Feb 11 — Day 353–155th Marine Infantry, Frontal rundown, Meet the offense
Hi FB!
For starters I want to focus a bit on the fighting around Uhledar, because now enough data has come in to turn a good deal of what we were speculating about a week ago, into pretty viable fact.
As many of you will recall, last weekend reports started coming in that the Russians made a push towards Uhledar and the Ukrainians shot it to bits. More bits of information dripped in over the week, and it is now clear that the Russians repeated the attack, at least once and probably more than once, with the same results.
The attacks were substantial and we now have a reasonably confirmed list of Russian formations, or more specifically brigades involved: 155th Marine Infantry, 40th Marine Infantry, 80th Coastal (Arctic) Infantry, 14th Special Forces. There also appears to have been a formation of largely ethnic Tartar forced conscripts from Crimea, and the whole mess was commanded by 20th Combined Arms Army. We now have enough battlefield video to confirm at least some of these units were equipped with T-90 and T-80 tanks, a fair sampling of armored personnel carriers, and the POWs and soldiers observed by the UAF had the normal issue of personal kit.
In other words, the fighting around Uhledar over the last week gives us a pretty fair picture of where the conventional Russian ground forces are at and how the Russian army high command sees itself executing missions in the future. As we have seen repeatedly (this is now the third review in a row I’m seeing unadulterated Russian debacle in Uhledar), the Kremlin seems incapable — I say again, they can’t do it, they’re incapable — of advancing against dug-in UAF troops over substantial open ground, even when the RF tries as hard as it can. Ukrainian artillery is too capable, Ukrainian drone observation is too consistent.
It is worth noting that in this sector I’m seeing multiple indications (images, references by soldiers, tactical outcomes and so on) that the UAF artillery has got its hands on artillery-delivered anti-tank mines, the US Army acronym is FASCAM ( Family of Scatterable Mines), which certainly I have NOT seen on the list of American munitions sent to Ukraine.
UPDATE: A reader informs me indeed FASCAM was mentioned in one of the US military aid announcements last year, so there you go. It certainly could be in the hot little hands of Ukrainian gunners right now. We just don’t know for sure.
I have no hard proof, but just like in the last review, this time once again I am in receipt of a video of a Russian armored vehicle, in this case of BMP, driving around in Uhledar sector in a way that really seems like the crew had no idea there were mines there. It could be bad information and situational awareness, of course. But it looks like maybe FASCAM to me. Emphasis on the maybe. Video attached, plus a comic book description of how these things work.
A key confirmation not of FASCAM per se, but overall Russian tactical and operational failure on the Uhledar axis is, a week into these attacks, Russian army critics inside Russia are pointing out exactly the same thing we are seeing in the videos the UAF soldiers and military spin officers are putting on the internet, and that the Ukrainian Army General Staff is telling us. Igor Girkin, the MH17 co-conspirator on the lam from Interpol, and an inveterate opponent of the Russian army high command, said the Uhledar attacks showed the Russian generalship has learned nothing from a year of fighting, that it is capable of only throwing troops into a meatgrinder, that it fails to enforce even the most basic discipline, and that its senior officers’ only priority is protecting their personal property and income. If these guys stay in charge, he says, Russia will lose the war. Here’s a soundbite: “The generals are cretins. Our attacking soldiers were shot up like in a shooting gallery”.
Other Russian platforms are indentifying commander of 20th Army, LTG Rustam Muradov, (image) as the man responsible for the Uhledar disasters, and are calling for his head. Some of the Russian internet has intimated that the public attacks on Muradov actually are part of a power fight between the Russian regular army and the Russian mercenaries led by the Wagner Group, but either way, this is not the kind of public finger-pointing you normally see in a successful war effort.
The UAF took prisoners following one of the Uhledar disasters, image attached. Video of several of the captured Marines made their way onto the internet, and one of them, Aleksandr Gorshkov, resident of the Russian Far East, offers some useful insight into the Kremlin’s “plan” for fielding ground combat forces. According to Gorshkov he was serving as a shore security officer in Vladivostok when orders came down to his unit to give up bodies to forces in Ukraine, and he was unlucky and got picked.
He says his normal military job was, within the navy, to perform shoreside security, and after about a month of bad training in Russia, he wasn’t seriously skilled in ground combat, but the army made him a rifleman/grenadier and assigned him to 155th Marine Infantry Brigade as part of a replacement unit, probably a platoon. His commander was a 24-year-old lieutenant fresh out of military academy with only a theoretical knowledge of tactics, wasn’t really confident in himself, and in whom troops had little trust. Gorshkov calls his officer “incompetent”. Video attached.
