The Ukrainian Military Reboot Of 2024
Big changes are underway across Ukraine's military effort now that the winter fighting season has come to a close. Kyiv appears set to launch another offensive once Putin's latest effort has failed.
The past week and a half of fighting in Ukraine hasn’t brought any dramatic changes. Moscow continues to nibble away on several fronts, losing soldiers and equipment at an astonishing rate in exchange for a field here or a tree line there, while both sides continue to mount raids deep into the other’s territory.
Having been forced to come to grips with the immensity of the challenge since the disappointing results of the under-resourced summer 2023 campaign, Ukraine’s leaders are in the middle of rebooting the war effort to align it with the emerging situation. Changes at the top, both on the military and political side, portend shifts in how the war is fought at the ground level, too.
The process is not entirely straightforward, simple, or easy for news organizations to describe. Most have defaulted to a grim, unduly pessimistic view of the war as a result of having no clear narrative about the coming year. Kyiv is being careful not to allow any hype to build, which is likely wise.
Scientific and journalistic analysis are very different animals. This isn’t to say that one is always better. Each serves a different function. Journalism creates plausible narratives around socially accepted facts. It is inherently biased by the audience that consumes it, writers and their readers bound by the latter’s belief that the former is a reputable source of information.
This is how journos get away with writing and publishing pieces supported by only a few sources, often anonymous, with those claiming to be from inside the government given special pride of place. While fascinating and valuable, even the best in-depth investigative story relies on far fewer data points than nearly any competent scientist would accept. Yet it is entirely commonplace to cite something written in the New York Times as established objective fact.
Scientists have their own issues with claiming absolute objectivity when they have no right to. Science is not unbiased either, but is, if done right, much less so over the long run. That tends to make scientific analysis better able to describe the dynamics that give rise to different outcomes. It can offer forecasts that, while often wrong about fine level details, do a reasonable job of identifying which futures are more likely to emerge than others and how they might come about. Improved policy is a natural result.
Journalism is a client-focused service: the audience is supposed to be happy with the product and will seek sources that match their bias. Science is meant to upset somebody’s apple cart, even everyone’s every now and again.
Of course, the flip side of science is that most of the time it confirms mundane and often boring details, shooting down flights of fancy with ruthless abandon. The laws of statistics are a powerful limiting factor requiring large amounts of data to displace a null hypothesis. The null is not inherently correct, but a general standard to test against, a sanity check, if you will. Because the pull of gravity is so easily tested, anyone claiming the ability to fly has an obligation to offer compelling evidence. The Wright Brothers, among others, proved how to defy gravity for a while by piloting an aircraft in public view.
The main difference between most scientific disciplines and fields is in what evidence they accept and how strong it must be. No measurement technique works in every situation.
Generally speaking, the null hypothesis in military matters is best constructed by looking at similar situations from the historical record. Ideally, you mix journalistic and historical studies with first-person accounts, especially battle and campaign records to mitigate the bias inherent in each form of data. You need effective theory to understand it all, too, which is a whole other discussion.
When I make a forecast or argument about the future of the war in Ukraine, I’m implicitly laying out what I see as a default scenario and estimating how far away from it actual reality could get assuming that there are forces linking events over time. It’s imperfect, but usable.
Ukraine has survived what is likely to prove the most difficult and uncertain part of the entire conflict except the first few weeks of Putin’s all-out assault. There is a tremendous amount of work to get done over the next six months, and much could go wrong, but Kyiv has taken essential steps by refreshing senior military and political officials.
Admiral Chester Nimitz, one of the senior leaders responsible for the defeat of Japan in the Pacific War, afterwards stated that nearly everything that happened was more or less as predicted by pre-war exercises. The main surprises were Japan’s technological advantages early in the conflict, its choice to continue expanding the defensive perimeter it had created in the Pacific by 1942, and the resort to kamikaze attacks when the war was obviously lost. The role played by air power was also unforeseen in specific terms, but it largely replaced reliance on battleship guns to destroy the enemy.
Taking a longer view, the Ukraine War’s course to this point was also broadly predictable. Once Ukrainians rose up to fight the invader, Putin’s original plan for rapid regime change was obsolete. This was no march on Budapest or Prague, no dispatching troops to Astana in Kazakhstan to prop up a client regime. So the orcs shifted to imitate what worked in Grozny, which is all they have been able to manage the two years since. Yet even if Kyiv and Kharkiv were surrounded and placed under siege, Putin’s forces lacks enough bodies and shells to take or even flatten them.
