Putin's Next Summer Campaign
Right on schedule, Putin has found another excuse to expand his war on Ukraine thanks to some Islamic State terrorists. Ukraine's strategy for the rest of 2024 is now clear: parry, then counterattack.
Over the past several weeks, the shape of the Ukraine War through the end of 2024 has been substantially clarified. Moscow is almost certain to launch a major offensive operation in early summer, taking advantage of a window of relative weakness where Ukraine’s forces are low on ammunition and fresh troops. But after it fails, in late August or early September, Ukraine will be set to launch its own round of intensive operations.
Pieces are slowly falling into place that should allow Ukraine to push across the Dnipro river into occupied Kherson and reach the gates of Crimea. An actual landing on the peninsula is within the realm of possibility by winter. At the very least, Ukraine intends to cut it off from the rest of Putin’s tottering empire one way or another.
Whether or not this triggers the political crisis in Moscow that I expect, victory would signal that the tide has turned in Ukraine’s favor once and for all. Ukraine’s 2023 was a lot like the Allies’ 1943. But despite a year that ended in a frustrating near-stalemate, trends were already turning against the Axis powers despite their belated efforts to fully mobilize.
The “we can repeat” crowd in Putin’s empire - loons who actually believe they’re going to march on Berlin to defeat Nazis like their grandfathers did - fails to comprehend that they lack the strength. Putin’s state is a pale reflection of Stalin’s or even that of the last Tsar. It can’t even stop ISIS gunmen from murdering over a hundred civilians at a concert then driving most of the way to Belarus.
So much for the whole there is no crime in russian cities nonsense that Putin’s fellow travelers abroad like to spout. It’s always fascinating to see a police state fail at the one job it ought to be good at.
Beyond that, of course, is the simple truth that all the industrial capacity available to Putin’s New Axis, comprising the Muscovite empire, North Korea, Iran, and Belarus, amounts to nil against what the European Union alone can muster. An institution bedeviled by bureaucratic inertia though it might be, the thing about inertia is that once an object has finally been shifted into motion it becomes difficult to stop.
In World War Two, the Soviet Union only survived the Axis assault because of Lend-Lease, and then only just. Even with it, by 1944 Stalin was threatening to negotiate a separate peace if the Allies didn’t open up a bigger second front than the one in Italy because the Red Army was bleeding out.
The USA gave the USSR today’s equivalent of around $150 billion in military supplies over four years. Hundreds of thousands of US-made trucks gave the Red Army the operational mobility it needed to fend off Germany’s vaunted panzerwaffe (incidentally, if there isn’t already a breakfast chain in Germany called the panzer waffle, there ought to be). Thousands of aircraft and armored vehicles came at a critical moment, even if the Soviets generally thought their own kit superior in most respects.
Those Studebaker trucks, though, they were popular. The Germans were happy to capture them, especially since most German divisions throughout the war relied on horses for their logistics.
As the general Soviet strategy was to throw people and equipment into the maw of Axis forces until they broke - ideally the less-well equipped Hungarian or Romanian allied units the Germans relied on to cover their flanks - Lend-Lease was a literal lifesaver. As cynical as the capitalist west has always been towards friends and foes alike, even its elites were willing to work with their ideological arch-nemesis to end the threat posed by Hitler.
Bureaucratic inertia is why Putin’s regime keeps trying to replicate Soviet ways today. Even down to individual manuals given to new recruits, Putin’s regime is desperate to cloak itself in the imagined glory of the Soviet past. There are a lot of pensioners in russia whose lives aren’t what they expected thanks to the USSR’s fall. This kind of obsessive backward-looking mentality is characteristic of an institution in the throes of terminal collapse. When too many elders can’t see a future, they sacrifice their young.
Yes, Ukrainian forces are tired. But they’re also working out how to hold the line with fewer troops thanks to the arrival of tens of thousands of attack drones. To launch a successful operation into enemy-held territory is now an extremely dangerous, almost suicidal affair that requires proper preparation in multiple dimensions to pull off. You have to have well-trained, properly equipped, and motivated professionals to do anything other than churn up the landscape and seize a square kilometer here or two every day.
While Ukraine likely does need to expand the category of people subject to mobilization, this will mainly serve to keep the front stable while veteran formations are prepared for active operations. Effective operations into enemy territory just aren’t possible unless personnel are motivated by something more than the threat of social exclusion or going to jail.
