Ukraine's New Capabilities
As shaping operations ahead of Ukraine's summer offensive escalate, Moscow's troops are taking hits in places they clearly did not expect.
Ukraine’s summer campaign continues to accelerate more or less as anticipated.
Over the past week President Zelensky has publicly stated that Ukraine needs more time to prepare its attack: a sure sign that the fighting has already begun.
It isn’t that Zelensky is lying - US media habitually kills nuance and frames every issue as an either/or proposition. So to say that Ukraine’s liberation campaign has already begun would put Kyiv on the spot: journalists would begin asking why progress was going so slow, creating a narrative that benefits Moscow.
This in turn opens the door to US politicians declaring the conflict a stalemate and failing to re-up funding when the current stream dries up in summer. While Ukraine’s most important material support has always come from Europe, the half offered by the US is still a hefty chunk of change that Kyiv can’t give up lightly.
American partisans have already begun to subordinate Ukraine’s fight for survival to the demands of the upcoming election, which is all but guaranteed to be close and a civic nightmare. This means that Zelensky must constantly walk a fine line between highlighting Ukraine’s ongoing vulnerabilities with reminding the world that its victory is just, necessary, and inevitable.
But what constitutes the start of a military campaign? In truth, everything that has happened since Moscow seized Crimea in 2014 is part of a single evolving chain of events.
Historians create arbitrary boundaries because to understand a system as complex as world history you have to split up the problem somehow. However, imagining that civilizations and languages persist with only cosmetic changes is a choice made by scholars who generally haven’t been forced to put their theories to the test in any meaningful way.
The danger of relying on experts citing facts instead of reasoning through problems using a systematic, holistic approach is that they will always, like parents tired of dealing with a child’s questions, resort to telling people to simply trust them because they are the experts. And the media, being in the business of selling an entertainment product, happily fosters the illusion that pitting two alleged experts against each other in a debate ultimately leads to the production of ironclad truths.
Ukraine has done an admirable job of navigating the information war national security insiders in the English-speaking world wage to steer public debate about defense matters. But now Zelensky’s government faces new challenges: media talking heads and politicians in partner countries aim to put the Ukraine War into a little expert-dominated box where they maintain the sole right to speak for Ukraine to domestic audiences.
The much-discussed Pentagon leaks are starting to look an awful lot like an information war op designed to exert control over Kyiv. The New York Times and Washington Post both continue to cite information from these leaks as if they are facts and not merely (alleged) mid-level military intelligence briefings.
These two outlets are rather notorious for working closely with most administrations - Trump’s calculated disdain for them is one of the major reasons they despise him so much - to create a channel for unnamed sources to spread illusions. Media outlets treat such sources’ claims as gospel truth, so access to insiders is deployed by every US administration to discipline journalists into behaving according to certain invisible rules.
Recently, pieces have started to come out of these organizations that portray Zelensky in a relatively harsh light just as he begins to press for more substantial military aid - allegations that he wanted to invade Russia and the like. It is clear that national security insiders are deeply afraid of being seen to lose control of Kyiv: this is more likely behind the reluctance to give Ukraine certain classes of weapons than a true fear of Putin escalating the fighting to the nuclear level.
For the record, conspiracies are rare in the real world because people are terrible at keeping secrets. And anyone with a basic understanding of statistics knows that coincidences are incredibly common: the trouble in most science is finding unique variables whose explanatory power isn’t diluted by correlations with other parts of the model.
But people do herd: groupthink is a very real phenomenon created by desire to be a valued member of whatever team a person feels they are on. Nobody generally wants to be the one person going against the will of the group, but this often means that important information or ideas are prematurely rejected because someone doesn’t think they will get a reasonable hearing.
The abject failure of a military Moscow has supposedly been carefully rebuilding for decades to be capable of taking on any threat, even all of NATO, is in large part a function of groupthink. This plague’s presence is often revealed when a grand complex plan is put in motion only for the planners to discover that critical details were left unaddressed.
