Island Hopping To Crimea: Across The Dnipro
An outline of how Ukraine can push across the Dnipro in 2024, the next essential step in liberating Crimea - an achievement that likely ends the war and Putin's regime with it. War is politics.
It’s been another week of tough fighting with little movement on the ground in Ukraine, though not for lack of Putin’s troops making ill-advised efforts on the usual fronts. Some of these have even gained ruscist forces a shattered village or two in the grey zone between the main lines, not that this does them much good.
Small retreats are to be expected in positional warfare of the sort Ukraine must endure until at least spring. While I continue to reject the developing conventional wisdom in the English-speaking world that assumes Ukraine must sit in a defensive crouch until 2025 - an approach that amounts to freezing the conflict exactly as Putin hopes, whatever rhetoric is used to cloak the truth - it seems plain that Ukrainian troops aren’t launching any major ground attacks until spring at the earliest.
For the time being, in order to minimize Ukrainian casualties and use of scarce supplies, it only makes sense that Ukrainian commanders on the ground would retreat from positions that become too risky to hold. As the successful rebuff of all ruscist efforts to clear the Krynky bridgehead proves, just getting close to Ukrainian forces is extremely difficult thanks to a barrage of accurate strikes on advancing troops and their supply lines.
The ideal scenario for maximizing Moscow’s losses is to withdraw wherever they advance, then counterattack with lots of stuff that goes boom as they expose themselves to seize ground. As degraded as Moscow’s professional cadres are, attempts to advance are almost certain to result in high casualties. To convince assault groups facing 50% casualty rates (or worse) to go on the attack requires giving them enough armored vehicles to offer the illusion of enough firepower to win. So even if Putin cares nothing for the life of his people, he’s still got to throw away ever-scarcer armored vehicles to make progress.
Also, he’s got to keep burning through ammunition like there’s no tomorrow. While Moscow is again using four or five times more shells than Ukraine and can produce more, especially now that North Korea’s defense industry is plugging into Moscows’s, it generally has to fire multiples of what Ukraine does to achieve the same effect thanks to a general lack of accuracy in Soviet designs. Even setting aside the quality issues apparently damaging artillery barrels and at times killing whole crews, over the long term even outproducing Ukraine by several factors won’t be enough.
Especially if Ukraine continues to have so much success getting drones to hit targets across Putin’s empire, striking fuel depots and weapons factories hundreds of kilometers from the front. This is systems destruction warfare of the sort China also embraces: any and every point of leverage that can be generated has potential military value. The more Moscow has to disperse air defense systems away from the front, the better. Any interruption in fuel shipments is helpful - and as oil depots are both very vulnerable and prone to fueling their own annihilation, even a little strike can set off a chain reaction.
Likewise, sabotage in factories and interrupting usual activities with drone strikes has a cumulative effect on the enemy’s metabolism. In fact smaller, less-damaging, and more frequent attacks are likely more effective than massive raids, because the latter pushes people to rally around their leaders while the latter makes leaders look inept and weak.
One of the most important lessons to take away from this war in a purely military sense is the age-old truth that logistics rule the day. Isolating a military formation physically has only ever been a means to a clear end: starving it of supplies until it cannot or will not fight on. What European military traditions like to call “decisive battle” or “battle of annihilation” simply reduces to rendering the enemy incapable of fighting back on the broadest geographic scale possible. Even insurgencies only survive if they can obtain supplies sufficient to power a constant flow of harassing attacks.
The core reason why Ukraine was unable to make more progress this summer is that it wasn’t possible to fully or even mostly sever frontline ruscist units from their logistics bases. When Ukraine began to break through the Surovikin Line in August, Moscow dispatched its last reserves to plug the gap. This was partly due to Ukraine not receiving weapons like ATACMS until it was too late, but also a function of the geography of the Azov and Donbas fronts.