Moscow can’t accept this. Its leaders remain so bent on reviving a lost past that they are simply sacrificing human lives on the altar of Putin’s inability to accept defeat. The old Soviet stocks of gear won’t last indefinitely. Even if Moscow were counting on Trump’s likely reelection to save it, the smartest move would be to declare victory and go into a defensive crouch.
That Putin doesn’t says a great deal about the future of this conflict. Over the past six months an intensive propaganda campaign has been underway in countries that support Ukraine, its primary goal being to convince leaders and the general public to see Ukraine as a lost cause. In the USA and Europe, the ten percent or so of people who sincerely like Putin’s style of rule and are openly sympathetic to Moscow have been making a lot of noise to this effect.
But like Putin’s predictable Ukraine-blaming response to the atrocity perpetrated by ISIS gunmen against a concert, this too is a tell. Ukraine is now essentially exchanging blows with the enemy on equal terms, striking deep inside Putin’s territory on a regular basis. That’s a big difference from 2022. The disparity will increase going forward.
The moves Putin’s forces make this summer and why I expect them to largely fail will be the focus of the second section. The first will cover the flurry of events this past week, and finally I’ll assess strategic developments, where there continues to be good news, even in the USA.
A quick note - next week’s post will be delayed to Thursday. I’m spending some time off with family, and rather than cobble something together in a rush I’ll just push my next report out to the end of the week. More will have happened by then anyway.
Weekly Overview
The murder of 137 - and counting - civilian concert-goers by apparent ISIS gunmen couldn’t come at a more opportune time for Putin. This, however, does not mean that the thing was a false flag op, as many are suggesting. There isn’t any hard evidence of regime involvement in this attack. I doubt that any will emerge. The most mundane explanation is usually the most reliable in these situations.
And unfortunately, it isn’t like you can trust any confession orc security forces beat out of whoever they grabbed. Torture is pointless because people say whatever they think the torturer wants to hear… but that doesn’t matter in Putin’s empire. It just needs the excuse to do what it wanted to already.
However, there is an important gap between terror attack and false flag op to keep in mind. As a fair few vulnerable young people pushed to attempt acts of terrorism by FBI agents over the years have demonstrated, security services can and will engage in dubious tactics. It isn’t out of the realm of possibility that someone in Putin’s security services really did pay the four men captured on the road to Belarus from Moscow to commit a heinous act - or found out one was going to happen and simply did nothing.
The idea that Ukraine backed the attack is plainly ridiculous because it doesn’t stand to gain in any dimension. It was predictable that Putin’s propagandists would try to pin the blame on Kyiv. And if Ukraine wanted to take revenge for ruscist attacks on civilians, it has better options.
In reality, Muslims around the world have very good reasons to despise Putin’s regime. They understand from their own difficult history with various incarnations of the Muscovite empire that the thing is a predatory European colonial force to its core. Inside russia, nationalists who adore Putin immediately pump out anti-Muslim propaganda whenever something like this happens.
In a war that already feels like Tom Clancy and Larry Bond’s Red Storm Rising too many days, it was kind of inevitable that a terrorist group like ISIS would be drawn to hit Moscow. Plenty of Muslims haven’t forgotten what Putin’s orcs did to Chechnya, and ISIS will exploit any grievance.
To me, the most suspicious aspect of this attack from a conspiratorial perspective is that the attackers didn’t fight to the death. Normally ISIS goes in for suicide tactics. But nothing says an organization can’t evolve.
Elsewhere in our modern-day Mordor, the fighting in Belgorod is still ongoing. Ruscist forces are unable to fully clear the border areas where Russian freedom fighters have taken root, although by launching mass bombing attacks it seems that the ruscists have driven the insurgents out of all but one village.
A mix of anti-Putin Russians, free Chechens, and Siberians who have realized they deserve their own country too, the border raids appear to have been costly for both sides. At least one if not several attacks from the Ukrainian side didn’t work out too well, but almost two weeks in fighting hasn’t fully ceased. The town of Grayvoron, a few kilometers from the border, has been frequently bombarded, forcing civilians to evacuate.
Moscow is reportedly pulling troops from the contact line in Ukraine to reinforce the area, so in a sense, that’s mission accomplished even when the insurgents are ultimately pushed back into Ukraine. They’ll try again. And again.
