March 4 — Day 374 — Fortess Bakhmut, Long range shenanigans, Loading the dice
Hi FB!
I’ll start off with two images from Zaporizhia: the Russians fired an S-300 into an apartment building on Wednesday. Ten dead counted so far, rescuers are still going through the debris looking for survivors and more corpses.
Bakhmut
It’s now effectively confirmed that the Ukrainian intention is to force the Russians into a long, grinding series of attacks with very high casualties, and that the Ukrainian “retreats” we have seen are part of that strategy.
This is not to say the Ukrainians are not under pressure nor to assert they aren’t taking losses themselves. Nor is it to predict that the Ukrainians will for sure succeed with the plan. Their defenses might crack, the Russians might come up with a major new attack force, the shell shortage might go from “tight” to “critically short”.
But, enough reliable information came in over the past three days, that now saying “The Ukrainians are drawing out the fight in Bakhmut intentionally, their withdrawals are part of a plan, and to some extent at least their plan seems to be succeeding, for the time being” isn’t speculation in my mind. It’s a fairly safe description of what’s going on.
One key development came on Wednesday-Thursday, with widely confirmed reports the UAF pulled at least most of its troops from the eastern side of Bakhmut and blew up all the bridges over the Bakhmutska River. This is confirmed by both sides. Map attached to give a rough picture of the fighting lines at the moment.
On the anecdotal level, the Vblogger Madyar published a report that his unit was getting pulled out of Bakhmut (after 110 days on the line), and, simultaneously, videos appeared of other UAF soldiers looking pretty happy they are out of Bakhmut and making the drive to Slovyansk, after Russian attempts to close the encirclement by assaults in north-west and the south-west have all failed.
A key piece of information came from the Russian side, specifically a Kremlin “war correspondent” named Boris Rozhin, citing an LPR officer named Andrei Morochko, who reported that to the north of Bakhmut, where a mix of Wagner troops and Russian airborne had been advancing, things came to a halt after it turned out the Ukrainians had dug a new line of fortifications and firing positions around the village Min’ivka. The UAF has armored vehicles and artillery to back it up, he said. We guessed the Ukrainians might have been doing this way back in January when the Ukrainian national leadership started talking about “Fortress Bakhmut”.
There also has been a lot of jockeying for optics. On the Russian side Evgeney Prigozhin recorded another video, trotted out three sad-looking Ukrainian POWs, said Wagner has almost total control of Bakhmut, and called on Zelensky to do the right thing and abandon the town. It took the Ukrainian internet about two hours to geolocate Prigozhin’s video to a village about seven kilometers outside of Bakhmut.
On the Ukrainian side, meanwhile, Ukrainian national security council head Oleksei Danylov, on the evening national news said Bakhmut is a bloody but nonetheless success story with the UAF killing or wounding seven Russians for every Ukrainian casualty. This is I think a pretty credible estimate of what the Ukrainian national leadership thinks internally. Unlike the General Staff Russian casualty estimates, a statement like that by Zelensky’s top security guy has political weight behind it.
There is an election next year and if it comes out Zelensky’s team grossly lied about casualties and misled voters, and effectively softballed how many Ukrainians are dying and getting injured, then Zelensky and his team could very easily get hammered in the polls.What Danylov said isn’t proof, of course, but it might well be true factually, and in any case it’s a public commitment by a top administration official to long-term defense of Bakhmut. Never forget Ukraine is a democracy, civil society is seriously engaged in watching government like a hawk, and elected officials fully understand voters are watching their actions.
Finally, General Syrsky showed up in Bakhmut again, on Friday, less than a week after his previous visit. At the time we speculated maybe he was trying to stave off disaster, or maybe organize a total abandonment of defenses. The images the national government allowed the public to see of that visit (attached) however, confirm the most likely intetrpretation of what’s going on is that the phased defense of Bakhmut is a planned UAF operation (although without question some soldiers on the line under constant fire would disagree with that), and if the voters are watching Zelensky and Danylov like a hawk, then Syrsky is watching what’s going on in Bakhmut like a hawk.
Bottom line, this is an awful lot of public commitment to holding Bakhmut. As to why, the Ukrainians aren’t keeping that secret either, same day Serhiy Cherevatyi, spokesman for the Eastern Group of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, said the UAF’s objective in Bakhmut was to weaken Russian forces so that “rested reserves with new military equipment” could repel them later.