People like me, who in March of 2022 were writing about the need to swiftly build up a pan-European force to help Ukraine lift these sieges and free up soldiers to launch a counteroffensive in the east and south, might have been surprised that Putin went big, but not that this choice didn’t work out well for him. It wasn’t any surprise that Ukraine’s forces in Donbas were caught between the jaws of an orc assault. Ukraine’s ability to block Moscow’s effort to envelop Donbas from north and south is largely explained by the commitment of forces to continue fighting to surround Kyiv and Kharkiv even after it was clear that Ukraine wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
Military science is a science; applied correctly, scientific methods can have tremendous explanatory power. This does not mean that there is one correct form of science, however: the whole point of taking a systems approach is using whatever methods are best suited to the problem at hand. That creates the necessary foundation for the generation of effective policy.
One piece of recent journalism that struck me as excellent is by Olha Kyrylenko, writing for Ukraine Pravda. It features several Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines telling their stories in their own words. In contrast to most journalists from the West who interview Ukrainian personnel, there is no obvious agenda, no desire to get a cheap sound bite. It’s essentially scientific in its willingness to let the subjects of the study speak for themselves - give me a representative sample consisting of a few hundred of these, some neat clustering techniques can reveal a lot about the inner metabolism of Ukraine’s armed forces.
These soldiers run the gamut from the rare but real born warrior who actually thrives at the front and will keep fighting despite losing a limb all the way to the dude willing to call the defense of Bakhmut a terrible mistake someone should pay for. Journalism and science aren’t at odds, they’re highly complementary - the goal of both ought to be to capture as much of a situation’s essence as possible, good and bad.
Weekly Overview
Several European countries have even, thanks to Macron, started seriously talking about sending troops to train Ukrainians in Ukraine. Given that they would have to be protected, this creates the potential for NATO forces covering the ground and sky in eastern Ukraine, including the border with Belarus, freeing up Kyiv’s assets for redeployment nearer to the front. Like delivering F-16s, such a move would be about two years late - but better than never.
As unlikely as this is to happen soon, rationale for taking a step like this can be found in the simple fact that orc missiles have overflown Poland and drones have hit Romania on multiple occasions. The integrity of NATO now demands forward deployment of air defenses sufficient to make eastern Ukraine a no-fly zone for ruscist aircraft and missiles. Troops to handle training and logistics are only logical given Ukraine’s promised accession to NATO in the future.
Moscow has launched some of the largest ever combined drone and missile strikes over the past few weeks, even targeting Kyiv on several occasions. While some see this as a prelude to a new ruscist offensive or attempt to destroy Ukraine’s power grid, a better explanation at this point is that these attacks are revenge for Ukraine’s ongoing campaign against Muscovite oil refineries and arms plants.
The emphasis on hitting Kharkiv gives away the game. Knocking out public services there can be seen as an attempt to divide Ukrainians by illustrating how the defense of Kyiv’s airspace is prioritized, but Moscow is mainly just inflicting harm where it is most able, recognizing that to bash through Kyiv’s air defenses means using several hundred relatively scarce weapons at once.
Whatever the reason, the solution is obvious: give Ukraine more Patriot systems! As it turns out, of the fifty the USA operates, none have gone to Ukraine. The one system the US was mainly responsible for was apparently cobbled together from NATO spares. Germany sent three out of its twelve, and it appears France and Italy collaborated to provide two SAMP/T systems.
If you aim to demonstrate that NATO is critically divided and the USA is its weakest link, this is how you go about it. This charade the Biden Administration puts on about restoring America’s reputation abroad is comically pathetic. The guy makes Denethor of Gondor from Lord of the Rings look like a hero, and he turned out to be the worst defeatist of them all, Sauron’s most effective ally, the dude who was certain that only he could withstand evil but also that evil would triumph.
As far as ruscist attempts to defend their own airspace go, Ukraine continues to mount effective strikes. This past week saw a light aircraft converted to a drone penetrate a couple thousand kilometers into russia and strike its target. Air defense personnel are so jumpy that they shot down one of their own Flanker fighters over Sevastopol. And the latest Storm Shadow strike on Crimea looks to have damaged one or two more landing ships, further restricting Moscow’s ability to supply the peninsula over the Black Sea.
On the ground, the orcs continue their recent pattern of trying out every tactic you can imagine in largely doomed efforts to make operations work out as planned by some colonel a hundred kilometers from the front. After trying infantry only attacks for a while, the orcs will throw vehicles in the mix again. Small groups, usually, but just to keep Ukrainian troops on their toes Moscow sometimes goes big.
In what is reported to be the largest single armored assault in at least two years, Moscow threw three dozen tanks and a dozen troop carriers into a massed charge on the Avdiivka front. The result?