You win a war by destroying the enemy’s ability to resist. Its military forces are the primary target: hitting their logistics is a means to that end, degrading their performance to make it easier for troops on the contact line to advance. Splitting formations apart is always a good idea, as is forcing the enemy to deploy troops in range of your weapons.
Overall, the fronts across Ukraine have remained fairly stable over the past week. Moscow has kept up the pressure in the usual areas, moving a few kilometers at most. This came on the Avdiivka front, where Ukraine’s slow withdrawal to a prepared defense line continues one blunted orc attack at a time.
Along the Durna to the north, 3rd Assault, 47th Mechanized, and affiliated units have stopped the enemy cold. Further south, where the water line curves back to the west, the orcs have been advancing beyond Tonenke. I’ve seen suggestions that Ukraine will pull back even more here, but I expect the line will cut across the fields to reach the Vodiana because there’s a strip of high ground and a road east of Yasnobrodivka there. Plus the orcs would be dumb to push into a beautiful killzone by rushing west to the nearby reservoirs. But they aren’t exactly proving to be clones of Einstein…
Moscow’s attempt to reach Chasiv Yar from Bakhmut is ongoing, and has almost crawled through the town of Ivanske. But it still isn’t to the main defense lines east of the town, a major one being along a canal, and won’t break in or through without committing as much firepower as it did in Avdiivka.
Unlike Avdiivka, Ukraine really needs to hold Chasiv Yar, though. The biggest reason that it fought so hard in Bakhmut was the imperative to prevent a subsequent ruscist offensive from breaking through here. In many sectors you have the flexibility to let the enemy stick their neck out before launching a counterattack, but these are always balanced by the ones where the terrain requires a tougher stand.
Ruscist attacks on the Krynky, Robotyne, Vuhledar, and Kupiansk fronts continued, but without any notable success. Signs are growing that Moscow plans on a major operation on the Robotyne front, where it may be nervous that Ukraine will re-start its efforts from last summer in a few months. But so far attacks have been fierce, but not indicative of the onset of a major campaign.
Lyman is the one other area where the orcs have been able to make some progress, after many months finally making it to within one kilometer of the Zherebets river. 21st Mechanized Brigade has conducted a long fighting withdrawal for at least six, possibly up to nine months. Along with a smattering of other units, particularly fighters in the forests to the south along the Siversky Donets river and brigades covering a long arc to the south of Siversk where it meets the Bakhmut front, the Ukrainians here have prevented a dangerous thrust from developing.
It appears likely that Ukraine will soon retire behind the river, here as in other areas using the terrain to minimize the number of troops required to sit in exposed positions along the zero line. To advance, Moscow now relies on churning these to bits by sending in disposable soldiers to locate targets for glide bombs to strike.
Ukraine appears to be shifting towards what I’d recommend, something I’ve seen called an Area Defense strategy. Basically, you create a zone of death where your forces can flit between protected positions guiding fire support into the enemy as they move forward. Aside from counterattacks to clear the area after the enemy is pushed back, you don’t occupy the zone or risk too many lives holding any part of it. If the enemy takes it over, you build another one.
I’ve written that ground conflict is a scout’s war now, but I can’t neglect the vital role of combat engineers. Being able to quickly put troops and vehicles under cover is absolutely essential on the drone-infested battlefield. Moscow can sacrifice surveillance drones to observe targets for Lancets attack drones to strike up to 50km behind the front lines, this now comprising their main counter to Ukrainian artillery. This means that all vehicles have to have overhead cover if they’re parked for too long.
As far as the war for Ukraine’s upper skies goes, the glide bomb problem continues to kill dozens of Ukrainian soldiers each week, making it exceedingly difficult to hold known positions. Moscow is using its aviation more carefully, though, and the contrast between how it reacts to Ukrainians learning how to kill more pilots as opposed to grunts is telling. Putin’s system survives by giving those on the middle rungs of the ladder take comfort in other people being first on the sacrifice list. Whenever Ukraine has started killing officers or specialist troops in large numbers, Moscow reacts.
I expect that Ukraine intends to launch major anti-airfield raids in ruscist home territory in the future. It needs the right kinds of drones to do the job and the numbers required to launch waves of strikes in a short period of time, inflicting as much damage before Moscow inevitably disperses its aviation like it did ammunition dumps once they became vulnerable to HIMARS attacks. Forcing Moscow to disperse air defense assets across the interior of the empire to guard its oil and gas infrastructure is another important prerequisite step.