Soldiers in Putin’s military, as was true going back to the Soviet and even Tsarist times, are totally subordinated to professional officers who protect their class privileges at any cost. The Soviets tried to wipe out the officer class once, but lacking a supporting cadre of long-serving professional soldiers who rose through the non-officer ranks this just didn’t work.
Officers in every military have a nasty tendency to form self-protecting cults that fail miserably at their job when sent to war. America’s military has seen this happen on numerous occasions, and given the rise of the military-industrial-media complex in the USA it is extremely likely that the country will be badly disappointed if and when it is ever truly tested.
In any case, it is important to keep in mind that Ukraine’s counteroffensive won’t be a single 2-3 week blitz - unless the level of abject incompetence Moscow’s forces have displayed this last week proves to be a harbinger of an epic collapse to come.
There will be multiple waves of attacks striking at different portions of the front line after periods of intensive bombardment of logistics and command nodes. To keep casualties to a minimum - on both sides - Ukraine needs to segment the enemy’s forces and defeat portions one by one. It won’t be possible to know which formation will go down first because Moscow does clearly have a reserve to commit that will at least slow Kyiv’s progress once committed.
Zelensky announcing that the counteroffensive needs to wait a few more weeks was a shrewd move: now no one can expect Ukraine to prove it is making gains while the final preparations are made.
To power through the later counteroffensive waves - not to mention re-equip all of Ukraine’s defenders with modern equipment, as has to happen eventually as it enters NATO and the EU - Kyiv will need at least as much gear as it has received already. Zelensky is touring Europe right now to secure the necessary commitments and press the case for receiving combat aircraft as soon as this can be made to happen.
While he works, Ukraine can spend the next few weeks launching ever-more comprehensive and intensive strikes on targets of opportunity. They might even pull something spectacular under the assumption that Moscow won’t expect anything like that while Zelensky is away.
At the very least, as I figured they would, Kyiv’s forces have gone on the attack near Bakhmut to help keep the last citadel free. So far all that has been confirmed are two successful pushes aiming at the Wagner pincers that have been struggling in vain to cut off the roads to Chasiv Yar through Khromove and Ivanske for weeks now. What is apparent is that a whole lot of orcs turned tail and ran in short order, allowing Ukraine to make progress with surprising speed, given the standard pace of movement in this area over the past six months.
This debacle triggered another public spat between Wagner’s leader and Putin’s army leaders, namely Shoigu and Gerasimov. Probably too much is read into this, as aware that foreign media gives a lot of attention to insider spats I’m sure they play up public divides. Yet there is something in the tenor of the latest round of infighting that seems to imply a major screwup at the front.
Wagner appears bent on playing the same role in Putin’s regime as the Waffen SS did in Hitler’s. The Nazis wanted their own loyal army, distrusting the old-school conservatives who dominated the traditional military establishment. At the expense of the professional force they pulled in psychopaths, ideologues, and whatever conscripts they could get their hands on.
Dictators do this because they need to avoid any rival concentration of power forming that could displace them. They encourage infighting among close subordinates to prevent anyone from becoming a threat. This, naturally, has knock-on effects on the broader military effort.
Wagner appears to have promised Putin last year that if it was given one section of the front and sufficient resource it would show up all the old school generals. Which I get, but it isn’t like Wagner is anything special. Taking Bakhmut is now a strategic imperative for Moscow because of how hard it has fought for it, which is a bad reason to fight a battle precisely because it’s a sunk costs trap where you lose either way.
Failure will have - is having - a clear knock on effect on morale across the rashist front lines. Most people don’t want to die for a lost cause, and when your rhetoric has it that your army is unbeatable, overt defeat starts to raise uncomfortable questions. Soldiers may be isolated from the wider world when in the field, but their survival instincts still kick in once the truth is in the wind: they generally know when their officers’ plans have failed.
It definitely doesn’t help when your vaunted military doesn’t bother to have tanks or armored vehicles backing up infantry assaults most of the time. A hundred thousand casualties in six months is a lot for even Moscow’s empire to take in a world where the sale of the pain can’t be hidden from the general public.
