La bataille pour la première position
The battle for top spot
Let's start with a figure: 42. This is the number of destroyed Ukrainian combat vehicles (battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and, this time, including Leopard 2Rs equipped with breaching devices) recorded by the Oryx website between 7 and 14 June 2023, compared with 91 Russian vehicles. We are all aware of the major limitations of this exercise, the forced time lag between the online version and the events and, above all, the fact that no account is taken of what has not been made visible. It should also be remembered that these figures relate to the whole of the Ukrainian theatre and not just the Ukrainian counter-offensive, even though we suspect that this is where the heaviest losses occurred.
What we can say, however, is that the figure is higher than average, and we have to go back to the first few weeks of the war to find any equivalents. At the same time, in absolute terms these are not very high figures either. We can consider that the twelve manoeuvre brigades engaged in the first echelon by the Ukrainians, nine already in place and three as reinforcements, had around 1,200 combat vehicles in working order (around 1,400 in theory). Even if we double the Oryx estimate and consider that a brigade is neutralised when it has lost 40% of its major equipment, this gives a potential of four months of uninterrupted combat at this rate of loss. The men serving this equipment will have cracked long before then. At this stage, it should be remembered that, despite the videos that the Russian side has lavishly provided, overall Ukrainian material losses appear to be fairly moderate. If you show a video of a destroyed tank a hundred times, you will always see just one tank actually destroyed.
On the other hand, these material losses were fairly unevenly distributed, first and foremost in terms of quality, with no doubt a significant proportion of the precious engineering equipment. A modern army on the attack is a delicate watchmaker. It has to simultaneously deploy resources that protect the attacking troops from threats from the air - drones, shells, attack aircraft and helicopters - others that neutralise enemy strongpoints with fire, and still others that make it possible to seize these strongpoints or bypass them by overcoming obstacles of all kinds. If one essential piece is missing, the whole thing falls apart. The Ukrainian force has more or less everything it needs, but it does have a few weak points, such as anti-drone systems, crossing capabilities and the quantity of artillery shells, which reflect our own weaknesses. It remains to be seen whether the whole will be completely coherent once the first Russian position has been conquered, as the mission of this first position was precisely to disorganise the Ukrainian assault force. It is interesting to note above all that these losses were unevenly distributed between the units. Out of 42 combat vehicles reported destroyed in one week, there were 4 Leopard 2A4s and A6s, 3 Leopard 2Rs and 16 Bradley ICVs. Considering that all these Western vehicles belong to the same brigade, the 47th Mechanised Brigade, that's quite a lot for a single unit.
As for the men (94% of Ukrainian civilian and military casualties were men), things are more complicated to determine. If we again take the figures for Oryx combat vehicle losses since the start of the war and compare them with the total estimated human losses on both sides, we get an average of 120 Ukrainian killed and wounded for every tank/VCI found lost and 60 on the Russian side. These are not, of course, the losses in these vehicles, but just a rough estimate based on the application of a correlation coefficient. This would give an order of magnitude for this week of almost 5,000 Ukrainian soldiers hit, with 2,500 permanently out of action (killed, seriously wounded, taken prisoner) in a week and 2,500 who can quickly return to the line. Assuming that 3,000 to 4,000 of these men are in the Ukrainian counter-offensive, at this rate the 12 first echelon brigades will be able to fight for three months before being reduced to 30% of their strength. Here again, rotations will normally be carried out earlier.
Behind the twelve first echelon Ukrainian manoeuvre brigades and the six territorial or national guard brigades holding the positions, south of the town of Zaporijia, there was a second echelon of ten manoeuvre brigades ready to relieve those in front or to attack the line themselves. Between Zaporijia and Dnipro, there was even a strategic reserve of five brigades that could be deployed anywhere. In short, Ukrainian resources were barely tapped.
But it's much the same on the Russian side. Oryx has counted 91 combat vehicles destroyed across the theatre this week. Here again, it's not clear what comes under the Ukrainian counter-offensive, but this undoubtedly represents the majority of losses. Again, this is a little more than the average for previous weeks, but not as many as the 238 combat vehicles lost each week between 24 February and 1 April 2022, largely in the battle for Kiev (the famous "decoy" dear to the pro-Russian influencers). This would also represent around 5,400 men if the ratio of 60 to 1 vehicle is applied, the majority of whom would have been killed in the Ukrainian counter-offensive. In both cases, these are still largely sustainable casualty rates for the 28 brigades/regiments identified in this sector.
It's worth noting in passing that the losses of the Russian defenders seem to be equivalent to or greater than those of the attackers. This may seem paradoxical, as the attackers were supposed to be exposed to more fire than the defenders, but in reality this was not the case. Remember that the units engaged on either side face two threats. They can face each other directly in "close" combat, in fact often at a distance, where much more use is made of heavy machine guns, machine guns and tank tubes than assault rifles. In these conditions, it's a question of quality rather than numbers.