But it’s very difficult to shut down dispersed air operations entirely, or even close an airfield for more than a few days. This requires nearly constant attacks, meaning Ukraine has to have to have thousands of drones available for a sustained campaign. An airbase isn’t an aircraft carrier, out of action for weeks or months if one unlucky strikes get through. Runways have to be repeatedly cratered as they get repaired; attacks with fragmentation warheads must be frequent enough to disrupt repair activities and force aircraft to stay in protected shelters.
It’s all coming, sooner or later. So far, in the race between improved drone capabilities and electronic warfare, drones hold a narrow lead. Inertial navigation systems are getting more sophisticated all the time, allowing a drone to find its way to a target by comparing camera images and electromagnetic transmissions from known sources instead of relying on signals from global positioning satellites, which are now routinely spoofed. And small, slow drones are well suited to exploiting gaps in radar coverage, following rivers and other terrain features.
Until Moscow is able to field a network of distributed sensors that can pick out the movement of a drone from its movement across the sky or the sound of its engines, it won’t stand a chance of stopping every attack. It also needs mobile teams with machine guns and shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles to hunt down drones. And that’s an exceptionally difficult challenge in an empire the size of Putin’s.
In a demonstration of just how rattled Moscow is by the string of Ukrainian successes against ships, aircraft, oil installations, and Belgorod-Ukraine border, a new wave of mass missile and drone strikes has begun. These included the biggest single assault so far, with ruscist forces very deliberately using their most effective weapons to strike areas where Ukraine’s air defenses face the most significant challenges.
Other attacks targeted Ukraine’s Intelligence service in Kyiv, these unlike many of the attacks in the Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia regions causing minimal damage. People are being harmed mostly by falling debris, which is tragic, but much less bad than a warhead detonation would be.
Aside from a few strikes, though, it appears that Moscow has finally realized that it can force Ukraine to expend precious Patriot interceptors more often and with a lower success rate by going after targets in the east instead of Kyiv, which likely has two long-range air defense systems guarding its skies. Another two almost certainly cover Odesa and Mykolaiv, with ruscist aviation very cautious near the Black Sea. That leaves only two systems to support the new efforts to push back against ruscist aviation in the east.
It’s a bold choice if true, leaving the Dnipro region vulnerable. But there are always tradeoffs to make. A consequence may have been the series of successful strikes in central Ukraine over the past few months, this latest wave hitting another of Ukraine’s vital dams and its associated hydroelectric power infrastructure. I have to suspect that Moscow also wants to threaten Ukraine’s ability to use stored snowmelt to raise the level of the Dnipro at its mouth, something that should make it easier to move supplies to the far bank under cover during spring and summer.
Here I fully expect Ukraine to make every effort to expand its bridgehead. Sweden and Finland, possibly other partners, have notably announced that they are giving Ukraine boats and landing craft. How many is unclear, but it adds to my case that even while Ukraine shields itself from repeated hammer blows in the east, it is determined to prove that water is the orcs’ Achilles heel in this war.
To that end, Sevastopol came under attack again in another strike by Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles. Once more the vaunted S-400 system failed to stop the attack, likely hindered by the lack of AWACS coverage thanks to the recent spate of losing A-50 type aircraft both in the air and apparently at their repair facility in Taganrog, near Rostov-on-Don.
Interestingly, NATO seems to be acting a little more assertive when it comes to gathering intelligence for Ukrainian strikes. The recent leak of a conversation between German Luftwaffe officers revealed that to use NATO precision weapons effectively generally requires access to databases held by member countries that contain precise geographic information used by inertial navigation systems on missiles.
Data for a strike has to be requested by Ukraine, gathered in an allied country, then given to an industry partner to courier across the border. Scholz in Germany is using this to insist that Taurus missiles can’t go to Ukraine because that level of involvement would be crossing some magic red line that means Berlin is actively involved in the fight where this isn’t true for France or the UK. In other words, the Germans found a rule to selectively enforce while self-righteously declaring this to be for the good of everyone.
A workaround might be in place, however: if German Taurus missiles go to the UK and France, they can release more of their reserves of Storm Shadow and SCALP models. It’s not a perfect solution, as Taurus is supposed to be better at taking out reinforced concrete structures like bridge pillars, though.
