Ukraine Blog 51 – Russia on the Path to Self-Destruction
Dear friends, family and colleagues,
I have been
away for a while. It mostly had to do with the new job. I’m learning a lot of
new stuff (and I really mean a lot) and it takes time to process. It doesn’t
mean that Ukraine has not been busy with defending the freedom of all of
Europe. It’s also doesn’t mean that Russia ceased it’s path towards
self-destruction. As a matter of fact, over the past few weeks the pace on this
path is increasing exponentially.
To be
honest, on the battlefield Russia is holding on longer than I expected. I
attribute this to two factors:
1. Winter has been unusually mild in
Ukraine. There has been not much snow and ground temperatures have been
consistently above zero. Therefore, the soil is very muddy and as such
Ukrainian mechanized forces can’t execute their now feared combined arms
maneuvers. It doesn’t mean the Ukrainians are not performing battlefield shaping
preparations. Especially key locations in Zaporizhzhia oblast have come under
relentless HIMARS strikes over the past couple of weeks. It’s rumored that the
Ukrainians destroyed the command of the 58th army in Melitopol. This
is the same formation that was responsible for Russia’s 2008 invasion of
Georgia.
Rumor or not, it mirrors what the Ukrainians
did a month before they launched their Kharkiv offensive, where they wiped out
the command of the 20th army in Izium.
Over the past days, HIMARS tactical strikes
have become really intense in Zaporizhzhia. I suspect that as soon as the
ground freezes, the Ukrainians will make a punch here. It’s quite ironic:
Russia hoped for a really cold winter for us to freeze to death, but it’s
actually this warmer weather that prevents a total collapse of the Russian
lines.
2. The second factor is that the
overall commander of the Russian war effort, Sergey Surovikin, is not a
complete idiot, like most of his colleagues. However, where he managed to plug
most of the front with Mobiks and managed to give the Ukrainians quite a hard
time, it appears that he also hit the wall now. Let’s dive into this a bit
more.
Over the
past couple of weeks, the Ukrainians performed two actions that didn’t result
in immediate battlefield gains, but in the background completely shifted the
strategic balance.
1. Apparently, the Ukrainians found a
way to strike Russian ultra-strategic targets deep in Russia. The most
prominent of these targets, are the strategic bomber bases. While a lot of
sources claim the Ukrainians used ancient Soviet TU-141 drones. It think it’s
more likely that the Ukrainians used new indigenously produced low altitude,
high speed drones or that they extended the range of the indigenously developed
Hrim missile (which we discussed earlier during the Saki airbase attack). I had
a careful look at the footage below (which I haven’t seen before) and it looks
like a very fast moving ballistic missile to me
We will probably only know after the war how
the Ukrainians did (twice actually already), but the implications are huge.
We’re not talking about a regular support airbase here. This base holds the tip
of the spear of Russia’s strategic nuclear bomber fleet. China hitting
Barksdale AFB, where America’s B-52’s are located would be the same thing. The
Russians of course immediately downplayed the incident that all missiles were
shot down and everything is under control. However, I’m very sure the
Ukrainians hit something big on Engels air base. I’m thinking about multiple
bombers destroyed or damaged or even command posts destroyed. Why? Because the
Russians moved out no less than 6 Tu-95 Bear bombers to a base in the far East
(ironically called “Ukrainka”)
This means that the Ukrainians managed to do
the unthinkable. To hit back and reduce the capacity of the vehicles that
caused them so much suffering in the winter. The last Russian mass missile
attack on Ukrainians cities has already been well over more than a week ago.
Ukrainian intelligence estimates that Russia only can execute 2-3 more of these
mass missiles strikes. If true, it means that Ukraine for now has won the air
war. Of course it remains to be seen what Russia comes up with (Iranian drones and
missiles), but at least Ukrainian air defenses get better by the day with both
high grade state of the art Western missiles and low grade high effective drone
killers like the German Gepard.
2. Russia finally seems to have hit the
limit in Bakhmut. December has been very intense for the defenders of Bakhmut
and at times, it even looked like Russia made a breakthrough into the city. The
Russians led by the Wagner group launched a massive attack in mid-December and
managed to take a couple of building blocks in the Eastern outskirts of
Bakhmut. However, this happened at the moment, the Ukrainians rotated their
forces. The crack 93th brigade was moved out and replace by at least four fresh
brigades. These brigades (equipped with French VAB armoured personal carriers)
immediately launched counteroffensives that dislodged the Russians from
positions that they fought for since October and where they lost tens of
thousands of troops for. Best summary and predictions of the entire Bakhmut
battle have been from German Twitterer Tendar. Below’s tread is a must.
