Air Denial And Ukraine
Control of the skies isn't strictly required to win a war: preventing the enemy from using them against you is good enough
Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season. And once again, thanks for reading!
Ukraine and its partners gave a very nice holiday gift to the frontline soldiers fighting in occupied Kherson last week. It came as welcome news that Ukraine knocked down three Su-34 Flanker strike fighters, more or less a ruscist equivalent to the American F-15E Strike Eagle. Supposedly a couple more jets have gone down since, though the cause in these causes is not as apparent.
Over the past year flights of these jets releasing GPS-guided glide bombs had filled a vital gap in Moscow’s fire support system, acting like a heavy long-range multiple rocket launcher. Though not particularly accurate, with targets selected many hours before strike packages launch from bases in Muscovite territory and consequently missing the primary targets most of the time, these attacks still prevent Ukraine from building up dense concentrations of vehicles near the front line.
The fighting in Krynky, one of Ukraine’s bridgeheads across the Dnipro in Kherson, saw near daily barrages against the 300 or so Ukrainian Marines fighting to grind down ruscist efforts to drive them back over the river. That is, up until Ukraine managed to ambush a trio of Flankers with what most reports agree were Patriot missiles before the ruscist jets could launch their weapons.
This scenario is, incidentally, more or less what I predicted earlier this month would happen eventually, especially once F-16s arrived in force. Germany just delivered another Patriot battery to Ukraine this December, and as soon as it arrived Ukraine appears to have put it into action in Kherson.
With a maximum effective range of 160km using PAC-2 interceptors, a Patriot battery parked north of Mykolaiv can shoot down high-flying aircraft well behind the front lines. Ruscist glide bombs have a maximum range of around 50km only achievable if the weapons are released from high altitude. Moscow has published videos of its Flankers performing this mission, and radars can often track jets even beyond the range their missiles can reach, so it’s quite likely that Ukraine has plenty of early warning and took full advantage.
Truth be told, the effective range of a Patriot battery in combat can extend quite a bit further than 160km from a single central point if launchers are placed closer to the front than the more vulnerable radar antennae and control vehicles. A launcher shooting from downtown Kherson could send a Patriot interceptor all the way to Crimea.
Ukraine likely wouldn’t take that risk with a launcher because the newest generation of Lancet drones are able to reach a good 50km or more behind the front and ruscist recon drones can often peer that far back to cue targets. A concentrated ruscist missile and air attack against Patriot system could overwhelm it, and the odds of this happening go up the closer any part gets to the front line.
But a system set up north of Mykolaiv would have the benefit of having the one guarding Odesa be just close enough to offer mutual protection. Not necessarily against ballistic missiles like the Iskander or Kinzhal, as the maximum effective range against fast-moving exo-atmospheric targets is much shorter, but to breach the targeted Patriot battery’s defenses would require overcoming the two dozen weapons it can send up in its own defense. Pretty much the only way to knock out a major air defense system itself protected by mid and short-range weapons is through a massive strike with ballistic and cruise missiles plus a whole lot of decoys and drones all hitting within the span of an hour.
The same is true of Moscow’s S-400 system, which is why Ukrainian special forces have been working hard to degrade the one covering Crimea over time. Success has allowed Ukraine to launch multiple cruise missile strikes against the Black Sea Fleet, the latest one totally demolishing a landing ship in Feodosia. Moscow might have worked out how to slow Ukraine’s ground offensives to a creeping grind, but at sea it really is losing to an enemy whose small navy was gone within hours of the all-out invasion starting.
And now in the air Ukraine is also, at long last, beginning to reach qualitative parity. There are no places within the occupied territories that Ukrainian weapons cannot now reach. Early in the war all it had to strike back at Moscow’s air power was a few short range ballistic missiles of the Tochka type, essentially modern versions of the old Scud just accurate enough to threaten airfields. S-300 and S-400 interceptors were able to handle most that launched, and Ukraine soon ran out. Repurposing old obsolete S-200 air defense missiles has been only a limited success, mostly by forcing Moscow to use expensive interceptors to knock them out.