As I’ll detail below, new weapons and Ukraine’s success in holding positions across the Dnipro - plus, of course, the effective defeat of the Black Sea Fleet and knocking back ruscist aviation from the southwestern front - open the door to accomplishing this mission in the western half of occupied Kherson. Ukraine’s actions since launching the cross-river operation three months ago all point to it developing an inexorable advantage similar to the one that forced Moscow to retreat from much of occupied Kherson in the fall of 2022.
By the way, the story of the gutsy Bradley crews who took on and knocked out a T-90M at close range has spread across the media, and a Ukrainian news team managed to get an interview with one of the pair that an excellent translator on social media captioned for English-speakers. I really appreciate how they showed what it’s like to have to maintain an armored vehicle in the middle of winter, and also that the guys fighting on the front line in Ukraine are, like most soldiers throughout history, just ordinary folks doing a hard job. The ultimate working class, most of whom find officers some combination of irritating and outright hazardous to their health and welfare - and for historically valid reasons. That’s why the best officers are generally indistinguishable from the enlisted in their charge, recognizing the vital function of their role in the group while dispensing with the trappings of authority except when strictly required.
Interestingly - and an indicator of how difficult it can be to suss out details using video footage alone - the tracers I thought meant that the Bradley was using depleted uranium rounds at the end of the fight more likely meant it using high explosive shots, the Bushmaster autocannon’s other option. The armor-piercing ammo feed had jammed, and since the rounds were unlikely to penetrate a T-90M from the side anyway the best option was to have small explosions rip across the tank’s outer surfaces to destroy the crew’s ability to see and fight. It appears the ruscist crew in question survived, but the vehicle was finished off by a drone so won’t be returning to the fight.
It’s also pleasing to me personally that the gunner’s reaction to seeing the tank in his sights was almost exactly what I figured - a close-range gun battle with a tank is just about your worst nightmare as an IFV crew. Worth nothing as well is how he credits time spent playing video games with reminding him how to do the most damage possible.
Something that I suspect that most senior military leaders don’t quite comprehend yet is just how much the video games most younger people have now played from childhood has actually instilled adaptability and an intuitive sense of strategy. The right organizational structure and leadership is needed to harness this power, but plenty of people under the age of fifty have now spent decades practicing essential aspects of warfare, even if game mechanics generally fail to get across the more mundane aspects, like time spent digging.
I very much hope to be able to find funding for game and simulation related projects, as it has long been my belief that nearly every aspects of a service member’s work can and should be digitally simulated in a way that blends the inherent fun of games with real-world relevant systems capable of training critical, adaptive thought and behavior. More on that in this space in the future!
With winter in full swing and major ground operations by both sides significantly impeded, it’s a good time to take a look at how Ukraine may approach its upcoming operations. Contrary to the narrative about Muscovy’s war on Ukraine now prevalent in the English-speaking media, Ukraine is almost certain to attack with force in 2024.
At this point I have to assess that the widespread messaging about Ukraine playing defense on the ground throughout 2024 is a sign of either another NATO information warfare operation designed to massage public expectations or just how ineffectual and decrepit Western military thought has become. Having preserved most of its equipment and personnel by not pushing too hard this summer, it would be gross strategic malpractice to let Moscow have another year to adapt how it fights.
Ruscists can and do adapt, even if the pace is glacial at high levels, and the fact that Ukraine has now constructed solid defensive lines means that it will be able to start holding more sections of the front with fewer veteran troops by this summer, an opportunity it cannot miss. Nor does Kyiv want to keep a million people in uniform on a day to day basis any longer than necessary - sooner or later people have to muster out, their combat skills lost.
It’s frankly kind of weird that so many minds in the English-speaking military community can’t see that the more time Moscow has to dig in and build up its military production the harder it will be to win in Ukraine or defend NATO in three to five years’ time. Especially when Ukraine’s capabilities in 2024 will be so much more improved, though still of course too thin to overpower Moscow outright.