Observers have counted around twenty vehicles gone, including two-thirds of the troop carriers, in exchange for a slight expansion of the grey zone. Here’s what this portion of the Avdiivka sector looks like, arrows below covering the last ten or so days of fighting. Blue Xs mark the approximate area where the big push got blown up.
Between ambushes by anti-tank hunter-killer teams armed with Javelin and Stugna missiles, mines, drones, and artillery, the orcs didn’t stand a chance. They rarely do when this sort of thing is tried, because as I’ve argued over and over for the past year the classic understanding of mass in military operations has to be re-evaluated.
To advance, you’ve got to be able to constantly suppress the enemy’s ability to shoot back. One way to do this, in theory, is to gather dozens of tanks and have them shoot everything in sight to clear a path for the infantry. But in practice, a tank can be hit from farther out by a drone or missile than it can effectively fire back. Tank crews are not supposed to charge across open plains with guns blazing, but act like anyone else with a brain on the modern battlefield and shoot from cover, then run to a new hiding spot. Rinse and repeat, all day long.
Most of the trouble each side has had using tanks, and the reason some people are again questioning if they’re obsolete, comes down to an improper Soviet-era understanding of what they’re really for. Mobility and ability to communicate allowed German troops in the relatively few Panzerdivisionen the Wehrmacht ever operated to systematically outmaneuver enemy forces by working around their flanks to avoid defensive strong points. This kept casualties down, while any serious success rapidly generated chaos in the enemy chain of command. The dynamic allowed teams on the evolving front line to out-adapt the other side, and in this fight the halftrack or truck mounted panzergrenadiers who accompanied the tanks were vital. They’d show up in places their own commanders didn’t expect, seizing opportunities as they arose.
Nowadays, myths of the Second World War predominate even among experts in NATO and Moscow alike. So Putin’s generals dispatch their troops in classic Red Army style offensives, ironically acting more like Imperial Japan’s leaders did in the Pacific War. Embracing a totally mythic view of bushido, the classical Samurai ethic, Japan’s leaders threw away thousands of lives in one futile, misguided operation after another during 1943 and 1944. Not only did they abandon the essence of their savvy original strategy for beating the USA in any war, they also utterly failed to comprehend that you can’t simply will your way to victory: fighting spirit always loses to high explosives.
This isn’t to say that the orcs are never any good at fighting or don’t pose a lethal threat to Ukraine - many are highly capable. But the average orc isn’t, in large part because the average orc officer is part of a system that has proven unable to adapt at a higher level than the individual company or battalion. Soldiers are divided into meat and elite, each with their own appointed fate.
Avdiivka was not the only sector of late where Moscow tried a mass armor rush and failed. I find it notable mainly because of where it took place: Moscow appears to be trying to hit the Ukrainian defense line along the Durna at multiple points to find and turn Ukraine’s flank. In the process, it is sending troops into a strip of land where Ukraine can hit attackers from three sides.
We’ll see how well this works out for the orcs in the coming weeks. The first big push in this area went about as I figured one would if Moscow made one here. If Ukraine can keep drawing the enemy into lopsided engagements that lack obvious upside, who is truly attacking whom, even if some shell and mine infested ground is lost?
Even while shifting tactics locally, Moscow has continued to press Ukrainian positions on all the usual fronts, crawling forward at extreme cost. In addition to Avdiivka, the orcs are still creeping towards Chasiv Yar on the Bakhmut front and Robotyne in Zaporizhzhia, losing twenty thousand people very month to take a few dozen square kilometers. And while Ukrainian troops are absolutely having to fight desperately hard, the situation is set to improve in a matter of weeks even if Putin does mobilize 300,000 additional bodies in the coming months.
Assuming the Europeans come through with the reported ammo deliveries in the next few weeks, shells can replace bodies. When the orcs crawl out of their holes to fight, drones are great for disabling vehicles, but cluster shells are much more efficient at eliminating infantry.
And without help from them, tanks become hunted instead of hunters. Having been trained to operate one, I can attest that the Javelin is brutally effective and simple to use. Look through the command module scope, set the cross hairs on the target, let the system take a picture, fire the missile, then sit back and watch the fireworks - or, if you’re wise, run far away before someone can shoot back then do it again. Optical locks are a hell of a thing. Just wait until more drones have them.
Tactics and Operations
Zooming out, Ukraine’s new military chief Syrskyi is taking the exact steps needed to in order to make a late summer counteroffensive happen. In some excellent interviews lately, he’s been laying out how Ukraine is preparing for the next phase.
