L’infanterie, les chars et la guerre en Ukraine (2e partie- Routes, bastions et corrosion)
Infantry, tanks and war in Ukraine (Part 2 - Roads, strongholds and corrosion)
On 24 February, the Russian army launched its armies in the purest style of the Soviet "high-speed offensives" already experimented on a small scale and with success in the Donbass in 2014 and 2015. It is very ambitious and confident as the Russians are engaging their entire forces almost simultaneously.
The mobile armoured model put to the test
The operational objective seems quite clear: to seize Kiev and Kharkiv, to reach the Dnieper river as quickly as possible in order to encircle the Ukrainian army in the Donbass from the north and the south, and then probably to take Odessa.
Three groups of armies were formed for this purpose: in the south, the 58th Army and then the 49th Army were to leave Crimea, seize the entire southern region of the Dnieper as far as the Donbass and push as far as possible towards Odessa. The "Donbass group" with the two separatist army corps and the 8th, 20th and 6th Russian armies must fix the Ukrainian forces in the Donbass, completely seize the province of Luhansk and the city of Kharkiv and then probably advance towards Dnipropetrovsk in parallel with the 1st Guards armoured army, which must probably seize Cherkasy and Kremenchuk on the Dnieper. Finally, the Northern Group, with the 36th, 35th and 41st Armies in Belarus and the 2nd Guards Army from Russia, was to take Kiev.
One must therefore imagine France in 1940 being approached along its entire border from the Channel to the Mediterranean by a German army reduced to its two airborne divisions and its ten Panzer divisions, but reinforced by brigades of multiple rocket launchers and hundreds of helicopters and attack aircraft in place of the Stukas, while the country would be struck in all its depths by kinetic attacks - missiles or air raids - or electronic attacks. On the other hand, France would be defended all over the country, with a fortified line facing the most sensitive zone, by a network of 37 active or reserve manoeuvre regiments, reinforced by as many reserve regiments for the defence of zones.
The first observation after a few days of war was that the Ukrainian physical or informational communication network in the depths resisted the attacks. This is not the main point, but it will obviously have an influence on the conduct of ground operations. Secondly, the skies are not completely in the hands of the Russians, who are unable to destroy the capabilities of the Ukrainian Air Force, which thus maintains an air guerrilla capability. The Ukrainians maintain a multi-layered ground-to-air defence that hinders the action of Russian aircraft, increasingly reduced to the role of Sturmovik. The threat is real for Ukrainian ground forces, but not completely paralysing.
The Russian operation succeeded in the south, rather surprisingly so, as the narrow exits from the peninsula appeared to be the easiest places in Ukraine to defend. The operational mobility of the units of the 58th army played to the full by taking advantage of the surprise and its two motorised divisions rushed on roads E97 and E105 to reach Kherson on the Dnieper river and Melitopol respectively from the first day. Melitopol and the port of Berdiansk were taken the next day, Kherson resisted for a week before falling. The port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov was surrounded on 3 March by the 1st DNR corps and the 150th motorised division of the 8th army, reinforced by a naval infantry brigade landed at Berdiansk. But this time the Ukrainians firmly resisted.
The Russian model thus worked perfectly in the South. We still lack the evidence to understand exactly why, but it is clear that the 58th Army completely surprised the southern Ukrainian regional command, which may not have suspected the strength of the Russian forces in Crimea, many of which had come from the Caucasus via the Kerch Bridge. Unlike the other largely recomposed armies, the 58th Army was the most coherent and was reinforced with good troops such as a naval infantry brigade, the reconnaissance and spetsnaz brigades of the 22nd Corps, and especially a division and an air assault brigade, which served as assault infantry in Kherson.
However, the Army Group South was stopped as soon as the Ukrainian defence was organised. Several Ukrainian brigades were firmly established in the port of Mykolaev between Kherson and Odessa. The Russian army is an army of roads, and Mykolaev is a road junction. Its capture is therefore essential for the Russians to continue operations beyond the Dnieper and especially to take the M14 towards Odessa. The problem was that the Russian model was not designed for fighting in a large, solidly held city.