But with Storm Shadow (SCALP in France) cruise missiles and even the limited-range cluster warhead ATACMS weapons that Ukraine was finally allowed to have by the Biden Administration, plus its own growing arsenal of one-way attack drones, Kyiv is at last able to hold every asset in Crimea and Donbas at risk. Ruscist jets and ships will soon be forced to operate exclusively from ruscist home soil, adding half an hour to an hour of additional flight time on each mission - and more warning of their approach.
In other good news for Ukraine, Europe appears to be finally stepping up even as the USA’s political dysfunction deepens. There are rumors of several more European Patriot batteries slated to head to Ukraine in the coming months. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of a major commitment to boost Ukraine’s air defenses in this way. An additional three Patriot systems located in the right places would extend an air denial bubble out almost to the Azov Sea, ending the threat of mass glide bomb attacks against the Orihiv front.
Particularly if the Patriot system’s mobility were effectively exploited, Ukraine could also stop all but ballistic attacks against a string of vital cities running from Kharkiv to Odesa. It is likely too dangerous to push them far into the Donbas region, where Moscow would be able to attack from multiple directions at once. But the primary center of gravity of this conflict is not Donbas, but Crimea. Putin can fight in Donbas to push the line of contact towards the Dnipro forever, but if Crimea can’t be held the effort is politically pointless.
Ukraine is slowly building up the right mix of capabilities to degrade Moscow’s logistics lines covering the troops in the peninsula. When viewed from a classic ground forces perspective, Crimea is a fortress surrounded by easily defensible choke points. But if you look at history, water bodies tend to serve more as transportation conduits than barriers.
The English Channel might be the most famous anti-tank ditch of all time thanks to Germany’s inability to rapidly push across in 1940, but once Germany was fully occupied on the Eastern Front suddenly manpower was at a premium and thousands of miles of coastline a massive vulnerability. Until the very end of the war the Germans were convinced that Norway would be an Allied invasion target, and so kept thousands of occupation troops there that could have been used elsewhere.
Amphibious assaults are brutally difficult affairs, it is true. The memory of Gallipoli - one of Churchill’s earliest too-brilliant-by-half military plans that went terribly wrong - still stings in Australia and New Zealand, I understand. Dieppe appears to make Canadians feel much the same. And Normandy too was nearly a disaster on at least two of the five landing zones despite many of the garrison forces being Eastern European conscripts unsure of what was even happening.
The truth of D-Day is that the proximity of the English coast made it more like a grand river crossing than the kind of warfare common in the Pacific Theater during World War Two. Inchon in Korea was not dissimilar, sustained from nearby Japan. In Moscow’s invasion of 2022, naval troops landed on the Azov Coast to help swiftly encircle Mariupol before its siege and destruction - another short hop as these things go.
Crossing to Crimea presents a similar challenge to the English Channel in terms of distance, probably easier when it comes to currents and storms as well as the amount of territory adjacent to any landing area the enemy could use to mass forces for a counterattack. Once Ukraine has liberated southern Kherson it will be able to send watercraft as small at jet skis over the bay between it and Crimea. If Moscow can’t adequately garrison and patrol the entire northwest coast while facing constant drone raids, it runs the risk of Ukraine seizing a foothold in one or more villages. With the southern half of Kherson being within HIMARS range of Crimea, this opens the door to a landing protected by adequate firepower - especially if ATACMS and Storm Shadow (hopefully Taurus, too, if Germany finally gets going with the deliveries) weapons are hitting deeper behind the front.
In other words, what Ukraine is doing along the Dnipro right now could prove an model for how it breaks into Crimea behind the main ruscist defense line. A key lesson of the fighting this summer was that to move forward in modern conditions probably requires building a series of capability denial bubbles where enemy forces operate with greatly limited effectiveness relative to friendly forces. First you have to make sure long-range air defense missiles can shut down the upper skies. Shorter range systems offer a critical backstop, preventing dense strikes from overwhelming the main SAMs.