If there was any strategic error in Ukraine’s operational planning during 2023, it was underestimating the need for comprehensive isolation of a targeted portion of the front. Soldiers can huddle in the nicest bunkers they can dig, but if they run out of food and ammunition they’re just more additions to the prisoner exchange fund. This was one of the most important lessons learned by the United States Navy and Marine Corps in the Pacific War, as well as the basic reason the breakout from Normandy, to say nothing of the successful landings on D-Day, actually happened at all.
Finally in possession of the full spectrum of military capabilities with the impending arrival of at least one squadron of F-16s and provision of cruise missiles (Storm Shadow/SCALP) and short-range ballistic missiles (ATACMS), Ukraine will be able to accomplish something that proved impossible during the summer of 2023: isolate a target front and destroy the ruscist forces trying to hold the line. To do this, lines of supply have to be hit so hard that troops on the line of contact run out of ammunition.
The stunning and spectacular Ukrainian victory in the Kharkiv counteroffensive back in the fall of 2022 made the swift collapse of Putin’s military in Ukraine seem possible for the first time - and had Ukraine the forces it deserved to back then, the war would in all probability be over and russia splitting into pieces by now. Moscow’s retreat from northern Kherson amplified the sense crisis. So in 2023 it was both politically and strategically necessary to test whether the Kharkiv scenario could be repeated in a push to the Azov Sea that would represent a scale-up of the prior year’s wins.
But the Muscovite collapse in Kharkiv was in large part a function of overconfidence and lack of troops in an area so vital to the northern wing of the attack on Donbas that I identified it as a place Ukraine would aim to strike soon as it could as far back as April of 2022. This defeat was so traumatic that it forced a reboot of Putin’s military effort that proved just barely sufficient to hold out in the summer of 2023.
They did it by following the nearly-successful model of defensive operations embraced by ruscist commanders in Kherson before lack of supply forced them back across the Dnipro. It was a bitter pill for Putin to swallow, the retreat coming after Moscow’s best remaining forces putting up a very hard fight that stymied Ukraine’s efforts to quickly advance. After weeks Ukraine was only able to beat back the enemy on the portion of its front line most distant from its logistics depot freshly moved out of HIMARS range - and that after a rigorous and sustained bombardment of the bridges along the river.
This, as it turned out, proved to be a critical weakness in the ruscist defense. To keep military forces in the field requires a constant flow of supplies, which means physically moving a lot of stuff over great distances. Since the dawn of warfare combatants have sought to destroy the enemy’s logistics as vigorously as they tried to destroy each other because this is often a cheaper way to bring victory than suffering the casualties and fundamental uncertainty of a major battle.
Like a pack of wolves or pride of lions bringing down prey that would withstand one or two attackers, harrying the enemy until a vital point is exposed then striking it for the kill is an ancient and proven strategy for taking down a tough opponent. Ukraine has been most successful where it was able to fix ruscist forces in place and bleed them out before punching just hard enough to make them retreat whatever their orders from their superiors.
This model will soon be possible to replicate in a step-by-step campaign that brings Ukrainian brigades into Crimea, almost certainly triggering a massive political crisis in Moscow. That, I suspect, is part of why Ukraine’s chances in 2024 are being systematically downplayed by analysts abroad: the Ukraine War is presently driven as much by inertia as conscious efforts to control the thing. The USA is out of ideas and riven by partisan gridlock, with most pundits stateside desperate to move on from anything that might harm Biden.
Putin is convinced that he can wait out Ukraine’s allies, split NATO and the EU, and get China to move on Taiwan. His belief is supported by the ongoing self-deterrence by the leaders of major NATO countries, especially the United States. Germany, its US-designed federal government still wedded to hiding in the USA’s shadow, is on the brink of moving in the necessary direction, but appears unwilling to take the final plunge until Trump’s return to the White House is certain.
