Ukraine - Russia Conflict
- Thread starter randomradio
- Start date
Seems like one of the stupid consequences of this stupid war is that Russia was able to send as many assets as it wanted but without the people to support/defend them. Now most of those assets are either destroyed or wearing Ukrainian colours. A course in idiocy if ever there was one.For fanboys who don't seem to understand why there isn't (and WILL NOT be) a counter offensive to stop Ukrainian push maybe this will help a bit.
It's been nothing but crickets on this thread from pro-Russian fellas.
Destruction of a moving target in the Kherson region
Goodbye.
Last edited:
Surprise surprise, people are not stupid.
curiosityguide.org
Russia Is Struggling to Get Reinforcements to the Front Line After Recent Ukrainian Counteroffensive
The recent Ukrainian counteroffensive has resulted in Russia being unable to get reinforcements up front due to the recent Ukrainian counteroffensive.
curiosityguide.org
L’ art opératif soviétique à l’épreuve de la guerre en Ukraine – 1. Udar sur Dniepr
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Soviet operative art in the test of war in Ukraine - 1. Udar on Dnieper
Soviet operative art (SOA) appeals to military historians and strategists, as does the generally original and rich Russian thinking. Its principles were established by a small group of veteran officers from Russia's wars with the Soviet Union in the early 20th century who set out to analyse the conflicts of the industrial age. In a consensus, they established that modern wars involving large masses and all the resources of nations could hardly be won in a few large 'decisive' battles, sometimes only one, but required a long distribution of effort in space and time.
It was the organisation of this distribution of tactical efforts to achieve the strategic politico-military objective, a situation they obviously did not invent, that they called 'operative art'.
In this interwar period, the problem was that of the continuous front, resulting from the considerable increase in firepower over the previous decades, while the rest, the movement or circulation of information, had remained unchanged for centuries. When you have to face a large amount of firepower on foot and without protection, breaking through the enemy's defences and sometimes even just reaching them becomes difficult. The only option is to bypass the enemy. But when the armies are gigantic and occupy all the space, this bypass also becomes impossible and this gives the trench lines of the Great War.
The AOS was mainly based on the solutions tested in 1918 on the Western Front by combining the German and French methods. The former consisted of combining surprise, firepower and assault troops to break the front with a direct attack, and then exploiting the breakthrough in depth by infantry divisions. The Germans sought to win the war as quickly as possible by the most powerful attacks of this type. The French method, on the other hand, relied on a high degree of motorisation to distribute forces along the frontline very quickly, which allowed them first to seal off enemy breakthroughs and then to organise a series of attacks that were smaller in scale than those of the Germans but twice as fast to mount. In the end, the fast French lateral manoeuvre won out over the slow German axial manoeuvre.
Tukhachevsky, Svetchin, Isserson and others therefore imagined a combination of the two methods, taking advantage of the rapid progress of motorised vehicles and also of the means of communication. The ideal offensive was therefore a large direct attack by surprise on a wide front and the greatest possible depth in order to provoke a shock (Udar) and the dislocation of the enemy's position. In absolute terms, especially for Mikhail Tukhachevsky, everything must arrive at the same time or at least as quickly as possible in the enemy's position, 'flying artillery', paratroopers in vertical assault, manoeuvre groups infiltrated into the depths, artillery, armoured attack columns, etc., in order to obtain its dislocation. Since a single 'udar' was not usually enough to achieve the strategic objective, it was necessary, especially for Svetchin, to multiply these shocks in order to keep the initiative until victory.
The designers of the AOS also tried to impose the idea of a purely military 'operative level' necessary for the implementation of the operative art, in reality mainly a 'no entry' sign for politicians. This did not protect them from the purges, and their ideas were only really implemented with the spectacular victories of 1943 to 1945 against the Germans and the Japanese, which became the undisputed references. Since the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet/Russian army is still trying to reproduce Operation Bagration, which destroyed a German army group in Belarus in the summer of 1944.
Subsequent developments are always integrated into the model, including the use of nuclear weapons, which is first envisaged as a preliminary "artillery preparation" and then as a threshold that must not be crossed. It is worth noting in passing that SOA is only interested in offensive operations, even in a strategic defensive posture. The USSR/Russia still believes itself to be threatened and sees attack as the best way to defend itself before its soil is ravaged. The 'high-speed offensive' conceived in the early 1980s by Marshal Ogarkov to invade the Federal Republic of Germany is still a Bagration operation, but with the new information technologies and under the nuclear threshold. At most, after the spectacular American victories against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, some Russian theorists also tried to stick in concepts borrowed from the adversary such as the sequential use of air forces - neutralisation of air/anti-air defences, then deep strikes and paralysis of enemy networks prior to major air-land offensives, but the graft will have some difficulty.
The success of SOA depends on very precise and careful planning in order to coordinate the actions of very different forces as well as possible, which implies having the most accurate assessment possible of the enemy but also of one's own forces, and once the plan has been drawn up, having an instrument that is materially, intellectually and morally capable of implementing it strictly. As in the industry of the time, SOA was therefore very Taylorist, with a design level and an execution level as distinct as a brain and muscles. At the lowest level, soldiers and their immediate managers are like low-skilled workers who are asked to simply apply the procedures laid down for each situation, which at least has the advantage of speed. Once the action is over, they are asked to report fully on the results achieved to maintain a clear appreciation of the situation.
When all the conditions are met - a good appreciation of the friendly/enemy situation, a precise coordination plan by a competent staff, perfect execution by units that are well versed in the procedures - the method is formidable. The problem is that these conditions have not been met since 1945 and certainly not in Ukraine.
