Eastern Ukraine is close to falling, but Putin now needs a peace, fast
Russian forces have reached the edges of the city of Dnipro, Russia claims. Sitting as it does on the elbow of the Dnepr River, this news would indicate that Russia is now in practical occupation of pretty much all of Trans Dnepr Ukraine, apart from the pocket in which about a dozen brigades (60,000 men) of Ukraine’s best troops are now trapped facing LDNR. Surrounded and cut off from fuel, food and ammunition, this force now has a choice of whether to fight to the last round or to treat for terms.
In Mariupol the Azov Battalion will be given no such choice. With de-nazification front and centre of its war aims we can expect Russia to take no (Azov) prisoners. Azov’s fight to the death, reportedly using civilians as cover wherever it can, is causing the reduction of Mariupol that we are now listening to (but not seeing – most of the film crews are in Kyiv).
With its arrival on the Dnepr Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine is approaching its end, successful in military terms but a disaster by any other measure. Which makes now a good time to think about whether and how the war might end.
Look back in (partial) satisfaction
Before I do that, now also seems like a good moment to reflect on the analysis of a possible war I wrote a month ago. The Ukrainian trope is that Russian forces have performed catastrophically badly. What do the last two weeks tell us about the fighting capacities of Russia’s ground and air forces?
In that analysis I anticipated that Russia’s first step would be to take control of the air, which I thought would take no more than a couple of days, beginning with cruise missile strikes on airfields and infrastructure. That part was 100% correct: Russia’s first move was to hit airfields, airfield fuel depots and aircraft on the ground with a salvo of around a hundred cruise missiles, mostly Kalibrs.
From that point on we have seen two competing narratives. The Ukraine narrative is that the Ukraine Air Force continued to fly, inflicting disproportionate losses on Russian aircraft. The Russian narrative is that Ukraine delivered few or no air attacks, having lost most of its aircraft and drones to the initial attack. Russia’s Ministry of Defence, for example, claims that 89 combat aircraft and 57 helicopters were destroyed in the Kalibr offensive, and that part of the surviving balance retreated to Romania.
Observation tends to show which story is correct. What we can see and hear in all of the interviews and reports broadcast from throughout Ukraine is the almost complete absence of air activity of either side in the background. Ukrainian positions are not devastated by air attack, and nor are Russian ones. Russia’s static column north of Kyiv has sat in the open largely unmolested by aircraft. We can also see President Zelenskiy pleading for a no-fly zone and for the loan of Polish MiG-29s, which combine to suggest that the Ukrainian Air Force has become non-functional.
At the same time, Russia’s air force has been conspicuous by its almost complete absence over the multiple Russian fronts.
Russia’s air force stays well grounded
A handful of informed Western analysts have described problems with the Russian Air Force which were previously unacknowledged (including by me). These include a lack of precision strike weapons (the equivalent of the Hellfire and Brimstone missiles, with 8kg warheads) and JDAMS (250-500kg iron bombs with precision guidance package attached)). We can see evidence of a lack of precision in videos posted by Russia’s Ministry of Defence of bomb strikes in Syria. Here iron bombs are dropped on targets held in drone camera views, and we see repeatedly that they miss by dozens of metres. A few dozen metres matter little in a desert, but a lot in Mariupol, so bomb strikes have been remarkably rare.
Sources also refer to poor co-ordination between air and ground assets, which generates a real fear of blue-on-blue strikes on the ground and accidental shoot-downs of Russian aircraft by their own SAM systems. Unwilling to fly high for fear of their own SAMs, Russian planes would fly low and strike with rockets rather than bombs, but Ukrainian ground forces have been rapidly supplied with MANPADs (man-portable air defence systems, for example Stingers), which can keep close air support at bay if the balance of numbers lies in favour of defence.
These gaps, multiplied by a clear Russian policy of avoiding strikes on civilians as far as possible, appear to have deprived Russia of close air support from both fixed-wing and rotary-wing assets. That is what we are seeing in the limited video reportage – almost no presence of Russian ground attack aircraft over the various fronts, no reports of strikes on Ukrainian logistics in rear areas, and practically none at all on Kyiv.
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Would the missle strike near Poland indicate a willingness on Russia’s part to continue escalations? While Russia has seemingly FUBBAR’d many aspects of their “cleansing” action and underestimated their opponents it doesn’t seem like they’re willing to concede anything just yet. And how does Putin really look at this action? I don’t think he cares what things look like on the ground right now or what it looks like over the next few months. He is looking far into the future and what he believes Russia should be. If he is fighting on a “spiritual” plane, so to speak, there is no predicting what lengths he will go to.
Just the thoughts of an ignorant redneck here. Carry on and thanks for your work here.
One of the things to consider with the poor ground-air coordination is that this is still a civil war. The evidence seems to suggest that the Russians are letting the anti-Kiev Ukrainians take point on most attacks (and concentrating on keeping the logistics open and putting in defense in depth, hence the “stalled” convoys), and they aren’t crazy enough to embed their FACs with the indigs.
Frankly, the best reason for them to have not attacked Kiev is that they want to do it with indigs, and the indigs are all from (and still are in) Eastern Ukraine. Once the cauldron has been collapsed (there’s evidence that Russia is trying to divide it into two or three pieces for defeat in detail) they’ll load them all up and ship them west — unless Z has collapsed by then. Or been told to by his masters.
I think he’s going to take it all. The West, by supplying men (“volunteers”) & materiel are itching for a Gulf of Tonkin incident. They might get it and then it’ll be anybody’s guess where it ends.
As is said in the intro to Schelling’s Arms and Influence, never box an enemy into a corner and cut off their escape route. We’d be wise to heed that advice.
Spiritually speaking, Russia will not stop spreading her errors around the world until the Pope (Benedict or his successor(s), not Francis as he is not the Pope) consecrate Russia to Mary’s Immaculate Heart in union with the bishops of the world.