I’d give it 2:1 odds, myself. With most scenarios ending up the same whoever wins: total dysfunction in D.C., the side out of power insisting that democracy has died with who knows what result on angry partisans who realize that they control all branches of government at the state level in around half the country. The American political system is a topic I’ll probably have to cover in the future, being all about a system gone mad, but it’s the sort of thing that takes a few drafts to do right and frankly there isn’t much incentive when most Americans are deep into the partisanship thanks to peer pressure.
With respect to Ukraine - though the truism applies everywhere - as the famous German-speaking theorist Clausewitz understood, War and politics are the same, the choice to use violence an escalation of existing disputes whether you’re talking about relations between countries or groups who share one. Often enough disputes revolve around something symbolic, something all participants agree has importance and take action to make this known to others.
The fact that Putin’s initial invasion in 2014 started in Crimea is a sign of the symbolic role it plays in his regime: he started there for a reason - many, in fact. Taking Crimea opened the door to his subsequent attempt to seize half of Ukraine by provoking ruscist goons to seize city halls from Kharkiv to Odesa in a fake uprising.
Only when this scheme failed did Putin sent in troops to prop up the rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk before Ukraine could crush them and restore its borders. During this fighting was when a ruscist Buk missile launcher took down MH-17 an airliner out of Amsterdam that was unwisely passing over the area. If you ever wondered why the Dutch have been some of Ukraine’s most vocal supporters, committing F-16s hopefully upgraded over the past months with the best radars available and compatibility with long-range AIM-120D air to air missiles, that national trauma is one good reason why.
There are plenty of nonsensical cultural and historical arguments that Muscovite goons will give for owning southern and eastern Ukraine, but the hard reality of Putin’s obsession with Crimea and Donbas is geopolitical. In his imperialist mindset these territories are vital for the security of Moscow, boasting reliable warm-water ports and creating a shield against NATO attacks from this direction, Crimea serving the same function as Kaliningrad in the Baltic.
Crimea and Kaliningrad are the veritable towers of the teeth at the gates of Mordor. They act as flanking threats to any ground force trying to hold positions in eastern Europe. With nuclear weapons on missiles and aircraft and powerful air defense systems, they create a hazard for any forward NATO operations, especially any involving the sea.
That NATO poses no real threat to Moscow and never did is beside the point: in Putin’s world to keep the restive Caucasus secure means holding the Black Sea, which in turn depends on control of Crimea. With its main port of Sevastopol ringed by mountains the southern half of Crimea is a veritable fortress with one massive weakness: limited connections to anywhere else.
An effective island, the fortress of Sevastopol can be cut off by any attacker who is able to block the Kerch Strait and Perekop Isthmus. In World War Two both the Germans and the Soviets were able to displace the other. Fortresses are only as strong as their links to the rest of a national logistics network - they cannot stand alone and only act to make any enemy assault in a particular area more difficult.
And from Ukraine’s perspective, Crimea is the outermost island in an effective chain stretching from Rostov-on-Don to Sevastopol. Moscow took special care to seize the Azov Coast at the cost of annihilating Mariupol at the start of the conflict for a reason: it needed a rail connection to Crimea to augment the vulnerable and expensive bridge over the Kerch Strait and also control of the nearest Ukrainian territory to it.
The main axis of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive was aimed at reaching the coast because this, along with taking down Putin’s precious bridge, would have represented a humiliating defeat. Over winter Moscow would have scrambled to keep Crimea supplied as Ukrainian drone strikes hit ships crossing the Black Sea and missiles rained down on depots.
But the difficulty breaking through the Surovikin Line in Zaporizhzhia has masked Ukrainian triumphs like the neutering of the Black Sea Fleet and securing several bridgeheads across the Dnipro. These feats, which seemed much less probable than breaking the orcs on the road to Melitopol at the start of the year, have transformed the strategic balance in the Black Sea.