If enemy aircraft can’t freely operate, hostile forces lose a vital piece of the overall military puzzle. A systematic vulnerability is created that can be exploited until the enemy adapts, if it is able. Which Moscow does, but slowly - and there are always limits to adaptive capacity. Having geared its military effort over the past year towards costly, blood-drenched ground warfare, Moscow’s ability to invest resources in the air and sea domains is increasingly limited by prior commitments.
Once the airspace is shut down near the front, electronic warfare becomes the next focal point. Extending a jamming horizon deep into enemy territory reduces the effectiveness of what have become the most important surveillance and strike assets for troops in contact with enemy ground forces. This is made easier if the enemy can’t see as far behind the lines or launch air strikes because of stiff air defenses.
This will lead to the ability to maintain more signal repeaters closer to the front that extend one’s own drone capabilities, creating opportunities for paralyzing hostile forces across an area of the right size to let a properly scaled ground force seize ground then dig in. Backed up by precision strikes from artillery close to the fighting and rockets or missiles striking logistics and command nodes, a kind of island can be created that isn’t reinforced or resupplied except at exorbitant cost.
This is the dilemma that Ukraine presented to Moscow in Kherson last autumn, and it worked as well in terms of liberating territory as the more classic counteroffensive in Kharkiv. In a very real way, all warfare may be turning into a kind of island hopping like that practiced by Nimitz’ forces in the central Pacific. The goal is to create, using the terrain and your capabilities, effective islands where your forces are able to operate with near impunity even as the opponent is stuck in place. This allows for maneuver to gain prominence once more, the goal being to muscle the enemy out of a defined region without having to directly fight their full force, instead picking it apart until it is compelled to retreat or be destroyed.
One of the earliest vital lessons in island hopping was not to attack every target. What to ignore and leave to wither on the vine was as important as picking a new atoll to seize. Costly assaults on tiny islets like Tarawa forced Nimitz to be more selective in where US forces actually landed: any place that wasn’t needed as a staging area for the next leap west could be isolated, reduced, then ignored. As Japan’s naval strength ebbed, it was not able to protect all of its garrisons. Soon thousands of troops were stuck, unable to assist the defense of the Marianas, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa and often starving.
In fact, the entire southern wing of the push towards the Dutch, British, and French colonies and former US possession the Philippines was probably unnecessary once Japan’s push in the Solomons was stopped. With Australia and New Zealand securely linked to North America, once the central Pacific was lost Japan’s logistics lifeline along the coast of occupied China was doomed. Blockade would have done for the Japanese war effort in time; Truman’s use of the atomic bombs was a message to the Soviet Union, not a necessity of war.
Logistics rule warfare because if troops can’t eat, they can’t fight. And if they can’t fight, they’re easy to defeat if you have patience. Thanks to the limited access routes to Crimea and Ukraine's expanding capabilities, Crimea is - or soon will be - an island. Occupied Kherson is too, thanks to the Crimean canal cutting it in half.
This is why I evaluate the destruction of Moscow’s bombers last week as being a clear indicator of the shifting tide in the air war. Ukraine has also reportedly knocked down a couple more ruscist jets in the south, possibly indicating a Patriot battery moving around.
But there is another intriguing possibility supposedly doing the rounds in the ruscist war blogger community. Many commentators over there are certain that it wasn’t Patriot that took down these ruscist Flankers, but newly-arrived F-16s.
Now, ruscists are always looking for the hand of NATO in every epic defeat they suffer. Unable to shed their colonial attitude towards Ukraine - which reminds me a lot of how East Coast Americans seem to view those of us from west of the Rockies - Moscow’s orc cheerleaders are desperate to portray every Ukrainian win as a result of mercenaries or fancy NATO weapons that when propaganda demands are also totally inferior to the many ruscist T-90s littering the battlefields of Ukraine. Moscow was claiming kills on Abrams tanks before any were even confirmed to be in the country.
