Russia's 2023 Winter Offensive: Week 2
Bakhmut holds! But the air war is set to get nasty.
Contrary to my expectation from a week ago, Russia has not yet dramatically intensified the pace of operations in Ukraine.
However, evidence continues to mount that the combat witnessed so far is not the main event, but a building prelude.
Putin’s forces appear committed to an extended period of what NATO military science terms battlefield shaping, which is a fancy way of saying that Russia is trying to confuse Ukraine about the location and pacing of its big strikes to come.
A key indicator is the continued lack of large-scale use of Russian combat aviation along the front lines. This, coupled to reports of a major buildup of jets near the border and continued episodic Russian use of dwindling stocks of cruise missiles to hit infrastructure targets across the full breadth of Ukraine, suggests that the next phase of Putin’s war is set to involve a lot more air power.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has finally demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that traditional US conceptions of air power and its role in warfare are totally obsolete. The American obsession with air superiority is rooted in a mythological understanding of its history bound to the United States Air Force’s need to justify its share of the Pentagon budget.
Virtually every US-based commentator who has knocked Russia for failing to gain air superiority during the Ukraine war betrays an astonishing ignorance of geography and the real history of aerial warfare. Even a cursory glance at the battles along the Eastern Front during the Second World War demonstrates that neither the Soviets nor the Germans ever achieved anything remotely like the comprehensive air superiority American pundits insist is necessary for successful ground operations.
Ukraine is simply too large for anyone to control its skies. The country’s air space covers a rectangle approximately 1200km long and 600km wide. Long-range air to air missiles can travel between 100km and 200km before running out of fuel, and radars on jets can reliably track targets a bit further.
Total coverage of this airspace requires maintaining control of eighteen 200km by 200km boxes. Aircraft almost always fly in pairs for safety, meaning thirty-six have to be aloft at all times. To sustain this sortie rate requires at least four times as many aircraft in the inventory as are in the sky, so you need at least 144 modern jets with long-range missiles just to ensure that anything that tries to fly is immediately shot down.
Note that this assumes zero resistance on the ground or from other aircraft. At its best, Russia could muster no more than 300-400 combat aircraft of all roles, about what the US could after a six-month buildup. Gaining control of Ukraine’s skies was always virtually impossible unless Kyiv’s defenders were utterly incompetent.
Russia’s failure to destroy Ukraine’s air force was a consequence of geography as well as good tactics and substantial foresight on the part of Ukraine, which fought the invaders according to its own style of waging war. Ukraine proved, hopefully once and for all that air denial is a more useful concept than air superiority or its American successor, air dominance.
Side note - it is always wise to be suspicious of any military concept that sounds like it came from a men’s health magazine. That, along with too much bling on uniforms, is a sure sign of a decaying military culture.
Aviation enthusiasts too often fail to forget that aircraft do not escape the influence of terrain, they do not and can not see everything that happens below. The air domain is not separate from the land, and air power plays a decisive but limited role in warfare.
The art of war, in a grand sense, boils down to the efficient allocation of resources to achieve objectives. What many call initiative is a function of having sufficient capacity for action to do something that forces an opponent to respond. And one of the key limiting resources in aviation is always bound to be trained pilots.
Despite having a lot of combat aircraft on the books, Russia’s air force apparently boasts only a hundred or so pilots who have spent time in a warzone. And the fighting in Syria was nothing like what they ran into over Ukraine.
For the first few days of the fighting in February of 2022, Russia did achieve something resembling air superiority over most of the country. Pilots defending Kyiv spoke of being outnumbered ten to one, forced to fly at rooftop height to inflict what damage they could - look up any interview by a Ukrainian MiG-29 pilot who goes by the call sign Juice for a taste of what that was like.
Before Russia attacked, though, Ukraine had already dispersed most of its jets and surface to air missile systems across the country. And because Putin tried to inflict the minimum amount of damage thought necessary to paralyze Ukraine’s government, his air force made little effort to wage an extended air defense suppression campaign, instead focusing on supporting Russia’s embattled armored spearheads in the hopes Zelensky would fall and most of Ukraine’s valuable assets could be preserved intact.
Within days, Ukraine initiated a kind of aerial guerilla warfare that began to inflict a steady toll on Russian aircraft. Russia had not planned to sustain major combat operations for more than a week, and soon started losing valuable pilots they have since reportedly been extremely eager to get back in prisoner exchanges.
Every combat pilot’s worst nightmare is a surface to air missile system switching on beneath them, too close to evade its weapons or shoot an anti-radar missile to try and take out the enemy radar. The only alternative to having so many jets in the air any SAM system that switches on gets taken out immediately - the solution the US Air Force began to rely on late in the Vietnam war - is to fly at low altitude.
