Ukraine Blog 06 - Partisan Warfare and the Southern Front

Dear friends, family and colleagues,

It’s time for a new update. The past few days have been exhausting and yesterday I had to spend a lot of time on verifying and mapping a lot of information. Today I took a day off from work, because I want to professionalize the updates a bit. I’m planning to create a blog to post this content.

So what’s happening on the ground? The Ukrainian defense plan starts to become clear to me. Two regions are becoming of great interest now. And in the sense that a picture starts to emerge there how the future protracted conflict will look like. Those regions are Mykolayiv and Sumy oblasts (provinces). In both oblasts, neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians are in full control. The Russians are present on the main roads and Ukrainian army territorial defense units (TDU) and other volunteer groups roam the countryside. With Western supply NLAW’s and Javelins, the Ukrainian groups are causing havoc on the Russian supply columns, but the Ukrainian army is too weak there right now to fully hold the territory.

Russian troops are abandoning so much equipment there right now, that the Ukrainian army instructed the TDU’s and citizens that in case they come across the larger Russian abandoned equipment (T-80 and T72 tanks and larger artillery) to burn them with Molotov cocktails. The Ukrainian army is simply not able to handle the large amount of abandoned Russian equipment. Burning them with Molotov cocktails is then a really good strategy. You destroy stuff without spending valuable Western anti-tank weapons. The Ukrainians also started to repair some of the equipment that’s valuable to them. The GAZ Tigr (the Russian Humvee) is actually a vehicle that you can use quite well in high mobility situations equipped with soldiers with NLAW’s and Javelins. In Mykolayiv I saw footage of locals burning four 9K22 Tunguska (out of 250 in the Russian army) air defense systems. On the one hand, very good that they destroyed them since they are one of the very few systems supposed to effectively counter the Turkish Bayraktar drones. On the other hand, quite foolish, because Ukraine needs every piece of air defense equipment possible. These would have been excellent tools.

IgorGirkin on Twitter: "Брошенная техника русской армии https://t.co/AdhCImBAIj" / Twitter

In Kyiv the defense is of a different kind. Ukrainian special forces there are very active and they are actively engaging and destroying the elite Russian airborne units (VDV). It’s understandable that Russia positioned them for the fight of Kyiv, but especially they are suffering horrible losses. One of the reasons is the thin armor of the airborne BMD-1, BMD-2 and BMD-3 vehicles (not BMP’s! although they look a bit similar). It’s essential that the Ukrainians kill of many of them as possible, since they are Russia’s most capable troops.

Surprisingly the Ukrainian air force was still in the air yesterday and were even performing close air support missions with their SU-24 and SU-25’s. Never expected that. This really is against all odds and shows Russia still doesn’t have full air superiority.

A couple of updates ago I spoke about the huge equipment reserves that they have in their possession. Yesterday I saw a video from the Far-Eastern military district where they were already loading huge trains with such equipment. This is much sooner than I expected. What I also noticed is that the equipment they put on the trains is already the old stuff. I saw ZSU-23 mobile anti-aircraft guns being loaded on a train. They were supposed to be decommissioned five years ago. It shows that Russia is really losing a lot of equipment. 

IgorGirkin on Twitter: "Хабаровск, 10 ч назад https://t.co/m8AsXoVauo" / Twitter

In addition there are big rumors that Russia will declare martial law today. This means that all men aged 18-50 can be drafted in the army. That would mean 20 million troops! If that’s true, it’s an indication that Putin indeed goes all in. The problem is, that you will have troops with even less training and motivation (I would say the larger part would have none at all) and you will have to equip them with that old stored equipment from the sixties and seventies. If Russia really start to send these type of units into battle you will see a massacre among Russian soldiers, very reminiscent of the stories of the battle of Stalingrad, where one soldier got the rifle and the other the bullets.

On the southern front the Russians keep making progress. The troops there seem to show a reasonable level of professionalism. Over the past two days, they took Kherson. The Russian infantry force showed a reasonable professionalism in maneuvering, posturing and tactical operation. This led them being able to take the city with little damage and no need to level the city with the MLRS’s. Why are Russian troops performing better here?

1.       Perhaps weather conditions at the Black Sea and the terrain are more favorable.

2.       Perhaps it’s because they restored the water supply to Crimea (which Ukraine cut off in 2014) and it would mean that some Russian troops actually achieved something meaning full for at least a couple of Russian civilians = morale boast.

3.       Perhaps it’s just the case that not all Russian troops seem to be demotivated and incompetent. Weird thing is that I didn’t expect this unit to show reasonable good standards.

However, it’s also possible that the Ukrainians more or less gave up on Kherson, because as I explained at the start of the update, the attention now is in neighboring Mykolayiv oblast. The terrain is much more favorable for partisan like defense and results are already being made there.

Then also on the Southern front, yesterday night, there was the attack on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Everybody cried that millions would die, because of a new Chernobyl. I can’t emphasize this enough: even if you want to create a new Chernobyl, that would be very hard to recreate it and for the following reasons:

1.       The accident in Chernobyl was caused because of very specific conditions. You had fuel rods that were uncontrollable and in a sealed component of the reactor and were burning down the nuclear fuel (meltdown) and there was no way for the crew to control this. The pressure was building up enormously and you had essentially a giant pressure cooker that said kaboom.

2.       A nuclear reactor by itself is concealed in a very heavy concrete shell. This shell is designed to withstand for example earthquakes and very severe weather conditions. Even when you don’t shut down a reactor (so it remains in energy producing mode), you can fire multiple tanks shells at it from point blank range and the likelihood of a new Chernobyl would still be low. Even in the event that a shell would penetrate the reactor and it will start leaking, Zaporizhzhia would be screwed, but not the rest of Europe.

3.       A far bigger risk for any high increase of radiation would have been a hit on the spent nuclear fuel that’s stored outside the plant than a hit on the reactor itself

So don’t worry, we will all be safe in any military operation to take a nuclear powerplant. It of course totally doesn’t legitimize Russian actions and still shows how reckless they are.

I would expect the southern front to be still the most dangerous at the moment and the Russians will likely continue to make progress there. For the rest of Ukraine: they Russians need to keep significant resources in place for the sieges of Kharkiv and Mariupol. Ukrainian civilians and the defenders are paying a very heavy and horrible price for this, but there sacrifice will not be in vain. The longer they can keep the Russians busy (and inflicting losses on them), the more time Ukraine has to take on the supply columns and that will eat away the Russian morale.

Best regards and "Slava Ukraini!"

Niels