Anyone who has served in a combat unit will recognize the giant red flags, and probable chances something very bad would happen if that platoon were committed to combat. If Gorshkov’s account is accurate — and as always, you can believe the video or not, but seems absolutely legit to me — then his platoon with a very high degree of certainty might have been able to man a position and defend itself at short range, occupy a piece of a village against no resistance and not kill too many civilians, or pull guard duty around an air defense unit.
Gorshkov got ordered to drive somewhere and occupy a forward position, his unit came under effective artillery fire well before they reached their objective, he and his mates bailed out from their vehicle, took cover in a cellar, and were apparently forgotten by the Russian army. Five days later UAF infantry showed up and he and his buddies surrendered.
Bigger picture, the 155th Marine Infantry, and this is not speculation, over the last week or so has been called on to attempt conventional war operations with armored personnel carriers, tanks and artillery, over mostly open ground, with practically every square meter of that ground was under observation by drones corrected by UAF operators with six to twelve months of combat experience, and able to call down NATO shells fired by NATO cannon trained by highly-motivated Ukrainian gun crews also with six to twelve months combat experience, and if that’s not enough, a cadre of those crews also was trained by NATO.
Yet another Madyar video is attached. Think about being a Russian on the ground in Uhledar sector, under that kind of drone observation and that kind of energetic hunting, by Madyar and his buddies, for Russians on the ground to shoot at.
For those of you not inclined towards trying speculative leaps, here is some pretty hard data: Saturday morning’s kill claim estimate from Ukraine’s Army General Staff. A new one-day record of RF soldiers reported killed in combat by UAF units: 1140 Russian husbands and sons lost their lives in Ukraine in the last 24 hours. Image.
Bakhmut
Sources on both sides report a relative calm following Wagner Group pushes, at least partially successful apparently, into the villages Blahodatne and Krasno Hora to the north of the city, further threatening and possibly cutting the M04 highway to Sloviansk. It seems clear that the UAF took substantial losses as the Wagner infantry moved on these village from multiple directions, and the defenders — apparently territorial defense fighters — took to their heels and ran. Reports are all over the place on the UAF losses, from several dozen to several hundred.
It is worth repeating, multiple sources, the UAF still seems to hold fortification on the high ground to the West, and anecdotal reports and information surfacing from the area paint a picture of organized Ukrainian defenses ready and able to fight. Over the past few days, the Belarusian Legion posted images of, they said, recently captured Russian fighting positions and dead Russian soldiers inside them. Reports from 3rd Assault Brigade, by independent journalist Yury Butusov, showed deep trenches, crew-served weapons in action and upbeat soldiers. A volunteer video showed a mostly-empty city and soldiers ready to fight. The Border Troops published images of their mortars in action. (Attached). But probably the most useful factoid concerning Bakhmut was provided to us by Evgeney Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, who in an interview with an apparent flunky said serious progress in this sector will take 1–2 years, and the day before he confirmed to CNN Wagner is no longer inducting felons. Which will undermine the formation’s ability to conduct at-any-cost attacks.
Late addition: General Zaluzhny issued a statement, following a conversation with US Chief of Staff Mark Milley (you know, the guy who said Ukraine has no chance of stopping Russia), that the latest information from the Bakhmut sector is, lines aren’t just holding, but in some places the UAF has recovered ground.
This is believable for several reasons. First and foremost, not once has anyone caught General Zaluzhny playing games with the on-the-ground reality, when informing the public. Sometimes he’s a lot slower than we’d like, and often he’s, well, economical with details. But his track record is literally superior to the US Chief of Staff: In this war, if Zaluzhny said it, it happened.
This is backed up by anecdotal evidence available in the open souces: there are fresh images out there of successful infantry advances and attacks by the UAF, to wit Russian dead and upbeat UAF soldiers posting good news in their feeds. This is not to say Zaluzhny said ground was, specifically, recovered in Bakhmut sector. But it looks possible.
RF combined arms attacks are continuing in this sector and I get the distnct impression the RF objectives are short-term push the Ukrainians away from Lysychansk and Severodonetsk, and longer-term complete the “conquest” of Luhansk region. On Monday the Ukrainians gleefully published video of a Russian Terminator infantry fighting vehicle — this is one of the new weapons systems specifically advertised as supeior to anything NATO has — getting trashed by a guided 155mm howitzer shell. Supposedly the Russian army has 10–20 of these things in the field.