Moscow’s inability to clear the Krynky bridgehead, let alone the others further down the river, is reminiscent of repeated German failures to use river lines as barriers against the Soviets in 1944 and 1945. The Dnipro and later Vistula - to say nothing of the Seine, Meuse, and Rhine on the Western Front - were all breached during an offensive then saw the attackers build up their bridgehead before breaking out like a thunderstorm.
This is by no means a simple sort of operation, but also pretty much inevitable unless the defender can either clear the other side’s footholds early on or build up such a potent defensive barrier that the attacker never musters enough combat power to make progress. This was the German strategy in the hedgerows of France on the Normandy Front after D-Day, but eventually the Allies developed counters to hedges in the form of improvised cutting tools welded to tanks and could use their dominance of the sky to destroy German logistics lines.
The trouble with accomplishing this on the Orihiv Front and breaking through to Melitopol or Berdiansk on the Azov Coast is that the geography of the front gives Moscow the ability to freely supply troops from multiple directions. It’s hard to isolate and pound a single sector of the front, then when a breakthrough is achieved a savvy defender will simply pull back to another line and make the attacker pay the cost of trying to supply forward units in the grey zone amid constant drone and artillery strikes.
But west of Melitopol, as the arc of the Dnipro bends westward, the geography of the area creates a very different situation. The closer to the Black Sea you get, the less ground is out of range of Ukrainian artillery systems. And south of Nova Kakhova a new feature of the landscape adds further complexity to the supply situation. A major canal linking Crimea to the now-defunct Nova Kakhova reservoir serves as a natural barrier to movement. While not too wide for bridging units to erect new structures, it is always ideal to be able to rely on existing infrastructure given the vulnerability of most engineering efforts to attack.
A bridge rebuilt can always be knocked down again. And if the engineers putting one up or making repairs are under constant threat of ATACMS strikes, the job can become impossible. Needless to say, engineers are generally highly trained soldiers with specialized gear that even a ruthless sociopath will hate to lose.
It is this vulnerability, along with the long coastline Kherson and the regions proximity to Odesa and Mykolaiv, that ought to prove Moscow’s undoing in its effort to hold Crimea. Simply put, if Ukraine can drop every bridge over the Crimea canal, it will create a natural logistical island similar to the one produced by Ukraine hitting the bridges over the Dnipro without relent back in 2022. Even better, every part of this island will now be within range of both HIMARS and Patriot systems. For the first time in this war, Ukraine will be able to create a zone where ruscist forces will be face attack anywhere they remain above the ground for long. That creates the necessary preconditions for rapidly expanding the Dnipro bridgeheads then marching all the way to the coast.
This in turn will allow Ukraine to move HIMARS launchers, Patriot systems and F-16 patrols closer to Crimea, bringing the northern portion of the peninsula in range of regular attack. In a future piece I’ll look at how to mount an amphibious operation to bypass the defenses Moscow has build to guard the Perekop Isthmus, but the first step is to liberate southwest Kherson to the line of the Crimea canal.
By my count, there are eleven crossing points between Nova Kakhova and where the canal forks ten kilometers from the southern coast near Kalanchak, two of them rail bridges. While it would be nice if Germany would send Taurus cruise missiles to do the job, the announced delivery of 40 French SCALP-EGs, their version of the Storm Shadow, as well as a monthly consignment of 50 rocket-assisted bombs equivalent to the US-made JDAM, means that Ukraine ought to have enough weapons to at least cripple every crossing, leaving the only ground connections passing along a circuitous route with no rail lines leading to the front.
Recent successes against ruscist aviation near Crimea - notably the bushwhack of several Flanker bombers and the downing of an A-50 AWACS, are now forcing ruscist patrols to stay so far from the front that early warning of Ukrainian air attacks from across the Dnipro is no longer guaranteed. Direct strikes by F-16s using the French Hammer bombs with their 70km range will soon be a real possibility without putting pilots at undue risk.