In Bakhmut several rashist units, whether Wagner or Moscow’s regulars is part of the spat their leaders are having, took a punch from Ukrainian units equipped with old T-64 tanks and antique M-113 troop carriers and simply folded. Ukraine claims at least two full companies out of the six or so in the targeted brigade were wiped out south of Bakhmut, the rest forced to retreat. To the north Wagner’s chief has been raging about losing important positions overlooking the city.
If these gains are held and ideally expanded, Ukraine’s defenders in Bakhmut’s citadel will gain some deserved relief. Depending on how badly Wagner and supporting forces are beaten down in the coming days, this or a supporting attack could possibly surround the ruins and trap thousands of russian soldiers inside. That would certainly make public experts like Michael Kofman and Rob Lee who insisted all last winter (and still do, though more quietly) that Bakhmut has no strategic value and Ukraine ought to withdraw look pretty darn foolish.
Yes, you smug academics, the casualty ratio in the city itself was probably no better than 2:1 in Ukraine’s favor, which is absolutely unsustainable in the long run. But to arbitrarily separate the fighting inside Bakhmut from what was going on in the surrounding areas is simple scientific malpractice.
One part of the front line is connected to all others. Moscow’s power must be destroyed wherever it chooses to fight, and once the decision was made to commit to a grind in Bakhmut Kyiv had little choice but to hold the line unless totally overwhelmed - so it conducted a slow, steady, fighting retreat.
Destroying Wagner cost Ukraine several thousand lives. And I would not have made the choice to stand in Bakhmut personally. But there was no way to avoid paying that awful butcher’s bill somewhere: in war, the other side gets to hit you back. Holding at Chasiv Yar instead of Bakhmut would have made little difference in the end.
Fortunately, along with the news of successes in Bakhmut has come repeated wins in the sky thanks to the belated delivery of two Patriot air defense systems, one from the USA and the other from Germany and the Netherlands, the latter clearly after some deserved revenge for the MH-17 shootdown back when this all began in 2014.
Virtually every drone and missile shot at Kyiv over the past few weeks has been taken down. Even a Kinzhal hypersonic missile has been confirmed downed, something the Patriot wasn’t even supposed to be officially capable of doing.
And over the weekend something extremely interesting happened in Bryansk, across the border from Ukraine. A full four, possibly even five, rashist aircraft were downed in the space of a few minutes.
For a while now Moscow has been deploying aircraft equipped with glide bombs to strike at Ukraine from safely behind the border. They apparently like to send a single Sukhoi-34 bomber backed by a Su-35 fighter with long range air-to-air and anti-radar missiles along with a couple helicopters, one for jamming Ukrainian radars and the other for search and rescue.
As one of these strike packages was flying towards Ukraine but still some 50km or so across the border it seems the electronic warfare helo got hit by a missile. Soon after the rest of the aircraft went down in flames.
Moscow first tried to play the thing off as an engine explosion, but social media posts spread despite the censors confirming four different burning aircraft in the same general area. None of the crew members are said to have survived despite the jets being equipped with ejection seats.
This points to a total bushwhack that none of the victims saw coming. But it also raises very interesting questions about what new military capabilities Ukraine might now have.
Over the past few days it has also been revealed that the UK has agreed to supply Ukraine with Storm Shadow cruise missiles, fulfilling a long-voiced request by Kyiv for long-range precision weapons. In truth this is even better news than Ukraine receiving ATACMS ballistic missiles would be given that Storm Shadows fly more like drones: low and relatively slow, allowing them to evade air defenses by flying down watercourses and roadways.
The advantage of ATACMS lies in a slightly longer range and the ability to be fired from the same launchers that shoot HIMARS rockets. Of course, as the Biden Administration required that the HIMARS launchers sent to Ukraine had their ATACMS capabilities stripped out, the latter is moot.