It is pretty clear that large-scale combined arms operations in the classic style are not going to be possible, at least until a new generation of armored vehicles comes online. For the time being, drones are too cheap and lethal to beat using traditional methods of creating mass and momentum because they can be launched from anywhere. In a purely physical sense, trying to mount a textbook mechanized assault is like sending men over the top of their trench into no-man’s land during World War One.
Putin’s forces keep trying that, and they are slowly bleeding out. The process is taking longer and so forcing Ukrainians to suffer more pain than they should have to, but Putin’s obsession with fighting the mythical united West has become a suicide pact for hundreds of thousands of people in his empire. There’s a very good reason that civilian vehicles and even ATVs are showing up among the wreckage of failed ruscist assaults. Putin is a discount version of Stalin, his empire equally shriveled compared to that of his forebear.
Unless he can convince Ukraine’s backers to stop giving it support, Putin’s cupboards will be almost bare towards the end of 2025. He won’t be disarmed, but lack of heavy gear in sufficient quantities will quash any hope of rapid advances in Ukraine or anywhere else. If he can freeze the war and import gear from abroad, however, even obsolete Chinese and North Korean kit, 2026 could be the year that he’s ready to connect Kaliningrad to the rest of the empire through NATO members Lithuania and Poland.
Of the sources available to the public that offer military analysis of the situation in Ukraine, I value Frontelligence Insight and the Centre for Defence Strategies beyond most. Their perspectives more often than not reflect the hard evidence provided by the many folks who georeferenced drone footage. Deep State Map, Geoconfirmed, Ukraine Control Map, and UA Map all do an excellent job of mapping everything and have some great map layers and overlays too, but I rely heavily on English-language sources from Ukraine to offer perspective on the data.
Generally speaking, the most reliable sources now agree that Kyiv will have to mobilize 150,000-200,000 more personnel and train them over the course of 3-4 months in order to renew offensive operations. This is far less than the 500,000 Zaluzhnyi required, but still a substantial number. How effective they are on the battlefield will depend on whether they receive a full three months of intensive training and modern equipment.
They also won’t be available until August at the earliest, with early September being more likely. That means the million or so personnel currently serving will have to hold the line as well as they can through summer, counting on fall weather and Ukraine’s new spear striking hard across the Dnipro to draw off Moscow’s reserves and end its summer offensive.
Of the million or so bodies Ukraine has in uniform, however, only 30%-40% have ever been to the front. Now, a two to one tail to teeth ratio is a reasonably standard proportion for any army engaged in combat over a number of years. And you don’t want untrained personnel anywhere near the front; they are more of a burden than asset in combat.
However, the rapid expansion of Ukraine’s military since 2022 has exacerbated gaps in an already creaky system. While corruption is nowhere near the levels Ukraine’s critics like to imagine, and probably not all that much worse than the covert forms of corruption that pass legal muster in the USA, opportunists are everywhere. War breeds them, and the number of long-serving professionals in Ukraine’s Armed Forces remains too low to maintain standards of accountability everywhere, thanks in no small part to attrition at the front.
Ukraine’s battle-hardened veterans have been fighting without a break for way too long, while a lot of rear-area personnel as capable of handling defensive fighting as exhausted veterans have had an easier war. This isn’t fair to the latter, and Ukraine also needs its most experienced fighters in a position to pass on their skills to new recruits and develop working doctrine - basic rules of the road when it comes to carrying out combat operations under current conditions.
Ukraine’s apparent solution is to swap about half of the 360,000 personnel in frontline units with soldiers whose duties have kept them in the rear thus far. If Ukraine rotates out the 180,000 people who have been fighting the longest, the other 180,000 can be promoted to leadership positions and train up the newly-deployed as quickly as possible. It is generally quicker and more effective to put a rear area soldier on front line duty than it is to send a raw civilian or someone recently mobilized.
There are also ethics to keep in mind - military personnel have to accept a degree of mortal risk as a hazard of the job. But part of the social contract that keeps the bonds between soldiers intact - something notably lacking among most orcs - is that everyone shares the risk in their own way, as the mission demands. And when the line soldiers wear out, even cooks have to step up and grab a rifle. However, it is unreasonable to expect people in this situation to perform miracles. Kyiv cannot cling to positions for the sake of it.
To make the most effective use of its scarce resources and tired personnel it is best to think of the entire front from the Dnipro to the international border as Ukraine’s great shield. Along it Kyiv’s forces have to use mines, drones, and artillery to induce as much friction and attrition as possible wherever Muscovite troops try to advance. Forward positions must be used to ensure the enemy has to commit a substantial force to advance into the grey zone then abandoned when the glide bombs come soaring in. Ideally, many will be remotely controlled.