The Ukrainians held Mykolaev and attempts to bypass the town from the north failed. The 7th Air Assault Division carried out a motorised raid to Voznessensk 90 km north-west of Mykolaev, another key point, but threatened to be cut off at its rear, it was forced to fall back in a hurry. Another attempt to push towards Kryvyï Rih, a hundred kilometres to the north-east, also failed for the same reasons and the poor quality of the roads.
The Russian army is an armoured army, but its logistics are carried out in trucks, which need good roads even more than tracked vehicles. Its rear bases are railway towns on the outskirts of Ukraine and shells and fuel (80% of the weight) are transported by trucks from these rear bases back and forth to the brigade/regiment bases about 5 km from the battle groups, which normally have only 3 days' autonomy. The further away these bases are from the railway, the longer the round trips are and with a constant number of trucks, the lower the throughput. If this first line was not a continuous front at the end of a narrow spire, as was the case during the 7th AAD's raid on Voznessensk, the logistical tail would also be vulnerable.
After two months of fruitless efforts across the Dnieper, Russian forces maintain the Kherson bridgehead opposite Mykolaev, rely on the wide Dnieper in the north and maintain a low density but continuous line from Vasylivka, south of the large town of Zaporizhia, which is inaccessible for 40km, to the DNR capital Donetsk in the east.
The Russian operational model also works in the province of Luhansk, in the north of the Donbass, where the 20th army seized the key point of Starobilsk on 26 February. As in the south, the region, rather open and poorly defended and favourable to armoured movements, was quickly conquered, before coming up against a firm defence, this time in Severodonetsk and along the forest axis of the Donets river which goes to Izyum. The small 6th army had a much harder time in Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, where it entered and finally got stuck, before giving up and trying to bypass it from the east and join the 20th army in the Izium region.
With five armies, the main Russian effort was directed towards Kiev. North-west of Kiev, an airborne assault group (VDV) tried to seize Antonov airport in Hostomel with an airmobile operation. The operation was ultimately unsuccessful, initially thwarted by short-range anti-aircraft defence that damaged the aircraft and, more importantly, by the counter-attack of the 4th Ukrainian Police Rapid Reaction Brigade and, presumably, the Special Forces. The VDVs were soon to be joined by the 35th Army from Belarus on what appeared to be the shortest route. However, the terrain was forested and good roads were rare. The Ukrainians also had time to cut through the terrain, destroying bridges and flooding to slow down and channel the Russians. Launched a few days later to relaunch the offensive further west, the 36th Army found itself blocked for a fortnight on 65 km of road. The two armies and the VDV grouping were thus blocked in a pocket on the north-eastern outskirts of Kiev with rare axes locked by small towns held by Ukrainian forces.
The same phenomenon can be found on a larger scale in the north-east with three armies, the 41st coming from Belarus in the north and the 2nd coming from Russia, blocked on the rare good roads of the region by the Ukrainian resistance in Chernihiv, Nijyn or Nokotop. The 2nd army circumvented the difficulty by bypassing the Nyzhyn area by the south to join the main road H07 in direction of Kiev. The 1st armoured army of the guard, the most powerful of all with three divisions and probably 20 battle groups must change course to join in its turn the road H07 with this difficulty that this great axis is blocked near the border by the Ukrainian resistance in Soumy.
To advance towards Kiev on road H07, the 2nd and 1st Russian armies were obliged to form arrows and even very long arrows of several hundred kilometres. Logistics became increasingly complicated. The advancing force was thus gradually reduced as a result of the reduction in logistical flow and the need for axis defence. In the end, the eastern outskirts of Kiev were approached in the Brovary region with only a handful of battle groups, which were stopped.
At the end of March, the five Russian armies were dispersed in the north of Ukraine, blocked in front of the cities and harassed in their rear, unable to seize or even surround Kiev. The Russian command decided to withdraw them, which was rather well organised, at least for the three armies of the north-east, which returned to Belarus and Russia without any trouble. It was more difficult for the forces in the pocket to the north-west of Kiev, where the retrograde manoeuvre was carried out under Ukrainian pressure on difficult and cut-off terrain. The Russians lost a lot of equipment as well as their honour.