Let's start with the brain, the operational planning level. One could imagine, one even believed, that Russian staffs at army level (corps in Western armies) and above would be good, if only because of their experience in the Donbass in 2014-2015 and especially in Syria, where most senior Russian officers have been. The two successful Russian offensives in the Donbass in the summer of 2014 and February 2015 were at the level of a full army, and while Russian ground forces were not engaged in Syria, the expeditionary force staff planned and conducted for several years the use of significant naval and especially air assets in conjunction with the military operations of the pro-Assad coalition.
One was finally surprised in February-March 2022 by the poor planning of the operations of the nine armies involved, as well as the Black Sea Fleet and the aerospace forces (VKS), which gave the impression of 'waging their war' each on their own, far from the discipline and coordination required by the guns of the AOS. The art of operations is the translation of strategic objectives into tactical orders, to the armies and then below, accompanied by political imperatives and constraints. These objectives must be clear, which was not necessarily the case. The chain of command also had to be clear.
In absolute terms, the strategy is defined by a dialogue between the political leader, who gives his vision, and senior military officials, who assess how it can be achieved. The 'Stavka', or general staff or planning and operations centre, is then responsible for translating this into missions.
Normally, the political leader does not speak military language and does not interfere in the details of translating his vision into missions on the ground. When things are done well, the strategy is translated into military orders all the way up the tactical chain. Things are not done well in Russia with Vladimir Putin distrusting overly powerful generals, talking instead to those who tell him what he wants to hear, and interfering in the details of operations without having any military experience himself. This does not generally produce good results.
While politically downplayed as a 'special operation', the war in Ukraine was also the largest ever waged by Moscow since 1945. At first, there was some trial and error about whether to create an intermediate level between Moscow and the three military district headquarters that had each taken over a sector of the front (the Eastern District in Belarus, the Central District in eastern Ukraine, and the Southern District for the Donbass), the Black Sea Fleet, the VKS, the Air Assault Forces (VDV), which formed a separate army, and the Special Operations Command. An air-land campaign command was finally formed in April and entrusted to General Dvornikov who was quickly replaced by General Zhidko. In August, it seems that two Moscow-led area commands were reintroduced, one of which was entrusted to General Surovikia. Surovikia is known above all for his political loyalty, a loyalty that earned him the appointment, a "landed man", to head the VKS in 2017 in order to take control of a structure that was considered a little too independent. Authoritarian regimes do not like generals who are too victorious and therefore often also popular.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian command system, which the Russians were unable to paralyse technically, finally proved to be superior. It is true that the Ukrainian command had to conduct a defensive campaign, which was technically simpler to organise than a large-scale offensive operation on foreign territory. The territorial structure of the command, from the oblast to the central command in Kiev via the regional commands, proved to be well adapted to this. More than political intrusion and distrust, it was the influence and complicity with the Russians that perhaps most disrupted the system, especially in the Southern Command, which initially failed to cope with the attack of the 58th Russian Army from Crimea.
Fundamentally, the Ukrainians have been much better informed about themselves and especially about the enemy than the Russians, because they are at home, have the support of the population, have many sensors, are fighting for their survival, which encourages them to put aside rivalries and political games in favour of greater honesty, and they receive very valuable assistance in this respect from the United States. The Ukrainian staffs see things better than their enemies, who were unable to detect, for example, the presence of five Ukrainian brigades at the beginning of September a few kilometres from Balakliya, or the extreme weakness of their own position. Indeed, it is on the state of its own troops that the reports are often the most false, after those on the results obtained on the enemy. The Ukrainian general staff is not free of mistakes, and the fierce defence of the Lysysychansk-Severodonetsk salient in June against all logic was undoubtedly one of them, since the two towns fell anyway and the Ukrainian forces lost many men. Perhaps this was the result of a political intrusion.
Generally speaking, the Ukrainian high command is doing quite well, and with no doubt American and British help, is capable of organising operations that are both inventive in privateer warfare - these strikes deep into the enemy's defences - and increasingly complex on the front line, whereas there is a feeling that the Russians are doing things less and less sophisticated as time goes by. It is also true that thinking and planning is not everything in wartime, orders must also be carried out and carried out well. If the Ukrainians are doing more and more things and the Russians less and less, it is also because on the one hand there are "muscles" that respond better and better while on the other hand they are atrophying.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Soviet operative art in the test of war in Ukraine - 1. Udar on Dnieper
Soviet operative art (SOA) appeals to military historians and strategists, as does the generally original and rich Russian thinking. Its principles were established by a small group of veteran officers from Russia's wars with the Soviet Union in the early 20th century who set out to analyse the conflicts of the industrial age. In a consensus, they established that modern wars involving large masses and all the resources of nations could hardly be won in a few large 'decisive' battles, sometimes only one, but required a long distribution of effort in space and time.
It was the organisation of this distribution of tactical efforts to achieve the strategic politico-military objective, a situation they obviously did not invent, that they called 'operative art'.
Bagration for ever
In this interwar period, the problem was that of the continuous front, resulting from the considerable increase in firepower over the previous decades, while the rest, the movement or circulation of information, had remained unchanged for centuries. When you have to face a large amount of firepower on foot and without protection, breaking through the enemy's defences and sometimes even just reaching them becomes difficult. The only option is to bypass the enemy. But when the armies are gigantic and occupy all the space, this bypass also becomes impossible and this gives the trench lines of the Great War.
The AOS was mainly based on the solutions tested in 1918 on the Western Front by combining the German and French methods. The former consisted of combining surprise, firepower and assault troops to break the front with a direct attack, and then exploiting the breakthrough in depth by infantry divisions. The Germans sought to win the war as quickly as possible by the most powerful attacks of this type. The French method, on the other hand, relied on a high degree of motorisation to distribute forces along the frontline very quickly, which allowed them first to seal off enemy breakthroughs and then to organise a series of attacks that were smaller in scale than those of the Germans but twice as fast to mount. In the end, the fast French lateral manoeuvre won out over the slow German axial manoeuvre.
