks, aircraft, and munitions at a phenomenal rate. But, for the Ukrainians, there are no production lines churning out new vehicles, and ammunition stocks are also finite.

Moreover, American war doctrine has never been tested in an environment like Ukraine’s, where Russian electronic warfare jams communications and GPS, and neither military has been able to achieve air superiority.

For all that, US officials are not dismissing the counteroffensive as doomed to failure, even if they acknowledge that the Ukrainians have not had the success that they or their allies hoped for when the push began.

Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security adviser, says: “We do not assess that the conflict is a stalemate. We continue to support Ukraine in its effort to take territory as part of this counteroffensive, and we are seeing it continue to take territory on a methodical systematic basis”.

Thus, the NYT offers some hope. Even if the counter-offensive fails to reach the coast, it has officials and analysts say, if it can make it far enough to put the coastal road within range of Ukrainian artillery and other strikes, it could cause even more problems for Russian forces in the south who depend on that route for supplies.

That, however, is probably as much as the Ukrainians can even dream of achieving. Whether it will be enough remains to be seen. Russia is not being idle. They do have production lines churning out new vehicles.