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Ukraine: What’s Happening, What Might Be Next
This post is intended to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive, as for instance BDB’s poll on support for weapons/troops for Ukraine.
What’s Happened
The MSM has been saturated with news of a hurricane that might be blamed on Republicans somehow, and a pipeline explosion that might be blamed on anyone, or sheer incompetence, depending on your favorite theory. So the operational details of what’s been happening in Ukraine after the big breakthrough East of Kharkiv may have disappeared unless you’ve been specifically tracking them (I have). So, a quick recap of the last couple of weeks:
Ukraine went into a short operational pause in the Kharkiv / north Luhansk area, presumably to resupply and reorganize.
Russia kept banging away on the Donetsk front, making little progress and continuing to lose troops and equipment.
Ukraine kept banging away in the Kherson area west of Dnipro, also making little apparent progress and expending a lot of HIMARS and other ammo blowing up bridges and Russian supply dumps and headquarters.
Things started moving quickly again last week. In the northeast, the Ukrainians managed to surround the town of Lyman, a rail and road hub. There were between 500 and 5,000 Russians and proxy troops trapped there, depending on who you believe. Some or most of the Russians may have made it out, losing a lot of equipment. The final retreat, mostly by LPR proxy troops, apparently became a slaughter by Ukrainian artillery, mines, and light recon forces. There’s plenty of video evidence of the latter out there, don’t go looking unless you’re ready for it. I’ll drop a link to a text-only report by an American volunteer in one of the recon teams, but you still don’t want to read it near meal or bedtime.
After the Lyman episode, the Russian front north of there is being pushed back daily. Some of this may be planned/controlled withdrawal, some seems to be a collapse. The Ukrainians now appear to control the important road between the towns of Svatove and Kreminna in Luhansk oblast.
Over the weekend, the Kherson front suddenly erupted. The Ukrainians punched in between several towns in the northeast of the oblast, west of a large reservoir on Dnipro, and have pushed the Russians back some tens of kilometers. The advance appears to be continuing. As of today, the Russians abandoned another portion of that front (Davydiv Brid) to avoid a possible envelopment. Again, this appears to be some combination of collapse and planned withdrawal.
Both of these fronts are moving daily, best followed in real time. A sampling of reporting sites: Most speculative, kinda conservative, really conservative. These are all more-or-less the Ukrainian view. For Russian side reports, try here.
Some of the ‘mobiks’ from the chaotic Russian mobilization have appeared at the front. Mobik prisoners have been taken, and the dead recovered. There are video reports and call intercepts reporting mobiks being dropped off along the front with little or no supplies or communications.
What Might Happen
A pattern of Ukrainian operations is emerging. They are pushing recon/sabotage teams in between Russian-occupied towns and strongpoints, followed by light mechanized forces heavily armed with anti-armor weapons and backed with artillery and rocket fire. These threaten to envelop a major position, leading the Russians to fall back to protect their flanks, or potentially become surrounded. For what it looks like from the POV of the scouts, this series of reports from the same volunteer I linked above gives a sample.
The UA is managing this because the Russians can no longer man a continuous line at the front. This implies that the larger numbers of casualty reports for Russia are credible. It’s also visible that some of Russia’s most elite formations have been shredded (‘heavily degraded’ is apparently the term of art) in the process. It also makes some ‘sense’ of the reports of untrained mobiks being dropped off with little support along the front. These poor [CoC] are being used as human trip wires to slow down the penetration by Ukrainian scouts and light forces.
The Russians left the mobilization too late to assemble a credible, trained, and equipped reserve force. They are being used as cannon fodder to delay Ukraine. Local Russian reserves have apparently been committed and defeated in Kharkiv/Luhansk and Kherson. This suggests Ukraine can continue to advance.
On the other hand, the fall mud season (rasputitsa) is beginning, which will slow everything down. Recent videos have shown muddy but still firm secondary roads in the north (Kharkiv/Luhansk), but there’s been enough rain that it’s likely armor would now bog down off-road. Roads in the south (Kherson) appear to be dry still.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Ukrainian attempt to punch much deeper into Luhansk, probably towards the key logistics center of Starobilsk, before the mud really sets in.
There are recurrent rumors of Ukraine preparing a third offensive, this one to punch South towards Melitopol and then Crimea. I haven’t seen any actual evidence of such, including from those who are buying up satellite photos. And it’s just what I’d spread around if I were the Ukrainians, to convince the Russians to keep reserves there while the other fronts collapse. But I could be wrong…
Published in Foreign Policy
Let them. But we should keep out of it. It is two bad guys fighting each other.
LOL. Zalensky and the entire kleptocratic cabal ruling Ukraine are ruthless autocrats.
Ukraine is fighting to remain free of Putin’s tyranny. That is a moral enterprise.