Tukhachevsky, Svetchin, Isserson and others therefore imagined a combination of the two methods, taking advantage of the rapid progress of motorised vehicles and also of the means of communication. The ideal offensive was therefore a large direct attack by surprise on a wide front and the greatest possible depth in order to provoke a shock (Udar) and the dislocation of the enemy's position. In absolute terms, especially for Mikhail Tukhachevsky, everything must arrive at the same time or at least as quickly as possible in the enemy's position, 'flying artillery', paratroopers in vertical assault, manoeuvre groups infiltrated into the depths, artillery, armoured attack columns, etc., in order to obtain its dislocation. Since a single 'udar' was not usually enough to achieve the strategic objective, it was necessary, especially for Svetchin, to multiply these shocks in order to keep the initiative until victory.
The designers of the AOS also tried to impose the idea of a purely military 'operative level' necessary for the implementation of the operative art, in reality mainly a 'no entry' sign for politicians. This did not protect them from the purges, and their ideas were only really implemented with the spectacular victories of 1943 to 1945 against the Germans and the Japanese, which became the undisputed references. Since the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet/Russian army is still trying to reproduce Operation Bagration, which destroyed a German army group in Belarus in the summer of 1944.
Subsequent developments are always integrated into the model, including the use of nuclear weapons, which is first envisaged as a preliminary "artillery preparation" and then as a threshold that must not be crossed. It is worth noting in passing that SOA is only interested in offensive operations, even in a strategic defensive posture. The USSR/Russia still believes itself to be threatened and sees attack as the best way to defend itself before its soil is ravaged. The 'high-speed offensive' conceived in the early 1980s by Marshal Ogarkov to invade the Federal Republic of Germany is still a Bagration operation, but with the new information technologies and under the nuclear threshold. At most, after the spectacular American victories against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, some Russian theorists also tried to stick in concepts borrowed from the adversary such as the sequential use of air forces - neutralisation of air/anti-air defences, then deep strikes and paralysis of enemy networks prior to major air-land offensives, but the graft will have some difficulty.
The success of SOA depends on very precise and careful planning in order to coordinate the actions of very different forces as well as possible, which implies having the most accurate assessment possible of the enemy but also of one's own forces, and once the plan has been drawn up, having an instrument that is materially, intellectually and morally capable of implementing it strictly. As in the industry of the time, SOA was therefore very Taylorist, with a design level and an execution level as distinct as a brain and muscles. At the lowest level, soldiers and their immediate managers are like low-skilled workers who are asked to simply apply the procedures laid down for each situation, which at least has the advantage of speed. Once the action is over, they are asked to report fully on the results achieved to maintain a clear appreciation of the situation.
When all the conditions are met - a good appreciation of the friendly/enemy situation, a precise coordination plan by a competent staff, perfect execution by units that are well versed in the procedures - the method is formidable. The problem is that these conditions have not been met since 1945 and certainly not in Ukraine.
The poor man's Stavka
Let's start with the brain, the operational planning level. One could imagine, one even believed, that Russian staffs at army level (corps in Western armies) and above would be good, if only because of their experience in the Donbass in 2014-2015 and especially in Syria, where most senior Russian officers have been. The two successful Russian offensives in the Donbass in the summer of 2014 and February 2015 were at the level of a full army, and while Russian ground forces were not engaged in Syria, the expeditionary force staff planned and conducted for several years the use of significant naval and especially air assets in conjunction with the military operations of the pro-Assad coalition.
One was finally surprised in February-March 2022 by the poor planning of the operations of the nine armies involved, as well as the Black Sea Fleet and the aerospace forces (VKS), which gave the impression of 'waging their war' each on their own, far from the discipline and coordination required by the guns of the AOS. The art of operations is the translation of strategic objectives into tactical orders, to the armies and then below, accompanied by political imperatives and constraints. These objectives must be clear, which was not necessarily the case. The chain of command also had to be clear.
In absolute terms, the strategy is defined by a dialogue between the political leader, who gives his vision, and senior military officials, who assess how it can be achieved. The 'Stavka', or general staff or planning and operations centre, is then responsible for translating this into missions.
Normally, the political leader does not speak military language and does not interfere in the details of translating his vision into missions on the ground. When things are done well, the strategy is translated into military orders all the way up the tactical chain. Things are not done well in Russia with Vladimir Putin distrusting overly powerful generals, talking instead to those who tell him what he wants to hear, and interfering in the details of operations without having any military experience himself. This does not generally produce good results.
While politically downplayed as a 'special operation', the war in Ukraine was also the largest ever waged by Moscow since 1945. At first, there was some trial and error about whether to create an intermediate level between Moscow and the three military district headquarters that had each taken over a sector of the front (the Eastern District in Belarus, the Central District in eastern Ukraine, and the Southern District for the Donbass), the Black Sea Fleet, the VKS, the Air Assault Forces (VDV), which formed a separate army, and the Special Operations Command. An air-land campaign command was finally formed in April and entrusted to General Dvornikov who was quickly replaced by General Zhidko. In August, it seems that two Moscow-led area commands were reintroduced, one of which was entrusted to General Surovikia. Surovikia is known above all for his political loyalty, a loyalty that earned him the appointment, a "landed man", to head the VKS in 2017 in order to take control of a structure that was considered a little too independent. Authoritarian regimes do not like generals who are too victorious and therefore often also popular.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian command system, which the Russians were unable to paralyse technically, finally proved to be superior. It is true that the Ukrainian command had to conduct a defensive campaign, which was technically simpler to organise than a large-scale offensive operation on foreign territory. The territorial structure of the command, from the oblast to the central command in Kiev via the regional commands, proved to be well adapted to this. More than political intrusion and distrust, it was the influence and complicity with the Russians that perhaps most disrupted the system, especially in the Southern Command, which initially failed to cope with the attack of the 58th Russian Army from Crimea.