This tactic savaged the Red Army in late 1943 and early 1944. Stalin’s hordes never worked out a better solution than attack the line everywhere to ensure the limited number of German mobile formations available in any single area was insufficient to stop an advance somewhere. As any number of failed mass orc armor attacks have shown, having more stuff in one place doesn’t guarantee victory in the Network Age. The more Moscow tries to advance, the faster it loses people and gear.
Area defense does not freeze the front lines, however. Ukraine has to be prepared to lose a few square kilometers every day to bleed out the bear. The geopolitical hell of the Eurasian steppe is that there aren’t a lot of natural boundaries aside from major rivers. Part of the reason Putin was a fool to start this war is that once you start meddling with international borders, it’s painfully easy to make a case for moving them quite dramatically in any direction.
What this means is that territory alone cannot be the metric of success in this war. Ukraine has to defeat the ruscist regime, meaning that it must inflict a serious defeat that is both military and political in nature to keep Moscow from trying this again. Crimea is now the central focal point of this war, and the shortest road leads across the Dnipro through occupied Kherson.
Area defense can be a potent strategy in the open steppe because it trades space for blood and forces the enemy to commit to large-scale in operations on a defined front where he’ll always be under observation. The ability of drones to fly several kilometers out from a hidden position to disable armored vehicles slows the pace of any advance where these cannot be suppressed to a crawl, just like a minefield: only drone operators are much more mobile.
Inability to develop anything resembling tempo or momentum makes the attacker’s troops extremely vulnerable. They have to supply and reinforce forward positions under constant attack. The farther the orcs get from a town or village, the less effective their attacks become. Moscow appears as incapable of understanding that its approach to operations is now as obsolete as that of senior Japanese leaders heading into 1944.
Combining the least-exhausted half of Ukraine’s veteran fighters with trained personnel, even if they aren’t infantry specialists, should give Kyiv the ability to minimize its losses of troops and positions for the rest of this year. It has to be assumed that the orcs will throw away up to a quarter of a million lives in the upcoming summer campaign, which in the very best case will force Ukraine to suffer tens of thousands more casualties to stop the assault. It’s important to understand that no matter what happens, ten to twenty percent of the people acting as Ukraine’s broad shield will be dead or seriously wounded by the end of the year.
This is the cost of failing to give an ally proper support in a timely manner. If you won’t treat your allies like you would your own people, what’s the point of alliances?
The time Ukraine’s frontline soldier buy will allow it to build up a powerful reserve, one capable of liberating southern Kherson while counterattacking locally wherever the ruscist advance this summer exhausts itself. Ukraine’s spear will be forged around about a third of the 180,000 veterans rotated off the line, these sixty thousand matched up with around two-thirds of the newly mobilized to staff up to thirty brigades. The rest of each cohort will take over rear area duties, the 60,000 or so remaining newly mobilized forming a replacement pool to cope with the inevitable losses of the next year.
The 60,000 or so veteran personnel still able to handle the rigors of combat after a few months away from the contact zone will become the officers and sergeants who whip the 120,000 newly-mobilized into capable fighters. Two-thirds of the rebuilt brigades should be available for offensive operations by September, with the other ten held back in reserve as a hedge against ruscist attacks wearing out formations assigned to Ukraine’s shield.
It’s important to keep in mind that Ukraine’s partners will need to substantially step up their provision of material aid to make this work as it ought to. The thirty brigades that form Ukraine’s spear should all have at least one battalion of modern infantry fighting vehicles, meaning that Kyiv needs around 900 Bradley/Marder/CV-90 type vehicles by late summer. Another battalion, ideally two, will have wheeled armored personnel carriers like the American Stryker, Canadian LAV or French VAB. A fourth or even fifth, if available, can ride in armored trucks, but these will ideally be reserved for frontline combat support troops like engineers.
And yes Ukraine also needs modern tanks - at least a company of 12, but ideally a battalion of 30 or so, for each brigade That means several hundred more Leopards, Challengers, and Abrams need to be committed in short order to allow time for training. Contrary to assertions that these vehicles are overweight duds, better tactics and more engineering assets can utilize them with greater efficiency.
Twenty brigades available by the start of September would radically alter the character of the fighting on the ground, especially if Ukraine uses them to strike Moscow’s most vulnerable front: Kherson. The proliferation of drones has enhanced the role of terrain: to advance requires suppressing the enemy’s ability to fight across a clearly defined area.
The objective of warfare is the same as it has ever been: destroy the enemy’s ability to resist. Networks make communication cheap enough that geographic distribution allows for incredible resilience to direct attack. This means that beating an enemy requires isolating them from support and supply.
