L' offensive d'hiver
The winter offensive
There is a lot of talk about the possibility of a new major Russian offensive operation, particularly on the occasion of the anniversary of the start of the war on 24 February. Apart from the fact that the various dates anxiously awaited during this war have not been particularly eventful, it is nevertheless very likely that this great offensive operation has already begun. We have entered it gradually by a gradual increase in the number of attacks until a critical threshold is reached where the majority of the means are engaged. If we stick to our guns, we will be out of it in two or three months.
Impossible bypass, difficult breakthrough
This Russian winter offensive is so similar to the one from April to June that it can be called the "second Donbass offensive" with probably the same objective of complete conquest of the Donetsk province and still the same vagueness about the political objective sought beyond this military objective.
This new offensive is simply taking place on a smaller front line than in April since the Kherson bridgehead has disappeared and the Russians have been almost entirely driven out of Kharkiv province, but it is only taking place "full iron" on this line. It is true that it is difficult for the Russians, as for the Ukrainians, to do otherwise.
It is not possible to project forces over the line by airborne or helicopter operation, due to the lack of transport for the Ukrainians and above all for everyone else due to the density of anti-aircraft defences which would make the experiment extremely dangerous. Nor was it possible to go around by sea in the manner of the American landing at Inchon in Korea in September 1950. Here again, the means to carry out large-scale amphibious operations were lacking and the coasts were too dangerous to access. And even if this was achieved, it would be necessary to be able to supply, hold and then expand the bridgehead formed, by air or by sea, and this was not easy. An offensive crossing of the Dnieper on either side would cause similar problems, as the obstacle is so great. The Russians managed to do so somewhat by surprise at the very beginning of the war, only to find themselves blocked and driven back. They and the Ukrainians would no longer enjoy such favourable conditions.
The Russians could finally try to bypass the front line by passing through their border or that of Belarus, which constituted impassable political walls for the Ukrainians. The headquarters of the 2nd army was installed in Belarus with perhaps 8 to 10,000 men. There is also a concentration of forces in Belgorod province, probably under the command of the 20th Army. At this stage, this is clearly insufficient to imagine threatening Kiev again. Both armies are mainly training cadres for troops at the moment, and in the case of Belgorod province are involved in promoting the idea that Russia and even Belarus are under threat. From a Ukrainian point of view, even if this threat is agitated, as it is always necessary to stimulate Western attention and willingness to help, it is likely that the Russians would like to try again to enter Ukraine from these sides in order to inflict a major defeat on them almost certainly.
NTM in Ukraine
For it is not only a question of geography or adapted equipment. There is also what an army is really capable of doing in the face of a given enemy, what we call "relative power". It is basically the combination of a mass of means and skills. These skills themselves can evolve according to several factors. One of them is the incentive to learn, adapt and innovate. This incentive evolves according to the scale of the challenges to be solved and the confidence to succeed. Without organisational stress, say in peacetime, the incentive to evolve is much weaker than when there are dangerous missions and multiple challenges to solve. In other words, lessons are more expensive, but one learns and evolves much faster when fighting for real, precisely because the lessons are expensive. The average tactical level (NTM) increases and if in parallel the number of units increases, the relative power of the army increases squared.
Obviously, this incentive will produce more or less important effects depending on the learning ecosystem. Faced with similar challenges, some armies will progress more quickly than others, depending on their internal capacity to generate, promote and impose new ideas. In this respect, and even if it should not be idealised in this area, the Ukrainian army undoubtedly has a greater propensity to learn and innovate than the Russian army. After one year of war, this observation remains unchanged.
Another essential factor is the level of losses. It is difficult to capitalise on collective experience when too many members die or disappear because they are wounded or transferred elsewhere. On 23 March 1918, the French Third Army was engaged in Picardy to help the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). The German mobile divisions had just broken through the defence lines and had to be confronted on open ground outside the trench zone. Faced with this new challenge, the French artillerymen did rather well because there were still many veterans of 1914 among them. Innovation sometimes means remembering and they only have to draw on similar past experiences to find solutions. The French infantrymen, on the other hand, who had suffered much higher losses than the artillerymen since the beginning, no longer had any veterans of 1914. They only knew trench warfare and had to reinvent everything under fire.
Why talk about this on the occasion of this winter offensive in Ukraine? Because the NTM is a supreme strategic fact. The Russian army in Ukraine is now more numerous than in the summer with the arrival of the mobilised troops, the mobiks. It may even have 180 manoeuvre battalions, but the rate of loss and turn-over has been such that these battalions, which are certainly very heterogeneous between a battalion of mobiks and a unit of Wagner + (excluding ex-prisoners), remain of mediocre tactical quality. When a unit, however elite at the outset, such as the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, has to be reconstituted twice, one can imagine that it has had difficulty capitalising on its experience or, for example, that the soldiers trained in fire who could have made good NCOs are simply no longer there. The NTM largely determines the form of combat. With well-trained soldiers, cadres and staffs one can organise complex battles, without this it is impossible. In this case, there are only two solutions: either one waits to raise the average tactical level and then organise more ambitious operations, or one attacks right away but in a very poor tactical manner.
Faced with the Ukrainian offensives in the autumn, the Russians succeeded in pulling off a 'Hindenburg 1917', or at least they succeeded in the first phases with the establishment of a solid defence line on the front and the mobilisation of forces in the rear. Under this shield, the Germans had then attempted to stifle the United Kingdom by all-out submarine warfare. This can be compared to the missile campaign on the Ukrainian power grid. But above all they worked. After recovering forces from the Russian front, they had the patience in the winter of 1917-1918 to reconstitute a mass of manoeuvre based on recompleted divisions, reorganised and trained for weeks on new methods. The problem for them was that the Allies also worked hard in this period. The operations of 1918 were on both sides of a level of complexity impossible to achieve with the skills of 1916 at the time of the battles of Verdun or the Somme. Moreover, it is likely that by the 1920s, after the demobilisation of the forces, they were no longer able to organise them.