Fundamentally, the Ukrainians have been much better informed about themselves and especially about the enemy than the Russians, because they are at home, have the support of the population, have many sensors, are fighting for their survival, which encourages them to put aside rivalries and political games in favour of greater honesty, and they receive very valuable assistance in this respect from the United States. The Ukrainian staffs see things better than their enemies, who were unable to detect, for example, the presence of five Ukrainian brigades at the beginning of September a few kilometres from Balakliya, or the extreme weakness of their own position. Indeed, it is on the state of its own troops that the reports are often the most false, after those on the results obtained on the enemy. The Ukrainian general staff is not free of mistakes, and the fierce defence of the Lysysychansk-Severodonetsk salient in June against all logic was undoubtedly one of them, since the two towns fell anyway and the Ukrainian forces lost many men. Perhaps this was the result of a political intrusion.
Generally speaking, the Ukrainian high command is doing quite well, and with no doubt American and British help, is capable of organising operations that are both inventive in privateer warfare - these strikes deep into the enemy's defences - and increasingly complex on the front line, whereas there is a feeling that the Russians are doing things less and less sophisticated as time goes by. It is also true that thinking and planning is not everything in wartime, orders must also be carried out and carried out well. If the Ukrainians are doing more and more things and the Russians less and less, it is also because on the one hand there are "muscles" that respond better and better while on the other hand they are atrophying.
L’art opératif soviétique à l’épreuve de la guerre en Ukraine – 2. Les âmes mortes
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Soviet operative art in the test of war in Ukraine - 2. Dead souls
In fetishising their victories at the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Russians forgot that for Operation Bagration there were 2.3 million Soviet soldiers against 800,000 Germans, and for August Storm there were 1.6 million against 600,000 Japanese and with 20 times as many tanks and nearly 30,000 pieces of artillery, which helps to achieve success. Better still, after years of struggle the Soviet units had become strong and reliable professional military communities. The balance of power is not the same in Ukraine.
The Russian military coalition
In this hybrid in-between the old tradition of a mass conscript army and the goal of a modern professional army, the Russians were only able to commit 160,000 men to Ukraine initially. Worse still, they did not provide for at least an equivalent professional reserve to reinforce it individually or in formed units. A professional army without a reserve is necessarily small and vulnerable to any surprise that would require significant resources. The 'special operation' was condemned to succeed immediately or it would be in great difficulty. It did not succeed immediately.
Good planning is a good prediction of how one's forces will behave in the face of the enemy's forces. This is not easy when these pawns are heterogeneous.
During the Serdioukov reform, all the divisions of the army were replaced by brigades, then with Choïgu from 2012 onwards we returned to the old structures of divisions and regiments, but not completely and many independent brigades were maintained. Between the 'army' level, which operates these divisions and brigades, army corps were also formed, in fact small armies. This is enough to give a staff headache, but that is not all.
In order to maintain a somewhat large army, but with insufficient volunteers to professionalise it completely, Russia has kept conscription small, so that it takes up about a third of the units' strength. But since conscripts could not be engaged in anything other than an officially declared war, everything had to be restructured. Each brigade or regiment was thus required to form two battle groups (BGs) composed only of volunteers to fight in Ukraine but with a coherence to be rebuilt. In theory, each BG is the association of a melee battalion - infantry, tanks - and a support battalion - howitzers, multiple rocket launchers, anti-tank, anti-aircraft. In fact, starting from matrix units of different composition, we ended up with 120 groups, all slightly different, of 600 to 900 men.
This ensemble formed the already complex core of the Russian expeditionary corps, but like that of the Third Reich, the modern Russian army was a collection of different and sometimes competing armies. The most successful is the Air Assault Army (VDV), which is separate from the Army. It forms 12 almost complete brigades or regiments for engagement in Ukraine as they are much more professionalized than the army units. The VDV also has the 45th Special Forces brigade, in fact an elite air assault brigade, which is added to the small spetsnaz brigades of the military intelligence service (GRU) normally present in each army.
The Russians have invested heavily in this prestigious army, but there are two problems. The first is that in a context of scarce human resources, the VDVs have drained a large part of Russian volunteers, to the detriment of army units that are now poor in good infantrymen and therefore weakened. The second is that this elite army is designed to be airborne or, above all, heliborne. It is therefore organised in small air-mechanised units equipped with armoured vehicles light enough to be transported by air. However, after the failure of a battalion's heli-lift to Hostomel airport at the beginning of the war, the air assault units did not carry out any more air assaults, contenting themselves with fighting like common infantrymen, with the disadvantage that they were less well equipped than them, with vehicles that were less protected, less well armed and carried less. The VDVs also have few tanks and much less support than the ground forces.
The Navy also has its own land force for amphibious operations. Like the VDVs, the five small brigades available are rather lightly equipped elite units, and like the VDVs they will not be used in the planned framework but as land units with the same qualities and drawbacks.
There are also armies peripheral to those of the Russian Ministry of Defence. The main one in volume is composed of the two small armies of the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (DNR/LNR), a mixture of political militia battalions, rather good like Sparta or Somali, and 11 regiments/brigades composed of requisitioned conscripts, between 30 and 40,000 men in total, often poorly trained and motivated, and in any case badly equipped. The DNR/LNR regiments, initially under the control of the Russian 8th Army, were above all a reservoir of auxiliary regiments sometimes engaged far from home.
