Update on operations in Ukraine 16 April 2022
by Michel Goya.
General situation
A spectacular Ukrainian victory with the destruction of the cruiser Moskva. Balanced situation on the different fronts, made up of small attacks on both sides, in particular in the north of the Donbass, and street-by-street fighting in Mariupol, but also increasingly in Kherson. It is now highly unlikely that the Russians will achieve any significant victory before 9 May, except perhaps the capture of Mariupol.
The battle for Donbass has started well with a series of divergent Russian attacks in the Yzium region towards Barvinkove and Sloviansk (a Russian effort with the equivalent of what the French Army could mobilise), converging around the Severodonetsk pocket (Severodonetsk, Rubizhne, Lysyschansk and further south Popasna) and direct from the city of Donetsk on the N15 road. Attacks are always limited, one or two groups at most per axis, with artillery and air support (200 sorties/day in the Donbass) but progress is slow. The fastest progress was made in the direction of Barvinkove at a rate of 1 km/day, and already the advanced "tip" from Yzium (20 km?) was harassed along the axes.
Covered in front of Kharkiv, which was severely hit by artillery, by the 6th Army, the Russian forces fed the attack zones via the Belgorod base with the battle groups recovered from the armies engaged in the battle of Kiev. In reality, there was no real Russian operational pause and little change in methods. While the weather was bad and rather handicapped Russian air activity and support, the Ukrainians received new equipment and improved the defence of urban bastions.
Ukrainian forward defence was coupled with action in the rear. Ukrainian special forces probably destroyed a railway bridge at Shebekino in Russia, between Belgorod and Yzium, and possibly another bridge in the Yzium area.
South and the Battle of Mariupol
Situation unchanged on the Donbass-South line. Russian forces continue to advance slowly into Mariupol. The 503rd Ukrainian Naval Infantry Battalion managed on 13 April to escape from the Iliych factory in the north of the city to the central pocket of resistance held by the 36th Naval Infantry Brigade and the Azov Regiment. Two other small pockets resisted in the west of the city and in the port (12th National Guard Brigade). An estimated 3,000 to 3,500 Ukrainian fighters remain. The Russian 150th Motorised Division, the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade, the Chechen National Guard force and the DNR forces amount to perhaps 10,000 men in total.
This represents a low density for a city of 166 square kilometres, implying a high degree of intermingling of forces inside and perhaps a low degree of sealing of the outer perimeter, especially anti-aircraft. This may explain why Ukrainian forces were able to be supplied at night by Mi-8s (3 of which were reportedly shot down) at very low altitude, as evidenced by images of the use of Western equipment provided after the start of the siege. The Russian forces always compensated for the lack of infantry in volume and quality with firepower, ravaging the city for little effect on entrenched forces. The city was reportedly hit for the first time in the centre on 15 April by Tu-22M3 strategic bombers with FAB 3000 (3 ton) smooth bombs.
If the outcome of the battle cannot be doubted, its date remains very hypothetical. For the same order of magnitude of forces, the two battles in Grozny lasted eight weeks in 1995 and six weeks in 1999-2000. It is therefore not impossible that the city will be taken by the fateful date of 9 May.
Southwest and the Battle of Kherson
The area held by Russian forces north of the Dnieper was the focus of the main Ukrainian offensive effort with 4 manoeuvre brigades, including the 28th Mecha from Odessa, certainly with the intention of capturing Kherson and penetrating the occupied area south of the river. The capture of Kherson by the Ukrainians would be a great victory as it would place the 4 Russian brigades north of the city and the Dnieper in a difficult position, with only Kakhovska as a crossing point and link to the occupied zone. The Russian forces in Kherson, the remnants of the 7th Airborne Division, the 20th Motorised Division and the reconnaissance forces of the 22nd Corps attempted several unsuccessful clearing attacks. The 80th Air Assault Brigade (Ukr) pressed north to capture the Molidhizne road junction. A strike on a Russian depot in Chornobayevka (west of Kherson) destroyed several dozen combat vehicles.
The destruction of the cruiser Moskva
The cruiser Moskva sank on 14 April after an attack by Ukrainian forces from Odessa on the 13th. The Russian discourse officially announced an accidental loss, which was not necessarily more glorious, before reacting as if it was indeed an attack (television talk, retaliatory strikes on an anti-ship missile workshop). The Ukrainian victory is not in doubt. It was a great success, demonstrating Ukrainian technical (the Neptune missile is an ingenious improvement on the Kh-35) and tactical (the first combination of armed drones and long-range anti-ship missiles) intelligence in this war.
The Moskva was an old ship with several design flaws (vulnerable aluminium structure, incomplete radar coverage and poor close-in defence) but it was a powerful anti-ship and anti-aircraft firing platform equipped with the S300 system. This is probably why (the range of the S300 is less than that of the Neptune) it was in the firing envelope of recent but well-known anti-ship systems. The Russians thus offered the Ukrainians the destruction in combat of the largest warship since 1945, the precedent of the same type being the Argentinean cruiser of lesser tonnage General Belgrano in 1982. The symbolic success is of strategic importance.
At the operational level, with the destruction of the Alligator class amphibious ship at Berdiansk on 24 March by ballistic missile strikes and the damage to one or two other Ropucha class ships, not to mention the Raptor patrol boat hit by two anti-tank missiles near Mariupol, this represents heavy losses for a Black Sea fleet of 21 major surface ships. The casualty figures for the 480-strong Moskva crew are not known at this stage, but as with any major vessel destroyed, they can be considerable. The Russians may have lost more soldiers in battle in a single day than France has in thirty years.
The Black Sea Fleet still controls the high seas against a small Ukrainian navy that quickly ceased to exist and thus access to Odessa or Mykolaev, but the coast west of Crimea is, if not forbidden, at least very dangerous with the presence of 6 launchers and perhaps 70 Neptune missiles, not to mention the Western anti-ship armaments that are being delivered. Amphibious operations are now excluded from this side. In any case, the naval infantry brigades dedicated to this mission have already been engaged as infantry units in the fighting in Kherson and Mariupol. One can even consider that the Black Sea fleet, whose access to the Bosphorus is currently forbidden by Turkey, is trapped in Sevastopol as a "living fleet" where it is not excluded that the Ukrainian forces could strike it again in an imaginative way.