The trouble with that strategy is that everyone and their uncle on the ground these days has shoulder-fired SAM systems, called MANPADS in the lingo. Portable SAMs mean that you have to be heavily armored to fly low and survive, and even Russia’s Su-25 close support jets, which can take a beating, have suffered heavy losses.
Starting back in about April, Russian jets stopped flying over Ukrainian lines except in exceptional situations, like when they carpet bombed Mariupol - including a theater marked out as a refuge for children. By June, Russian tactical aviation work was almost entirely localized, mostly consisting of Su-25 jets firing rockets at a wide area from a pre-planned firing point determined by GPS.
The main exception is a ring of air defense patrols conducted by MiG-31 interceptors and Su-35 Flanker armed with extremely dangerous long-range missiles. Able to take down Ukrainian jets flying higher than about 20 meters over the ground from 200km away, these, along with Russian S-400 long range SAM systems backed by A-50 aerial surveillance aircraft, make it close to impossible for Ukraine to operate behind Russian lines either.
My standing evaluation since midsummer has been that the Russian air force is rebooting itself. Partly held back as a hedge against any direct confrontation with NATO, using missiles fired from long-range bombers and Iranian one-way drones to exhaust Ukraine’s stocks of surface to air missiles, Russia’s air force has likely been intensively training pilots to support the winter offensive.
They will most likely be employed across a localized portion of Ukraine, possibly limited to Donbas but potentially extending to the Dnipro, to hunt and destroy Ukrainian artillery and troop concentrations. Adoption of NATO-standard artillery, even if it came in a veritable zoo of weapons from different countries, generally gives Ukrainian gunners a range advantage over their Russian opponents.
For Russian ground operations to work, they require artillery superiority. If their rockets and guns are getting pummeled by Ukrainian fires teams they can’t hit back, any advance will be at the cost of the poor bloody infantry. Tanks, especially Russian designs, fare little better than grunts, if isolated and targeted with precision shells. And even Russia’s deep inventories of metal and meat are not infinite, it can’t waste them forever.
Russian prestige as well as its ability to secure anything like a win in Ukraine both depend on executing a well-planned and coordinated offensive in Ukraine in the coming days and weeks. A narrow window has now opened where the lingering winter frost will mitigate the clinging mud of the steppes until sometime around April. Vegetation will not be blooming until then, making it more difficult for Ukraine to conceal the positions artillery teams hide in between fire missions.
The relative absence of the Russian Air Force, therefore, appears very likely to change suddenly in the coming days. One category of precision weapons Russia has not apparently exhausted is the kind of short-range air to ground missiles that need to be fired from close to the battlefield at medium to high altitude. Assuming that Ukraine’s SAM operators are running low on ammunition, Russian air defense suppression efforts will help keep casualties to a minimum during an intensive campaign lasting 4-6 weeks.
This is where the lack of adequate investment in ground based air defenses by NATO nations really hurts Ukraine. Aware that they lack the SAM coverage required to defend their own territory against any Russian attack, most have to rely on their limited stocks of fighter aircraft, hence their reluctance to supply these to Ukraine.
While it will not take as long for Ukrainian pilots and maintainers to adapt to new jets as pundits insist, the fact remains that delays in updating Ukraine’s air force over the past year have created a serious vulnerability. If Russia is willing to accept losing several aircraft every day for a month, it can likely achieve something resembling air superiority where it matters.
The best hope for bolstering Ukraine’s air force in the short run is someone in the US State Department or the EU doing a deal with one or more of the countries that operate Russian aircraft to mimic the German ring exchange program. This sends modern weapons to countries that transfer old Soviet-era stocks to Ukraine, and could in theory be replicated in Southeast Asia.
Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam all operate one or more squadrons of 16+ Su-27 or Su-30 model fighters, which Ukrainian pilots are already intimately familiar with. The former are already moving to adopt US or French jets, and this process could be accelerated to allow them to divest Russian make gear and get it to Ukraine. Vietnam is a tougher case and adjacent to China, but might be open to a deal with a country like Britain or Italy that it has less of a bad history with than America or France.
Polish and Slovakian MiG-29 jets would be excellent, if they have not already been transferred in disassembled form. But it is perhaps the Southeast Asian region where the swiftest inroads could be made towards boosting Ukraine’s air power.
Regardless, in the air Russia has the initiative, and the question remains where it will apply the force it has likely mustered. As with operations on the ground, the choice appears to be a grind through Donbas or opening a new front in Kharkiv. My evaluation remains that Russia is giving the outward of impression of planning the former, while quietly preparing to launch the latter.
Why? Because if Russia cannot stop the flow of supplies to the vast majority of Ukraine’s ground forces committed east of the Dnipro, its offensive is unlikely to succeed.