Russian sources are predicting a local UAF counterattack, using tanks and APCS, in the vicinity of Chasov Yar with the objective of reducing Russian pressure on the two supply roads still open into Bakhmut. Another UAF defensive line is under construction along the line of Rai-Aleksandrovka-Chasov Yar, meaning we now have confirmation of UAF prepared defenses both to the north and south of Bakhmut, albeit 3–4 km. to the west.
This is strong evidence that the UAF’s declared “Fortess Bakhmut” strategy isn’t misdirection, it’s what they’re trying to do. I’m still not fully clear if the intention is to hold “shoulders” of the access road to Bakhmut, or just force RF losses and then retire to the new defensive line. My guess is the UAF currently wants to hold Bakhmut if it can but not at absolutely all costs. But clearly, the Ukrainians are acting like they have the initiative and they will dictate how the battle goes, which if they manage it will be an achievmeent, that’s not so easy in the defense.
No matter how those things play out, if the Spring offensive turns out to be successful, then you watch, Bakhmut will transform, in punditland, from a place where the UAF “just can’t stop the Russians, proving Ukraine just can’t stop Russia”, into a “brilliant example of defense in depth and operational patience, which the Ukrainians learned from NATO.”
Although, I confess some fear that, when the histories are written, most of the time the UAF and whatever skill they are bringing to the table will be completely forgotten, and the conventional wisdom western expert party line will be “Bakhmut was yet another example of how the mighty all-powerful Russian army could have won but they defeated themselves, and the Ukrainians who had no chances because they aren’t NATO, were just lucky.”
Kupyansk-Sviatove
It seems like the Russians are again attempting to push in this sector, or possibly, the local commander just got a new trainload of artillery ammunition. There are reports on both sides of civilian evacuation in Kupyansk (which was liberated way back in September) because of continuing Russian shelling.
Kreminne
According to regional governer Serhiy Haidai the sector is seeing Russian “experimentation” with attack tactics, in part using the Terminator assault vehicle, which is very heavily armored and purpose built to blow infantry out of trenches. The UAF can kill it with its more powerful anti-tank weapons but it’s a big battlefield and the sector is heavily wooded, so, the Russian tactic is another version of the bit-by-bit approach: find a place where there are some UAF infantry, pound it, send in poorly-trained mobilized reserve soldiers, if they die repeat the process until the Ukrainians retreat or die.
In some sense this probably is the Russian local commander attempting to show his bosses he’s not sitting passively. According to UAF sources the greatest RF pressure, all reportedly contained, is south of Kreminne vicinity the P-66 highway.
Long-range attacks
One possible long-range attack took place on Friday when probably twenty or more people with smart phones recorded the shoot down of a Russian Su-34 bomber over Yenakive. Image attached. This was well behind Russian lines and so theoretically too far for Ukrainian air defenses to shoot it down. But shot down it clearly was, so now we have to guess if it was a super-duper Ukrainian fighter pilot, a western missile system the Ukrainians risked close to the front line, or just an inept Russian blue-on-blue (or in this case red-on-red, I guess) error.
The UAF has been all kinds of busy the last few days in executing pinprick-type attacks against Russian targets that certainly won’t bring down the Kremlin walls, but definitely mess with the Putin narrative that all is calm and quiet in Russia and the social contract that Putin gets to be a dictator in exchange for keeping life for the average Russian predictable, and keeping the fiction that Russia is a superpower at least vaguely credible.
A reasonable run-down on what’s blown up where recently, in Russia, you can find here:
I’ve uploaded photographs relative to the research institute in Kolomna so you can see exactly how deep in Russia that strike was, if of course it really was a strike.
Sushani raid
Without question the most spectacular “Ukrainian” intervention inside Russia, however, came on Friday, when a group of “Russian nationalists” crossed the border into Bryansk Oblast’, at minimum shots were fired by somebody somewhere, made some video of themselves holding up a flag and calling for Putin’s overthrow, after which they skedaddled scot-free back into Ukraine.
