L'organisation de la défense russe
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
The Russian defence organisation
The area held by the Russians north of the Dnieper is a pocket 20 to 50 km wide across the river and 150 km from Kherson to Vysokopillya, the northernmost small town, or about 5,000 km2 and the equivalent of a French department. This bridgehead forms both a protection zone for the conquered area south of the Dnieper and Crimea, but also a possible base for future Russian offensives, especially towards Odessa. It is therefore strategically very important.
The Kherson front was held by the 49th Russian army which had come from the Caucasus via the Crimea. It relieved the 58th army which had conquered the area at the very beginning of the war. The 49th Army normally comprised only two motorised infantry brigades (34th and 205th) and the 25th deep reconnaissance brigade (Spetsnaz), as well as its support brigades and a logistics brigade. On arriving in the area in March, the 49th Army took under its command the 22nd Corps with the 126th Coastal Defence Brigade, the 127th Reconnaissance Brigade (both substantially organised as motorised brigades) and the 10th Spetsnaz Brigade, as well as the 7th Division and the 11th Air Assault Brigade. It was reinforced by the small 20th Motorised Infantry Division (two regiments) from the 8th Army and possibly an independent brigade (4th), and especially the 98th Airborne Division. In case of emergency, the 49th army could be reinforced by some brigades or regiments of the 58th army at rest in the Melitopol region, 200 km from Kherson and with the risk of clearing an already sparse Zaporijjia front.
As always in this conflict and on both sides, we find ourselves with a hodgepodge of disparate units: army headquarters, army corps, divisions or autonomous brigades, motorised brigades and regiments, brigades and airborne or air assault regiments. In absolute terms it is a fairly powerful force with a priori 14 brigades or combat regiments divided between the direct command of the 49th Army in Kherson and that of the 22nd Army Corps further north in Nova Kakhovka-Tavriisk, the other crossing point on the Dnieper. In theory, this fighting force had more than 20,000 men. In reality, many units had been committed to the area since the beginning of the war and were at best 50% of their potential. Newly arrived units, such as the 98th Airborne Division, were less worn.
As elsewhere in Ukraine, the Russian strength on the Kherson front was long-range strike power. The 49th Army has its two artillery brigades (self-propelled artillery, multiple rocket launchers and anti-aircraft), the three divisions have their artillery regiment and each independent brigade has a battalion. It can be estimated that the Russians have about 200-250 different artillery pieces that allow the MRLs to strike from behind the Dnieper up to 20-30km beyond the front line in the depth of the Ukrainian position. Most howitzers can support the defence of the southern compartment from the south of the Dnieper, while they must be in the north to support the central and northern compartments, which means taking shell trucks across the river. The Russian forces also have the capacity for several dozen daily sorties of attack aircraft and helicopters over their area.
We are therefore in the presence of a defence network of 14 manoeuvre units of 800 to 1,500 men who hold a front of 150 km, i.e. about ten kilometres for a thousand men. This is a fairly low density which is compensated for by a terrain that is generally favourable to the defence and which has now been developed for several months. The defence is organised in two large sectors cut by the river Inhulets.
Kherson is defended in front on a line of contact of 40 km from the coast to the Inhulets and 25 km deep. The Russians based their defence on several successive lines organised on the chessboard of villages transformed into support points spread every 2-3 km. The sector is only crossed by three penetrating roads that go from Mykolayev and Snihourivka to Kherson, one of which, in the centre, is quite narrow. Outside these roads, there are small roads and open fields, but it is not clear whether they are suitable for armoured vehicles.
The Nova Kakhovka sector is a rough rectangle of 50km by 100km backed up to the south and west by the Inhulets River, with the small town of Snihurivka as an inflection point and Russian bridgehead across the river and a more open space from Ivanivka to the Dnieper. The Russian defence is based on the Inhulets and the small towns along it, and then on another chessboard of villages less dense than in the south, at a rate of one every 5km. The Ukrainian entry point to this compartment is the Davydiv Brid-Ivanika couple on the Inhulets from where the only roads leading to the Dnieper towards Nova Kakhovka leave.
To sum up, the Russian foothold was made up of a series of dozens of support points for battalions or companies supported by powerful artillery, to the south of the Dnieper for the Kherson sector and to the north for the Nova Kakhovka sector, with all that this implied in terms of logistical flows. The terrain was very flat and open. Any important manoeuvre involving combat vehicles was therefore quite easy to carry out from the ground or the sky, and could be hit within ten minutes by artillery or aerial fire. The open terrain, divided into a few large, narrow, straight axes, is also a perfect terrain for anti-tank missiles. In the background, the Dnieper is a considerable obstacle, impossible to cross at its complex and otherwise very wide mouth. It can only be crossed by taking Kherson (300,000 inhabitants before the war) or Kakhovka-Tavriisk (100,000 inhabitants), which can constitute solid bastions. Although bridges over the Dnieper are rare, the Russians have two bypasses along the river to the north and south.
Ukrainian opportunities and challenges
The Ukrainian command has an equally disparate set of forces. The 241st Territorial Brigade, a small naval infantry marching brigade and the 28th Mechanised Brigade faced the Russian southern compartment. A second grouping of three manoeuvre brigades (36th Naval Infantry, 14th Mechanised and 61st Motorised), a territorial brigade (109th), the 17th Independent Tank Battalion and a militia battalion faced the Russian forces in the central compartment. The northern compartment was approached by the 108th Territorial, the 63rd Mechanised and the 60th Motorised. There were also two reserve groups, the first with two territorial brigades (123rd, 124th) in Mykolaev, the second in Kryvyi Rhi a few dozen kilometres north of the front with the 21st National Guard Brigade, especially the 5th Armoured Brigade.