Ukrainian jets can hit each of the crossings with these weapons while staying well on the other side of the Dnipro. While the S-400 battery in Crimea backed by AWACS coverage as well as regular patrols by MiG-31 and Su-35 fighters normally make coming near the river in a crewed aircraft very dangerous, pushing back the AWACS patrol routes to Krasnodar and Rostov to keep these precious jets safe along with the damage Ukraine has been doing to the S-400 complex in Crimea have eroded Moscow’s ability to control the skies close to the front. 20km behind it is soon to become, if it isn’t already, a place Ukrainian jets can reach without undue risk.
When Ukraine has at least 8-12 F-16s and twice as many pilots along with all the necessary support staff - a point it should reach by July at the latest, March in an optimistic scenario - it is likely to deploy them in south-central Ukraine. To avoid coming under attack Ukrainian Air Force jets shuttle between air strips set several hundred kilometers behind the front, always staying dispersed to minimize the risk of losing multiple aircraft in a missile strike.
Given the intensity of the hunt for them the UAF has to anticipate, F-16s will likely remain on the ground as little as possible. The aircraft doesn’t have a particularly long range, but the 500km-with-bomb-load cited by Wikipedia for the F-16C model is enough - though more advanced than the ones Ukraine is set to receive, internal fuel capacity isn’t something that changed a lot between F-16 variants so far as I’m aware.
In flight, to avoid the risk posed by the S-400 SAM and R-37 long-range air-to-air missiles used by the orcs, F-16s will likely fly at high altitude parallel to the front lines at a distance of around 200km until fuel runs low, at which point they’ll land to refuel at one of many prepared airstrips in range. Ukraine has no shortage of airstrips leftover from Soviet times, and refurbishing multiple to handle F-16s shouldn’t be a problem. Moscow can attack any strip it likes, but more will always appear, never hosting more than one or two jets at any given time.
From the ruscist perspective, F-16s will always be around, hovering just out of reach, ready to work with Patriot and other ground-based systems to repel incoming ruscist raids as required. But sometimes, maybe even several times a day for a week or more, one or two pairs will suddenly divert from their usual holding pattern and race towards the Dnipro. As they do the pilots will activate jamming pods to reduce the effective range of the enemy’s radars and accuracy of any incoming missiles until they can release their bombs.
Having air-to-air missiles with almost as long an effective range of the ones Moscow employs - assuming that Ukraine receives AIM-120D model AMRAAMs and not an older version - and with the threat of Patriot systems forcing ruscist aircraft to remain cautious, it stands to reason that Ukrainian F-16s and any older aircraft with them can reach the Dnipro and release ordnance before turning to run. Even if their approach can’t be masked thanks to having to fly at high altitude to maximize the range of their weapons, as soon as their bomb load is away the jets can quickly gain speed and partial refuge in the ground clutter by diving as they turn back north.
This maneuver is pretty much the same that they’d perform if the enemy responded quickly and sent fighters to attack. In aerial combat energy is everything, but once a missile is inbound the target’s odds of survival are largely a function of distance upon launch. Most long-range anti-aircraft missiles fly up to a very high altitude then dive down on their target using radar to track it, using up most of their fuel in the first stages of flight.
To evade one, traditionally the first step is to put as much distance between yourself and the weapon as possible while gaining speed. Diving from a high altitude is a good way to accomplish this. Once the missile reaches the apex of its trajectory and activates its onboard radar to complete the intercept, the pilot turns to a course running perpendicular to the approaching missile’s path to minimize the doppler effect. While doing this they release chaff, flares, and decoys if carried and switch on electronic countermeasures if they haven’t already.
Ideally around this point they catch sight of the missile’s smoke trail. When they do or otherwise assess that the weapon is on final approach, they execute a vicious breaking turn towards it while releasing more chaff, flares and decoys. If all goes well, the jet’s turn rate will be fast enough that it slips out of the missile seeker’s detection cone so it latches onto the next-closest electromagnetic signature.