So I have to take any claim that F-16s were involved with spoonful of salt at this point. If Moscow shows wreckage of AIM-120D model AMRAAM air to air missiles, that would serve as evidence for the F-16 claim.
Much like assertions that Ukraine previously used Patriot missiles to ambush a pair of Flankers backed by a duo of electronic warfare helicopters in Bryansk earlier this year, the lack of Moscow’s propagandists displaying wreckage of NATO weapons makes a simpler explanation more likely. In that incident, an S-300 launcher could have been used in conjunction with the Patriot radar to surprise the enemy.
Similarly, early reports have it that the Patriot system used in this latest aerial ambush kept its radar off until a NATO AWACS aircraft monitoring the fighting from Romania of the western Black Sea sent a warning that an air raid was in progress. Without having to worry about Moscow using recovered Patriot bits landing on its sovereign territory to claim that NATO had attacked it directly, all Ukraine’s Patriot operators had to do was wait until the planes were close enough that they had no chance of escaping the danger zone.
Most anti-aircraft missiles are essentially lethal autonomous drones, programmed to attack only targets that fit a specific electromagnetic profile, using radar reflections or heat to home in. These days, you can fire one off towards a target area then later feed it more precise targeting data. Ruscist jets apparently use the exact same flight path until something goes wrong, making a shootdown that much easier.
So until there is hard confirmation, I am skeptical that F-16s have been used in Ukraine yet. However, I’d like to believe that training was completed quickly enough that a squadron is now on duty, dispersed across Ukraine to back up Patriot batteries in shutting down the skies over the front.
I expect them to be constantly shuttling between air strips guarded by Patriot batteries. Because ruscist Mig-31 Foxhound and Su-35 Super Flankers carry missiles that can hit air targets as far away as a Patriot can shoot and there are still S-400 launchers in Crimea, F-16 pilots will have to be extremely conservative.
Still, differences in how effectively the two side’s jets can target each other when their respective electronic warfare systems come online is a big unknown. F-16s can carry jammers and decoys in addition to long-range weapons, and a pair flying at high altitude can attract enemy attention while a pair flying in at ground level go undetected even as they approach the front line.
F-16 pilots can use HARM missiles, which seek out and destroy enemy radar and jamming systems bases on the signals they emit, much more effectively than Ukrainian pilots in Mig-29s and Su-27s that have to rely on adapters. These apparently have to be programmed on the ground to fly to an area and switch on, while an F-16 pilot can see what’s emitting in their neighborhood while flying around and release HARMs as the situation demands.
That is what will open the door to localized strikes against ruscist electronic warfare systems that allow Ukraine to extend a drone denial bubble over the front. Even a pair of F-16s carrying four HARMs apiece can, if able to approach close enough to the front, do serious damage to ruscist drone operations near an embattled bridgehead like Krynky.
They are also able to use long-range anti-ship missiles, complementing Ukraine’s naval drones. All one of these has to do is get a fix on a ruscist vessel at sea and transmit the coordinates to an F-16 flight carrying a few Harpoon anti-ship missiles. The western Black Sea will be off-limits to ruscist aviation and shipping. This in turn makes it easier for Ukraine’s old Su-24 Fencers, a rough equivalent to the US F-111 (that Australia also used for a long time) or pan-European Tornado, to fire Storm Shadow missiles from directions ruscist air defense operators in Crimea don’t expect.
It’s notable that soon after Ukraine took down the Su-34s last week it also unleashed a series of air raids with the US equivalent to the ruscist KAB glide bomb, the JDAM. Coordinated air strikes, especially if drones are added to the mix, can create hours-long periods where ruscist forces are stuck hiding across a wide front. It’s these moments that allow Ukrainian ground units to do damage or simply prepare to fend off the next enemy meat assault.
On the ground this past week Moscow has continued offensive operations on every active front as well as amplifying efforts near Bakhmut, Marinka and Lyman. Putin’s generals say that they’re advancing everywhere, and this is technically true if you remember that ground forces now have to fight their way through a 10-20km wide grey zone before reaching the enemy’s main positions.
