Endgame In Bakhmut?
Russian forces have renewed their assault while Ukraine appears to be readying a counterstrike.
The ongoing struggle for Bakhmut may finally be reaching its last stages. In the past week Wagner mercenaries have reportedly been swapped out for Russian regulars backed by substantial air power.
Russian attacks have pushed straight through the urban center from north, south, and east, forcing Ukraine to withdraw to the western quarter where the ground is higher and supply lines shorter.
Notably, however, there have been reports of fresh Ukrainian forces entering the area. Both within the remaining defensive perimeter and on the flanks of the Russian push over the Bakhmutska river, it appears that Ukraine is prepping for a counterstrike.
Watching the evolution of the map over the past few months, I am fairly confident that Ukraine’s leadership deliberately chose to conduct a slow fighting withdrawal to drain Russian combat power and cause the front to weaken. Rather than hold Bakhmut at any cost, Ukraine has been trying to get Russia to overextend itself before punching back hard.
This technique was proven time and again during the Second World War, and in many ways the Russian military of today acts like a child imitating stories it once heard a family member tell about grandpa’s time in the war. American military leaders, on the whole, are pretty much the same.
That might be why so many appear to have a difficult time understanding why Ukraine has fought so hard for a city with a pre-war population of less than 100,000. They are used to seeing strategy as a kind of checklist that guarantees success once all the correct boxes are ticked.
Bakhmut isn’t geographically strategic in the sense that losing it will send Ukraine into headlong retread. Its strategic value lies primarily in the fact that Putin wants it and has invested a lot in taking it.
To win this war, Ukraine has to render Russia incapable of launching another invasion. It will demonstrate this is the case by forcing Russia to withdraw back to the 1991 borders - which, it is worth noting, everyone at the time agreed were completely acceptable.
Ultimately, international relations is all about making claims and being able to back them up. Scientifically speaking, there is no higher power constraining the actions of any player on the global stage: those who can, do.
Some might recognize this as the principle idea underpinning what is called the realist school of international relations, and for good reason. However, what realist scholars like Mearsheimer fail to understand is that what order exists between countries is generated by their mutual actions.
They don’t always pursue their national interests to the degree they actually could. Their actions are moderated by numerous contextual factors, not least of them how they are perceived by others.
Rather than purely rational agents bent on domination, countries tend to act like caricatures, living a vision of themselves as they wish others to see them. Some, like Russia, go completely malignant and embrace imperialism cloaked in resistance to a US domination of global affairs that simply doesn’t exist. America in its turn acts like World War Two never ended and the planet is one Pearl Harbor away from total atomic annihilation unless America sticks its nose in everything.
But these are just grand bluffs. International relations is a system, and systems tend to express as games when people are involved. Realists make the mistake of viewing countries as static behemoths incapable of evolving over time, yet even as the national character a nation creates for itself tends to stay the same, how it expresses itself and relates to other countries does change.
It’s useful to think of international affairs like a game of Poker where each player has two personal cards and the entire table shares a set of five community cards (some call this variant Texas Hold ‘Em, but I just call it Poker). The object of the game is to take the other players’ money, however no one immediately jumps to the simplest solution to achieve this aim: murder.
Why? Because they know that other players will reciprocate in kind. Sure, someone might think they’re so tough that no one can stand up to them, but sooner or later they are always proven wrong.
Sometimes by a group of individuals who understand that the game serves a purpose and so do the rules, others by some plucky sort who doesn’t take kindly to bullies. For the purposes of this metaphor, naturally, that’s Ukraine.
Either way, everyone who plays the game agrees to use it to decide who walks away with the most cash. Countries make bets by laying claim to resources or territories and daring anyone else to try and take them. Combat power is generated and applied, with greater or less efficiency, and the betting landscape is altered.
After 1945, the world tried to adopt the principle that altering borders unilaterally was a no-no. World leaders have had difficulty following this rule, though.
In international relations, even wars are just part of the process of making bets. Leaders, no matter how powerful, are people too. Even cabals of very smart people are inherently limited in how much information they can take in, understand, and effectively respond to. Turning a complex situation into a kind of game is a cognitive strategy everyone uses.
The main difference between a game of poker and international relations is that in the latter violence is an inherent part of the betting process. Whether dispatching an aircraft carrier battle group to show the flag or launching some missiles, it’s all the same.
The misery everyone else has to endure tends to scale with how much each side has at stake in the outcome, and each side has an incentive to bluff about how far they are willing to go. Hence, most major wars since the beginning of civilization.
A lot of people think that bluffing is the essence of poker - and these are the sorts I have always very much enjoyed taking money from in the poker games I’ve played. On the whole, the most aggressive bluffers tend to be the worst at statistics, and poker is mostly a numbers game.