Speculatively, would it be possible that somewhere in the Kremlin a bunch of generals sitting around a table decided that the way to dig the Ukrainains out of the forests around Kreminne, was to commit this vehicle to combat? Kind of like the King Tigers in the Battle of the Bulge? If yes, then add that to the list of really obvious military parallels between der Bunker and the Kremlin. Video attached.
As to why bother, why not let the Ukrainans attack and die in this sector, this is speculation on my part, but, in my view along with simply “not being Putin’s worst general of the week”, a major driver of Russian operational decisions are the current objectives of the Special Military Operation, which are to “liberate” Russian-speaking regions, especially Luhansk and Donetsk regions. It was a year ago but those of us that were there remember that on the first day of the war Putin laid out the full conquest of Donetsk and Luhansk regions as war aims. My theory is that priority is still driving Russian army decision-making, essentially, because until Putin says it’s no longer a stated goal of the SMO, the Russian military robot-like will keep on trying to capture Luhansk and Donetsk regions as best it can.
Kupyansk-Svatove
Multiple sources reported a big uptick of RF artillery fire across the line in this formerly quiet sector and in the north, RF troops crossed the international border and occupied the formerly-liberated village Dvurechenske, in far north Kharkiv region. Map attached.
So what does it all mean?
I’ve attached a recent NYT (I believe) map on Ukraine with some red arrows. The one on the left is a clearly-drawn map and I generally agree. The way it looks to me, the Russians are in fact committed to a major offensive right now, or at the very minimum are on the rails heading that way. They have three places that they are pushing or plan to push. What follows how I see it:
(NOTE: The map on the right, well, let’s just ignore it.)
Uhledar — This is the regular army main effort. Its objectives are to gain ground and break through Ukainian lines, and if possible encircle and destroy major Ukrainian formations. 20th Army is the backbone of this attack. Things are going badly.
Bakhmut — This is a parallel main effort where the Russians seek to execute the strategy of bleeding the Ukrainian forces of losses so that they will quit fighting. Over time, the goal is to encircle Bakhmut and annihilate whatever Ukrainians are trapped inside. The Wagner Group is the backbone of this attack. There is slow progress but casualties are so high it’s not always possible to keep attacking. An equally important goal is to suck Ukrainain reserve forces that might otherwise be used in an offensive elsewhere, into close-in, urban fighting that plays to Wagner advantages of large numbers of infantry and relative willingness to take losses. This strategy is partially successful, but, the Ukrainians have a lot of practice moving troops in and out of threatened sectors. They’re still able to do so in Bakhmut right now.
Kreminne — This is a secondary effort with the short-term objective of “completing” conquest of Luhansk region and a general objective of tying down Ukrainian fighting force that might be used elsewhere. The problem for the Russians is that this is a heavily-wooded sector where infantry dominates and the regular Russian army is not flush in infantry, and it is trained-infantry poor. This is why we see the Russians resorting to the military version of a cheap magic trick, and trying to obtain leverage with a “wonder weapon” that really has no business driving around forests, without serious protection, looking for something to attack.
Kupyansk-Svatove-Kharkiv
In this sector the Russians very clearly are attempting to tie down Ukrainian forces.
Reserves
Multiple reports say the Russians have concentrated 5–15,000 men in the Mariupol-Melitopol area, and based on the rule that militaries don’t do things differently if they have a way to repeat what they did in the past, and that that goes double for the Russian army, chances are very high that the backbone of those forces are reconstituted airborne units. The qualification is that these formations have (or are supposed to have, anyway) armor, fighting vehicles, artillery and so forth. That a bunch of Russian regular troops are in the area is widely confirmed, and that a good proportion of them airbone units is a pretty safe guess.
You don’t have to be Napoleon to figure out possible missions for this reserve force. One would be to exploit a breakthrough at Bakhmut or Uhledar. Another would be to plug a gap or counterattack should the Ukrainians launch their southern offensive, most likely towards Melitopol, but also possibly towards Mariupol.
Stuff for Ukraine and other subjects:
This review has gone on long enough, we can get into that some other time.
I should record that on Monday during the latest missile strikes a Ukrainian air force fighter shot down a cruise missile in my neighborhood and I got to witness part of the engagement.
Let the record reflect I officially state here that I owe that pilot (and his ground crew, never forget the ground crew) a beer. Much appreciated!
