Ukraine's Summer Tsunami: The Second Wave
Where Ukraine's summer campaign stands after a month of intensive ground operations
This past week in Putin’s war on Ukraine saw a number of diplomatic chips laid down during the NATO summit while both sides escalated their attacks along the front line.
The bad news is that NATO continues to be so visibly afraid of Putin’s nuclear arsenal that the war might well drag on into 2024. The good is that emerging signs indicate Moscow’s defenses are starting to crack under the strain of Ukraine’s relentless pressure.
Sports often offers useful analogies for warfare because, deep down, both activities involve organizing humans into groups to accomplish abstract tasks on some landscape.
Which is a fancy way of saying that when you break down the physical movements and communications that any sports team or group of soldiers makes, there are more similarities than differences. If, of course, you ignore the fact that the latter face death when the other team scores a point.
War is not a sport: the two can just be understood using the same models. Actually participating is a whole different ball game, if you’ll forgive the pun, with only a fraction of people who experience real war wanting to have anything to do with it again once their time in the field is done.
Rope-a-dope is a tactic used in boxing to wear out an opponent by forcing them to attack in an unfavorable situation, energetically speaking. In a broad sense it applies to any scenario where one combatant gets their enemy to exhaust their resources at a faster rate. Ukraine reports inflicting at least five serious casualties for every one suffered over the past few weeks of fighting: that’s the rope-a-dope in action.
Some call this attrition warfare, but all warfare seeks to attrite - wear down - the enemy’s ability to fight. In ancient times wise armies fought by having ranks of soldiers overlap their shields to form a physical wall only an equally well disciplined and numerically superior force could hope to push off a chosen patch of dirt.
The team better able to organize and deploy its power typically wins a fight; the uncertainty of combat mainly revolves around who in fact really has the advantage. Who will wind up being the bigger dope is always the heart of the matter, and in the Ukraine War so far that has generally been Putin’s ruscists.
While they have adapted, their freedom to do so effectively has hard limits. The ruscist military happily sabotages its own adaptive capacity by relying on a semi-feudal system of command and control that lets officers act like petty kings in their proscribed domain - soldiers are inputs who cannot be granted autonomy without risking the whole system falling apart.
This doesn’t mean that the ruscist military isn’t extremely dangerous; it just isn’t very flexible in the short run. Adaptations that work in one place or field unit aren’t necessarily ported over to a different one with any speed; you can almost feel orc officers trying to follow textbooks when they plan operations to make sure that their superiors have no cause to accuse them of making mistakes when things invariably go sour.
You can see the impact of the managerial style of leadership common among the orcs in the thousands of drone videos online showing ruscists under fire - generally Ukrainian troops, even in the manipulated drone shots that Moscow releases, exhibit sound tactics. They avoid clustering, go to ground and call in artillery when hit, and retreat in the face of superior firepower taking their wounded with them wherever they are able.
More often than not their enemies in similar videos are all clumped together or break cover and try to run away in the middle of a bombardment - always a good way to get killed, that. When caught in forward positions without sufficient artillery support they are often wiped out by assault teams throwing grenades into dugouts or dropping shells from drones, no friendly tanks anywhere in sight.
Even compensating for the natural bias in each side’s editing the superior competence of the average Ukrainian soldier is visibly apparent. Ruscist troops are often competent in small groups; up to even the brigade level it appears that officers in many units are capable of actually leading their people, not just sending them to slaughter.
But there are limits to what the most capable mid-level officer can achieve in a broken military system. Putin’s is so riddled with corruption and infighting, as the Wagner revolt demonstrated to the entire world, that what potential it has is almost totally squandered.
The choice to defend well forward of the defensive lines constructed with such dedication is a perfect example of Moscow’s dysfunction. Politics, as Clausewitz famously observed, is warfare. The two are synonyms, the choice to use violence made by organizations that decide it serves their interests - or mistakenly believe bloodshed won’t rebound upon them like it usually does.
