Russia's 2023 Winter Offensive: Week 5
Ukraine launches counterattacks near Bakhmut, while Russia goes hypersonic with little apparent effect.
Over the past week Ukraine appears to have launched counterattacks in the Bakhmut area almost exactly where I was hoping to see.
Only time will tell whether they stick.
The fog of war, as the haze of uncertainty surrounding active military operations is often called, is thick around the embattled city. Ukraine has refused to abandon it despite the advice of many foreign experts and apparently many of the soldiers fighting there.
I believe I understand why, as well as how Ukraine might be in the process of inflicting a nasty defeat on Russian forces in the area. We’ll see how things play out over the coming week, but regardless, valuable scientific lessons can be learned from the ongoing fight.
In any situation where two opposing sides have limited resources, an excellent strategy one can choose is to let the other act first. By committing itself to a course of action, the first mover reveals vital information about their intentions and capabilities.
This allows their opponent to select the defending move that expends the least energy in return for the greatest gain. In nearly any kind of contest this logic, which leads to tactics like the ever-lethal feigned retreat, is deadly potent, though execution requires a lot of discipline, training, and mutual trust.
In terms of figuring out where each side is in control of what territory across what is likely a constantly shifting front at the local level, one of the most reliable indications of one side or the other making gains are statements given by Ukraine’s armed forces naming places where Russian attacks have been repelled.
Despite truth famously being the first casualty of war, Ukraine’s leaders, to this point, have wisely avoided lying about pretty much anything where an independent observer could catch them out in the act.
When attacks happen within Russia, for example, Ukraine is always careful to say that its armed forces are not responsible and suggest the involvement of unnamed third parties. Early on in 2022 it became widely understood that Ukraine tacitly accepts the support of allied groups that operate near the border with Russia to carry out strikes behind Russian lines. This accords Kyiv plausible deniability while advancing the argument that internal tensions inside of Russia will soon boil over and rip the country apart.
For the record, that has been the way of Russian history since the Muscovite Empire began its expansion three centuries ago. Russia is in fact one of the newer nations of Europe, which is why the thing is so incredibly fragile, just like Germany was after it came together in the middle of the 19th century.
Centralized rule from Moscow has always been Russia’s bane, and the new totalitarian alliance between Putin’s State and the Russian Orthodox Church is just another iteration of the same old failed dream of the Russian World. When Russia finally fragments into its constituent city states, Europe will finally have a chance to come together as a coherent entity under the European Union and end its ridiculous internal wars once and for all.
Kyiv’s leaders appear to be driven by a healthy dose of material realism inspired by their awful geographic position. They are doing a particularly excellent job of cultivating relationships with the thought leader set in the USA, so far keeping them from totally submerging Ukraine’s national interests into America’s obsessive desire to re-start the Cold War.
Tensions are rising between Kyiv and Washington behind the scenes, as the former knows this war is existential while the latter would prefer to freeze it while the US and its allies can still walk away claiming they’ve won, and before the thing can go nuclear.
This, I suspect, is the ultimate reason for Kyiv’s relative honesty: Zelensky’s government understands that the only way to make sure their story isn’t swamped by the daily efforts of America’s self-proclaimed expert caste to sell their own tale is to always be more credible than anyone else.
Fans of Putin and Biden will always attract followers in love with sucking up to the powerful, but Ukraine appears to understand that it is the disengaged, detached general population around the world that truly matters for its future. Kyiv knows that popular support for Ukraine abroad is driven by the constant Russian atrocities being inflicted on the Ukrainian people.
Though most people understand the truth that Russia invaded Ukraine and is wholly responsible for its actions there, they also maintain a healthy distrust of American experts because they’ve lived through a few American media cycles and seen their unfortunate impacts. The approach of the twenty year anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 offers a sobering reminder of just how idiotic American leaders can be.
Much of the media is little better, with widely-cited sources like the Institute for the Study of War never telling the whole truth. They openly embrace what specialists term information war, which is just a fancy way of saying propaganda.
This past weekend ISW published one of its daily reports insisting that Putin has lost the “information war” with Ukraine inside of Russia.
What the analysts here mean is that more content critical of the government is being published in Russia than anticipated. Governments are supposed to control how their populations view ongoing conflicts, with the tacit implication being that they have to manipulate public perception for the greater good.
It is important to note that, as usual, ISW offers no solid evidence to back its claim. This should come as no surprise: much of what it passes off as analysis is only a truncated version of what Ukrainian and Russian sources publish themselves.
ISW staff cultivate portions and translate what they like, adding editorial comments into daily briefings that get repeated without question across the international media space. They go through all this effort because according to the dominant theory of warfare embraced by most NATO countries, the battlefield is divided into separate domains like air, land, sea, space, cyber, and information.
