To say that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has not gone according to plan is
hardly a novelty at this point.
Two and a half months after Russian forces launched
a full-scale assault on their southwestern neighbor, they have little to show
for it. A six-week campaign to capture the capital Kyiv was abandoned in early
April, with heavy losses in both blood and treasure. A refocused effort on
eastern Ukraine has brought few gains at a high cost, as well as stunning
reverses, like the sinking of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet flagship. Even those at
the upper echelons have begun to openly recognize serious difficulties:
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a staunch Putin ally, admitted on
May 5 that the offensive was “not going” as expected.
اضافة اعلان
There are plenty of reasons to believe the situation
will soon become much worse for Russia. Over the next few weeks, it is very
plausible that the momentum could amazingly shift toward the Ukrainian side,
enabling the start of territorial reconquest that could see battered Russian
units pushed to their breaking point and even collapse.
Russian forces are nearly three weeks into their
Donbas offensive. Heralded as Moscow’s crowning war effort, the operation was
intended to smash Ukrainian forces in the east of the country, enveloping and
destroying a large portion of Kyiv’s army and opening the door to further
Russian conquests in Ukraine’s heartland. Russian forces massed around the north
and south of Ukrainian positions in Donbas, reinforced with both fresh units as
well as reconstituted ones withdrawn from northern Ukraine, and attempted to
punch through Ukrainian defenses in a series of mass assaults.
Yet the offensive itself has looked anything but
decisive. Russian units have moved forth ponderously. While armored formations
have been properly supported by infantry in many cases, unlike in the war’s
early weeks, this has translated into little success on the ground. Even in the
Izyum area, the railway town where Russia concentrated 22 of its 168 total
battalion tactical groups (the main Russian combat formation), progress has
been limited to perhaps 30Km of open farmland to the south. Over more
than two weeks, the entirety of Russia’s advance has seized just a handful of
strategically insignificant villages, while incurring massive casualties at the
hands of Ukrainian heavy weaponry.
And while Moscow might prefer to shift the
battlefield entirely to Donbas, Ukraine gets a say as well.
Over the past week, Ukrainian forces have made
significant gains on the outskirts of Kharkiv, the major northeastern city
where Russian troops had dug into defensive positions. Stripped of part of
their strength to bolster the Donbas campaign, the remaining Russian units
proved inadequate to hold ground, and by May 2 were pushed out of the village
of Stariy Saltiv, 40Km east of Kharkiv city and astride the Seversky
Donets river. Ukrainian reinforcements from Kyiv and elsewhere have turned what
began as an operation to relieve pressure on the city into a campaign that now
threatens the flank and supply lines of Russia’s operations at Izyum.
Transfers of heavy and advanced military equipment to Ukraine are continuing at a rapid pace, enhancing the lethality and scope of Kyiv’s capabilities almost daily.
The overstretch of Russian forces hinted at by the
Kharkiv campaign is only more dire when the situation is taken as a whole.
Russia committed three-quarters of its entire standing ground forces to the
initial invasion of Ukraine on February 24, engaging all of these units in the
country within two weeks. Once progress stunted, Moscow then began to scrape together
what more it could from its other units, drawing forces from as far away as
bases in Tajikistan, South Ossetia and the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad. There
are simply no more professional troops to draw upon while maintaining any
semblance of force along Russia’s vast borders.
All the while, Ukraine is experiencing the opposite.
Transfers of heavy and advanced military equipment to Ukraine are continuing at
a rapid pace, enhancing the lethality and scope of Kyiv’s capabilities almost
daily. The US has delivered nearly 90 state-of-the-art M777 howitzers to
Ukraine in the past three weeks, as well as training Ukrainian crews to use
them. Drones like the Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost, capable of striking
Russian crews at 20Km distance or more, have also been delivered in
their hundreds. Just last week, Poland transferred 230 of its communist-era
T-72 tanks to Ukraine.
Analysts say Kyiv now has more tanks on Ukrainian
soil than Moscow does. Many thousands of foreign volunteers, mostly experienced
military personnel, have also arrived to fight alongside Ukrainian forces. It
is a near-certainty that the Ukrainian military is better armed and more
capable now than it was on the day of Russia’s invasion — a remarkable fact
after 70 days of full-scale warfare.
Ukraine is
getting stronger, while Russia’s position only becomes weaker. There is no
quick or effective method for Moscow to reverse this. While some speculate that
May 9, when Russia celebrates its World War II victory over Nazi Germany, will
be used to declare war on Ukraine and full mobilization, such a process would
take months to generate manpower of dubious quality, to say nothing of the
political risks.
The Russian armed forces are being ground to dust
before the world’s eyes in eastern Ukraine, and there is little that could
conceivably alter this course, let alone provide Moscow with some sort of
further advance or victory. And with Moscow’s army suffering catastrophic
losses every week, a breaking point for Russian formations — followed by rout
and collapse — could be closer than we think.
The
writer is a security analyst currently in Kyiv, Ukraine. Usually based in
Tbilisi, Georgia, his work focuses on, among other things, politics, minorities
and violence in the Caucasus.
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