Dr Mike Martin @threshedthought
Much has been made of this Russian redeployment to the east of Ukraine.
A thread.
First a few thoughts.
The Ukrainians won the first major battle in this war. That was the Battle of Kyiv (2022).
This battle will be studied. Is being studied.
Supposedly the Russians were going to pull their forces out of Kyiv and redeploy them to the East.
I’m not so sure about this. Pulling units out of a battle where they have taken a lot of damage and casualties and then trying to form new units out of the debris (reconstitution in military parlance) is super hard. See here:
www.army.mil/article/219390/the_fallacy_and_myth_of_reconstitution
This is even more so when you consider the low state of training of Russian forces and their terrible morale.
Even if they could rebuild a semblance of a force out of what managed to get out of the Battle of Kyiv, the idea that they can easily move it 1500km across Belarus and inside Russia to the East of Ukraine … I just don’t buy it.
There won’t be many Ru forces coming from Kyiv.
The Russians have also supposedly solidified their command structures. Finally.
A major weakness of their initial plan was that the different prongs were commanded separately meaning they could coordinate, sequence activity or prioritise top level assets like planes
Interestingly the war in the east is being commanded by the commander in the south.
This means it will take him a while to understand in detail what is going on.
There also news that Russia is calling up reserves and conscripting a new batch of soldiers.
Irrelevant in the timeframes we are taking about. It will take months for them to come online.
And finally, on the Russian side we have rumours that the commander has been given the date of the 9th May to achieve results.
This is the Russian May Day Parade celebrating the end of World War Two.
So that’s a month away. A tall order indeed. They’ve gone backwards over the last month.
Facing the Russians are maybe 75k Ukrainian forces in the East if you include Territorials.
The Russians maybe have 100k? Hard to say.
A good rule of thumb in warfare is that attackers need about 3 times as many forces as defenders in order to be successful (if all other things - like quality and morale of forces - are equal).
It’s much easier to defend.
So you can see from these numbers that the Russians aren’t in a position to do much attacking.
Neither are the Ukrainians, mind.
This leaves a couple of options.
The Russians could try and encircle all of the Ukrainians in a pocket, this defeating them (waiting until the starve/surrender etc).
This ain’t going to happen. The Russians couldn’t manoeuvre 120km along roads to Kyiv.
No way they can manage the 500km required to encircle the Ukrainians in the East.
So that leaves the Russians one option: try and grind the Ukrainians down.
This won’t work. They don’t have the numbers and their force morale and training isn’t high enough.
What about the Ukrainians?
Their strategic aims are fairly clear: push the Russians out of the sovereign territory of Ukraine.
Their strategic aims are fairly clear: push the Russians out of the sovereign territory of Ukraine.
So I think the Ukrainians should think about three things because what they need to do is cause the Russian forces to collapse.
1) I would start some sort of sabotage operations or insurgency behind the Russian positions. That shouldn’t be too hard as it is in Ukraine after all.
This is to scare the Russian forces.
2) I would conduct commando or special forces raids in places like Crimea, and in Russian territory.
This is to keep the Russian commander off balance and make them keep forces all over the place for defence.
3) I would launch short sharp attacks on Russian forces in Donbas. This is why the Ukrainians are asking for artillery and armoured vehicles from the West.
This will eventually force the rout of the Ru but the final push should only happen once 1) and 2) have had time to work
This is phase two of the war. It will take about a month to play out - so by ‘victory’ day parade in Moscow.
But it may not turn out how the Russians think.
The momentum is with the Ukrainians. I think they’ll kick the Russians out.
But they’ll lose 100k civilians doing it.