The Bryansk bushwhack was most likely accomplished by surface to air missile systems deployed very close to the border, not jets. But the news of Storm Shadow deliveries raises the fascinating question of what aircraft Ukraine will use to launch them, the weapons being designed to be used by modern combat jets.
Over the past six months there have been a number of rumors about older combat jet models largely retired over the past ten years being considered as candidates for Ukraine. So the theory goes, the focus on F-16s is meant to deflect attention from Ukraine being equipped with Mirage 2000 or Tornado jets from allies.
It is possible to retrofit older airframes with newer electronics to make them safe and serviceable warplanes. And because Soviet and NATO weapons tend to be incompatible without serious and expensive modifications, getting Ukraine jets that can launch Amraam air-to-air missiles and Storm Shadow cruise missiles might be best done by pulling airframes from storage.
France and the UAE specifically denied that Ukrainian pilots were being trained on Mirage 2000s last year, but who knows if that was the whole truth. The Mirage 2000 is roughly equivalent to F-16s dating to the 1990s and the Tornado is a long-range bomber that in some variants also carried air-to-air and anti-radar missiles.
Ukraine could have theoretically sent up a pair of fighters flying at low altitude, perhaps directed by the Patriot system operating near Kyiv or even covertly assisted by a NATO surveillance jet flying over Poland. When near the border they would fire off their missiles, at least one set to home in on the transmissions being sent out by the jamming helicopter.
To jam radars you typically broadcast junk transmissions at wavelengths that destructively interfere with your opponent’s radar waves or bombard the operator’s screen with junk returns. Either requires emitting signals that a missile can be programmed to look for.
Does Ukraine secretly have a squadron or two of refurbished Cold War jets deployed near Kyiv? One of the major issues with using NATO-standard aircraft is that they usually require well-prepared runways - ideal targets for enemy cruise and ballistic missiles. And even if runways can be repaired, hangars, control towers, fuel tanks, and other important infrastructure are harder to keep intact.
Unless, of course, your air base sits within one of the most heavily defended bits of airspace on the planet. Which Kyiv now is thanks to a multi-layer air defense battery with long-range Patriot, middle-range NASAMS, and short-range Avenger systems, plus roving drone hunters in pickup trucks with anti-aircraft guns and shoulder-fired SAMs.
Though any air defense system can be overwhelmed, you’d need a simultaneous strike with at least a couple dozen cruise missiles, a hundred drones, and half a dozen Kinzhals. Most would be wasted, but more importantly this amounts to a couple months of production.
Before wasting hundreds of missiles trying to knock out the lights and heating last winter, Putin could have hit Kyiv’s air defense system itself with multiple waves. Instead, Moscow tried to hit the Patriot system’s radar with a hypersonic missile.
Hypersonic weapons are both extremely dangerous and over-hyped (no pun intended). The major advantage of the best kinds is that they can maneuver until the last few seconds of their trajectory, making them extremely difficult to intercept.
The Kinzhal, however, is just an air-lanched derivative of the Iskander ballistic missile. It is fired by a converted MiG-31 interceptor already moving at twice the speed of sound at very high altitude. The main danger it poses is that it’s very hard to identify the target with enough lead time to score an intercept - a ground-based weapon has to loft to altitude before tipping over and accelerating to extreme speeds, giving defenders some lead time.
However, the flight of a MiG performing a Kinzhal run is reasonably predictable, and at high altitudes it isn’t hiding from anyone’s radar - frankly, a MiG-31 isn’t hiding from anything ever, it’s a behemoth of a fighter. The target in this case was obvious - the Patriot’s radar, which would reveal its position every time it switched on and would take longer to move than the Kinzhal would take to strike - if it got there.
Apparently several missiles were fired to score the intercept, and no doubt they were aided by the massive thermal profile of a projectile moving at many times the speed of sound through the lower atmosphere.
Regardless, that’s a confirmed kill - and one for the history books. The Patriot has come a long way since it was routinely failing to destroy Iraqi Scuds fired at Israel in 1991.