Wherever ruscist troops mass their forces to seize a position, they quickly come under attack. Not every formation appears prepared for continuous waves of small units staffed by disposable personnel; many ruscist formations continue to play war in the predictable set piece way they were likely trained, attempting to bring 10-20 vehicles into a fight until taught the error of these tactics.
After literally months of fighting Moscow is claiming - with justification, this time - to have taken the small frontline town of Marinka. This appears to be part of a general effort to push Ukrainian forces back from Vuhledar, reported to be a lynchpin of Ukraine’s defensive lines as they bend to the north towards Donbas and west towards the Dnipro.
Naturally, long lines of burned out ruscist armored vehicles are appearing on drone footage. Lately the town of Novomykhailivka has become threatened by the loss of Marinka, but in an effort to push Ukrainian troops back one of the enemy columns that are sent in these big attacks was largely obliterated. Notably, 46th Airmobile brigade was moved from the vicinity of Verbove on the Orihiv front to reinforce or possibly replace 79th Air Assault Brigade, which has been fighting here for at least six months.
In the Lyman area, a ruscist attack Ukrainian sources have been warning was imminent began, the enemy striking towards the town of Terny. Likely the goal is to cut off a north-south road and envelop the town of Zarichne, on the road to Lyman and the banks of the Siverski Donets river. It moved by a couple tree lines, but Ukrainian armor moved in and stopped the advance.
Supposedly a Leopard 2A6 or A5 - Strv 122 in Swedish service - belonging to the 21st Mechanized Brigade was largely responsible for stopping the attack, though this could easily be a misunderstanding of events. One was captured on Ruscist drone footage taking a hit and being abandoned after apparently throwing a track, so my bet is that a group intervened to good effect, suffering a single partial loss likely to soon be recovered.
Most modern armored vehicles abandoned on the battlefield are later recovered by the side who winds up holding the relevant ground after a fight. Some fascinating unit histories from the Second World War, especially the much-investigated independent heavy tank battalions equipped with the legendary Tigers, portray much of a German tank crew’s daily life as involving recovery and repair of a disabled Tiger left behind in the grey zone. On average, Ukrainian mud probably consumed as much German firepower as several thousand T-34s when you consider all the effort that went into keeping German tanks operational in the latter part of the war.
There had been reports lately of the 21st being withdrawn from the front to recuperate, but like the hard-fought and similarly well-equipped 47th Kyiv appears to be relying on it in defensive fighting where Moscow shows intent to advance. Interestingly, 82nd Air Assault is still reportedly fighting in the Orihiv bulge despite the futility of using most of its heavy armor.
This could be due to Moscow’s ongoing efforts to reclaim ground here. Ukraine has seen some of its earlier gains rolled back near Robotyne and Verbove, but so far the lines have held despite a reduction in resources committed here. Kyiv could see the portions of the Surovikin Line now under its control as a good set of positions to hold through winter given the level of underground excavation discovered there.
Given Putin’s determination to make his forces advance despite the costs of fighting in winter against an enemy with higher quality equipment and personnel, it makes sense to dispatch one of Ukraine’s best-equipped and now battle-hardened brigades - or at least a portion of each - to blunt Moscow’s attacks. The assault on Kupiansk in the north continues to go nowhere even though most of the brigades Kyiv has here are relatively green. The 21st has Lyman covered, which keeps open the potential for it and other brigades to move closer to Bakhmut if required. The 82nd and several other brigades, including the Leopard 2A4 equipped 33rd, have the Orihiv bulge handled.
That leaves the 47th and the other forces dispatched to Avdiivka over the past month managing the situation there. While fierce ruscist attacks have continued, maintaining pressure on the defense, the direction and pacing of the last few attacks indicate that Moscow wants to prioritize other fronts now that Avdiivka has proven too tough to crack. A number of commentators have noted that Moscow never promised much with this offensive, always casting it as a defensive operation despite putting tens of thousands of troops into the failed assault.