Successful delivery of pair of bombs weighing around a metric or imperial ton can deliver crippling damage to even a reinforced structure like a bridge. Crush every single crossing over the Crimea canal, and ruscist forces on the other side will quickly face major challenges in sustaining themselves against Ukrainian attacks.
With ruscist glide bomb attacks on the Ukrainian bridgeheads dramatically reduced now, Ukrainian troops can worry less about that particular hazard while they fend off increasingly desperate orc ground attacks. While the hard freeze gripping most of Ukraine the past couple weeks has made resupply of the bridgeheads more difficult and the town of Krynky has been largely demolished, it is notable that Ukraine’s other footholds across the river have not been eradicated even if they have not recently grown.
Annihilation of the logistics network presently keeping around eight ruscist brigades emplaced west of the Crimea canal would expose over twenty thousand orcs on what is already the part of Moscow’s logistics network in Ukraine at the farthest point from Moscow. This would replicate the scenario that forced Moscow to “voluntarily” withdraw from the Dnipro’s northern bank in late 2022.
Stopping F-16s by moving S-300 or S-400 SAMs closer to the front would only expose these valuable assets to ATACMS strikes. Radars operating in Crimea can take advantage of the high ground to see threats coming at them that pass over the ridge bounding the Dnipro’s shallow valley to the south, but not much beyond that, making forward-deployed SAMs less useful even if they can theoretically shoot down incoming ballistic missiles.
It’s an open question as to how many ATACMS Ukraine has received - the Biden Administration appears to have shifted from a strategy of prohibiting entire weapons systems to restricting inventories such that Ukraine’s progress is slow. But assuming that Ukraine is able to build up a stockpile of a couple hundred and as many cruise missiles, that arsenal plus long-range heavy bombs should be sufficient to break ruscist brigades on the wrong side of the Crimea canal this spring.
Ukraine’s Marine Corps brigades can move to link up the bridgeheads already secured as well as seize more farther downriver. Ukraine will have many more opportunities to make Moscow send ground troops and possibly aircraft into the maw of a prepared defense. Once winter is over and the Dnipro is flush with snowmelt, boats should be able to reach higher up the far shore more quickly, easing the Ukrainian supply situation and creating more attack options.
With all of occupied Kherson in range of HIMARS attacks and most susceptible to bombardment by 155mm howitzers too, the conditions will soon exist for Ukraine to make continued ruscist occupation of the Dnipro’s banks totally unsustainable. I believe that Ukraine controlling both banks of the river downstream of Nova Kakhova by May is entirely plausible. Pushing the enemy back from the towns on the occupied side will leave a broad, mostly flat sandy lowland with only scrubby brush for cover between Ukrainian positions and towns along the Crimean canal.
Create a 20km buffer zone between the Dnipro’s banks and orc positions and the conditions become right for setting up permanent crossing points around Kherson. Add a corps of 4-6 top-notch brigades with modern gear into the mix once they can be supplied, and an assault that reaches the Black Sea and brings the gates of Crimea into artillery range is possible.
Ukraine would be in an excellent position launch another major offensive on the Orihiv front to further stretch ruscist logistics. The Crimea canal isn’t wide enough to serve as a permanent barrier, but makes quite a convenient one for Ukraine in the short run thanks to its emerging superiority in long-range fire support. If it becomes the new main line of ruscist defense, orc positions in Nova Kakhova, where the Crimea canal meets the now defunct reservoir, will become very difficult to defend while Moscow is reinforcing the approaches to Crimea.
If Ukraine is also able to break through here, an advance on Melitopol from the west pairs perfectly with another major assault coming at it down the highway from Zaporizhzhia. The entire line of the Dnipro, which Moscow relies on to avoid having to commit even more troops to the area could easily crumble, leading to the liberation of the occupied nuclear power plant in Crimea and removing the threat of it being sabotaged as a prelude to Putin escalating to the nuclear level “in retaliation” in a last-ditch effort to scare Ukraine’s allies into backing down.