In any case, the process is messy and fraught, but by the middle of this year Ukraine will finally be on the verge of having a full NATO-standard toolkit, plus a few hundred thousand drones. Assuming it can keep a fifth to a quarter of its brigades - 15-20 - off the front line, reorganize the veterans into leadership teams to train up new and hopefully younger recruits capable of aggressive operations, keep the flow of aid going, and smash Putin’s next offensive, by the end of summer Ukraine may finally be in a position to replicate its spectacular successes of the fall of 2022.
Tactical and Operational Developments
There is a lot of chatter about a big impending ruscist offensive after the spring mud dries in May and June. I do expect this to materialize, and it might even open a new front north of Kharkiv like the one I was worried Moscow might try in early 2023.
Putin is likely to believe the ISIS attack, plus his sham election being over, gives him space to substantially expand mobilization. Moscow was already talking about building up a force of a hundred or even two hundred thousand fresh soldiers before the terror attack. It’ll be easier to justify now. But it’ll take months to have the desired effect - last time, mobilized troops took over six months to begin demonstrating anything resembling reliable competence.
I expect any grand offensive on his part to end in dismal failure. Not because I’m some starry-eyed pro-Ukraine optimist - far from it. There just isn’t evidence that Moscow is capable of running a Soviet style Deep Battle campaign to break the deadlock. Nobody could, at this point. NATO doctrine and kit is obsolete too, just not as bad as most things Soviet.
Most offensive efforts in Ukraine end up in a stalemate because of the democratization of firepower. This appears to be the key driving factor in the changing military landscape, creating a situation akin to that faced by armies in 1914, when machine guns allowed a few soldiers to hold off vast numbers.
It took Britain and France more than two awful years and revolts among front line soldiers to work out that throwing bodies at the problem wasn’t going to wear the Germans out. The efficiency of flesh against bullets is too poor. Ukraine has thankfully never been able to even consider this option, even bloody fights like the one in Bakhmut much less painful than would have been the case had Ukraine dug in and held on at all costs.
Ukraine has always fallen back when the odds were too poor; sometimes, like in Avdiivka, much too late. But something that has been lost in the commentary about the defense of Avdiivka is that when Ukraine pulled the 110th Mechanized Brigade out there were only a couple thousand soldiers at most in jeopardy of being surrounded. Thousands more were on the flanks, but they fought a fighting retreat in good order and are still in the field. Moscow, by contrast, had tens of thousands engaged at one point or another, a huge proportion dying to take one mid-sized town.
So far as operations go, if Ukraine replicates the defense of Avdiivka across Donbas for the next year it will bleed Putin’s forces dry. It can’t rely on doing this, however, because even Moscow adapts. Every day the orcs experiment with new tactics, the battlefield being the ultimate accelerator of innovation if frontline troops are allowed the freedom to be creative. We can’t say for sure that the ruscist virus won’t hit on a lethal solution.
Use of chemical weapons to clear bunkers is, for example, on the rise. Putin is only deploying irritants, basically tear gas, but escalation to something nastier could happen at any time and be subtle enough that hard proof would take time to amass. Chemical weapons were deployed much this way in Syria before the larger attacks on civilian areas began. These were very possibly launched by Syrian commanders acting on their own initiative, but the regime bore responsibility nevertheless - as did the rest of the world for letting Assad get away with it.
The battlefield solution that Putin’s orc generals are gravitating towards in Ukraine is a pure distillation of what they think worked for the Red Army in 1944. Institutional inertia is a hazard in any organization, but especially one dominated by strong hierarchies where authority is respected for its own sake.
There isn’t a way to organize a military effort that dispenses with hierarchy. It’s a pure function of the limits of the human brain as a cognitive system that it cannot keep track of more than half a dozen objects in a particular set at once. And trying to keep an eye on multiple set is only possible if you sacrifice resolution, that is, stop being able to understand important aspects of internal dynamics.
Because overwhelming the opponent’s ability to cope with the scope of a situation is a valid and wise strategy, cognitive limits plus the natural laws of geography ensure that military forces will in some sense always be disaggregated. It makes perfect sense to have one organ within the organism focus on organizing efforts at a global level, several that care about more local subdivisions, and so on down.