Over the past week, in fact, the main orc effort beyond the Dnipro front has been in Bakhmut. There Ukraine reports a concentration of troops twice as large as what was committed to Avdiivka, around 20% of all the soldiers Putin is reported to have in occupied Ukraine.
Here the brigades that led Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive on this front have been partly or completely withdrawn, while others formerly assigned to this sector are back on the line. 3rd Assault was confirmed to have rotated away, and not a lot has been heard from 5th Assault that I’m aware of so it might have pulled back or be reinforcing other units. However Lyut, an Assault Guard brigade formed from police units across Ukraine, is still in the thick of it around Klischiivka, posting some gripping documentary footage (non-graphic) of personnel storming orc positions.
Extra points to the media officer who included footage of Ukraine’s secret weapon: trench kittens. Will kill disease-infested mice and guard POWs as a side bonus!
Also a good demonstration of why harming prisoners is always wrong - often shell-shocked folks who just got abandoned by their own people are a fount of useful information. Showing that Moscow’s frontline soldiers aren’t the fresh-faced eager youths on the recruitment posters, but older men who don’t look to have been fed recently, is also valuable.
With cell phone conversations often picked up by Ukrainian signals intelligence, a lot is known about the conditions Moscow’s troops routinely have to endure. While I have no doubt that a good portion of Ukraine’s brigades are led by idiots, I’d also wager that the ratio of bad leaders to good is strongly skewed in Kyiv’s favor relative to Moscow or Washington D.C. Russia in any of its imperial incarnations has always, like all European empires, been a social pyramid scheme at heart.
Life is a lottery where social mobility is accorded only to those with the right connections. While the contemporary USA is increasingly defined by this pernicious dynamic too, the rot is much older and runs far deeper in Putin’s empire. Soldiers who can pay to avoid the worst duties, creating a black market within the ruscist military system for risk avoidance. To generate disposables who can be safely sent to die on the front to prove that the officers responsible are doing their part in the war, behaviors like alcohol and drug use - endemic among soldiers no matter the rules they’re supposed to obey because of the stress of the whole war business - get those lacking connections sent into penal battalions.
In occupied Ukraine civilians have been conscripted to serve as support staff only to find themselves sent to the front to dig trenches, sometimes without weapons. Basic gear like clothes and even rifles are often purchased with a soldier’s wages or by their family. Ukraine might have to rely on fundraisers to equip many of its units, but the situation is nowhere as bleak as what Moscow’s troops face.
In effect, Putin is trying to ensure that as few people come back from the war who might oppose him later as possible. The death toll is naturally skewed towards ethnic minority populations.
I would expect the welcome news that my crazy ruscist-convert brother-in-law who took his family to live in Rostov-on-Don to join the magical Russian World has been conscripted and sent to the front, except that Ruscist Orthodox priestlings are probably exempt. Putin’s rule depends on a close alliance between the church and the oligarchs in his orbit - that’s the root of the active repression of gay, lesbian, and trans people in his faux-masculine empire - so someone willing to preach hatred of the West has a shield that someone with Assyrian ancestry otherwise lacks… for now.
Anyway, this is all just to say that respect for prisoners of war is one of those behaviors that distinguishes a worthy fight from politics as usual. One of the critical fissures within the democratic world is the split between the former empires that haven’t given up their old ways and the true democratic nations that aim only to defend themselves from aggression.
Not to get into Middle East affairs, but it says a great deal about the USA’s leaders that they try to equate Ukraine’s fight against Putin’s imperial malice with Israel’s unrelenting assault on Palestine. If aliens showed up in orbit tomorrow and tried to group countries based on their behavior, russia and Israel would be in the same category right along with with the USA and China. Europeans would be seen as mostly having moved on from imperial ways, difficult to trust entirely but with their hearts now more or less in the right place, as in most Commonwealth countries and the Asia-Pacific (which, for the record, will never be replaced in my mind by the atrocious Indo-Pacific construction that’s meant to make India, another backsliding democracy, feel special).