Bastions and corrosion
In this confrontation of models, the initial advantage was rather on the Russian side by playing on the surprise effect and the Ukrainian unpreparedness in certain sectors. Some armoured columns were able to advance 50 km per day for a few days, which made it possible to capture at least three towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants and a strategic area in the north of the Crimea.
The mobile armoured model, especially in its Russian version, generates its own entropy even without opposition. One has to imagine several thousand armoured vehicles with an average age of 40 years and a high fuel consumption launched in a 500 km long race with an under-dimensioned logistic echelon that has difficulty keeping up. Even without combat, units have had to stop every 150 km for lack of fuel, and above all abandon broken down or damaged vehicles in a delicate position, with the headache of managing the men who were on board when all the other vehicles are full, while the capacity to repair them on the spot is very limited. Russian armoured units are complex, their disorganisation comes into play very quickly with losses.
Of course, this entropy increases exponentially as soon as opposition occurs. The preferred opposition for the Russian model is that of symmetrical conventional units in open terrain, detected as far away as possible thanks to advanced sensors - reconnaissance vehicles, helicopters and drones. From there, the small battle group command post has to organise a manoeuvre from 8 to 10 companies, a number that exceeds the cognitive handling capacity of five elements especially under pressure. It is therefore simple and is based on the sub-grouping of tank and infantry units, which must attack or defend as a whole, and the artillery sub-grouping, which must strike up to about 20 km with howitzers or up to 90 km with multiple rocket launchers, all protected from aircraft by a mobile anti-aircraft battery. The ideal manoeuvre is to fix the enemy with an attack or a stoppage and hand him over to the artillery fire, while the following battlegroups bypass, flank or encircle this enemy.
The problem is that the Ukrainians have done everything to avoid this, fighting solidly only in closed terrain and fighting fluidly in open terrain.
Closed terrain is that of entrenched positions, woods, mountains and especially cities, in short all those places where it is difficult to be seen and where the context divides the effectiveness of powerful fire at a distance. The closed and particularly urban terrain is therefore, in attack as well as in defence, that of precision close combat, and therefore that of the infantry, which does not exclude the use of armoured vehicles.
One can even imagine forming urban infantry regiments entirely organised and equipped for the defence or conquest of cities. For an "army without infantry", as the Russian army is sometimes exaggeratedly called, a single Ukrainian brigade solidly entrenched in a city of more than 50,000 inhabitants, and there are 83 in Ukraine, is a problem and this problem grows geometrically with the size of the city, the volume of forces holding it and their quality. The 1st Ukrainian armoured brigade together with a territorial brigade, a national guard (police) brigade and militias (Ukraine is very tolerant of private armies) formed a 'stronghold division' in Chernihiv, a city of 290,000 inhabitants and 80 square kilometres in the far north of the country, which held off the entire 41st Russian army.
Throughout this first phase, the Russians conquered two cities of over 100,000 inhabitants, Melitopol and Berdiansk, without a fight, and after a week's fighting the city of Kherson, largely because they committed their best infantry, with 7th Air Assault Division, against an arguably inferior Ukrainian motorised brigade that did not have time to organise itself well. They penetrated a third of Kharkiv before withdrawing and surrounded Chernihiv, Nijyn, Nokotop and Soumy, before being forced to lift the siege. The only successful siege was that of Mariupol, taken after three months of fighting.
It is rather surprising that the Russian Army did not take into account this problem beforehand, which could have been largely anticipated, but perhaps this would have imposed too great a transformation of their force model, to the benefit of the infantry (and therefore to the detriment of other more prestigious arms in Russia) and with the need for this centralised combat to have quality subordinate cadres capable of initiative. This was a difficult cultural innovation that the Ukrainians partly succeeded in but the Russians did not. In the meantime, the Russians are overusing their good infantry - air assault troops, marine infantry, Chechen national guards, Wagner mercenaries, all outside the army - diverted from their original mission, a classic, to conduct close combat.