Putin’s power has been badly shaken. His desperate response to the Wagner revolt and past Ukrainian successes on the battlefield have revealed the extent to which Putin’s control over his regime and people are rooted in bluff. He sustains himself in the Kremlin merely by making life after him unthinkable thanks to the threat this poses to a great many established interests - inside Moscow’s empire and among its purported enemies.
To survive the epic failures of the past year and half Putin has chosen to pretend that everything is going according to plan. To sustain the illusion of untouchability he needs to avoid rebellion requires that Putin be unshaken by any development - even ones that genuinely should cause alarm.
Putin has embraced pure inertia as a strategy, recognizing that fear and time are his most potent remaining weapons. In a strange way his choice mirrors that of Biden, who similarly insists against all material evidence that NATO is stronger than ever, the USA remains eternally committed to Ukraine and all its other allies, and his administration has successfully led the free world in defeating Moscow’s aggression even as Ukraine’s future remains in doubt.
The tension between Kyiv’s need to reclaim all the territory that Moscow stole as a minimum condition for ending this war and Washington’s preference for an endless low-grade conflict has never been more palpable than it is now. American presidents make rhetorical statements in the hope that the media will accept them as true and stifle any effort to question their logic. This is one of the reasons the USA winds up in forever wars its leaders never quite lose but also can’t manage to win - normal democratic accountability is broken thanks to out of control partisanship.
The postwar order is indeed dead and gone: in systems terms, both Biden and Putin’s countries are clearly in the midst of an epic, decades-long collapse that will force a fundamental reordering of their internal affairs and relationships with the rest of the world - if they survive at all.
It is a classic mistake of leaders during this season of the adaptive cycle to try and freeze time or roll back the clock. The only way out is through, and the best anyone can hope for is to dampen the impacts and try to steer towards the least dangerous waters.
But hope for keeping the old order intact forever springs eternal. So the Biden Administration’s absolutely wretched National Security Advisor will try to shame a Ukrainian activist for daring to ask why the US keeps going slow with aid. Meanwhile, despite all military sense Putin’s generals are replicating their mistakes from this past winter and throwing ill-equipped troops into a meat grinder in the hope that Ukraine will run out of firepower.
Moscow’s strategy has been clear since the first images of knocked out Leopards and Bradleys hit the media: insist that Kyiv has lost no matter the evidence from the front. This, however, requires clinging to every scrap of dirt the orcs stole to maintain the fiction that Moscow is fighting to defend its own territory. It means that front line soldiers have to fight without proper artillery support and must keep throwing bodies into local counterattacks to slow Ukraine’s constant progress through the dense minefields.
What this has done is give Ukraine the ability to essentially play defense tactically while maintaining an offensive posture in an operational sense, letting units who can push forward to seize ground hold position and fight off ruscist counterattacks. At the same time, long-range artillery gets a chance to locate and pick off ruscist guns as well as their supply depots - command centers too if possible. You don’t usually get to play rope-a-dope when on the attack, thankfully Moscow has obliged.
Ukraine wants to generate as much of what Clausewitz called friction in the ruscist military system. This essentially means throwing as many monkey wrenches into the gears as possible ahead of more intense pressure somewhere on the ground.
Cluster munitions will be extremely useful for Ukraine going forward not only because they can help clear entrenched positions that would otherwise require soldiers risking life and limb, but because cluster strikes are wicked effective against enemy artillery. Most guns are not heavily armored even if mounted on a tracked vehicle and typically keep a supply of shells right next to their firing position - even a single submunition detonating too close can destroy it all and the crew along with it.
That’s why it made for such weird political theater this past week as the US progressive caucus came together with hard-right MAGA types to oppose Ukraine receiving American cluster munitions. It is brutally ironic that these two otherwise eternal foes can have in common a desire to give Putin a battlefield win, but efforts by pro-Moscow propagandists to recruit among the right and left are starting to bear fruit in a clear warning for Kyiv and its allies.