Stopping such a logical structure from turning into a social system dominated by individuals seeking prestige is an age-old challenge of humankind. Even if everyone involved shares a similar background and worldview, differences of perspective will cause conflicts. Sometimes survival depends on making split-second decisions without waiting for a group to reach resolution by consensus. That’s where the essential principle of unity of command plays such a key role - and poses a lethal threat when an overall commander gets something wrong or assumes they know more than they really do.
Information decays with distance from its source, and only people on the front line really know what’s happening in their field of view. Any effort to assemble a global one is fraught with the danger of biasing all downstream analysis. The situation gets worse when leaders are bound and determined to make reality conform to the way they wish it were rather than how it is.
The adaptive capacity of the ruscist empire is inherently limited because of its authoritarian nature, which perverts the necessary hierarchy of military affairs into a predatory scheme. An effective market for avoiding service on the front line in an assault unit leads to daily life for the average orc in Ukraine becoming solely about evading danger, not achieving important objectives.
Moscow’s officers respond by treating their soldiers as inputs in a great machine. They have their own place in the pyramid, a generally privileged position secured so long as they follow orders from above to the letter. Most likely regret sending comrades to pointless deaths, many even have relatives in Ukraine, but fatalism in the face of the State is all part of the russian world. An easy way to abdicate responsibility for resistance.
It isn’t that Moscow lacks a strategy for winning the war that dooms so many of Putin’s soldiers to die for nothing; the problem is that the kind of officer who gets promoted in Putin’s system has a strong incentive to indulge the Kremlin’s fantasies. Were Putin to spend a few days in the trenches he might understand why his approach to the war is so inane. But without practical experience, he’s free to be like any angry ideologue yelling at pundits on TV.
War hasn’t really changed over the past few thousand years. The basic goal of the thing remains the same: destroy the enemy’s ability to resist. Policy with respect to who the enemy is generates a logical strategic approach to victory, which gives rise to the need for a series of planned operations. Before, during, and after these ops tactics are devised, tested, and revised to maximize battlefield performance with a mind towards reducing casualty rates to zero. Operations, strategy, and ultimately policy must obviously evolve as more becomes known about the general situation: rigidity is death.
To efficiently defeat an enemy force in battle is always about finding or developing an asymmetry to exploit - ideally many. In short: find something the opponent is vulnerable to, then hit them with it over and over again. Fast-moving, spectacular combined arms operations are intended to destroy or suppress every enemy in a target area to enable people on the ground to move without being shot or blown up. Speed is enabled by vehicles, shock by big guns, and mobility the enemy’s inability to adapt fast enough to respond. To the degree possible the opponent has to be blinded, hamstrung, then left vulnerable to a killing blow.
Minefields made Ukraine’s counteroffensive operations difficult, to be sure. Glide bomb attacks pose serious challenges. But drones have been the single biggest friction factor driving battlefield stalemates. Most military gear is not designed to be struck from all sides, nor are troops trained or equipped to handle low-flying aerial threats that can come from any direction.
This won’t stop Moscow from attempting one last Deep Battle inspired attack, however. Putin’s generals appear determined to substitute glide bombs and drones for Sturmoviks and Katyushas, annihilating all possibility of opposition in a narrow area to power advances deep into the enemy’s rear areas.
The question is where the stroke will fall. There are a number of options, and knowing Putin’s generals, they might feel compelled to try them all at some point.
Option A is the most straightforward: an attempted double envelopment of the last urban area in Donbas under Ukraine’s control. This would represent a serious defeat for Ukraine, almost certainly pushing its partners to counsel negotiations. It is probably the most achievable option.
It also amounts to a frontal assault likely doomed to sputter out. During the fight for Avdiivka, Moscow committed reserves from other fronts, exhausting the offensive potential of formations fighting in Vuhledar and Robotyne, yet still only managed to force one brigade to retreat from the outskirts of occupied Donetsk city. The farther Moscow pushes west, the more difficult it will become to sustain any advance unless Ukraine is occupied dealing with crises on multiple fronts.
Option B would expand from a frontal attack in Donbas to an all-out push across the contact line. Moscow would attempt this because it anticipated that Ukraine’s limited supply of modern gear and especially ammunition has left weak spots. If Moscow is able to boost its electronic warfare capabilities this kind of attack becomes more of a concern, because right now shortages are hindering operations on other fronts.