Though linked under jargony concepts like “multi-domain warfare” and other such scholarly double-speak, for the most part each field maintains its own experts, think tanks, and bureaucracy. Academics create little niches in these domains where they amass expertise without anyone having to put all the little novelties together into a comprehensive working theory, as proper science demands.
As an analytical technique, separating a problem into components has merit, and systems scientists do this all the time. But most defense-focused scholars refuse to acknowledge to the general public that this is just a framework for understanding war, a schema has no real meaning outside of the minds of scribblers sitting behind desks.
It is actually a perversion of systems theory, properly speaking. An attempt to port systems insights into an outdated linear paradigm without understanding or including its full essence, thus rendering it worse than powerless. The information domain is a myth, a way of bundling propaganda activities with regular military operations.
Russia does the same thing, in point of fact, Russian officers constructing their own maladaptive system that has so manifestly failed in Ukraine. They simply refuse to accord any autonomy to individuals, where Western sources grudgingly admit that generals can’t directly control everything everyone under their command does… most of the time.
Information war is just a convenient excuse to spin facts and distort public understanding about contemporary events. It is fundamentally self-destructive, because it destroys trust and breeds misconceptions, allowing the deadly peril of groupthink to set in.
Hubris usually follows, and after that comes catastrophic military defeat that ends thousands of lives and triggers a conflict that reverberates for generations.
Powerful people and their allies are obsessed with information war because it allows them to evade accountability for screwups. It’s all about shaping public opinion so people won’t ask hard questions.
The head game policy makers play with the rest of us is difficult to wrap one’s mind around unless you’ve studied public policy at the graduate level. Many experts, especially older ones trained to believe in their own claims of authority, sincerely believe that often the general public must be misled for the greater good.
This is a totally anti-democratic impulse little different from the one that leads Putin’s Russia to repress independent media despite how little this does to insulate it from the consequences of this mad war. In America, the same process is carried out by clubs self-purging their membership to eliminate voices that challenge the preferred official narrative their peers have invested in.
This system is why otherwise intelligent and mostly competent figures like Anthony Fauci got in so much trouble during the Covid-19 pandemic. They were caught out massaging the way they presented data, failing to publicly acknowledge how little was truly known about certain aspects of this awful plague and that some of their guidance was based on nothing more than prudent judgement backed by long experience.
They never tried to explain that nuance, always acting like the authority figure had to have all the answers. From that seed of disconnect partisan politics took over, and the war against Covid was lost.
The single biggest reason American democracy is collapsing right now is perhaps the fact that no one trusts expert advice anymore, always checking it for secret partisan content - which they can always find if they want to badly enough. Then each side accuses the other of promoting fake news and alternative facts, and the fragile illusion of society collapses completely.
Honesty is always the best policy in governance. You can deal with people pushing back against unpopular rules, but once trust is lost, you’re done. Most real action takes place at the ground level, in the hands of people on the front lines, so to speak.
If regular people don’t properly understand the system they are participating in, they can’t make the infinite constant adjustments at the ground level that keep any human organization from collapsing from internal friction.
Bakhmut offers a perfect example of just how little most Western experts truly understand how Ukraine is winning its fight for survival against all odds.
For the past few weeks Western experts have been laying the groundwork for Ukraine pulling out of Bakhmut. They have actually been coming close to shaming Ukraine for standing and fighting, at times alleging that the city has no strategic importance.
The trick here is in how you define strategic.
While it is absolutely true that the greater war will not be won or lost in Bakhmut, not only is Ukraine inflicting severe casualties on Russia’s forces in the area but recent reports of repelled attacks behind the reported front lines indicate that Ukraine is making the most of the inherent difficulties that come with surrounding a fortress.
Kyiv isn’t making a big deal of this yet, which likely implies that heavy fighting is underway and might be inconclusive. But at the moment it sure looks like Ukraine’s defenders pulled off an absolutely textbook example of a retreat followed by a focused counterattack.
This works well because attacking forces are often at their weakest right after they secure their objective. And highly centralized systems of command and control like Russia’s are extremely prone to pushing an offensive too far, leaving it vulnerable to a quick counter-punch.
Combat power is best seen as a kind of embodied energy that allows a military force to seize and hold ground. Units deployed from their garrisons are constantly losing it, and combat operations can exhaust it in days or even hours. It is the precious, fundamental, limiting resource that makes warfare possible. Its physical impact is always strongest at the local level, when the teams trying to move through an area have to expend power to displace or defeat an opponent.
Just like a person can push themselves too hard in work or exercise and collapse, so can - and do - military offensives. As a system, an army is a lot like a human body. Leaders often fail to recognize the signals of impending failure, falling prey to sunk costs fallacies and other logic errors under stress or due to lack of education.