In a signal that he understood the implications of this move, Putin quickly capitalized on the insipid cluster bomb controversy to spread the lie that his troops haven’t been using them throughout this conflict, often in civilian areas. The ultra MAGA hard right’s desire to give Putin room to maneuver I understand, as many of their basic political aims align.
But the behavior of American progressives and much of the broader global left when it comes to backing Ukraine is deeply concerning, as it appears their vision of working class solidarity doesn’t extend to soldiers fighting on the front lines. Which is pretty sad, because if any country on this planet is demonstrating how to stand up to and break the power of an authoritarian regime, it’s Ukraine. And slowly but surely, this is exactly what’s happening.
Something NATO leaders have utterly refused to publicly accept is that admission to NATO, even if Kyiv invokes Article 5, doesn’t necessarily mean that the alliance goes all-in and starts bombing Moscow any more than one nuke going off somewhere automatically triggers global thermonuclear Armageddon. Part of the reason nobody declares war any more is that this has little true meaning: in the Second World War the UK and France all but abandoned their ally Poland after declaring war on Germany despite Warsaw fighting for longer and against dramatically worse odds once Stalin joined Hitler’s assault than France did the following spring.
Wars are always campaigns, a sequence of investments of power to achieve concrete aims. What matters most is the scale of the actions taken; these are acts of communication that function as the only real evidence any country has to go on when deciding what to do next in a dangerous world.
If NATO declared war on the Russian Federation tomorrow, but launched no military attacks, would its statement have any meaning? Doubtful - plenty of leaders in Moscow insist that they are already waging war with NATO, and given that NATO weapons are killing ruscist soldiers they have a point. Yet they haven’t bombed London or had a submarine sink a ship carrying Bradleys from the US to Europe, have they?
Similarly, by not listening to NATO countries adjacent to Putin’s empire who have proven willing to all but empty their arsenals in order to support Ukraine despite the risk to their people, NATO leaders send a powerful signal that Article 5 itself is quite likely a bluff. If the USA won’t risk any form of direct conflict over Ukraine, a country presently under genocidal assault, then why would Moscow ever believe it would defend Finland or Estonia?
I suspect that eastern European countries will move to make their own arrangements in the near future thanks to the signals coming out of Washington. East Asian democracies can and should do the same, because for all their differences Japan, South Korea, and Australia have more hope of effectively cooperating to deter China from attacking Taiwan than the US and definitely NATO.
Too many political leaders have apparently forgotten that victories never come without risk or cost. And once certain lines are crossed there can be no going back without consequences that will linger for a generation.
Thankfully Ukraine is hurting the ruscist invader more than it is being bloodied in return and is still on course to win. It will simply take longer and cost more lives than strictly required because, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the allies you have, not the ones you want.
Movement Along The Front
Though only a little bit of ground has changed hands this past week, the trend of the past month or so has continued apace: Ukraine’s first echelon continues a hard fight for every tree line and field while the orcs are forced to commit their dwindling reserves to hold the line.
In the north, between Kupiansk and Lyman, ruscist forces have been steadily ramping up attacks towards a key rail line leading back to Kharkiv. The fighting in the forests has been fierce (here’s a loud but not bloody clip on Youtube), with Ukraine slowly giving ground as its artillery savages orc forces trying to advance.
New reports have it that Moscow is concentrating 100,000 soldiers in the area, though how well trained they are is unknown. My evaluation remains that Putin is trying to build up some kind of super-loyal Republican Guard style force comprised of people willing to sign contracts and using conscripts as cannon fodder - whether these formations are committed and fight any better is unknown. With any luck, I’m wrong and they don’t exist.
Ukraine has a lot of natural defenses on its side in this area, so I doubt that Moscow will make much progress. This looks like a classic spoiling attack, perhaps meant to keep Ukrainian brigades massed around Sloviansk from moving south towards Bakhmut.