Returning to the fronts in Ukraine, the ruscist effort to punch from Bakhmut to Chasiv Yar looks to be its main hope of gaining ground in the near future. It’s pretty clear that Moscow wants to force Ukraine to give up its gains south of Bakhmut over summer by pushing along the highway and towards another long canal that anchors the defense of Chasiv Yar from the north.
However, Moscow is giving every sign of understanding the threat it faces on the Dnipro front. Over the past week major assaults attempted to dislodge Ukrainian troops from their toehold, with some of the most modern equipment available to Moscow burning on the road to Krynky.
Supposedly ruscist forces actually took over most of the town for a time before falling prey to a trap. The topography of the Dnipro River valley appears to be aiding Ukraine’s efforts to push across. Upstream, the draining of the Nova Kakhova reservoir by Moscow’s demolition of the Nova Kakhova dam has created a kind of natural wall. Below the dam, however, the Ukrainian side of the river sits a few meters above the ground to the south. Not only does this give Ukrainian artillery even more of a range edge, but tanks can offer direct fire support.
That makes any Ukrainian position across the river a mortal threat to Moscow. To contain it requires accepting a constant loss of people and gear to artillery fire no density of Lancet drones can entirely prevent. But an all-out assault forces the attackers to concentrate in a small area, bringing its own challenges.
Several press reports have portrayed Ukraine’s occupation of positions on the far bank as a suicide mission, but the hard truth is that any operations on the front line at this stage are almost suicidal. Further, journalists always collect lots of quotes then select a few that stand out and create a sense of narrative because that’s what sells.
A full report that accounts for the nuances of how soldiers happen to feel based on where they are in a deployment cycle, their job, the weather, and innumerable other factors is harder to sell to a broad audience. Every experience in war is unique, and not only do individuals have their own perspective but it is contingent on the experiences of the people they fight with. News stories are useful only when you look at trends in the coverage or can focus on fairly unambiguous signals of something going well or poorly. Towns liberated and bodies counted, the news handles fine. Anything with more nuance than that swiftly becomes a matter of what the journalist’s audience wants to hear.
That’s another reason why this war is so unlike any other of its size: most of the same data journalists use to make judgements of fact are available to anyone thanks to the open source community. To put together a portrait of what’s really going on and what may happen next demands a mix of expertise that most journalists lack.
As best as anyone can say so far, with a fairly limited investment of resources in Krynky Ukraine has established a presence that Moscow can’t ignore. With much of Kherson south of the Dnipro being open and lacking substantial cover, if Ukraine manages to push just a few kilometers south of Krynky and hold positions across a key road, every ruscist position downstream becomes harder to resupply.
Advance down that same road to link up with the units that have landed downstream, and Ukraine could push to cut off the other major supply route supporting the occupation forces in western Kherson. That should then trigger a cascade of forced withdrawals all the way down to the Black Sea, letting Ukraine move heavier forces across the river and sustain them. Slowly but surely the enemy can be wedged back towards Crimea and the defunct canal connecting it to Nova Kakhova.
Once this “island” is liberated, Crimea is in sight. And thanks to the limited number of supply routes sustaining ruscist troops holding the neck connecting it to Kherson, their positions are effectively another island sustained through two bottlenecks: Melitopol and Dzhankoy.
The significance of Ukraine receiving more Patriot systems and - soon if not already - the first operational squadron of F-16s. They aren’t going to win the war overnight, nor will Ukraine ever win air superiority over the entire front.
NATO won’t ever have it either if it goes to war. Neither will anyone who has to defend Taiwan from China. Operational art and strategy forever determined to crib from Patton’s dash across France is a grave error that will bring inevitable defeat.
It is high time someone showed how to fight without control of the skies. Ukraine is on the verge of denying them to the enemy near the front, a radical change from the situation in 2023.
A stalemate this is not. The third phase is well underway. And the war can still be won in 2024.
Best wishes for the New Year!