Ukraine Blog 44 – Ukraine just shaped West Point’s Curriculum

Dear friends, family and colleagues,

I will jump straight to it: if you want to know what the curriculum of West Point will look like for the next 50 years, Ukraine just showed it. We are going back to a good old fashioned battlefield update. What we have been seeing (and what we will be seeing) over the past couple of days is a complete rout and disintegration of the Russian army. Things are already dramatic, but I can assure you: this is only the start!

Currently I’m following the Ukrainian advances and it’s hard to keep up. The Ukrainian army is so fast that they have to take particular things into account. Let’s talk about that later. What Ukraine is currently doing is pushing hard on two separate fronts that are simultaneously disintegrating fast. And we finally start to recognize a pattern. Let me take you to the Ukrainian playbook (forget the Russian one).

When Ukraine decides to conquer a particular front it essentially executes the following steps. I have seen it now in the following fronts: Snake Island, Balakliia, Lyman and Kherson. Especially the Kherson front collapses exactly how I expected to be.

1.       The first step is to HIMARS the sh*t out of hinterland logistics, command and control and ammunition depots for multiple weeks with a relentless campaign of tactical and strategic strikes. These strikes will completely paralyze the frontline units that remain largely untouched in these strikes, but will be deprived of critical supplies. Please read NLWarTracker’s insane Twitter treat on the HIMARS campaign that Ukraine executed in Svatove over the past couple of days

NLwartracker on Twitter: "Last week the 🇺🇦 forces started an unpresedented #HIMARS campaign on the 🇷🇺 supply hub Svatove. In 2 days at least 5 seperate targets where hit in & around Svatove. This town was a supply hub for the Lyman & Kupiansk front.1 strike took out the command of the 144th regiment. https://t.co/VXCCOTTYtd" / Twitter

2.       During the initial phase the Ukrainians are already performing heavy reconnaissance of the Russian lines, looking for that one crucial weak spot. Make no mistake, this is a dangerous job and will occasionally lead to significant Ukrainian casualties as the following footage from a couple of days ago from Kherson shows. Spearheading Ukrainian forces ran into a still capable Russian VDV paratrooper unit here, resulting in a lot of destroyed Ukrainian armor.

🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker on Twitter: "#Ukraine: Ukrainian equipment destroyed by the Russian army in #Kherson Oblast - T-64BV and T-72M1 tanks, YPR-765 and Kozak-2 armored personnel carriers. https://t.co/dMS8a5p79K" / Twitter

3.       Once the crucial weak spot has been found, the Ukrainian army starts a very powerful armored punch with around 15 to 20 tanks and 10 to 15 supporting Armored Personal Carriers. Once the initial line has been pierced, the complete Russian line (weakened by weeks of HIMARS strikes) collapses.

Li Tai Fang on Twitter: "@lucerne_angrm @konrad_muzyka There's no huge frontal assault in Lyman, nor the earlier Kharkiv offensive when Russians talked about a Ukr spearhead of 15 tanks. Ukr surrounded Lyman. Same thing in Kherson. No rush for large frontal assault. Cut off Russian supply lines and let their combat power deteriorate." / Twitter

Emil Kastehelmi on Twitter: "The Ukrainian counteroffensive south-east of Kharkiv has achieved significant success during the last three days. The Ukrainian forces have managed to widen the breakthrough, and are now advancing in the Shevchenkove direction. 1/4 https://t.co/nXFLbKKMIn" / Twitter

This tells me one thing: Ukraine is THE nation to conduct 21^st century warfare. Conducting large tactical/strategic strikes without air superiority in combination with very powerful combined arms assaults is something that only the best armies (and I’m talking Israel, South-Korea and the U.S. here) are capable of. Trust me, as somebody who knows a thing or two about modern combined arms warfare, it’s a privilege to watch.

But it’s not just Ukrainian battlefield brilliance that makes the difference here. Of course, as usual, Russian stupidity helps quite a lot. Quite a lot of channels point out that Putin (like Hitler) took personal command of the battlefield. For once I believe the rumors for one hundred percent, because the Russian decisions on the battlefield doesn’t make sense (even for usually incompetent Russian commanders).

1.       The Russians put all their best remaining troops on the defense of Lyman in northern-Donetsk oblast. This absolutely doesn’t make sense. Those troops should have been busy making defensive lines along the Troit’ske, Svatove, Kreminna line. Now that an awful lot of these troops have been killed in Lyman (I have seen the footage on Telegram. I won’t share it with you), all the remaining flanks into northern Luhansk are open. I expect the Ukrainians to capture all of northern-Luhansk within a week.