Bakhmut has naturally been hot too, with Ukraine’s steady push down the slopes to the southeast threatening ruscist control of the city’s southern flank. Fighting has also continued to the north, where ruscist counterattacks have made progress slow going, but an effort to encircle Bakhmut and trap thousands of ruscist troops there appears to be well underway. A few pushes towards Soledar from the north could potentially meet with the thrust south of the ruined city, turning it into a miniature Stalingrad.
Further south each side is trading attacks along the front lines from Toresk to Marinka, with the town of Avdiivka still nearly encircled but holding. The built up areas around Donetsk City will likely be too difficult for Ukraine to take head-on for some time to come, but surrounding it will hopefully become a possibility by late this summer.
Along the long southern front opposite the Azov Coast fighting has been underway nonstop even if the pace of Ukrainian advances has slowed. This was always bound to be a difficult area to make progress because it was no surprise that Ukraine needed to mount an effective counteroffensive in this area.
A few reports that came out this past week offer a sense of how badly the orcs are hurting in the month since intensive ground operations began. The New York Times claims that Ukrainian units committed to fighting in this area lost up to 20% of their equipment in the first two weeks and 10% in the second after shifting tactics to compensate for the orcs’ choice to defend forward at this intensity.
Some (mostly American) pundits are spinning this to claim that Ukrainian troops aren’t sufficiently well trained, but the hard reality of modern warfare is that these numbers are absolutely normal. Losing 1% of your equipment every day you are engaged in combat operations is pretty much average, going down to 0.5% if you go slow or have serious advantages and jumping to the 2% range on bad days.
Military formations tend to be able to fight normally up until they have lost around 20-30% of their gear. That doesn’t mean it is all totally destroyed and the crews lost, but it does represent a loss of immediate combat power and the ability to perform complex actions.
This is a big part of why Putin’s orcs were forced to withdraw from northern Ukraine less than six weeks after the invasion in February, 2022. Not only was the muddy season approaching while tens of thousands of troops were bogged down with their supply lines under constant assault, but after a month of fighting well beyond the intensity they were trained for Moscow’s troops could hardly even protect themselves much less seize Kyiv.
Ukraine has only committed a fifth or so of the brigades it has been preparing for the summer campaign. So while it is absolutely true that those on the front lines have slowly been worn down and will likely need to be pulled back soon, they were only ever the first wave of the broader campaign.
Now, this isn’t to minimize the real human losses these figures imply. Even in the best case scenario a brigade with 4,000 personnel will suffer around 1,000 casualties before it is no longer combat-capable. Some Ukrainian units have taken a lot more damage without being forced to retreat, but pushing any team too far has serious and often fatal consequences.
Of those 1,000 casualties at least half will probably recover and return to their units in a few months because shrapnel from shells causes something like 80% of all injuries but are often relatively minor. But if only 10% of the casualty toll is fatalities - that’s unfortunately an optimistic estimation - that’s a hundred people gone forever. For every one lost another is permanently injured and another two or three taken out of action for months or even years while they recover.
This horrific butcher’s bill is probably why there was a rather public spat within the 47th brigade, the force leading the attacks south of Mala Tokmachka that has lost about a third of its heavy gear trying to pierce orc minefields, that led to the replacement of a senior sergeant who had become a bit of a character on social media. He alleged that command problems were making it impossible to lead and requested to be demoted; this appears to have been granted.
While it probably made most military professionals cringe, this sort of incident is inevitable in the age of social media and can serve as a useful learning opportunity - the only mistake is to overreact. The people involved have lost friends and colleagues; emotions are bound to be running high and some will be looking for something to blame other than the random chance that rules so much of warfare.
I do suspect that there were serious mistakes made that further training might have rectified - the fact that Ukrainian troops receive training in NATO countries does not make them superior to the ruscists. A huge amount of learning in this war has to be done on the battlefield because everyone is experimenting with new combinations of technology and tactics all the time.
Ukrainian soldiers at all levels are now the most experienced in the world; no one else has seen and done what they have. There is only so much NATO trainers can do aside from teaching basic universal skills and fostering the ability to perceive opportunities and seize the initiative without waiting for orders.