Hope and pressure to be seen to succeed can all too easily drive them to make the kinds of mistakes that get a lot of people killed. This is yet another reason decentralized leadership and execution are so vital in modern warfare, where drones and precision weapons reduce the margin of error in dramatic ways and only people on the front lines are able to work out how to survive and accomplish their mission.
Officers who treat their soldiers like mechanical inputs and are encouraged to make progress on the ground no matter the cost are extremely prone to pushing an offensive too far.
A military unit in action functions a lot like spring. As it extends away from its supply base, available energy declines until it takes so many resources just to keep units in the field at all that advancing becomes impossible. Push too far, and the spring becomes so taught it can actually fracture if struck by a force hitting the right spot.
If you’ve ever pushed yourself to muscle failure in exercise before, you have a natural intuition of what is going on here. Matter always wins out over mind in the end, and on the battlefield this dynamic can create a massive asymmetry between fighting forces that allows one to turn the tables on the other.
Steppe peoples have always been able to take full advantage of moments of metabolic collapse because of the mobility afforded by horses. Ukraine fights in the style of the Cossack wherever it can both because this is Ukraine’s heritage, but because it has to.
The only way a less powerful force wins against a tougher one is by using its resources better than its opponent. Wherever Russia is vulnerable at any level, Ukraine must strike.
Whenever and wherever Russian forces reach a culmination point, as it is called in the lingo, Ukraine is bound to launch a counterattack, even in a place like Bakhmut. If Russian forces are not extremely well prepared to meet the blow when it falls, they will be savaged.
Already the lines south of Bakhmut have apparently been shoved back several kilometers away from Chasiv Yar. Just as Wagner mercenaries closed in on the supply lines passing through Khromove and blew up a bridge there - since replaced by a temporary structure, because Ukraine apparently plans for everything - Russian airborne forces were kicked away from the other major logistics route leading into the town.
Unless Russian forces are able to hold their ground closer to Bakhmut, it appears that Ukraine may regain complete control of the H-32 highway. This should allow Ukraine to supply forces defending the western and southern portions of Bakhmut indefinitely, even if Wagner units reach Khromove.
Even better, on Sunday Ukraine reported repelling an attack in Paraskoviyivka, a town to the north of Bakhmut on the M-03 that Ukraine last held in mid-February. This village is just 5km from positions supposedly held by the 4th Tank Brigade, which just received Ukraine’s first Leopard 2A4 tanks, though it is unclear if they are in the field yet.
Ukraine’s apparent push out of Chasiv Yar last week was presaged by a similar report of stopping a Russian attack near Klischiivka, so it is very possible active fighting is underway behind the Wagner forces trying to cut Bakhmut off from the north. How far Ukraine’s pushes go will depend on what reinforcements Russia has available to throw into the fight and how many casualties Ukraine is taking, but even a large-scale raid can have major impacts.
At this rate, Russia won’t be taking Bakhmut any time soon. Given the higher ground and line of settlements running from Chasiv Yar up to Kramatorsk and ongoing Russian efforts to creep to Lyman, Russia might even be forced to bypass Bakhmut and press down the M-03 towards Sloviansk while facing a constant threat to their exposed flank as the spring uncoils.
Now, so far there has been no sign of the major Russian offensive in Kharkiv that I have been so concerned about the past few months. Time is running out for it to begin before spring forces a pause in major movements everywhere except along major roads and rail lines.
However, major Russian formations likely filled with mobilized reserves still have not shown up on any map that I’ve seen, with Wagner and Russian Airborne units leading the fight for Bakhmut.
Between 100,000 and 200,000 soldiers likely drafted into Russia’s army since last September have not yet appeared on the battlefield. It remains possible that Moscow’s strategy all along has been to force Ukraine to commit reserves along the existing front lines ahead of a sudden attack elsewhere in the country.
The massive missile strike launched this past week appeared at first to be the long-awaited first salvo in a new phase of the fight. But it was not repeated, has not been accompanied by substantially increased air operations beyond the front lines, and though including an unprecedented six hypersonic Kinzhal weapons fired at once, appears to have had little impact on Ukrainian operations.
Russia instead appears to be continuing its effort to spread Ukrainian air defenses thin across the country. Reports of substantial increases in the use of combat aviation near the front lines does track with my standing expectations, and will be lot easier to execute if Ukrainian air defenses are forced to stay spread out. Another missile wave could come soon, though if it is again targeted at Ukraine’s major cities this will likely be a waste of effort.
Now that spring has arrived, it is clear that Russia’s fight to destroy Ukraine’s power, heating, and water infrastructure has been a costly failure. Russia can’t sustain massive strikes day in and day out thanks to decreasing inventories of weapons, and they only have 50-60 Kinzhals in stock, so using them against anything but a high value target is a waste.