And now Kyiv is as secure as any place on the planet can be from aerial attack. The air defense bubble around Ukraine’s capitol will make it possible to deploy modern strike jets at several airfields, dispersing them to ensure they aren’t an easy target for a mass attack.
That being said, I consider the chances that the Bryansk shootdowns were done by jets to be fairly small. If they were, I suspect the culprits were MiG-29s recently donated by Poland and Slovakia.
It is reasonable to think that if any Soviet-era aircraft has been modified to handle NATO-standard weapons it would be these airframes. Their donation has been under consideration since Putin’s assault on Kyiv began, and many older jets were apparently dismantled and sent to Ukraine as spare parts for its existing fleet.
MiG-29s modified to handle Amraams and Storm Shadows are probably more likely, at this stage, than Ukraine receiving even old NATO jets. Ukraine’s Su-27 jets don’t get as much media coverage as their MiG-29s, likely in part because Moscow relies on updated versions of the Flanker for its own efforts.
Aside from situations where payload and range are primary considerations - the video of the bombing of Snake Island last year being a good example - MiG-29s likely operate closer to the front than the Flankers to avoid being mis-identified. Ukraine’s Flankers could be the ones carrying Storm Shadows, though, leaving the Migs to fire HARMs or the new decoys Ukraine is apparently using to help Storm Shadows evade hostile air defenses.
I hold that the most likely explanation for the events over Bryansk, however, is something simpler, though still directly related to the deployment of Patriots. Though the stocks of S-300 missiles are dwindling, the reduced pace of Putin’s bombardment of Ukraine’s cities has likely stretched the inventory. There are a few users of the S-300 abroad, like Greece, that could have been convinced to offer a resupply.
The S-300 is a lot like the Patriot, though more mobile and somewhat less effective. The air denial bubble around Kyiv created by the Patriot system should cover the city of Chernihiv. An S-300 battery emplaced just within its protective bubble can likely track and shoot targets flying at high altitude - which you do to maximize the range of glide bombs - well across the border if it is willing to risk one of its launchers.
Maybe Ukraine risked a Mig-29 flying close to launch a HARM or even an air-to-air missile set in home-on-jam mode, but I suspect that the electronic warfare helicopter was hit by an S-300 specifically modified to seek out its jamming signals. The video of the chopper shows it just flying along as if nothing unusual was happening - they had no warning.
Russian airborne radars might have missed an inbound Ukrainian flight at tree-top level, but an S-300 missile fired from a launcher positioned near the border would naturally offer less warning. Once the help was down, more S-300s could be cued on the unprotected jets. It seems likely that the pilots of the aircraft preparing their run towards the border had no warning either, possibly because Ukraine’s SAM operators altered their radar emissions in some way to avoid tripping their victims’ threat warning receivers - or maybe the jets didn’t have them switched on, thinking they were in safe airspace.
Groupthink is a heckuva drug.
Moscow has been selling the line that partisans with shoulder fired missiles are to blame, but this appears to be a naked effort to cover up for another brutally embarrassing failure. If a NATO weapon like an Amraam, HARM, or Patriot were used I expect Moscow’s propagandists would already be going into overdrive about being directly attacked. And as for an accidental shoot down - maybe one or two were, but not all.
The simplest explanation in warfare is usually the best: whether warned by radar or someone with inside knowledge of an impending air strike, Ukraine set up a perfect ambush and sent a powerful message. The same is true with the announcement of Storm Shadow missile deliveries - now Moscow has to disperse ammunition dumps and headquarters again, which will further impede its ability to defend the lands it has occupied.
Shaping operations can be expected to continue like this for up to a month. Ukraine is in the position of being able to force its opponent to anticipate attacks on multiple fronts, making it that much harder for Putin’s orcs to work out how to most efficiently defend themselves.
When things kick off in a big way, it is now quite likely that panic will set in at many points along the front line. The speed with which rashist gains in Bakhmut have been reversed with only the first application of substantial combat power bodes very poorly for the future of Moscow’s occupation.
The orcs know they’re in trouble - the longer they are allowed to stew, the greater the impact of the punch when it lands.