And then there are the armies of Vladimir Putin's friends. In parallel to the regular army, Russia has also formed a National Guard (RosGvardia) under the command of General Viktor Zolotov, a former KGB officer, former bodyguard and close friend of the President of the Russian Federation. The National Guard, which absorbed the intervention forces of the National Police, is normally in charge of maintaining order and as such is also engaged in Ukraine in order to ensure the control and security of the rear of the armies. It is therefore to be found in the occupied zones, in particular in the oblasts of Kherson and Zaporijjia, but with little military capacity and without it being clear how it is coordinated with the armed forces.
Within the initial framework of this National Guard, the private army of Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic, has also emerged, the equivalent of an infantry division formed from the security forces, the 'kadyrovtsy', and which acts as a small allied army.
Finally, there is Wagner, the private army of businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, also close to Putin, which is the size of a small infantry division and has its own resources, including a small air force. Prigozhin also has some special powers, such as the ability to recruit wherever he wants, including in prisons.
In addition to all these ground forces, the 6th, 4th and 14th air forces assigned to the military districts surrounding the Ukrainian theatre and the Black Sea fleet, fluid warfare units, have been employed in a trial and error manner. There is now a joint missile force striking across Ukraine and air wings acting in cautious, planned strike operations ahead of the ground armies.
What is important to remember is that the Russian military tool is very heterogeneous and fragmented into forces that are often not very cooperative. This does not facilitate a good estimation of the real capacities of the units, especially since they are easily lied about despite the presence of political commissars, and the planning of operations is distorted accordingly.
The Ukrainian military coalition
The Ukrainian army at the beginning of the war was hardly more homogeneous. There were in fact three armies: the active, the territorial and the national guard.
As in Russia, the active army was mixed, but unlike in Russia, conscripts were enlisted at the same time as professionals, which at least had the initial merit of not breaking the cohesion of the brigades. As in Russia, a distinction is also made between army, air force and navy brigades. The Ministry of the Interior even has at least one pure mechanised manoeuvre brigade with the 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade. The new difference with Russia is that this initial force has been reinforced by a quarter with reserve brigades.
In total, there are 34 manoeuvre brigades, roughly equivalent to the melee units of a hundred Russian battle groups, but much less in artillery. There are no less than seven different types of brigades, which is probably too many, but the chain of command over them is much simpler than in Russia, as they are directly operated by the regional commands or the central command in Kiev, which also runs the Special Forces, which are the size of a small light infantry division.
The second army was formed by the 28 territorial brigades. Units made up of reservists and inexperienced volunteers, the territorial brigades were organised just before the start of the war for the defence of areas and secondary missions, such as the protection of sites or checkpoints, thus relieving the manoeuvre brigades. These are basically light infantry brigades of varying size and without many heavy assets.
The third is the conglomerate of units headed by the Ministry of the Interior with National Guard brigades, not very different from the territorial brigades, and a myriad of autonomous volunteer battalions such as those of the Azov Regiment. To this could be added a fourth army with the International Legion for the Territorial Defence of Ukraine, another conglomerate of battalions, with foreign recruitment, totalling 15-20,000 men.
With a small but active air and anti-aircraft force on the ground and in the air, and small naval forces for coastal defence, the Ukrainian army is ultimately almost as heterogeneous as the Russians', but easier to manage at least in an area defence context where there are few manoeuvres to organise.
Entropy, negentropy
Without going into the details of the tactical actions, it must be understood that in the confrontation of the models the Russian expeditionary force wore itself out considerably by penetrating the Ukrainian defence-in-depth system. The hoped-for operational shock never came and the Russian armies were corroded as they advanced towards Kiev. They never recovered.
About a third of Russian losses in combat vehicles in the war occurred in the first month of the war. In terms of casualties, this translated into 20-25,000 killed and wounded, the vast majority of whom were concentrated in the melee units of the 120 battle groups. These small groups, made up of volunteer soldiers on a short contract with a small staff that had itself suffered a great deal, could be tough in combat but were not resilient. When they break up, they constitute a community that is too small and too weak to be reconstituted quickly.
The initial Russian losses were made up by recovering all the battle groups still available in Russia, about forty of them, which were immediately committed to the fire and many of them suffered the same fate as their predecessors. Then, when the king was left with no organised professional reserves, it was necessary to carry out a major campaign to replenish individual ranks by combing the armed forces and recruiting volunteers for six months at a time. However, volunteering to join a 'risk' unit, i.e. the ones that ultimately win a war, is not necessarily very attractive even with a good salary. There is a high chance of being killed or maimed for something that is not clear to you, even tactically, and without the pride of belonging to a prestigious or at least welcoming community. The life of a Russian soldier is already not very attractive in peacetime, it is even less so in wartime.
As the Russians reduced their operational art to simpler combat, with combinations of artillery strikes and battalion assaults in the attack and static positions in the defence, the human capital of the Russian army deteriorated for lack of sufficient reinforcements and time to reconstitute real combat units. Like the dead serfs still administratively alive in Nicholas Gogol's 'Dead Souls', there are lists of names of soldiers in Russian brigades and divisions, but they no longer corresponded to those of the real combatants, who were much less numerous. In some places in the area that was attacked by the Ukrainians between Kharkiv and Sloviansk at the beginning of September, one even found dummies instead of men.
By default, therefore, the Russians used their peripheral units as an attack force throughout this second phase of the war. Paratroopers, marine infantry, Chechen brigades and Wagner were thus engaged and overcommitted for three months. They, too, broke down. Several air assault regiments no longer exist, and several other of these units have no operational value, reduced to little and exhausted. Again, replacement did not follow because it could not follow due to lack of men and time.