Not only this, but Ukraine’s air defenses may start getting stronger in the near future. The arrival of Patriot batteries should relieve some pressure on the air defense system, allowing Ukraine to keep a couple Buk mid-range SAM systems with every brigade along the front lines to act as a deterrent to Russian air strikes - or bleed them if they come.
A couple months back it was revealed that Ukraine has managed to integrate US-designed Sea Sparrow missiles with Soviet-era Buk launchers. This could go a long way towards restoring Ukraine’s ability to deny Russian aircraft space to operate using precision weapons launched from high altitude.
Overall Russia continues to act awfully dumb with respect to its operations on the ground, but it remains an open question whether this is intentional, meant to distract from an imminent major offensive, or a simple case of bureaucratic inertia. The USA failed to effectively adapt and innovate in Iraq two decades ago, feeding more and more troops into a disastrously bungled occupation until it finally started paying off portions of the insurgency.
It is wise for Ukraine to assume the former, and fortunately it does not look like Ukraine has committed so much combat power to Bakhmut that it will face a serious crisis if Russia does try some grand offensive meant to reach the Dnipro through Poltava in the coming days.
Elsewhere in Bakhmut, Russia continues offensive operations against heavily fortified portions of the old Donbas front line, either wasting troops on fruitless assaults or expending them to tie Ukrainian forces down ahead of the push to come:
Gains of a kilometer or two have been registered south of Marinka, likely intended to be paired with more assaults on Vuhledar.
West of Avdiivka Russia is creeping towards one of the major roads leading into town.
Zarichne on the road to Lyman is threatened by a slow grinding push from Kreminna, while Russian forces continue to make attacks towards Kupiansk.
It seems clear that Russia’s strategy for the first phase of its winter campaign was to take Siversk, Bakhmut, and Lyman to place Sloviansk and Kramatosk under threat again. Izium would likely have come under renewed attack, while Ukraine would be forced to deploy most of its reserves instead of preparing for the upcoming summer campaigns.
That, I still believe, was meant to act as a prelude to an armored assault in Kharkiv. It is possible that the failure of most of these operations changed Russia’s plans, that Moscow realized they were too ambitious and risky, or that the time is simply not yet right.
If this endless grind is truly all that Russia has left, Putin is in serious trouble and Russia’s military strength truly is a giant bluff, a con job for all time.
That means some kind of nuclear escalation is probably inevitable before this war ends. China has made it clear that it won’t tolerate a Russian first use, thank goodness.
But if an accident happens or can be arranged by Russia around the Enerhodar nuclear power plant, the truth of what happened will be muddied so quickly Putin might believe he can get away with some kind of nuclear “retaliation,” likely an atmospheric blast intended to cause no casualties while signaling a readiness to go all the way.
At that point NATO faces its true test. Member countries are still hesitant about giving Ukraine jets that, let’s be honest, pose little to no threat to most of Russia proper given Russian air defenses and interceptors.
That sends a clear signal to someone like Putin that his nuclear threats are working. It gives him every reason to believe that NATO will fold if pressed hard enough and in the right way.
Another possibility is that Putin has decided to accept a thousand casualties a day in exchange for creeping gains over the next couple years in the hope of exhausting NATO reserves of patience and ammunition. He also may be holding out hope of another Taiwan crisis or a cross-border spat in Korea that will further encourage the Biden Administration to cut back on aid to Ukraine for fear of being vulnerable to China.
Can Putin do this to the Russian people forever? That I suspect no one can say. But he has reason for hope.
Dangerous signals are already emanating from the Biden Administration that indicate Ukraine won’t be able to rely on American support for much longer. Partisan political warfare is set to escalate in the USA, and Americans are not known for their ability to remain committed to a project until the end, especially not with the threat of nuclear war hanging over them.
The stakes of the fight for Bakhmut are higher than most commentators admit. War is a continuation of politics, and who winds up holding the ruins at the end of the day will claim a victory that leaders in other countries will use to justify their next moves over Ukraine.
Facing the threat of reduced support in the future, Ukraine can’t afford to lose anywhere now. And this is Kyiv’s paradox: the more partners abroad insist Ukraine can’t lose, the less committed they appear to be to making sure it can actually win and the more they talk up negotiations whenever Ukraine seems to be losing ground.
It is this, and not callous political motivations, that forces Kyiv to fight so hard for Bakhmut despite the awful pain being suffered by Ukraine’s defenders along the front lines in this modern-day Verdun.
This is the awful Catch-22 the Biden Administration has placed Ukraine in.
It ends, when Ukraine’s allies act the part and arm Ukraine, full stop. Anything less is tacitly condoning genocide.