The Ukrainian command, like that of the Russians, would gain by reorganising its forces into coherent divisions grouping more homogeneous brigades. This will undoubtedly be done as soon as it is possible to prepare forces further back.
In total, the Ukrainians field 15 brigades or their equivalent. These Ukrainian brigades are rather less worn out than the Russians and generally have a higher strength (around 2,000 men, sometimes more) but the ratio of forces is not very advantageous. Six of these fifteen brigades are composed of territorial and national guardsmen who are rather lightly equipped and, above all, much less supervised and trained than a manoeuvre brigade. This leaves nine manoeuvre brigades and the 1st special forces brigade. This is not much for 150 km of front.
The Ukrainian artillery was distributed among the units at the rate of one battalion per manoeuvre brigade, with no doubt the reinforcement of the brigade of the Southern Region Command. Its equipment was similar to that of the Russians, but of lesser volume (around 150 pieces) and with fewer shells. The Mykolaev sector also includes almost all the helicopters available to the Ukrainians and a squadron of Bayraktar TB2 armed drones, which are difficult to use in a sky that is heavily defended by the Russian anti-aircraft brigades. The big news is the increasing arrival of Western artillery, disparate, but overall with greater accuracy and sometimes greater range than Russian artillery. The HIMARS multiple rocket launcher battery in the Voznesensk area is capable of accurate strikes provided intelligence is available over the entire Russian zone and even south of the Dnieper.
As on the other Ukrainian fronts, but perhaps even more so than elsewhere because of the openness and visibility of the Dnieper basin's field of operations, it is difficult to concentrate resources without being quickly hit, and this up to several dozen kilometres beyond the line of contact. This considerably limits the possibilities of manoeuvre. Here, as elsewhere in Kharkiv, it would be possible for the Ukrainians to seek to reverse the long-range firepower ratio with Western assistance first before launching large-scale attacks. This may take months, assuming it is possible.
Failing that, if the Ukrainian command still wants to recover the Kherson area as soon as possible, there are two possibilities.
The first is to try to achieve a general weakening of the enemy's position through large-scale harassment and to sterilise any offensive capacity (Russian objective) or to impose a withdrawal (Ukrainian objective) in the manner of what happened around Kiev in March. This harassment consists of a series of ground raids by small combat units on foot or in vehicles that infiltrate the enemy's position to cause damage or by a multitude of precise strikes (artillery, drones, helicopters, aircraft) on identified targets. However, this mode of action requires a lot of actions, and therefore a lot of means, to hope to obtain an effect that is otherwise rather random and rarely rapid. To put it plainly, the Ukrainians would have to strike the Russian position day and night with all their precision weapons and attack the entire line every night with dozens of commandos to make life unbearable for the Russians beyond the Dnieper after several weeks. The Ukrainians have neither the means nor the time to achieve this. This may come later, but for the moment it is not the case.
The second, which is incompatible with the first, if we have the appropriate means, is to create spaces for manoeuvre by momentarily neutralising the enemy's firepower, by means of an effective counter-battery or the destruction of logistics, as well as the interdiction of the sky over a given space by the concentration of anti-aircraft batteries on several layers, then by 'encircling' a target area (cutting off bridges and roads to possible reinforcements), neutralising the defence with shorter range fire (mortar-direct fire) and finally by brutally attacking the position with one or two battalions. The conquered area, usually a village, is then immediately organised defensively to meet counter-attacks. This is the attack box method used by the Russians in the Donbass, except that the Ukrainians cannot ravage villages or towns with their artillery before attacking them. Unlike the first method, where one hopes to see an effect emerge from a single blow by accumulating small independent actions, this method involves acting in sequences of blows, each blow depending on the previous result. In other words, it is a question of intelligently hammering the front by creating pockets of a few tens of square kilometres that will eventually make the zones untenable for the enemy on pain of encirclement. Pockets joined together then become zones of hundreds of square kilometres and from zone to zone one can thus advance to the final objective, in this case the Dnieper for the Ukrainians.
To do this, in the absence of a more marked numerical superiority, there was no other solution than to play on a better economy of forces by bringing together the brigades' artillery battalions in one or two large support groups 20 km away and by grouping under the same command five of the nine manoeuvre brigades facing a single compartment: facing Kherson in the south, in the centre in the region of the Davydiv Brid bridgehead or on the northern limit. By remaining on the defensive elsewhere and even accepting losses in areas of secondary interest, it would be possible to hope to advance village by village by a continuous hammering of battalion attacks, perhaps with occasional acceleration effects if the advances encircled Russian units and pushed them back. Of course this process will not happen without a Russian reaction, through reinforcement of the sector, perhaps major counter-attacks, or simply by attacking again in the Donbass and thus putting the Ukrainian forces under stress with the obligation to come and reinforce the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk sector.
If the series of Ukrainian attacks eventually meet strong resistance, or if they reach the outskirts of Kherson, which will require a reconfiguration of the Ukrainian forces into 'urban combat' mode, the supporting artillery grouping must be able to switch very quickly with two manoeuvre brigades to another point of attack on the front. If it is not possible to launch large attacks, it is necessary to multiply small actions, whether they be attacks or lateral manoeuvres. The main thing is to keep the initiative. At this price, the Ukrainian forces can only hope to reach the Dnieper by the end of August. Taking Kherson or crossing the river elsewhere will be other challenges, but the approach of long-range artillery to the river would open up new opportunities and would already be a major victory. But it will be very difficult.