Things could not improve for the Russians as long as all or most of their combat units were in the front line, but as the Russians were short of combat units, they could hardly be withdrawn. The redeployment of the 36th Army and the 5th Army to the Melitopol area may have had this function of reconstitution in addition to the reserve function of the Kherson front, but it has considerably weakened the northern front and the Russians have paid dearly for it and are forced to reinforce the north again. It is not the all-out use of DNR/LNR auxiliary units that will solve this problem, as they have suffered even more than the Russian units and have become even more fragile. Only the private armies are doing a little better but they remain marginal in volume.
Due to a lack of mass, the Russian army was exhausted in an initial failed operational shock that backfired, then in long trench battles where it was able to regain the upper hand but again at the cost of losses that were not fully replaced. Since July, the general staff could still see many units on the map but could not do much with them other than hold positions for a while. The possibility of a Russian victory was now, like the German army in crisis on the Western Front at the end of 1916, a 'Hindenburg line' and a profound work of reconstitution, integration of the battalions that had arrived from Russia and innovation.
The Ukrainian armies also suffered greatly but they had reserves, which saved them.
The manoeuvre brigades proved to be resilient structures. None of them seems to have been destroyed despite the fighting, including the heavy fighting in the Donbass in May-June, and they have the critical size to form a military community with an esprit de corps and the ability to separate combat and learning. The Ukrainian brigades are all the more resilient and learning because of the incomplete but real effort made before the war with Western help to build up a real NCO corps. Command procedures were also made more flexible and even more so when civilians were integrated at the beginning of the mobilisation. All this is essential. War is a succession of innumerable small battles and between 'mechanised' troops who are otherwise unfamiliar with procedures and troops who are more motivated and more agile in making decisions, the balance ceteris paribus tends to tip in favour of the latter. In short, the Ukrainian manoeuvre units resisted rather well.
But this was not enough, as the Ukrainian manoeuvre army remained inferior to the Russian army in terms of volume and especially in terms of resources. What saved the situation in the war of positions was the transformation of the territorial brigades. Initially designed to carry out zone defence, the territorial and national guard brigades were then engaged on the quieter parts of the front line and were transformed into manoeuvre units. This was done for a time by integrating battalions from the manoeuvre brigades, with the very real risk of weakening the latter, and by gradually increasing their equipment. Several of these new brigades were then engaged in tougher fighting, sometimes prematurely as in the defence of Lysychansk-Severodonetsk where they suffered greatly. Now, these brigades are capable of simple offensive manoeuvres, in addition to the manoeuvre brigades or sometimes alone as in the north of Kharkiv.
This densification of the territorial brigades made it possible to have a sufficient number of units to hold the front and therefore to be able to withdraw them to reconstitute themselves in the rear, to progressively integrate the numerous recruits called up at the beginning of the war who had time to learn the basics of soldiering. They also learned to use the new equipment provided by the West, perhaps with the help of ghost soldiers.
The number of real Ukrainian fighters now exceeds both the number of its dead souls and, above all, the number of Russians. The autonomous battalions still need to be integrated and depoliticised into regular brigades where they will be more useful.
The number of units in line allows especially to constitute masses of manoeuvre in the rear to attack quickly the points of the front. The logistics, especially with so much different equipment, is certainly a headache for the staffs, but not only are they technically better, but they can more easily carry out their plans with more standardised units and therefore we know their reliability. If the Russians have every interest in forming a 'Hindenburg line' as quickly as possible, the Ukrainians now have an interest in shocking it without ceasing.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Soviet operative art in the test of war in Ukraine - 2. Dead souls
In fetishising their victories at the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Russians forgot that for Operation Bagration there were 2.3 million Soviet soldiers against 800,000 Germans, and for August Storm there were 1.6 million against 600,000 Japanese and with 20 times as many tanks and nearly 30,000 pieces of artillery, which helps to achieve success. Better still, after years of struggle the Soviet units had become strong and reliable professional military communities. The balance of power is not the same in Ukraine.
The Russian military coalition
In this hybrid in-between the old tradition of a mass conscript army and the goal of a modern professional army, the Russians were only able to commit 160,000 men to Ukraine initially. Worse still, they did not provide for at least an equivalent professional reserve to reinforce it individually or in formed units. A professional army without a reserve is necessarily small and vulnerable to any surprise that would require significant resources. The 'special operation' was condemned to succeed immediately or it would be in great difficulty. It did not succeed immediately.
Good planning is a good prediction of how one's forces will behave in the face of the enemy's forces. This is not easy when these pawns are heterogeneous.
During the Serdioukov reform, all the divisions of the army were replaced by brigades, then with Choïgu from 2012 onwards we returned to the old structures of divisions and regiments, but not completely and many independent brigades were maintained. Between the 'army' level, which operates these divisions and brigades, army corps were also formed, in fact small armies. This is enough to give a staff headache, but that is not all.
In order to maintain a somewhat large army, but with insufficient volunteers to professionalise it completely, Russia has kept conscription small, so that it takes up about a third of the units' strength. But since conscripts could not be engaged in anything other than an officially declared war, everything had to be restructured. Each brigade or regiment was thus required to form two battle groups (BGs) composed only of volunteers to fight in Ukraine but with a coherence to be rebuilt. In theory, each BG is the association of a melee battalion - infantry, tanks - and a support battalion - howitzers, multiple rocket launchers, anti-tank, anti-aircraft. In fact, starting from matrix units of different composition, we ended up with 120 groups, all slightly different, of 600 to 900 men.