It’s very murky what actually happened. According to Russian state media, these guys were known anti-government terrorists and during this raid a pair of civilians died, a child was shot but doctors later saved his life, hostages were taken and released, and a Russian police car apparently pursuing the “insurgents” hit a road mine and three cops were injured.
The Ukrainians and Kremlin critics, meanwhile, are saying this has “FSB faked attack to stoke public anger” all over it. The way the information has come out in Russina media — hyperventilating grandmothers supposedly eyewitness to the attack yet at the same time conincidentally telling the reporter what a great guy Putin is, images of a shot-up automobile with zero surroundings visible, which confounds geolocators, and a grim-faced Putin all ready with a prepared statement about the sanctity of Russian territory only hours after the attack — really does match standard Russian propaganda techniques, but we really don’t know for sure.
However, an excellent confirmation that something happened and that it was probably the Ukrainians that engineered the operation came from the Russian government critics, who pointed out epic clumsiness and delay in local security response to the border incursion, for instance three hours between first report of unidentified armed men in the village and declaration of a local emergency, failure of any police to show up in the village until the “insurgents” were long gone, and the police car driving onto road mines, notwithstanding multiple citizen phone calls to the local police stations reporting the “insurgents” were laying down mines. Usually, when critics of local Russian government point out stuff like this, there’s a good chance something like that really happened, in my experience that sort of complaint almost never is faked.
Inside Zaluzhny’s brain
The international press in the last few days offered up a nice smorgasbord of factiods that improved our understanding of how the war might go in the multi-month time frame. Der Spiegel, for instance, interviewed an advisor to General Zaluzhny, named of Viktor Nazarov (pictured) who said that yes an offensive is coming but the war is going to be a long one, in his opinion lasting at least into 2024, barring a collapse of the Russian regime. I’m not sure this is the internal view of the Ukrainian army general staff, it might be, but at minimum we can take what Nazarov said as the official Ukrainian message to European countries not fully on board with a long war to get the Russians out of Ukraine.
He also messaged when talks might begin, to wit, from a practical point of view there can be no negotiations before the UAF liberates the Zaporizhia and Kherson regions in toto. That implies a UAF offensive that gets to the Azov Sea, the gates of Mariupol, and the Crimean narrows are in the view of the Ukrainian military leadership, and without doubt political leadership, the minimum preconditions for talks. Some of us *cough* have been predicting this for some time.
Mystery (mostly) solved, long-range UAF strikes less of a head scratcher
For this section I’ve attached a very attractive 2014 image of the weapons system in question shamelessly stolen from the internet.
We now have a leading candidate for at least some of the long-range strikes we couldn’t figure before, because Ukraine had no weapons that shot that far that precisely. It basically turned out as we had been speculating.
According to platforms like War Zone and Defense Express, the Ukrainians have in fact figured out a way to modify their version of the Smerch long-range artillery rocket, which they call the Vilkha-M, to hit targets with a lot more accuracy that the Soviet-level 10–30 meters’ CEP. The specific term used is “with extreme accuracy”, and the named source is an official in Ukraine’s National Association of Defense Industry, an NGO that in peacetime existed to try and promote and sell Ukrainian weaponry, who was speaking at a press club in Washington DC, of all places.
The UAF with Vikha-M can place a 220 kg warhead at a range of 110 km., using GPS guidance and flight correction system using gas jets on the side of the weapon to help it home in. It’s not clear whether this is home-grown tech or imported, but, in my opinion the Ukrainians are fully capable of developing either or both, the question would be resources. Maybe someday a western company will stand up and take credit for saving Ukraine because it sent some GPS guidance systems that had already been in production for some time, and the Ukrainians adapted and installed the systems on their missiles, while the company didn’t do much but make money.
What’s more, the UAF had around 100 of these systems when the war started, production is ongoing, and development is in progress to up the range to 150 km. The longer-range Vikhla-M systems (really missiles) “probably” will be tested in combat during the…wait for it…Spring offensive.
However, the Vikhla-M does not explain the strikes in Crimea, which showed probable UAF missile strike capacity out to 300–400 km., more or less.
The first thing out of Zelensky’s mouth, when the war started, was what?