The principle is simple: when two units meet, the unit with the highest tactical level on a scale of 1 to 10 systematically wins, and the scale of its victory will be more than proportional to the difference in level between the two enemy forces. Defending an entrenched position brings a one-rung bonus and, in both attack and defence, the support of a powerful reconnaissance-fragmenting complex. At the end of the day, at equivalent levels, combat is indecisive and subject to the vagaries of chance; with one extra level, you win by a limited margin; with a two-level difference, you win by a large margin with far fewer losses than the other; with three levels, you crush the enemy.
Before going any further, let's also remember that the notion of a "3 to 1" ratio of forces required to win an attack makes sense at the strategic level (the French army of 1990 would probably win over the army of 2023 because it was three times more numerous) but not at the tactical level, let's say at brigade level and below. In this very dangerous world, once you reach a certain threshold, adding more men means raising the M in the equation slightly, but above all it means adding losses. So it's possible if you don't care about the losses, as Wagner did in Bakhmut, but it's by no means the norm. For almost a hundred years, the balance of power in land battles has rarely been more than 2 to 1, and very often the attackers are outnumbered by the defenders. So here we come back to the point that, tactically speaking, size doesn't count for much. All that matters is the difference in tactical level.
The difficulty for any army will be to reconcile mass and tactical level, as these are not perfectly compatible criteria. The key point is to have and keep a large number of good quality officers and non-commissioned officers, despite the intensity of the fighting and the scale of the losses.
What are we seeing on the ground now? The Ukrainians launched all or most of their first echelon to attack the first Russian position, with each brigade acting in columns of combined arms battalions.
From west to east, near the Dnieper at Lobkove, the 128th mountain brigade advanced and was halted by the advanced Russian elements without suffering too many casualties. The 65th mechanised brigade did the same further east in the Nesterianka area. On the other hand, the 33rd and 47th mechanised brigades engaged more intensively from Orikhiv towards Robotyne and Verbove respectively. The 33rd Brigade made good progress before being halted. It even underwent a counter-attack from the main line of the 291st regiment of the 42nd motorised division, but this too was halted. Losses were fairly heavy on both sides. The biggest failure came from the 47th Brigade, whose four assault columns were severely curtailed in front of the Russian grouping of the 22nd Spetsnaz Brigade and the 45th Special Forces Brigade, used in infantry formation. In the central sector of Houliaipole, the Ukrainian 46th Airmobile Brigade (equipped with French VAB vehicles) made slight progress. All in all, we had balanced fighting in the west and centre that didn't achieve much, and an unbalanced battle that ended in a serious setback. Given that the 47th Brigade was supposed to have been trained by Westerners, we may have to ask ourselves a few questions.
While the Ukrainians were clearly contained in the western part of the front, they were much more successful in the Velika Novosilka area. There, they benefited from the salient shape of the front, which enabled them to coordinate the flanking action of several brigades (if pockets were formed on the flanks, the Russian units in front were threatened with encirclement and had to withdraw), whereas the brigades in the west had to attack in parallel in a straight line without having much opportunity to help each other. The Ukrainians had units that were not necessarily among the most heavily equipped but of good tactical quality, such as the 37th Marine Infantry Brigade (with French AMX-10RCs) from the Vuhledar sector, which successfully attacked the eastern flank of the pocket. The 35th Marine Infantry Brigade to the north and the 68th Fighter Brigade and 31st Mechanised Brigade to the east also hammered away at the first position, forcing the Russians to withdraw. The Ukrainians thus conquered the first Russian position on both sides of the Mokri Yali river, repelled a counter-attack by the 127th Motorised Division from the main line and are now continuing their methodical advance southwards. More than 75% of the ground conquered by the Ukrainians in a week has been in this sector alone, and it is likely that the same is true of the losses inflicted on the Russians.
To sum up, as might be expected, the fighting is difficult and obviously much more similar to the long months needed to conquer the Kherson bridgehead, where the Russian position was shallower and three times weaker than in the Zaporijia-Donetsk area, than to the breakthrough in Kharkiv in September 2022, which was in fact an anomaly because the Russians were so abnormally weak there. The fighting was also fairly in line with expectations. Experienced brigades are better than young brigades, whatever the range of equipment used, but even the best brigades do not succeed if they do not coordinate well with a reconnaissance-rapple complex that can offer them protection against what falls from the sky and support against what comes from the ground.
This first week of fighting is undoubtedly only half the success that the Ukrainian command had hoped for, but it is only the first week. There will be many more to come, and at this stage there is no way of knowing who will prevail in this tug of war.
bulgarianmilitary.com
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