This ensemble formed the already complex core of the Russian expeditionary corps, but like that of the Third Reich, the modern Russian army was a collection of different and sometimes competing armies. The most successful is the Air Assault Army (VDV), which is separate from the Army. It forms 12 almost complete brigades or regiments for engagement in Ukraine as they are much more professionalized than the army units. The VDV also has the 45th Special Forces brigade, in fact an elite air assault brigade, which is added to the small spetsnaz brigades of the military intelligence service (GRU) normally present in each army.
The Russians have invested heavily in this prestigious army, but there are two problems. The first is that in a context of scarce human resources, the VDVs have drained a large part of Russian volunteers, to the detriment of army units that are now poor in good infantrymen and therefore weakened. The second is that this elite army is designed to be airborne or, above all, heliborne. It is therefore organised in small air-mechanised units equipped with armoured vehicles light enough to be transported by air. However, after the failure of a battalion's heli-lift to Hostomel airport at the beginning of the war, the air assault units did not carry out any more air assaults, contenting themselves with fighting like common infantrymen, with the disadvantage that they were less well equipped than them, with vehicles that were less protected, less well armed and carried less. The VDVs also have few tanks and much less support than the ground forces.
The Navy also has its own land force for amphibious operations. Like the VDVs, the five small brigades available are rather lightly equipped elite units, and like the VDVs they will not be used in the planned framework but as land units with the same qualities and drawbacks.
There are also armies peripheral to those of the Russian Ministry of Defence. The main one in volume is composed of the two small armies of the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (DNR/LNR), a mixture of political militia battalions, rather good like Sparta or Somali, and 11 regiments/brigades composed of requisitioned conscripts, between 30 and 40,000 men in total, often poorly trained and motivated, and in any case badly equipped. The DNR/LNR regiments, initially under the control of the Russian 8th Army, were above all a reservoir of auxiliary regiments sometimes engaged far from home.
And then there are the armies of Vladimir Putin's friends. In parallel to the regular army, Russia has also formed a National Guard (RosGvardia) under the command of General Viktor Zolotov, a former KGB officer, former bodyguard and close friend of the President of the Russian Federation. The National Guard, which absorbed the intervention forces of the National Police, is normally in charge of maintaining order and as such is also engaged in Ukraine in order to ensure the control and security of the rear of the armies. It is therefore to be found in the occupied zones, in particular in the oblasts of Kherson and Zaporijjia, but with little military capacity and without it being clear how it is coordinated with the armed forces.
Within the initial framework of this National Guard, the private army of Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic, has also emerged, the equivalent of an infantry division formed from the security forces, the 'kadyrovtsy', and which acts as a small allied army.
Finally, there is Wagner, the private army of businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, also close to Putin, which is the size of a small infantry division and has its own resources, including a small air force. Prigozhin also has some special powers, such as the ability to recruit wherever he wants, including in prisons.
In addition to all these ground forces, the 6th, 4th and 14th air forces assigned to the military districts surrounding the Ukrainian theatre and the Black Sea fleet, fluid warfare units, have been employed in a trial and error manner. There is now a joint missile force striking across Ukraine and air wings acting in cautious, planned strike operations ahead of the ground armies.
What is important to remember is that the Russian military tool is very heterogeneous and fragmented into forces that are often not very cooperative. This does not facilitate a good estimation of the real capacities of the units, especially since they are easily lied about despite the presence of political commissars, and the planning of operations is distorted accordingly.
The Ukrainian military coalition
The Ukrainian army at the beginning of the war was hardly more homogeneous. There were in fact three armies: the active, the territorial and the national guard.
As in Russia, the active army was mixed, but unlike in Russia, conscripts were enlisted at the same time as professionals, which at least had the initial merit of not breaking the cohesion of the brigades. As in Russia, a distinction is also made between army, air force and navy brigades. The Ministry of the Interior even has at least one pure mechanised manoeuvre brigade with the 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade. The new difference with Russia is that this initial force has been reinforced by a quarter with reserve brigades.
In total, there are 34 manoeuvre brigades, roughly equivalent to the melee units of a hundred Russian battle groups, but much less in artillery. There are no less than seven different types of brigades, which is probably too many, but the chain of command over them is much simpler than in Russia, as they are directly operated by the regional commands or the central command in Kiev, which also runs the Special Forces, which are the size of a small light infantry division.
The second army was formed by the 28 territorial brigades. Units made up of reservists and inexperienced volunteers, the territorial brigades were organised just before the start of the war for the defence of areas and secondary missions, such as the protection of sites or checkpoints, thus relieving the manoeuvre brigades. These are basically light infantry brigades of varying size and without many heavy assets.
The third is the conglomerate of units headed by the Ministry of the Interior with National Guard brigades, not very different from the territorial brigades, and a myriad of autonomous volunteer battalions such as those of the Azov Regiment. To this could be added a fourth army with the International Legion for the Territorial Defence of Ukraine, another conglomerate of battalions, with foreign recruitment, totalling 15-20,000 men.
With a small but active air and anti-aircraft force on the ground and in the air, and small naval forces for coastal defence, the Ukrainian army is ultimately almost as heterogeneous as the Russians', but easier to manage at least in an area defence context where there are few manoeuvres to organise.
Entropy, negentropy
Without going into the details of the tactical actions, it must be understood that in the confrontation of the models the Russian expeditionary force wore itself out considerably by penetrating the Ukrainian defence-in-depth system. The hoped-for operational shock never came and the Russian armies were corroded as they advanced towards Kiev. They never recovered.