Recent research has unfortunately confirmed my standing argument that Moscow’s nuclear posture isn’t what the Biden Administration apparently believes. The tendency of American leaders to equate World War Three with use of nuclear weapons and any nuclear exchange as inherently total is one of Putin’s most potent weapons. It’s the root of the lethal self-deterrence that has led to Putin being appeased for so long and to such an extent that after the partisan overreaction to the Capitol Riot and Biden’s bungling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan he gauged that the time was ripe to attempt genocide against Ukraine.
Ultimately, it’s going to be the widely-professed fear of nuclear war and the idea of the nuclear taboo that eventually encourages an actor like Moscow or Pyongyang to use a nuke. They don’t care about moral outrage. And all chest-thumping claims that the US would immediately intervene with conventional weapons ignore the fact that this would trigger a war the target could only hope to win by going nuclear, further reinforcing the self-deterrent loop at the heart of the problem. If things do go nuclear, strict tit-for-tat but at a slightly lesser intensity than the enemy’s last strike is the only option, tragic and terrifying as that may be to accept.
Ukraine has no incentive to get dragged into a forever war or be bound by rules set in D.C. because it’s Ukrainians who are dying right now. All the promises made by past US leaders to protect Ukraine in exchange for it giving up its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal have proven to be so much hot air, Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling dangerously effective.
Kyiv presently has a highly attractive offensive option for 2024 that its partners need to support without delay. Once Ukrainian troops are staring over the Karkinyts’ka Gulf at occupied Crimea less than 50km away, a sustained hop across this water body becomes a real prospect - as does Putin going ballistic when a Ukrainian beachhead is secured where holidaygoers from Moscow go on vacation.
Going into summer there was a clear sense of futility emerging from the ruscist war blog networks if translations of posts are anything to go by. This helped spawn the Wagner rebellion, which demonstrated just how fragile Putin’s empire really is. Half protest, half real attempt to replace Gerasimov and Surovikin at Putin’s side in a vain effort to change how the war was being run, the breakup of russia became a real possibility in June of 2023.
The unexpected success of ruscist tactical adjustments and the power of being on the defense shifted the tone of coverage in the Beltway and pro-Kremlin circles. But Putin’s strength remains primarily based on bluff enabled by enemies who fear the post-Putin world more than the nightmare Ukraine is trapped in - because, of course, the leaders of Ukraine’s allies don’t see their people dying… yet.
They will, though, if the war drags on into 2025 and beyond. Moscow’s missiles have already flown into NATO territory more than once; drones have already struck Romania. These quite deliberate tests are Putin’s way of saying that he doesn’t believe NATO Article 5 to be worth the paper it’s written on. The real reason he hasn’t launched strikes on hubs supporting the Ukrainian war effort that they couldn’t be sustained. After the initial shock, even NATO leaders would adapt.
To the extent that ruscist intelligence analysts read stuff published in English and use it to gauge the future of support for Ukraine, I’d suggest that Ukraine’s allies talk a lot more about potential upcoming operations that Kyiv could conduct in 2024. Moscow ought to be looking in a hundred different directions at once, unsure of where to commit its limited reserves of quality forces.
The trick in most operations isn’t to surprise the enemy by showing up someplace they didn’t expect, but simply being stronger in some dimension than the opponent is prepared to cope with. Any sensible orc officer is able to look at the map of Kherson and see the danger that ruscist forces are in. Fortunately, they rarely seem to have a line to Putin.
So while he’s busy throwing people away in one futile assault after another to feel like he’s winning, Ukraine can patiently and relentlessly create a scenario where Moscow knows exactly what is coming but can do nothing effective to prevent it because it’s lost the power to intervene.
That triggers despair, an essential step in breaking the enemy’s morale. If and when every orc in Kherson knows that they’re doomed, enough will retreat to shatter the others’ ability to fight.
Thanks to the geography of the area, all Ukraine needs is the resources to get the job done. And, ideally, some new capabilities to exploit the success and return to Crimea for good.