It appears the Ukrainian media and officials jumping up and down and screaming for months “Thanks for the tourniquets and sleeping bags and HIMARS, very much appreciated, but would you PLEASE SEND MORE AMMO!!” is slowly penetrating through to NATO nations. According to Financial Times, citing EU sources, a group of European states is organizing a joint production project for 155mm artillery shells, analogous, somewhat vaguely, to the pan-european coalition joint program for tanks that will, supposedly and eventually, ramp up tank production.
(BTW I saw a report in Rheinische Post that Rheinmettal is in talks with the Ukrainians to produce Panther tanks, the new kind not the WW2 kind, in Ukraine. Not sure I believe it but let’s see if I can find an image.)
The point here is that even on the official, molasses-slow, procedure-driven, process-obsessed level of European state bureaucracy, they have brought themselves to discuss how to get Ukraine lots more artillery ammo.
Financial Times on the 3rd continued its coverage with a report quoting Ukraine’s (still-in-the-job) Defense Minister saying Ukraine needs 250,000 shells a month to shift the Russians. To me that seems a little high, yes Ukrainian gun crews are pretty practiced but there are probably only about 400–500 155mm artillery systems in all Ukraine, and if you put that many shells through that few tubes you’ll probably burn the barrels out in month, and for sure you’ll burn them out in two months.
Once again I direct your attention to January reports that the US was going to tap into its shell reserves in Israel and release one million to Ukraine. Oviously a million shells can’t be Fedexed to Ukraine overnight, but, now it’s March. To me it’s pretty much a definitive fact, that when the UAF has built up a shell reserve of about a half a million shells, that’s a precondition for the Spring offensive.
Loading the dice in Ukrainian favor
Multiple western news agencies reported the Americans are or will support brigade and higher staff and planning for the UAF, in Wiesbaden Germany. This is the modern version of the wargames we’ve all seen in the WW2 movies where the generals stand around a table and figure out how to plan an operation, and flunkies push little model tanks and infantry figures back and forth across a map. WW2 North Africa campaign image attached.
The real deal will certainly be middle-aged guys in several rooms, also with maps, but with computers and excellent coffee machines and pretty good donuts and snacks, and lieutenants with computer tablets with all sorts of information the general needs to remember, but usually forgets. The Americans are being clear this is a Ukraine-led planning session and it will be up to the Ukrainians to game out their upcoming offensive.
Of course the Ukrainians, what with Americans being in the room, are probably not going to talk too directly about things like the armored exploitation option into Crimea if a brigadier sees an opportunity.
Similar UAF staff training is going on at the brigade- and battalion level in Grafenwoehr, again under US Army auspices. To be clear, this is above and beyond unit gunnery and maneuver training taking place mostly in Germany, and individual soldier training taking place in Britain.
In Ukraine, we have hard evidence of the UAF training up its brigades in combined arms. Attached is a video showing elements of 17th Tank brigade teamed up with 22nd Special Operations battalion a/k/a as the Kyiv Presidential Guard, in peacetime a public duties unit. They’ve been on the line for a while and have a reputation of being good fighters. The only possible reason these two formations would train together is if the top of the UAF saw a need for 17th Tank to be beefed up with skilled infantry.
Also, not sure you want to read into this, but this video appeared of the UAF training water-crossings. Maybe it’s misdirection, and maybe the UAF is thinking about avoiding the obvious land routes Berdyansk and Crimea.
The point of all this practicing and training and planning is, for this upcoming offensive, the UAF will be better-prepared, trained and organized than ever before. Whether that will work out to a significant difference on the battlefield, we shall see. The potential is there, but, my guess is it will come down to how much 155mm ammo the West manages to get to Ukraine before May.
Finally, for those of you who have read this far and understand Ukrainian and Russian, attached is a video of a conflict in an Odessa hotel between a lady apparently trying to order a banquet breakfast, and hotel staff uncomfortable with the customer’s use of Russian, particularly by calling “hryvnas” “rubles”.
This to me is fascinating window into Ukrainian civil society in all sorts of ways: Soviet vs. Western customer service, Ukrainian vs. Russian use in the public space, the Generation Gap, and — my personal favorite — how Odessites see themselves and their city, as opposed to the rest of the world. I offer the video not to pick a side but rather to show how language, ethnicity, social rules and traditions are so shaded and so dynamic, in Ukraine, that definitive analysis from the outside — Western graduate students and pundits, I’m looking at you — is a fool’s errand.