Autocrat? He was elected with >70% of the vote in a free & fair election. Only Russian propaganda considers him an autocrat.
Narrows eyes — can’t tell if I’m just not getting the joke.
71 percent !
Boundaries like borders and a commitment to nation-states?
I don’t think anybody is talking about making them Ukrainian in the same sense that Russians (and Soviet Russians) used to talk about getting people Russified (or Sovietized, depending on which way the political winds were blowing). They want the people living permanently in Ukraine to be citizens of Ukraine, of course, but if that’s oppression, then there is hardly any non-oppression to be found.
If, on the other hand, they want them to stop using the Russian language in public, and are prohibiting publication in Russian in the heavy-handed way the Russians used to prohibit Ukrainian publications, that is not so good.
I think you should care a lot more about respecting boundaries. And who knows, with your support Ukraine might be able to restore its boundaries even faster than otherwise.
A world in which aggressive dictators cannot run roughshod over countries that want closer relationships with ours is important to us. I’m glad it’s not yours to decide what is important to us.
That’s a serious accusation to be making, especially without evidence.
Zelensky won a free and fair election with 71 percent of the vote, despite having a background in comedy, not politics.
Compare that to Putin, who was a KGB agent under the Soviet regime.
And Zelensky’s comedy was a show about taking down corrupt officials in Ukrainian government.
That’s called freedom of expression, something they have little of in Putin’s kleptocracy.
The Russian military had intended to order 200,000 bullet proof vests and 500,000 winter uniforms from Turkish manufacturers. But the Turks rejected the purchase requests from the Russian military.
This could be a tough winter for Russian troops, don’t you think?
I certainly hope so. I do believe that the Russians are waiting for General Winter to weigh in, given the shambles of late Summer and the reverses of the Fall. If Russia intends to put conscripts in the rear (throughout Russia) to free up deployable units ahead of schedule, that speaks of a sustained winter offensive. As it is, they seem to be putting them into Ukraine as ballast, adding sandbags to a decaying levee. So perhaps it’s both, but it means that despite local power, Russia may be fairly desperate for how to not lose (much more of) what they’ve gained,in the short term, as well as seeking to prepare a larger strike for later.
Winter will stabilize lines, and will be kind to neither side. I hope that Russia’s supply and logistics problems (sourcing and transporting/deploying) continue to throw large multipliers into the odds against them.
I don’t think that Russia’s nominal Winter capability is all Potemkin, but I doubt that it extends beyond several purpose-focused units, i.e., those who would have been prepared for a potential action around Keralia and Finland.
I’m waiting for Colonel Douglas MacGregor to weigh in on this. LOL !!
General Winter may have a frosty reception for the Russian Army b/c of the “a wall of lies …” and all the corruption- it seems many winter uniforms are “missing”:
That one. I can see why the Ukrainians felt the need, but still.
I don’t understand the need to make one side all good, so they can do no wrong, and the other side evil, so they can do no good. Life is more complicated, no country is all good or all evil, or only does good, or only does wrong.
Here he is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuwhAFygmJs
On a platform of making peace with Russia – ie implementing Minsk II. We may, or may not, think Minsk II is a good thing, but that’s what the people voted for.
He didn’t do that – for a number of reasons, not all of them his fault.
You are quite right, Zafar.
And Zalensky has done none of the things he said he would do because he is a puppet, first of the kleptocrat oligarchs of Ukraine and now the kleptocrat autocrats in Washington.
And what would you call someone whose SBU, i.e. KGB sibling, carries out political murder on dissidents other than a thug.
Putin didn’t want peace- takes 2 to tango. Putin wants what Churchill at Yalta said about Stalin’s peace desires – a peace of Poland & a peace of Czechoslovakia and a peace of…..
Putin wanted Ukraine permanently out of NATO and with a federal structure that protected the rights of the Russophone minority.
Argle Bargle doesn’t address that.
It makes no sense to blame Zelensky when it was Putin who invaded Ukraine.
Please provide supporting evidence for your contention that, like Churchill reportedly said about Stalin at Yalta almost 80 years ago, it can NOW be said that “Putin wants … a peace of Poland & a peace of Czechoslovakia and peace of …”.
So Putin should have waited for Zelnsky to invade Donbas and Crimea as he was mustering troops to do?
Donbas and Crimea were stolen from Ukraine by Putin in 2014.
It’s clear that Ukraine is in the right and Putin is the aggressor who needs to be defeated or else Putin’s murderous aggression will have been rewarded.
Donbas and Crimea broke away because your wonderful, great Ukrainian Nazi friends started slaughtering Russians. Why are you on the side of such mass murders and thugs?
Fall mud season in Ukraine makes everything but paved roads impassable. It’s a slog even to walk as mud gloms onto your boots and grows and grows. Combat will grind to a halt soon. But in a couple months, the ground will be frozen solid and combat will pick up again.