2.       The thing that I absolutely don’t understand is that the Russians keep on wasting resources and efforts on Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast. They keep on playing superpower on the walls of Bakhmut, while they are literally losing thousands of square kilometers in Kharkiv, Donetsk and Kherson oblasts. The only reason I can think of why they keep on doing this, is the fact that Putin desperately wants to capture the whole of Donetsk oblast. Trust me: for even a moron of a Russian general, Bakhmut has zero military value.

3.       The Russian soldiers that are being captured right now in Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts complain that they have been in the battlefields for over seven months. Even the Americans in the worst months of the war in Iraq pulled their troops out after a maximum of six months (where most of the times the G.I’s were stationed in large compounds with good facilities like swimming pools and sauna’s).

What’s particularly indicative of the bad Russian situation, is what the Russian TV propaganda (thanks to Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) / Twitter) and Russian Telegram channels show.

Julia Davis on Twitter: "Witness a steady diet of upside-down propaganda fed to the Russians: head of RT claims the West is supposedly trying to "colonize & enslave" Russia and other countries. Without a hint of awareness, she unwittingly describes what Russia is doing to Ukraine and why Ukraine resists. https://t.co/tEEmplPLex" / Twitter

Rarely have I seen such upheaval in the Russian regime ranks: Heads need to roll. Interestingly enough, even after all of this no criticism goes to Putin, but generals like Shoigu and Gerisimov are definitely on the chopping block. It’s only a matter of time before the light of the nation (Putin) will be scrutinized.

It also provides an explanation for the Russian (partial) mobilization. The fact that the lines are collapsing like a house of cards, just illustrates that the Russian high command was aware that the regular Russian forces were on the brink of collapse in Ukraine. I almost feel really bad (but not really) for the Russian paratroopers in Kherson. They are true professional soldiers and their positions are supposed to be rescued by untrained, unmotivated, drunk Mobiks coming from Siberia. The fact that the Russian brought in the Mobiks, shows that they knew how dire their positions were and that they were close to collapse. And it will be incredibly sad for the Russian professional soldiers. They lost tens of thousands of colleagues conquer towns they bomb to rubble to ultimately lose them again to the Ukrainians. I can’t see this ending well on the Homefront.

So is Ukraine completely out of challenges when reconquering territory? Unfortunately not:

1.       On every piece that Ukraine reclaims, civilian control needs to be restored. Many people forget this, but the most horrible thing that happens in war, is that civilians services collapse. Suddenly there’s no place to get medical help, to get a driver’s license or a passport. You can’t leave these jobs to the soldiers. Civilian rule needs to be restored, but you need the very same soldiers to facilitate this: to provide security and to make sure that the civilian police can take over.

2.       The Ukrainian operational tempo is immense. Books will be written about this. I could hardly catch up with the reports of liberated Ukrainian towns on Twitter today. However, quick advances also come with a price: your ground lines of communication (GLOC) become stretched. Every town you liberate need a rear guard for restoration of civilian control/security. They can’t become too stretched out.

3.       Winter is coming. Although I think it will be far more of a problem for the Russians, the Ukrainians need to cope as well. Whereas 1.5 million Russian uniforms reportedly went lost due to corruption:

Visegrád 24 on Twitter: "The Russians have “misplaced” 1.5 million winter uniforms that were about to be send to the Russian soldiers in Ukraine. https://t.co/zydL58OMXO" / Twitter

The Ukrainians need to cope as well with the winter. It’s not only the cold, but also the rains in the autumn are immense. Although I’m pretty confident the Ukrainians will liberate the West bank of the Dnipro river and the whole north of Luhansk oblast before the autumn truly sets in, winter in Ukraine will be harsh, also for the Ukrainian army.

Two points for optimism:

1.       I’m absolutely sure the Ukrainians will conquer all of northern Luhansk oblast within a week. Once this task is completed, winter or not, a lot of interesting targets will fall within HIMARS range. HIMARS doesn’t care about seasons. Thanks to its GPS guidance, it can strike where and wherever it wants. South Luhansk oblast, if not liberated, will experience interesting times.

2.       The guy himself may not realize it yet, but the Ukrainian commander in chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has cemented himself as THE most important military commander of the 21^st century. Not by words, but by deeds. This guy will be commemorated and lectured to the likes of Sun Tzu and Von Clausewitz von Clausewitz many hundreds of years from now. I’m more confident that under his leadership Ukraine can finish the job of reclaiming its territory before the end of the year.

Слава Україні!

Niels