In short, faced with this dilemma, either through political pressure or to take the initiative, the Russian strategists decided to attack immediately and therefore very poorly, based, as from April to June, on battalion assaults with artillery support, but with few competent infantrymen and three times fewer shells. Let's say it right away, this is paid for mechanically with heavy losses, three times more each day than during the first battle of the Donbass according to Ukrainian figures, which should always be taken with caution. The Russians thus remain knowingly in a trap of incompetence.
The arithmetic stunner
These attacks are taking place throughout the theatre of operations with a rather dense and equitable distribution of Russian forces, in other words dispersed and without a second echelon. This already indicates that there is no real desire to break through, but simply to push and failing that to fix and wear down.
One remembers that the Kherson sector had been heavily reinforced during the summer, probably too much. The 49th Army and 5th Army, plus the 22nd Corps, were still there and held the right bank of the Dnieper with reduced forces. In the rear, the small 29th Army served as a reserve near the Crimea. It was a disparate unit deprived of most of its heavier manoeuvre units in favour of light battalions, about twenty in all. The first echelon served as the 'Dnieper Wall' and conducted mainly an artillery and commando battle along the front. The rear probably served mainly as a reserve and reconstitution zone. Several battle-tested divisions and air assault brigades were found there.
The Zaporijjia sector was more active. The reduced 35th Army held the Enerhodar nuclear power station and the southern bank of the Dnieper, but the 36th Army reinforced the 58th Army on the contact line. The total of 30-40 manoeuvre battalions is insufficient for a large-scale offensive operation, but allows for local attacks on Orikhiv and Vuhledar, which is part of Donetsk Oblast. These are two key points in the area. Orikhiv is an important road junction that commands the entire manoeuvre west of the Zaporizhia front, and its possession would provide a possible base for future attacks or, on the contrary, deprive the Ukrainians of one. Vuhledar, on the other hand, is above all a Ukrainian fire base, and perhaps later a manoeuvre base, which threatens with long-range artillery the entire communication network between Donetsk city and Mariupol. Its conquest, which is far from being achieved, would relieve the supply of the entire southern zone occupied by the Russians, an axis that is all the more important as the one coming from Crimea has been damaged. In summary, the mission of the Zaporajjia sector seems to be above all to rectify the line to its advantage by seizing key points and fixing the maximum number of Ukrainian forces for the main attack.
This main attack obviously takes place in the Donbass, whose two provinces actually form three sectors with more than a hundred manoeuvre battalions. The southernmost, the Donetsk City sector, is occupied by the Russian 8th Army and the 1st DNR Corps and aims, as it has since the beginning of the war, to push the Ukrainian forces beyond the city and out of the fortified position they have held since 2015. This is more of a pressure operation, with gains limited to a few villages, than an attempt to break through and dislocate. The northernmost sector is the Kharkiv province. Here we find the 1st Guards Armoured Army, the 4th Armoured Division in particular, and the 14th and 68th Corps. Its mission seems to be to protect the border of Luhansk province, by overrunning the contact line in the north inside Kharkiv province. Its immediate objective is the town of Dvoritchna as a bridgehead across the Oskil River and its further objective appears to be Kupiansk. Further south the Russian 41st Army held the Svatove area.
The Russian effort was focused between the two, on a sector that could be called 'Kreminna-Bakhmut' after the two battles at the ends of a general offensive operation towards Sloviansk-Kramatorsk. The effort at Kreminna was carried by the 20th Army and the 3rd Corps, spearheaded by the 7th Air Assault Division (VDV). The aim was to push the Ukrainians back towards the Oskil River and to re-enter the forest area of the Donets River towards Lyman and Siversk. The effort was supported in the south from Lysychansk by the 2nd LNR army corps reinforced by battalions of Russian mobilised soldiers. The effort in Bakhmut was led by the Wagner Company, whose strength on the ground was equivalent to that of a regular Russian army, but reinforced by the 106th Air Assault Division and artillery brigades from the 8th Army. The attack on Bakhmut progressed slowly but inexorably to the north and especially to the south-west of the town. The area held by the Ukrainians began to form a clear pocket, which was only supplied by a small axis. The question of abandoning Bakhmut or of a counter-attack by the Ukrainians inevitably arises.
In summary, from a Russian point of view the offensive is progressing and wearing down the Ukrainian army. Thanks to a regular supply of forces through a now unlimited mobilisation of men and industry, General Gerasimov can hope to conquer the Donbass by the summer of 2023 through continuous pressure. It will then be time to decide on the evolution of the strategic goals, depending on the balance of power. In any case, while the country is resisting the external pressure of sanctions and there is no internal unrest, time seems to play in favour of the Russian arithmetic stunner.
The conflict in Ukraine is sometimes compared with the 1939-1940 winter war between the USSR and Finland, drawing parallels between the determination and success of the Finns and Ukrainians in the face of an incomparably more powerful invader. It is forgotten to mention that the Soviets finally prevailed by a debauchery of means and sacrifices. After months of effort and 350,000 dead or wounded (six times more than the defenders) the Soviets finally broke through the Mannerheim Line and forced the Finnish government to admit defeat and negotiate unfavourably. This is most likely how things are seen in Moscow. The experience of this war, however, tends to show that predictions beyond three months are of little value.
War is always fought by at least two people, and next time we will be talking about the Ukrainian side.
️ Russian aircraft shoot down Ukrainian Mig-29 fighter jet and Mi-8 helicopter in Donetsk Republic.
