Carlotta Gall, reporting for the New York Times from the front lines in Ukraine, has a very interesting writeup of the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive.
“Despite grueling fighting,” Gall writes, “Ukrainian forces along much of the 600-mile front are moving forward, and commanders and veteran soldiers say they are in better shape now than six or 12 months ago.”
“If a year ago we were conducting defensive operations and we had the task of holding back the enemy, now we have the ability to attack,” Col. Dmytro Lysiuk, commander of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade, said in an interview in his frontline bunker last week.
Ukrainian officers are almost invariably upbeat in interviews. Even if the counteroffensive has yielded only mixed results so far, with Ukrainian troops slowed by dense Russian minefields and sustained firepower, they describe previous periods as being tougher than this one.
Back in May, as shaping operations for the Ukrainian counteroffensive began to get underway, a consensus grew up that “success” for this invasion would be judged by Ukrainian forces a) breaking through the main Russian defensive lines, b) reaching the Sea of Azov, and c) thereby cutting the Russian “land bridge” to Crimea. Whether those success criteria were operationally realistic at the time will be a question for the historians. But as a political matter — and remember, war is politics by other means, as Clausewitz taught us — reaching the sea and cutting the Russian lines in two made a lot of sense. Such success would unambiguously demonstrate progress on the part of the Ukrainian armed forces and give the West reason to believe that its military and economic aid has been put to good use.
This summer’s painfully slow progress, busted timetables, and high casualties have been a bitter lesson for both Western observers and, far more importantly, the Ukrainians doing the fighting. The Russians have by and large fought hard and well this summer, and their efforts have been coordinated with a more effective and competent command and control than was evident during the Russian winter offensive six months ago. There’s now a lot of skepticism out there — Barry Rosen in Foreign Policy and Daniel Davis in 1945 have essays that are worth reading — about whether the Ukrainian counteroffensive can achieve operational success. Some say that it has already failed.
Davis states his case bluntly: “The cold, hard truth in the war between Russia and Ukraine today is that Ukraine’s last-gasp offensive has failed, and no amount of spin will change the outcome. The UAF failed for entirely predictable reasons, based on enduring combat fundamentals that are not subject to optimism, wishful thinking, or spin. The question, however, is what should the United States do now.”
When I read Davis’s essay late last week, my reaction was, “Perhaps, but maybe not quite yet.” That’s what makes Gall’s reporting so interesting. One must of course take anecdotal reports from the front with a grain of salt. Just because morale is high on the Ukrainian side, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the Ukrainians are going to break the Russian lines. And, naturally, one would expect that Ukrainian troops would be eager to put on a brave face for a Western reporter. That said, this comment regarding cluster munitions caught my eye:
Tysen [a deputy battalion commander in the 80th Airborne Assault Brigade] and other commanders said that the Russian forces they saw appeared to be in poorer shape than the Ukrainian ones.
“Compared to the beginning of the war, their equipment and personnel are in a very sorry state,” Tysen said.
On the southern front, soldiers and commanders said there were signs that Ukrainian artillery was wearing down Russian units facing them, largely thanks to American cluster munitions.
“We are using them quite effectively,” Colonel Lysiuk said. “They arrived mid-July. And we use them constantly.”
“We destroyed a lot of the enemy’s artillery in this time,” he said. “If before 20 enemy guns were working, now it’s two to four.” There are also signs, he said, that the Russians “cannot maintain constant combat readiness.”
Tactics mattered, too, said a deputy battalion commander of 129th Territorial Defense Brigade, who goes by the call sign Kherson. . . .
As the Russian troops began to retreat, Russian forces fired rockets at the battlefield, killing their own men.
“They buried quite a lot of their own guys,” Kherson said [emphasis added].
These are — again — anecdotal signs of a Russian army under stress and facing shell hunger. It doesn’t mean that the Ukrainians will reach the sea before their offensive runs out of gas and culminates. It doesn’t mean that the Russians are going to crack in spectacular fashion. But I think it’s clear that the U.S. decision to release huge quantities of cluster munitions has kept the Ukrainians in the game. The influx of American shells has also changed the operational dynamic in another important respect: Should the Ukrainians manage to advance a bit more — even if they do not reach the sea — if they can get within range to put Russian-controlled roads and rail lines along the coast under concentrated artillery fire, they could effectively cut the Russian land bridge to Crimea. That won’t, of course, be as politically significant or symbolic as images of Ukrainian soldiers washing their feet in the sea. But as both sides begin to think about what the winter’s fighting will look like, that would be an extremely important development.
Expect the fighting to go on into the fall. There are no guarantees in war, and Davis may yet be proved correct, but the Ukrainians still have a puncher’s chance of reaching the sea or bringing shell fire directly onto Russian lines of supply, especially if the Russian army’s artillery-munitions shortages grow worse.
“A battery of field artillery is worth a thousand muskets,” William Tecumseh Sherman, perhaps apocryphally, opined. The Ukrainian army sure hopes he’s right.