That is almost certainly what the other twenty or so brigades not yet committed to the front have been doing: intensive training informed by the lessons learned so far. Modern gear is not magic, it just keeps soldiers alive much more frequently than Soviet kit and most of even NATO’s stuff has never been really battle-tested.
And it is worth comparing the discontent in the 47th brigade to what is happening on the other side of the lines. Several mid-level ruscist officers have been removed from their positions in recent days, one resigning by posting public accusations against their senior officer claiming they are misrepresenting the situation at the front.
By most accounts the orcs are being slaughtered by artillery all across the front. Drone footage of ruscist guns being annihilated by HIMARS shots well behind the front is coming out every day, short-range one-way drones are smashing exposed tanks and trucks. And tellingly it is the officers who know the truth and try to report it up the chain of command who are being removed, not Putin’s buddies Shagrat/Shoigu and Gorbag/Gerasimov.
Ruscist soldiers are being sent to die in droves simply because Putin cannot tolerate any more defeats. His last hope is to outlast his enemies, and it is too bad that NATO is determined to give him every reason to believe this will prove possible in the end.
If Ukraine is inflicting five times as many serious casualties as it is taking, and the 47th is an average example, that implies that it has wiped out a bigger formation than itself in a month of fighting - 5,000 orcs, probably 20% fatalities given the poor medical care they seem to receive on the whole. Kyiv recently estimated that there were over 350,000 enemy soldiers fighting on the occupied territories, about 300 for each kilometer of front.
I’d say that about six Ukrainian brigades have been making concerted pushes this past month or so. If the 47th’s experience is average, that means around 10% of the entire ruscist army in Ukraine as of June is now gone.
See why slow progress isn’t necessarily bad progress? To plug whatever holes in the line Ukraine’s brigades have threatened to tear, Putin’s generals had to commit reserve troops. How many they have at this point remains an open question, but the outcry from some of their more respected field officers implies that strain is mounting faster than among Ukraine’s forces.
Now evidence indicates that Ukraine is about to unleash its next echelon: generals are being killed far behind the front lines by Storm Shadow strikes. These excellent weapons are proving low-altitude penetration against ruscist air defenses to be more doable than previously thought, and ammunition dumps are going up all over the ruscist logistics network. Even the Kerch Strait Bridge was struck again, as was Sevastopol: drones appear to have been used in both of these attacks.
It is rather amusing watching videos of tracers ripping over the port of Sevastopol as ruscist gunners try to knock out small, high-speed drones skimming over the water. The media keeps acting as if remote controlled vehicles are something new, but in reality the basic technology has been around since the Second World War - it’s the ability to control them at long range that has changed.
Germany developed guided rocket towards the end of the war, but fewer know that before it even began Japan deployed a vicious long-range torpedo nicknamed the Long Lance that savaged unsuspecting Allied vessels from beyond the horizon. Ukraine, proving itself a thousand times more clever than virtually every naval planner in the English-speaking world since Nimitz’ day, has worked out how to effectively control these drones despite enemy jamming and use them to damage ships, which generally don’t tolerate explosions near their hull too well.
Until improved electronic warfare and hard-kill systems are deployed, these kinds of weapons will represent a constant danger for old-style military formations.
Moscow’s essential problem, however, remains poor training and coordination among front-line ground troops that translates into unsustainable casualty rates, poor learning, and general ineptitude at the operational level. Evidence of ruscist soldiers becoming so traumatized that they don’t even take cover when shelled is growing: this sort of thing can and will turn into a broader collapse of organized fighting spirit under sufficient pressure.
Slowly but surely Ukraine’s commanders are tightening the screws: if only they had all the mine clearing equipment, long-range missiles, and fighter jets allies of Ukraine have been telling anyone who would listen were vital to deliver as swiftly as possible. Meanwhile, the US is busy insisting that it isn’t holding up F-16 pilot training when literally every other country in the jet coalition is saying that they’re waiting on Washington.