You do have to work out what hands to play, when, and how strongly - that’s the learned art to it, of which strategic misdirection is often a part. But the essence of doing well at poker or diplomacy is developing credibility with the other players. The best bluff is executed when other players believe they understand how you play, giving you the ability to prove them wrong when it really matters - or get away with a few wins you shouldn’t have.
International relations differs from poker mainly in the fact that the game never ends. In addition, the players represent a constellation of power interests within their own country, and so find their ability to make bets limited by the risk tolerance of their peers. Even dictators are constrained by someone.
This is why Putin’s initial efforts at deceiving people about his intentions in Ukraine were focused on the Russian people. Boldness was enough for the rest of us: Moscow thought the shock of being willing to go so far would in and of itself deter NATO. The incredible level of unpreparedness and bad discipline exhibited by Russian forces during the first half of 2022 are indicative of a military machine that didn’t truly believe it was being asked to take on this mission.
Leaders’ lack of flexibility for institutional reasons is also behind the criminally lackadaisical up-arming of Ukraine’s military over the past fifteen months. Frankly, the inability to gift Ukraine more than a few dozen modern tanks after over a year sends a dangerous message about how well NATO members’ military budgets have been spent over the past thirty years. It makes all NATO-related defense activities look like a grand bluff.
It is worth pointing out that Americans who complain about the $75 billion worth of support already sent to Ukraine conveniently ignore the approximately $8,000 billion - I’m not making that up - the mad War on Terror cost the American taxpayer, an amount coming to over 25% of the entire national debt. I would suggest they consider the avoided cost of having to maintain military forces large enough to deter a belligerent Russia indefinitely if fiscal sense is truly their concern.
And here is where the poker metaphor starts to break down. In international relations reputation is everything, because prior behavior is all anyone has to go on when setting expectations about the problems in their life. What a country did in the past is the only information any other one has about what it might do in the future, and breaking expectations in matters of war and peace always has consequences.
When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, this told every country around the world that isn’t totally friendly with the US that this kind of behavior - ignoring sovereign borders - was possible in some circumstances. So Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and Iran, and others all armed up. Now that the United States appears weak - and thanks to lack of proper domestic investments across a generation is - they have begun throwing their weight around to see what happens.
Putin made a catastrophic bet on Ukraine lying down and rolling over again like it pretty much had to when Russia invaded Crimea. Russia’s reputation as a military power has been damaged - it looks weak, and so does he. Putin must keep gaining ground in order to pretend he isn’t losing. This is why Bakhmut has taken on such immense strategic significance: Russia has bet more than it ought on being able to wrest the city from Ukraine, and Kyiv has called that bluff, believing it can do more harm than it suffers in return when all is said and done.
Waiting until Russian forces have come close to exhausting themselves, leaving their flanks vulnerable, is what the Soviets did to the Nazis at Stalingrad. So the news of fresh forces rotating in has me keeping an eye out for news of a fairly substantial push near Bakhmut in the coming weeks. A deliberate strategy may be about to culminate.
There are a couple ways this could unfold, given the limited information available and the general pattern of fighting on the ground the past few months.
Ukraine could go small, merely pushing back the spearhead that has steadily crept around Bakhmut from the north. There are a number of what were said to be solid defensive positions nearer to the Bakhmutova river that Wagner was able to swarm in February, and a ten kilometer push should be well within the capabilities of fresh Ukrainian units even if they lack Leopard or Challenger tanks.
Instead, Ukraine could go much wider, aiming to reach positions it last held a full year ago. Kyiv has fought very hard to maintain control of the approaches to Siversk, north of Bakhmut. This gives its forces the ability to strike west of the Bakhmutova river into the rear of the forces laying siege to Bakhmut proper.
I doubt such an attack would reach the line of contact as it stood in February of 2022, but this isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility. Popasna is about a third of the distance from the front lines as Kupiansk was back in September, and the country is rural, with only scattered villages to serve as Russian strong points.
Either way, once the ground firms up Russian forces in Bakhmut will likely be put to the test. Wagner’s leader seems afraid of something happening soon, and that’s always a good sign. Ukraine hasn’t fought so hard to hold on to Bakhmut without at least hoping to use it as an anvil to smash part of the Russian army when the time was right.
Ukraine has done as good a job as could be expected sustaining its army’s ability to fight for far longer than anyone expected it would have to a year ago. There are a couple likely reasons for this.
So far, outside of situations where a brigade is deep in the fight - the combat in and near Bakhmut counts - Ukraine has been able to keep just 1-2 of the 3-5 line battalions in each brigade at the front for most of the war. This means that Ukrainian troops get rotated to rest positions every couple days, and after a couple months the battalions on duty get swapped out.