Thanks to the geography of southern Ukraine, Kherson and Crimea are the occupied territories Putin’s orcs are least capable of securing over the long run. The reason: limited and vulnerable logistics connections to the empire. To reach western Kherson and hold the line of the Dnipro Moscow has to push supplies across the Crimea-Dnipro canal. While there are more than a dozen crossings and building more is not beyond Moscow’s capabilities, they are all within reach of French-supplied Hammer rocket-powered glide bombs launched from the Ukrainian side of the river.
Any new bridge that Moscow tries to set up will be vulnerable to destruction unless it can control airspace inside of Ukraine. The loss of two and maybe more AWACS aircraft as well as the routine beating S-400 systems deployed to cover Crimea take have made this almost impossible. F-16s will not dominate the skies, instead they’ll launch constant hit and run raids against targets of opportunity. Though only two dozen at most will be available by the end of summer, that will be enough to constantly keep a pair of aircraft in the sky somewhere over southern Ukraine. Every few hours Vipers will knock out radar systems, bridges, or troop concentrations, and any ruscist jet that tries to intercept them will risk being ambushed by a Patriot launcher.
With sufficient ATACMS and the new small diameter bomb system fired from the same launchers, Ukraine will be able to hit targets deep into Crimea. Every railway junction, bridge, or other vital node will be subjected to attack. Drones, obviously, will be in the mix too.
If Ukraine can muster enough firepower, its four Marine Corps brigades should be able to clear a 20km strip on the south bank of the Dnipro. The spring snowmelt released by Ukrainian controlled dams upriver ought to make it easier to get boats close to cover faster, and the leafing out process should already be underway in Kherson, which is warmer than much of Ukraine. Backed by thousands of drones and regular air strikes, Ukrainian troops should be able to seize the islands of the Dnipro delta and slowly push back the enemy through late spring and into summer.
Once accomplished, setting up numerous bridges and ferries should be possible. And after logistics are in place, heavier brigades can mass on the bridgehead before unleashing assaults intended to drive the orcs back towards Crimea and Melitopol. After Kherson west of the canal is secure, Ukraine can focus its attention on breaking through across it along the Dnipro’s banks.
Trying to break the land bridge between Rostov-on-Don and Crimea near Melitopol is unlikely to work. By 2023 it was too obvious that this would be Ukraine’s primary target. Now this sector is simply too densely covered in mines and fortifications to make rapid progress. Zaluzhnyi wisely chose to call off the 2023 offensive before committing all his reserves, which is why the front line didn’t crack anywhere but Avdiivka this winter. A repeat effort, even with F-16s in the skies, will end the same way because the orcs have had way too much time to prepare.
But blowing up the Nova Kakhova dam was meant to insure against Ukraine flanking the defenses around Melitopol with a sustained river crossing. Since then, this sector has not been a priority for Moscow, which appears to supply efforts to roll back the toeholds Ukraine seized last fall through Crimea. Putin quite clearly views this area as secure, the difficulty of a major cross-river operation too much for Ukraine.
That makes it the perfect spot to prove him wrong. If Ukraine can get across the river and push east across the canal, the land bridge can be cut west of Melitopol instead of to the east. Even better, if Ukraine’s Marine brigades are given a couple months to recuperate in August and September as Ukraine’s spear strikes towards Crimea, a landing on its northwest coast might be feasible, offering the perfect distraction from Ukrainian attempts to reach the Perekop Isthmus from the north.
If 2025 dawns and Ukraine has Crimea or even better yet Sevastopol under effective siege, Putin’s war is basically over - provided his summer offensive fails without taking the Kramatork-Sloviansk sector. Fortunately this is more likely than not unless Ukraine makes some serious mistakes - namely clinging to territory that lacks sufficient value in terms of imposing a blood price on the orcs for taking it. Ukraine finally is on the cusp of having all the tools a modern military requires to advance in a select, properly prepared area where it can strike the full depth of the enemy’s positions without pause.
F-16s are not wonder-weapons and alone won’t change the course of the war. However, they are set to become an indispensable part of Ukraine’s battlefield toolkit. They will create space for other aircraft to operate more freely as well as being more efficient platforms for using weapons like anti-radar missiles. The hack some brilliant techs put together to let MiG-29s and Su-27s use HARMs was excellent, but requires that the missile’s target area be established before the flight. An F-16, by contrast, can shoot a HARM as soon as an enemy radar appears on the threat warning receiver. It can also smoothly switch over to fire at an aerial target if one blunders in range - hunting the large surveillance drones that Moscow flies ten or twenty klicks behind the front as well as helicopters and low-flying ground support jets will also be on the Viper jock’s task list.