The sad truth about Bakhmut is that from a
Russian perspective, it’s all politics.
a. For Putin it’s a win-win in the
sense that he can rid of massive amounts of Russian prisoners that form a huge
burden on the federal budget. Like the United States, Russia has a very high
prisoners to population ratio. Tens of thousands per month are dying now. You
have to understand that prisoners in Russia mostly consist of low life
criminals who are addicted to substances. After all, when you’re a real
criminal in Russia, you’re not in jail, but making money.
b. For Wagners chairman Yevgeny
Prigozhin it’s also all about politics. He wants to show to Putin that he can
do what minister of Defense, Sergey Shoigu, fails to do with the regular
military. However, Shoigu is about to slap back at Prigozhin and it all has to
do with the following video, that I think will ultimately cause the end of
Russia’s war in Ukraine (more on the accelerating Kremlin power struggle in the
next blog)
The Wagner soldiers in the video are
complaining about the lack of ammunition (in particular artillery shells). Although
I fully believe Shoigu is more than happy to let Prigozhin and his Wagner group
drown, I believe this is the start of a wider problem of the Russian army. It
was always the question when Russia would run out of ammo, not if. Already in
May there were estimations that Russian could sustain a 40.000 shells per day
use until January 2023 at max. However, it’s extremely difficult to back this
up with some empirical evidence. I always used as a standard metric the 45
kilograms of a standard Russian 152 mm shell x 40.000 x the number of days,
divided by a 1000 (kilo’s to tons). That would mean a consumption of 540.000
tons of ammunition on day 300 (which we passed last week). It turns out some
proper study has actually been performed by the Jamestown Foundation. The
article below is a must read if you’re interested in how much longer the war
will go on:
Ukrainian Strikes Cause Moscow to Re-Think Munitions Supply and Logistics (Part Two) - Jamestown
It turns out I came pretty close with the
estimation based on 152 mm shells, but the Jamestown Foundation did an
excellent job by also including the number of available launchers and the
weight per munition type. Fore example one Smerch rocket is already 800
kilograms. Jamestown did their measurement 5 months into the war. Based on an
initial stockpile of artillery munition of between 1.3 and 1.5 million tons,
Russia after 5 months had expended 735.000 tons. We are now at 10 months. This
would mean that Russia has now reached the full 1.5 million tons. Besides the
Wagner video, there are many observations that support this:
1. The Ukrainians intercept calls where
Russian commanders instruct their artillery batteries to limit the use of
rounds per volley.
2. Ukrainian troops encounter more and
more Russian dud shells (meaning shells who failed to explode
david D. on Twitter: "more and more russian dud artillery shells showing up on social media https://t.co/PJv6hUpbZ3" / Twitter The Russian dud rate was always high, 30
to 40 percent, but is now reported to be over 60 percent.
3. The Russians are now using artillery
shells produced in 2022. The rule with artillery shells is always to use up the
oldest ammunition first. Russian using their newest ammo is not a good sign for
them.
4. In addition, Russian soldiers complain
about the bad quality of the newly produced shells. This is in line with my
expectations. Due to sanctions, critical production components are lacking.
Also, quite a lot of factory workers have fled the country or have been
mobilized as a Mobik. It’s what a lot of people often forget. When you feed
your untrained population to a battlefield meatgrinder, you’re also depleting
the quality of your workforce.
All signs
point towards Russia heading for disaster. If they can’t tackle their artillery
challenges, Russia loses the last component over which they had absolute
battlefield supremacy. In the meantime, Ukraine is able to skillfully replenish
its artillery ammunition via production in Poland, South-Korea and domestic
production of 152 mm shells for the Soviet era tubes. In addition a lot of
things come together now:
1. We are not freezing to death in the
West. Gas reserves are almost 100 percent and the gas price is now below pre
February 24th level. Indian and China are buying Russian oil and gas at rock bottom
discount prices.
2. The Russian rubble, thanks to the
energy price cap, is finally nosediving. Not as fast, but still fast,
considering it’s a non-tradeable currency now.
3. Russia is preparing transform bank
savings into no-recoverable war bonds. In other words, the Russian population
can say bye bye to their savings.
4. Everywhere in Russia shopping malls and
commercial property go up in flames. This is most likely due to the owners not
expecting a return of Western commercial activity. The only way to limit the
damage is to burn the property and reclaim insurance money.
2023 will
be the darkest year in the history of Russia. By now nothing can be stopped to
avoid this. Its population doesn’t realize it yet nor is it able to comprehend
what should be the way forward.
Слава Україні!
Niels
Comments
Post a Comment