Evidence of this is everywhere on the ground. The Russian assaults on Vuhledar on the southern edge of the Donbas front have all failed. To the north, outside of Kreminna, Russia has made slow progress in pushing Ukrainian forces back west, but apparently has to deal with almost four Ukrainian infantry brigades in the forests along the Siverski Donets along their left flank.
At the edge of the sliver of Kharkiv oblast that Russia still holds, north of Kupiansk, recent attacks have forced Ukraine a few kilometers back towards the crucial rail junction. This is a sector to watch because of its proximity to major Russian bases across the border near Valuyki, which could push a lot of troops down the Oskil river to force Ukraine back across it and into the towns of Yampil and Lyman, along the Siverski Donets.
Meanwhile, in Bakhmut, Russian troops continue to be thrown into the struggle to surround the city. Wagner mercenaries launch assaults all around the perimeter of the city itself, but for the most part Russia’s main efforts have fallen to the north and south, especially the M-03 highway leading to Sloviansk.
Here some combination of Wagner regulars - distinct from the convicts essentially fed into the Ukrainian defenses around Soledar to inflict what casualties they could while saving Moscow the cost of housing them in prisons - and Russian airborne troops have crossed it and seized the towns of Krasna Hora and Paraskoviivka.
Fortunately for the defenders of Bakhmut the situation is not critical just yet. North of Bakhmut Russian forces are about to hit a water line with villages every few hundred meters, which forms a natural defensive line.
In military terms the reach of any individual element’s primary weapon is what defines its ability to control territory. Fairly flat country like eastern Ukraine means that a squad of soldiers with a machine gun can impact the calculations of anyone within about a kilometer of their position. By opening fire they force a response, so must be suppressed or destroyed if the enemy wants to advance.
Tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and infantry with anti-tank missiles can reliably reach out to touch someone around five kilometers away in open country. Part of the reason terrain matters so much in warfare is that it defines how far you can see, and therefore how far you can shoot. A line of villages a kilometer apart creates a natural barrier to attack if a force has sufficient firepower to defend them.
Plus it’s a lot easier to stay warm in a town, even if it is mostly rubble. In winter, never underestimate the morale impact of soldiers being able to keep warm.
Bakhmut is absolutely in a difficult situation, however conditions on the ground do not appear to make a withdrawal necessary yet. By contrast, Russia expending so much effort to take it essentially invites Ukraine to inflict what damage it can, because the logic of denial warfare means increasing the friction your enemy is under wherever possible, provided the cost is not too high.
Elsewhere, Russia continues to shell communities across the front line. There does not appear to be a visible build up of Russian units on the Zaporizhzhia front, where they appear content to hunker behind fortifications and wait for Ukraine’s eventual counteroffensive in this sector.
Domestically, though, indications are mounting that something big is coming soon. My expectation that major operations would begin in time to give Putin a success to crow about by the anniversary of the transition of the simmering conflict to full-scale war turned out to be incorrect.
However, this is far from good news. Combat power not being expended is charging up, in effect. And the stakes for Russia are so high, with a weather-induced deadline looming soon, that the longer it takes to begin whatever Putin is planning the worse its onset will be when the axe falls.
Putin is gearing up for a big public speech and concert in the next few days. US President Biden is heading to Poland to take credit for NATO holding together (so far) and Ukraine surviving as he aims to boost his re-election odds. His visit to Kyiv likely functions as an extreme affront to Putin that will be met with a major escalation of some kind.
Russian nuclear saber rattling is peaking again. Norway’s intelligence services recently reported that Russian ships in the Baltic Sea are carrying tactical nuclear weapons. Ukraine’s intelligence services are saying that Russian strategic nuclear forces are beginning a series of exercises that will likely involve the launch of nuclear-capable intercontinental missiles.
The crescendo of all this activity will likely mark the start of a dramatic intensification of Russia’s war. Some kind of operational surprise is probable.
Fortunately, there are flaws in Russia’s military system that cannot be papered over. And even if Russia achieves the maximum success it could realistically hope to, victory is simply not possible.
Russia lacks the soldiers to subdue a motivated resistance. All it can hope to do is lop off chunks of Ukraine, one at a time. Talk of a Korean scenario to end the war is emanating from Moscow, which is likely aware that this is the USA’s preferred outcome too.
Continued hesitation to give Ukraine all forms of military aid it has requested should be considered in that light.
Looking ahead, I have a hard time believing that Week Three of Russia’s winter offensive will fail to bring a marked change in the intensity of the fighting along the front lines, and perhaps beyond. Russian armor and aviation are not supporting the attacks near Vuhledar, Bakhmut, or Lyman en masse yet.
Where will Russia commit these forces? The world should know by March. And then we will see if Russia is truly exhausted as so many experts seem to believe.
I hope they are right. But in this and so many other things I am quite certain they are completely wrong.