It’s pilot autonomy and data connections that make modern multirole combat aircraft so potent. While the F-16 is individually inferior to a Su-35 or MiG-31, with missiles that don’t fly as far and a radar limited by shorter range, it can partially make up for these with quality, radar possessing superior fidelity to a given ruscist model at the same range. The F-16 is also small enough that by flying low it can almost certainly reduce the effective engagement range of any ruscist interceptor. F-16s can carry electronic countermeasure pods which jam enemy radars, making achieving a missile lock much harder. Also, any enemy aircraft looking for an F-16 can be detected by the aircraft’s warning receiver at a greater distance than the F-16 is detectable if its own is switched off, allowing a pilot to use clever tactics to avoid coming under attack.
Basically, rather than engage in head to head shooting battles with ruscist interceptors, F-16s will be wherever they aren’t, striking at targets Moscow can’t afford to lose and launching quick aerial ambushes against aircraft that fail to maintain situational awareness. They’ll probably never fly over land beyond Ukrainian lines, limiting the danger of electronics or pilots being captured. But every ruscist pilot will have to wonder if an F-16 is lurking close enough to race in on afterburner and unleash a couple radar guided missiles. And if NATO allows the F-16s to use their ability to network with NATO assets, any Viper jock is going to be able to see where every enemy jet and air defense system is operating near the front at any time without using its radar at all. Stealth is a relative, not an absolute, metric.
Another plausible use for Ukraine’s F-16s is hunting down the last of Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet. The F-16 has a ferry range of around 4,000 kilometers if it carries a bunch of external drop tanks. In theory, a flight of four, each armed with only a pair of Harpoon anti-ship missiles plus a couple AIM-120 air to air missiles for self defense, could take off from central Ukraine, skirt the edge of territorial waters along the Black Sea, and get within the 200km maximum range of the latest Harpoon variant before launching an attack from a direction Moscow likely won’t expect. They could carry even less fuel if four additional jets play buddy tanker for them.
This wouldn’t be an overwhelming strike, but Moscow would likely fail to see it coming and lose some ships. Most F-16s are not equipped to fire Harpoons, but Taiwan’s are, so it is entirely possible that the ones Ukraine receives will be appropriately modified. Of course, F-18s like those Finland, Spain, Canada, the USMC, and (formerly) Australia own carry Harpoons by default, and once you can fly a Viper, training on a Hornet can’t be that hard, so it’d be nice if certain politicians would get a move on there.
Fortunately even a dozen modern combat jets can have a much greater impact than their numbers imply, so if that’s all Ukraine has by September they’ll still cause no shortage of headaches for the orcs. With two dozen pilots available, half of the jets can be airborne at any given time. With its best weapons able to reach anywhere in Ukraine in a matter of minutes, F-16s will have to stay airborne as much as possible and under cover when landed for maintenance. They’ll be distributed across a number of bases, so Moscow will be forced to play guessing games when it launches its inevitable missile strikes to try and destroy the jets on the ground.
Exactly how many pilots and maintainers Ukraine will have available by late summer remains an open question. Six jets and a dozen pilots should be ready to go by the end of June, with a dozen personnel presently wrapping up advanced training in Arizona and Denmark. They appear set to join up in Romania and employ a tranche of 18 F-16s to conduct group training before slipping across the border with combat-ready jets to their base network in Ukraine sometime in summer.
Supposedly another dozen or so F-16 pilots in Arizona are set to follow the first six by the end of August. I’d presume there are as many at the same level in Denmark or another NATO training center. And additional pilots going through English-language and basic aviation training in Britain are moving on. A full two dozen Vipers in Ukrainian skies and twice as many pilots by the end of summer is entirely possible. That would allow Ukraine to commit a dozen to cover the interior of the country while keeping another dozen serving the south and east.
Not enough to turn the tide on their own, but a sufficient force to deal Putin’s fliers one bloody nose after another. With enough artillery, rockets, and long-range missiles, by September Ukraine should be ready to strike again.
The UK Guardian has it that the Kerch Strait Bridge will be gone by the end of June. I doubt this, mostly because the Guardian is reporting it and has a habit of falling for official bluffs. But if it does go down, that could signal the start of a major push across the Dnipro.
Strategy and Geopolitics
This has been a harsh winter for Ukraine’s defenders and civilians alike. Betrayal by the United States, as predictable as this was given the dysfunction eating away at the country’s foundations, has to hurt. Europe’s failure to ramp up ammunition production fast enough along with American partisan idiocy has caused severe shortages of artillery and air defense munitions.