This would seem like the least likely of the three options because of how badly the orcs have done running multiple operations at once, even if they’re supplied by different parts of the empire’s logistics network. The supply of effective officers is bound to be limited, and Ukraine has shown that it can make quick work of any improperly supported attack. Even Moscow likely has enough to a sense of its limits to try something more focused or entirely different.
Option C is the campaign that could actually win Putin the war, provided that his forces could pull it off. It would also present the highest risk of abject failure and the loss of a field army, which is why I don’t expect Moscow to take this road but almost wish it would. A limited thrust towards Kharkiv or Sumy is also possible as part of an effort to distract Ukraine and divide its forces, but a full-on new front is a stretch for Moscow unless it has learned how to get really good at hiding strategic reserves.
Moscow lacks the troops to subdue a city the size of Kharkiv. Its latest attack wave destroyed much of Kharkiv’s heating and power infrastructure, which could be seen as a prelude to a renewed offensive but is more indicative of a desire to take revenge for attacks inside ruscist territory. Kharkiv can be struck by S-300 air defense missiles in their inaccurate ground attack mode, causing effectively random destruction and complicating the work of air defenses.
Of greater danger is an assault that passes west of Kharkiv and attempts to secure a path of advance to the Dnipro in Poltava. A competent, effective military in Moscow’s position would do its utmost to make this happen because if Donbas is cut off from the Dnipro river, Ukraine will be forced to retreat. But trying it under present conditions would likely prove a bloody disaster for the orcs because along this new front Moscow would face all the same challenges it does on every other one. Ukraine would relentlessly strike the flanks, savage the enemy’s logistics, and counterattack.
Regardless of which option the orcs choose, Ukrainian troops are going to have to do a lot of fighting before the enemy is thin enough on the ground to push hard anywhere but the Dnipro front. But by late summer, the conditions should be right for Ukraine to punch back.
Strategy and Geopolitics
As hoped and expected, Europe is beginning to step up as the USA’s commitment to Ukraine fades. An armored vehicle coalition is already producing important results, Spain committing more Leopard 2A4 tanks and Germany a hundred armored personnel carriers of unspecified make. More will come in the near future judging by the number of countries involved, and joint production of gear like CV-90s is starting up. So that’s all good news.
Now, NATO gear isn’t a bunch of wonder-weapons. There is plenty of evidence available proving that Cold War era gear is obsolete on the modern battlefield. But the survivability of Leopards, Abrams, and Challengers means fewer dead Ukrainian soldiers. The same is true of infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, and everything else in NATO inventories.
Ukraine’s search for Patriot interceptors must be at a fever pitch, however. And here is where US congressional inaction may hurt the most, because the USA probably has the deepest stocks. That should end in a month or so, though there are no guarantees with the federal government anymore except chaos.
Mobilization continues to be a topic of heated debate in Ukraine, with most military professionals willing to speak on the record and now even NATO leaders suggesting it is necessary. Generally speaking, I have been and remain deeply skeptical of expanded mobilization. It will harm Ukraine’s economy, but more importantly, unwilling personnel have limited value in modern warfare. If you lack volunteers, something is wrong that forcing folks into uniform is unlikely to fix.
Ukraine’s personnel problem will be better solved by encouraging women and foreigners to serve in larger numbers as well as helping ensure that recruits serve under decent leaders. This also means that Ukraine must continue to avoid casualties, even if this means losing positions to the enemy and pulling back bit by bit. Expanded mobilization only makes sense if it leads to the right people doing the right jobs. It will probably be necessary given some pretty major issues with the current system, but more bodies can easily become a false economy.
Ukraine is not going to win this war through an endless grind. The laws of warfare have not changed: success on the battlefield depends on the return of mobility through a combination of improved fire support and better organization until better armored vehicles are developed - and ground support drones. And remote-controlled weapons systems to stick in frontline bunkers. And more new tools as the situation evolves.
The efforts of Ukraine’s leaders in the first half of 2024 are intended to enable a late summer campaign that can launch when Moscow’s summer offensive stalls out. By September Ukraine should have sufficient ammunition supplies and a couple dozen F-16 jets to help ward off orc bombers, plus a cadre of rested veteran brigades with quality gear.