Despite all its members’ claims, it is blatantly obvious that the Biden Administration’s main objective is to freeze the fighting in Ukraine ahead of the upcoming US elections, which polls do not show going well for the incumbent. Excuses for not fully arming Ukraine that rely on maintaining NATO readiness or deterring China from invading Taiwan are just rhetoric intended to convince allied media to begin setting the stage for a ceasefire that Biden will insist marks total victory for democracy.
In world politics the signals that players send are essential to understand. In classic international relations even democratic countries are expected to lie to shape public opinion, but how they lie matters - their rhetoric binds them.
Conclusion
Lurking just under the surface of the war in Ukraine is a deeper conflict over global power as the postwar order collapses and something new is born from the ashes. How the average person thinks about certain issues is an invisible battlefield where the contours of the future are shaped.
Lucky for NATO, Ukraine is doing an incredible job of breaking the ruscist bear. Unfortunately for Ukraine, only having a fraction of the mine-clearing equipment requested, still no modern fighter jets or ships, and insufficient air defenses means that progress on the ground must be deliberate and people have to die who didn’t need to.
The campaign is moving forward, though, and sooner or later the ruscist lines will crack. At that point the game is on: Putin’s last bluff will be called and the rising clamor among hardliners within his empire seeking nuclear escalation will be very difficult to ignore.
The logic of nuclear signaling is why the best assumption to make is that Putin will use a nuclear weapon before this war is over, likely after serious damage to the Enerhodar nuclear power plant.
The Biden Administration has done a marvelous job of signaling to Putin and any other leader with a mind towards attacking a neighbor that nuclear weapons are so terrifying that the mighty USA will absolutely bend over backwards to prevent their use. You can expect that card to be played over and over again going forward.
The abortive Wagner revolt appears to have sent the Biden Administration into a panic. Apparently a Wagner group entered one of a small number of storage depots for nuclear weapons and though they did not come near accessing any, the US intelligence community became rather “agitated,” the report said.
Almost immediately after is when news dropped that there are back channel negotiations underway between prominent US international relations scholars and diplomats from Moscow. Then came the NATO summit where Zelensky experienced substantial diplomatic heat after telling the truth about why Ukraine has not been given a firm timeline for accession to the alliance.
Considering how little the progressive wing of his party have pressured Biden on anything of substance so far, their defection when it comes to cluster bombs is likely another signal. His national security team acts as if they’re following an international relations textbook written twenty years ago, when I was earning a major in the subject at Berkeley, to the letter.
To a fault is more like it, because a dirty little secret of International Relations is that it doesn’t yet truly rise to the level of a science - there are multiple competing theories about how the international system works that are all famously impossible to reconcile. A true systems approach has, to my knowledge, never been attempted, mainly because the field has calcified to keep a few scholar-clubs in business at the expense of real scientific innovation.
And so stale debates over the virtues of realism and idealism continue, the participants refusing to accept that they are flat-out wrong on most matters of importance. The nature of war and the state is one; to accept the truth of either undermines the moral high ground so essential to the self-conception of elites in the so-called “Western world.”
Which, despite being a fiction, is no less powerful for that so long as enough powerful people believe otherwise.
The entire approach to international relations embraced by the Biden Administration has been as bitter a failure as Trump’s, and equally damaging to the alliance of democracies it claims to lead. One approach seeks to badger and insult allies while doing deals with authoritarian regimes abroad; the latter is gentler - until you upset this thin-skinned White House - but also deals with brutal dictatorships while pretending otherwise.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is giving a masterclass in making due with infinitely fewer resources than it deserves. It’s nice to see that there are still folks in this world who can get things done.
I suspect that the next couple weeks in Ukraine will see the orc lines begin to crack in one or more places. The distrust rippling through the ruscist ranks is only growing stronger: they can’t go on like this forever.
That’s most military campaigns throughout history if you look closely. First, they go slow. Then, in an instant, everything changes.
Fingers crossed that’s how it goes once again.