Also, excellent battlefield medical support has been reported, which is good for morale and helps keeps trained soldiers alive to train new recruits or even return to the fight. While there has been only limited evidence of Russian troops becoming more proficient at combat, mainly airborne divisions that appear to be receiving the highest quality gear and best training, Ukrainian competence is steadily growing thanks to training programs abroad turning out thousands of graduates.
Something most people outside of Ukraine don’t realize is just how well Ukraine has done with obsolete, Soviet era gear and training to match. Eight years of grinding war along the Donbas line of contact and thousands of casualties gave Ukraine a hardened corps of veterans, but after mobilization thousands of reservists joined them, often men in their sixties who served in the Soviet military.
While brave, bold, and often incredibly effective against outrageous odds using their Cossack methods, they don’t have experience on the higher tech stuff Ukraine is finally starting to receive. One of the quiet miracles of this war has been Ukraine’s ability to essentially field three different armies in sequence: the prewar professional cadre, a bolstered mobilized force using whatever arms they could find, and now a NATO-trained and equipped strike force capable of going on the attack.
The cost? Most of the first group are now casualties. The survivors are leaders and trainers for the second and now third iterations of the Ukrainian army.
Russia, however, is not only taking two to three times the casualties Ukraine has suffered - it appears to be losing proportionately more killed in action and seriously wounded. Aside from the risk aversion this will breed - a mentality Russia’s intensive entrenchment efforts will likely amplify - this means that Russian casualties are even worse than they seem relative to Ukraine’s.
I bring this up because casualty estimates are part of the much-discussed leak of Pentagon briefing slides. These, far from harming Ukraine, have only confirmed what anyone closely following the conflict should already know: as of March, Ukraine was not ready to go on the attack and had suffered heavy losses stopping Russia’s Winter Offensive. Further, Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine’s infrastructure had continued at February’s pace, Ukraine would run out of surface to air missiles by May.
Fortunately, Russia curtailed its missile campaign just as winter ended, its mission a qualified failure. Certainly it caused damage and inconvenience, but Ukraine’s will to resist only hardened. In the bargain, Russia traded away its ability to reliably hit targets deep in Ukraine until it can stockpile enough missiles.
The panic over the leaks conveniently ignores that the timeline for delivering most of the heavy vehicles, Patriot missiles, and ex-Slovak and Polish MiG-29 fighters was always March-April at the earliest. The units set up to field them had only just been established and assigned personnel back in February, and they have to be trained for several more months before going into battle.
Given the stakes of the upcoming offensives, it would be crazy for Ukraine to move in a big way before everything is perfectly set and the landscape well prepared. The threat of Russia committing its strategic reserves - these do appear to exist and are apparently being armed with tanks yanked out of storage and refurbished - remains, but won’t happen without Ukraine having some advance warning.
The fact that Russia’s military has been infiltrated by American spies is no surprise - the reverse is likely just as true. It is also likely that Russia’s military has been fully infiltrated by Ukrainian agents, too. There are certainly plenty of Russians who abhor what Putin is doing.
In any case the poor fool who posted classified documents online does not deserve to be made an example of like the US media and military establishment clearly aim to. Not only is the quality of American military intelligence eternally suspect - I’m tempted at times to consider American intelligence an oxymoron - something like a million people have top secret clearance in the USA.
The alleged leaker was a twenty one year old IT specialist in the Massachusetts National Guard. Why anyone in a reserve formation needed access to classified Pentagon materials relating to the war in Ukraine remains an open question.
Truth be told, the entire American secrets regime is all about giving a club of insiders special knowledge the general public lacks. They don’t like it when anyone pierces the shroud, because that makes their assets less valuable.
If there is any lesson to be learned from this round of US government leaks, it is how banal and self-centered US intelligence gathering is. American analysts are more concerned with snooping on allies’ private deliberations and probably the general public than they are defeating Russia.
This, unfortunately, has to happen. Putin has gone all-in, and in this game victory sets him up for the next land grab, which prudence now requires Russia’s neighbors all anticipate. Russia is presenting this war as part of an existential fight against NATO, led by the USA, so even victory in Ukraine will not be enough.
And if you think the US will stand up to China after ceding any inch of Ukraine to Russia, I’ve got a country called Taiwan I’d love to sell you at a bargain. Reputation matters more than anything in international relations, even raw power.
This is where realists are wrong. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make the dominant ideological worldview embraced by American leaders any more correct.
They see the world as a place where everything can be divvied up into neat little packages to be bought and sold - even countries.
But once certain lines are crossed - attempted genocide being one - the behavior itself is so abhorrent that it requires real punishment. True deterrence, in some cases, requires being willing to make a bet regardless of the risk.
That is why Ukraine has fought so hard for Bakhmut. And why it may yet mark another tolling bell for the Russian army, if and when the counterattack comes.