With Europe moving towards using hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen ruscist assets to support Ukraine, its funding issues ought to be much alleviated by summer. Aid from the US is likely to come in a few weeks now that Congress managed to work out a spending agreement, despite my longstanding expectations of a partial shutdown. The new talk is of structuring Ukraine aid as loans, which is kind of irritating and very American, but considering the value of a dollar’s worth of aid to Ukraine today compared to the cost of future repayment, as long as the credit limit is high enough Ukraine won’t mind too much.
The report that the Biden Administration is putting pressure on Kyiv to pull back from its attacks on ruscist oil refineries isn’t surprising, but is frustrating. Gas prices going up during an election year is any sitting president’s worst nightmare, and pressure is rising on the Fed to lower interest rates despite inflation being stuck at 3% and still threatening to tick higher. So although Ukraine denied the report, I have to consider it credible.
The way these things are done in the Beltway system pressure is always deniable in politically sensitive cases. In fact, the report itself probably is the pressure. The tactic is like a lawyer stating something prejudicial to a jury, like asking a witness when they stopped beating their spouse, when they know full well the judge will immediately order the remarks excluded from the record and even reprimand the attorney.
Why do this? Because (my wife practiced as an attorney for a decade, so I have this on good authority - and no, that isn’t a lawyer joke) the jury members won’t forget the words, their impression is still tainted. Try it too often with the same judge and an attorney will get in trouble, of course. But the law isn’t any more inherently objective than science.
Ukraine’s denials can be genuine if the pressure is applied indirectly. The message has been sent, received, and like those the Biden administration keeps sending to Netanyahu in Israel, ignored. He’s lost his ability to call in favors like that; guy is already a lame duck whether or not he wins in November, since Congress is guaranteed to remain bitterly divided.
In the management-by-committee style that defines the Biden Administration’s approach to governance, actual people’s lives in Ukraine are of less concern than powering Team Blue to another hollow victory for its own sake. I would not put it past Biden to openly press for a ceasefire in Ukraine before he does one in Gaza, something he’ll only do once it doesn’t matter to Israel any more the way he plays that game. It is also entirely possible that Trump and mainline House Republicans, now that primary season is almost done, will try to pivot center on Ukraine and pretend they intend to offer even more comprehensive support to Ukraine if elected and Putin won’t back down.
American officials will say anything to get what they want. But America’s dysfunction will hold whoever is in charge come next year, unless somehow the cosmos finds a way to grace us with the outcome no one at all. A meteor shower or alien invasion are about the only hope there, though. However, there now exists an outside chance that partisans on the losing side this November will reject the legitimacy of the federal government and force a constitutional crisis.
At that point, a good number of Americans would probably take the country splitting up over fighting to stitch back together something that wasn’t working. Many regions would be financially better off, as they historically give more in taxes to the federal government than they get back in net benefits. I’m biased, of course, because the West Coast is one of them.
With just the 20-25% of the Pentagon budget we could afford, the states that border the Pacific would be able to deter China from attacking Taiwan and help ensure Ukraine’s victory, whatever the rest of the USA did. I’d say we’d be better off in most respects, to be honest.
It’s grimly hilarious to see the masters of the universe in D.C. make one tragic mistake after another all because they, like Putin, are too busy imitating their favorite historical figures to comprehend reality. Geopolitical systems don’t work the way they do - and ultimately fall apart - for no reason. Sooner or later people with too much power make stupid choices. Then everyone else gets to clean up their mess.
That’s history.
In the end, geopolitical forces always force a realignment. The movement by European leaders towards a more independent position now has too much inertia to halt or much slow. That’s bad news for Moscow and D.C. alike, but good for Ukraine and the rest of a democratic world more threatened by bad leadership than disunity.
With South Korea and Japan become more closely associated with Europe all the time, the makings of a new and possibly much better world order are now in sight. Where the Anglosphere will fall is a very interesting question. Will Australia, Canada, and New Zealand be dragged into the maelstrom that is the partisan USA, or look to other democracies around the world?
Interesting times indeed.
There is little Ukraine can do about the strategic blindness of American leaders. But Putin’s bet on Europe’s divisions being as easy to manipulate as America’s was a bad one. Despite Orban in Hungary and a few other notables, Europe slowly but surely gets the job done - and once it begins to move, it’s too cumbersome a vessel to shift quickly from its course.
That spells doom for all Vladimir Putin’s hopes and dreams.