Ukraine - Day 257
Picking up on where the last essay's historical theme left off, the Battle of Kursk, we can examine how some of the tertiary events of that battle can indirectly inform us of what's happening today.
And what is happening recently in the Russo-Ukraine war? Not much movement in the front lines because of the Rasputitsa. Soldiers are complaining of trudging through mud up to their knees (though it's not like that everywhere). Offensive operations have largely halted since the vehicles can't travel overland. At least it's stopped most Ukrainian offensive ops.
Not the Russian ones. They're sending in their newly mobilized troops to the front in large numbers and they're getting killed in large numbers. Although I'm 100% behind Ukraine in this conflict, it's still dismaying to watch drone videos on social media and see the utter waste of life being thrust upon humanity by the Kremlin. Some of these units are sent to defend open fields with no tents, no sleeping bags, no food, no water, and most importantly and appallingly, no shovels. So they can't dig themselves trenches or foxholes. The drones hover far above them and they're eating grass, lying on the ground in all sorts of weird positions, trying to protect themselves from mortar shelling and drone grenade drops. In one drone vid, you can see a lot of them are already dead. When one of the live ones moves, the drone moves over him and drops another grenade. There's a puff of smoke and the dude doesn't move anymore. Another dude moves, same thing. There's no sound and the drone is far away, hundreds of feet in the air. So it's almost like a video game, but it's not. If the guys on the ground aren't getting killed instantly, they're dying painful deaths. War is always painful, killing the enemy necessarily involves mutilating them physically.
The mobilized troops aren't always in a hopeless defensive position. Most of the casualties are happening when they're sent on no-hope-of-success offensives. The Russians have set up conditions just like the penal battalions in WW2, but maybe worse, because now they have 2 lines of friendly units to kill the penal battalion instead of one. The first line is supposed to attack, the 2nd trench line is set up to kill the first line if they retreat. The 3rd trench line is set up to kill both the 1st and 2nd trench lines if they retreat. They're just sending troops on the same attack, day after day.
There's competition in Russian military forces for political power. There's the regular Defense Ministry forces (which are plagued by corruption and mostly incompetent) and there's Prighozin's Wagner Group mercenaries. The mercenaries are more motivated, but their tactics aren't any better. They've been taking in the convict (from prisons) mobilized troops and sending them on attacks everyday on Bakhmut (eastern Donbas front) for months. The speculation is Wagner is doing this for political reasons rather than military. They want to be able to say they're advancing while the Defense Ministry's troops are retreating on all other fronts. The Defense Ministry, in turn, is sending the newly mobilized units to attack piecemeal, before they've been able to build up enough forces to achieve any sort of operational success. The result of these politcal plays is: military failure and tons of newly mobilized, untrained, dead Russian soldiers.
Prighozin is jockeying for power in the post Putin world. The players in the Russian Game of Thrones are Prighozin, Sergei Shoigu (Defense Ministry), Valery Gerasimov (Defense Ministry), Ramzan Kadyrov (private Chechen army), and Viktor Zolotov (Rosgvardia). Maybe Alexander Bortnikov (FSB) should be in there, but I discount the intelligence service because they don't have the firepower of the other players. In Russia, it's firepower that matters.
History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. The attacks by the newly mobilized soldiers are so reminiscent of the penal battalion attacks in the Rzhev-Viazma salient northwest of Moscow 80 years ago where over 2 million Soviet soldiers perished. At Rzhev, Stalin sent in the penal battalions as soon as they arrived on the front and, just like today's Russia, before they had built up enough forces to achieve operational success. The bodies piled up in no man's land to the extent that Soviet soldiers were attacking over the bodies of their dead comrades killed in the days, weeks and months before. It went on for 15 months and despite having enormous fortifications, the Germans were rattled enough that they conducted a successful orderly withdrawal (very, very hard to achieve, hard to get soldiers to not rout) out of the salient so they could shorten their line. A few months later, the Battle of Kursk (referenced in the last essay) happened, culminating in the aforementioned Battle of Prokhorovka. It was the largest tank battle in history and the Soviets took huge losses, they lost 400 tanks on July 12, 1943. The commander of the Soviet armored force at Prokhorovka was Pavel Rotmistrov. To Stalin it looked like the Soviets were defeated as the Germans held the battlefield, but sitting in the Kremlin, Stalin had no idea how heroically the Fifth Guards Tank Army had performed (some of the T34s actually rammed the superior German Tigers at high speed, killing both tanks) and how the German offensive power was irretrievably broken. Stalin ordered Rotmistrov be arrested and was planning on having him executed but chief of staff Aleksandr Vasilevsky talked him out of it.