And then there is the open terrain combat, which is never completely open outside of sandy deserts. After a month of fighting, according to the open source site Oryx, the Russians have lost 342 battle tanks and 641 various armoured infantry vehicles throughout the theatre, but especially in the Kiev region. These are documented losses and therefore probably lower than the reality. These material losses may seem relatively small compared to the Yom Kippur War (3,000 battle tanks lost on all sides in 19 days) but they are considerable for modern armies in a reduced format. There is the entire material capital of 20 battle groups, out of 128 initially committed, and in passing almost twice what France could simply muster for its 'major engagement hypothesis'.
Most surprisingly, Ukrainian losses in combat vehicles, again underestimated, are about four times lower than Russian losses. Such discrepancies in losses between the two adversaries are usually achieved in battles that result in the dislocation of the enemy, resulting in many material losses, often by capture or abandonment, as well as many prisoners. None of this happened in Ukraine in 2022 except at Mariupol, the only battle that resulted in the complete destruction of brigades but on the Ukrainian side. The Ukrainians on their side did not destroy any Russian brigade or regiment, even during the withdrawal from Kiev. It can be concluded that it was mainly a question of small fragmented fights of the 'fight and flight' type, which could be translated as 'shoot first and leave before the Russian artillery fire'.
To succeed in this type of combat, one must have information superiority. This is globally the case for the Ukrainian forces, thanks to the help "from above" of the American intelligence, but also and this is more new "from below" thanks to the multiplication of civilian sensors such as commercial drones but also simply smartphones, with a good data fusion capacity. Digital warfare is a reality on the Ukrainian side thanks to a maintained internet link. Combined with the defensive posture and predictability of Russian movements, this information superiority allows light and discreet Ukrainian forces, regular or private, such as the Aerorozvidka drone squadron, to have the initiative in combat most of the time.
The fighting itself is often limited to short strikes and/or ambushes that are completed before the artillery of the battle group or army brigades can be activated. With the right human capital, Russian battle groups can be formidable. The 11th US Cavalry Regiment, organised and equipped in the Soviet style and serving as the opposition force in the Nevada National Training Centre, (virtually) defeats the vast majority of the US Army brigades it faces, but its leadership, from group leaders to regimental commander, is well trained and the unit is over-trained. This is clearly not the case in most Russian battlegroups, where everything revolves around a small, untrained, thinking command post and junior officers who are asked to obey strictly and apply patterns they do not master well. Such a mode of operation is particularly ill-suited to reacting to surprises, which are frequent, and tends to generate offensive manoeuvres reduced to their simplest expression.
It is interesting to note that the Russians also lost 150 artillery pieces and over 660 trucks in one month, two very high numbers that indicate that their depth and even their rear may have been hit, especially and logically in the vulnerable spires that may have been formed especially in the north-east of the country.
There is a lack of information on the causes of vehicle destruction, but one is struck by the abundance of Ukrainian infantry light anti-tank weaponry, especially after the first deliveries of weapons, and the effectiveness of downrange systems such as NLAW rockets up to 500m, and Javelin or Stugna P missiles at several kilometres. These weapons have the particularity of being 'fire and forget' and of hitting the roofs of tanks, their most vulnerable zone, and piercing a Russian tank up to the shells in the floor often blows the turret. It is conceivable that, caught in an ambush and under indirect fire, Russian crews might be tempted to get out of tanks that everyone knows are abundantly stocked and therefore expendable.
More conventional rocket launchers can have the same effect in the city when used at height in buildings. The second destructive system is that of low-cost and therefore numerous weapon drones, which produce the same effect of plunging fire and up to 8 km, sometimes more. Switchblade 300 or, especially 600 (up to 80 km) rodent drones can have the same effect at reduced prices. The Ukrainians did not have them during this phase. They would have wreaked havoc on the 64 km blocked column. The third destructive system is artillery when it becomes hyper-precise - one shell, one vehicle - thanks to guided munitions and drones. Anti-tank fire from the sky' is probably the main Ukrainian comparative advantage against which Russian armoured columns, and probably those of all armies, are currently poorly protected.
In summary, it is not the tank that died in Ukraine during this first phase, but perhaps the balanced model of large units organised around the battle tank, in favour of a new differentiation between units with high distant and indirect but very fluid firepower or, on the contrary, hyper-protected units for dense environments, a sort of return to mechanical (very) light divisions and armoured divisions.
(to be continued)
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