It’s of course common practice among journalists to lay the blame for the American federal government’s chaos on Trump-aligned Republicans, but that’s because their core audience doesn’t want to admit how Biden’s constant political triangulation enables the hard-right lunacy - and also even worse scam artists, like the latest Kennedy to get into politics. Not that it matters, but if forced to choose between the lot of loons seeking the White House I’d take loopy old Cornel West over the rest, even if he is totally out to lunch when it comes to the war in Ukraine.
If this somehow gets to you, professor West, I’m all for giving peace every possible chance, but only if you’ve got a partner trustworthy enough to honor agreements. Putin, Netanyahu, Bashar Assad, Kim Jong Un, and the lunatic leaders of Hamas - you can’t negotiate a lasting peace with someone who views negotiations as another weapon in their arsenal. Prisoner exchanges, temporary truces - these can work out so long as the tyrant enjoys a reciprocal benefit they believe will turn to their advantage. This is what separates them from run of the mill authoritarians like Xi Jinping, Viktor Orban, Xi Jinping, and the House of Saud. These guys want to make a deal - the other set is out for blood.
There are scientific explanations for why leaders behave the way they do. None of them are entirely free to act as they like - their rhetoric binds them to certain individuals, groups, and ideas.
Anyway, once everyone in Congress has extracted their requisite quantity of attention from delaying aid to Ukraine, the legislative situation is set to revert to the mean. America is happy to see Putin weakened, though not beaten, and also to have another excuse to funnel more money into the arms industry. Only a minority of legislators - and Elon Musk - are actually pro-Putin, mainly because they want money from the small minority of Americans who like the idea of a Christian theocracy such as the one Putin pretends he maintains.
Congress will likely approve aid this April, May at the very latest, for the same reason that it averted a government shutdown or defaulting on the national debt: no one wants to risk being responsible for a calamity like the collapse of Ukraine in an election year. Trump’s supposed opposition to aid is softer than it looks and, if he learned his lesson from downplaying the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic after surviving a nasty case of it himself, he’ll follow the polls and start talking about how he’ll make sure Ukraine wins.
Biden has left himself open to this play by failing to properly back Kyiv a long time ago. Recent reports about a call between Biden, Scholz of Germany, and Macron of France have it that the latter’s strong rhetoric about sending soldiers to Ukraine is opposed by both. The increasingly thin excuse of avoiding escalation has done more damage to America’s national security than any presidential action in my lifetime save the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
It’s rather interesting to note that Ukraine’s senior leadership has had more turnover in the past few years than America’s. Where most presidents go through several members of their national security team over the course of four years, Biden’s remains the same. This is not a positive sign about the administration’s flexibility or competence. Were so much of the US media not determined to pretend that Biden is the pope of American democracy, the nakedness of this pathetic emperor would be impossible to conceal. It’s the main reason he will more likely than not lose in November.
Like the idea that Ukraine’s fight is doomed and russia is eternal, the imagined competence of Joe Biden is another piece of American conventional wisdom bound to produce catastrophe sooner or later. The rising myth of the pandemic response - what little governments actually bothered to do in the USA - costing more than it was worth is another media-driven myth millions of Americans will live to regret when a 10%-20% fatal flu pandemic comes along.
Deep down, fighting a pandemic and fighting a war aren’t all that different. Neither is dealing with the planet’s degraded environment. There’s simple science behind all of it. It’s ridiculous illusions, like multiple independently developed vaccines made using different techniques all being part of some grand conspiracy, that gets people killed.
American partisans love their illusions. So does Vladimir Putin. So did Hitler and Tojo. None will be remembered fondly by history.
The biggest illusion of the past fifty years has been the lasting strength of Putin’s empire. His propaganda is obsessed with presenting russia as unbeatable precisely because it is so weak. That Putin is still claiming Ukraine was behind the cruel ISIS terror attack in Moscow and seeks to undermine russian unity is a powerful tell of what he fears. The ongoing inflexibility of orc operations, even as they innovate with new tactics, is part of a strategic malady that has afflicted Putin’s war from day one.
Like Imperial Japan in the Pacific War, he’s gone all-in on a war he cannot win. By the end of 2025, when his arsenal will be nearing exhaustion, European 155mm shell production alone will meet all of Ukraine’s needs. Ukraine is in the process of developing new doctrine and techniques to cope with the challenges of fighting in the drone-infested Network Age, just like the U.S. Navy had to embrace carrier-based aerial warfare after Pearl Harbor disabled most of its battleships.
So far, Ukraine has proven time and again that it can adapt. Weary, bloodied but unbowed, Ukrainians are working out how to win. Find a way or make one is basically their motto - and a great Amon Amarth track, too.