About a third of Russian losses in combat vehicles in the war occurred in the first month of the war. In terms of casualties, this translated into 20-25,000 killed and wounded, the vast majority of whom were concentrated in the melee units of the 120 battle groups. These small groups, made up of volunteer soldiers on a short contract with a small staff that had itself suffered a great deal, could be tough in combat but were not resilient. When they break up, they constitute a community that is too small and too weak to be reconstituted quickly.
The initial Russian losses were made up by recovering all the battle groups still available in Russia, about forty of them, which were immediately committed to the fire and many of them suffered the same fate as their predecessors. Then, when the king was left with no organised professional reserves, it was necessary to carry out a major campaign to replenish individual ranks by combing the armed forces and recruiting volunteers for six months at a time. However, volunteering to join a 'risk' unit, i.e. the ones that ultimately win a war, is not necessarily very attractive even with a good salary. There is a high chance of being killed or maimed for something that is not clear to you, even tactically, and without the pride of belonging to a prestigious or at least welcoming community. The life of a Russian soldier is already not very attractive in peacetime, it is even less so in wartime.
As the Russians reduced their operational art to simpler combat, with combinations of artillery strikes and battalion assaults in the attack and static positions in the defence, the human capital of the Russian army deteriorated for lack of sufficient reinforcements and time to reconstitute real combat units. Like the dead serfs still administratively alive in Nicholas Gogol's 'Dead Souls', there are lists of names of soldiers in Russian brigades and divisions, but they no longer corresponded to those of the real combatants, who were much less numerous. In some places in the area that was attacked by the Ukrainians between Kharkiv and Sloviansk at the beginning of September, one even found dummies instead of men.
By default, therefore, the Russians used their peripheral units as an attack force throughout this second phase of the war. Paratroopers, marine infantry, Chechen brigades and Wagner were thus engaged and overcommitted for three months. They, too, broke down. Several air assault regiments no longer exist, and several other of these units have no operational value, reduced to little and exhausted. Again, replacement did not follow because it could not follow due to lack of men and time.
Things could not improve for the Russians as long as all or most of their combat units were in the front line, but as the Russians were short of combat units, they could hardly be withdrawn. The redeployment of the 36th Army and the 5th Army to the Melitopol area may have had this function of reconstitution in addition to the reserve function of the Kherson front, but it has considerably weakened the northern front and the Russians have paid dearly for it and are forced to reinforce the north again. It is not the all-out use of DNR/LNR auxiliary units that will solve this problem, as they have suffered even more than the Russian units and have become even more fragile. Only the private armies are doing a little better but they remain marginal in volume.
Due to a lack of mass, the Russian army was exhausted in an initial failed operational shock that backfired, then in long trench battles where it was able to regain the upper hand but again at the cost of losses that were not fully replaced. Since July, the general staff could still see many units on the map but could not do much with them other than hold positions for a while. The possibility of a Russian victory was now, like the German army in crisis on the Western Front at the end of 1916, a 'Hindenburg line' and a profound work of reconstitution, integration of the battalions that had arrived from Russia and innovation.
The Ukrainian armies also suffered greatly but they had reserves, which saved them.
The manoeuvre brigades proved to be resilient structures. None of them seems to have been destroyed despite the fighting, including the heavy fighting in the Donbass in May-June, and they have the critical size to form a military community with an esprit de corps and the ability to separate combat and learning. The Ukrainian brigades are all the more resilient and learning because of the incomplete but real effort made before the war with Western help to build up a real NCO corps. Command procedures were also made more flexible and even more so when civilians were integrated at the beginning of the mobilisation. All this is essential. War is a succession of innumerable small battles and between 'mechanised' troops who are otherwise unfamiliar with procedures and troops who are more motivated and more agile in making decisions, the balance ceteris paribus tends to tip in favour of the latter. In short, the Ukrainian manoeuvre units resisted rather well.
But this was not enough, as the Ukrainian manoeuvre army remained inferior to the Russian army in terms of volume and especially in terms of resources. What saved the situation in the war of positions was the transformation of the territorial brigades. Initially designed to carry out zone defence, the territorial and national guard brigades were then engaged on the quieter parts of the front line and were transformed into manoeuvre units. This was done for a time by integrating battalions from the manoeuvre brigades, with the very real risk of weakening the latter, and by gradually increasing their equipment. Several of these new brigades were then engaged in tougher fighting, sometimes prematurely as in the defence of Lysychansk-Severodonetsk where they suffered greatly. Now, these brigades are capable of simple offensive manoeuvres, in addition to the manoeuvre brigades or sometimes alone as in the north of Kharkiv.
This densification of the territorial brigades made it possible to have a sufficient number of units to hold the front and therefore to be able to withdraw them to reconstitute themselves in the rear, to progressively integrate the numerous recruits called up at the beginning of the war who had time to learn the basics of soldiering. They also learned to use the new equipment provided by the West, perhaps with the help of ghost soldiers.
The number of real Ukrainian fighters now exceeds both the number of its dead souls and, above all, the number of Russians. The autonomous battalions still need to be integrated and depoliticised into regular brigades where they will be more useful.
The number of units in line allows especially to constitute masses of manoeuvre in the rear to attack quickly the points of the front. The logistics, especially with so much different equipment, is certainly a headache for the staffs, but not only are they technically better, but they can more easily carry out their plans with more standardised units and therefore we know their reliability. If the Russians have every interest in forming a 'Hindenburg line' as quickly as possible, the Ukrainians now have an interest in shocking it without ceasing.
looks like russia is mobilizing equipment for a big operation, probably they will wait till winter to make their next move.
Oh yeah, "members of public chambers in Donetsk are apparently calling for an immediate referendum on annexation." Russians there can obviously sense an impending a55-beating. 
Most evident is the fact that they have ran out of tanks, and possibly BMPs too.