The next major engagement on the Eastern Front was Operation Bagration the next summer. The Soviets initially planned for a single breakthrough but General Konstantin Rokossovsky argued strenuously for a double pincer attack. The other Soviet officers would sit, stunned, as Rokossovsky arged against Stalin. Nobody argued against Stalin and lived. Rokossovsky had been caught up in the officer purges before the war started and when the Soviets realized they needed military men who actually understood what they were doing, they called Rokossovky out of prison. He had been tortured, his fingernails were missing, his fingers were broken as well as some of his ribs. He later told his daughter he always kept a gun because if they ever came to arrest him again, he was going to off himself.
After Stalin had asked Rokossovsky to sleep on it three times and Rokossovsky always came back with, "two break-throughs, comrade Stalin, two break-throughs", Stalin finally relented. Rokossovsky got his way with the understanding that if his plan failed, he was going to be on the receiving end of the firing squad.
The offensive was an overwhelming success, it went far better than anyone could have hoped. Hitler gave the ridiculous order for the defenders to stand fast and the German Army Group Center was annihilated as they were repeatedly surrounded and liquidated. Again, logistics. If your logistics get cut off and you run out of ammunition, you, in the words of a modern youtube pundit, " are no longer a soldier, you are a homeless person."
How do the stories of Rotmistrov and Rokossovsky apply to this war? Putin has been rehabilitating Stalin in Russian education and Russian public discourse. He's made a modern version of the penal battalion. He doesn't have Stalin's NKVD, but he has something new, the Rosgvardia, a 340,000 strong internal police force newly formed under Putin's watch.
There has been so much talk of how Putin needs an off-ramp, otherwise, if he loses this war, he's finished.
I don't believe that to be true.
Stalin was going to execute both Rotmistrov and Rokossovsky (if Bagration went south) because the Soviet Union was truly in an existential conflict in WW2. Stalin, and everyone in the Soviet Union, needed performance out of their military, otherwise they were going to be exterminated. 6 million Jews died in the concentration camps, but so did 6 million Slavs.
Putin, who strives to emulate Stalin and any number of czars before him, does not demand performance because *this is not an existential war for Putin*. If it were, he'd have already shot both Shoigu and Gerasimov due to terrible performance at least 6 months ago. Instead of doing that, he's letting a Defense Ministry/Wagner Group competition play out. They're not 100% trying to win the war, they're 50% trying to win the war and 50% jockeying for power. It's a hedge on Putin's part so that if things really go south, he can blame one of them publicly and that'll be it, the defeat won't have been his fault. Putin's play is to flood Europe with Ukrainian refugees, try to freeze Europe in winter and hope that Western military aid to Ukraine ceases.
It's not going to work. Western aid will continue no matter how cold Europe gets.
The other reason I don't believe Putin needs an off ramp is there is no mechanism to displace him. The Rosgvardia (again, 340,000 strong), is run by Putin's former bodyguard, Victor Zolotov. Apparently Zolotov is a meathead, his only redeeming value to Putin is he displays absolute loyalty. And that is what Putin values above all else, it's why his military sucks, it's why his intelligence has sucked, it's why his decision making has sucked and it's also why he will stay in power. The Rosgvardia is a modern day Praetorian Guard. It answers to no one else and no other entity can challenge it, not even Wagner. Wagner doesn't have the numbers.
So: don't worry about nukes. Don't worry about an off ramp. Make no mistake though, after this war ends, it's not going to be like before. We're going to be in a new version of the Cold War. It'll be Cold War Lite, because today's Russia isn't the geopolitical behemoth that the post WW2 Soviet Union was.
As for the map I posted, this is a map I lifted from DefMon3 on twitter. It shows the rail lines in green. I lifted it because I was unable to find another map which so vividly illustrates the rail supply networks relative to the front lines. I added the blue arrows, the blue X and the two straight red lines, the rest of it is DefMon3's work.
UAF has been in OPSEC mode for weeks now. They're preparing something while waiting for the Rasputitsa to subside and the winter campaigning season to arrive. The ground will harden and the offensive will begin.
To me, it makes no sense that they attack Kherson and the fortified lines there. The straight red lines to the south of the river are new fortifications manned by veterans who have been withdrawn from the west/north side of the river. Mobilized troops are in the other side and it's obvious what's going on. The Russians have their artillery on the newly fortified side of the river where they can be supplied and when the Ukrainians attack they're going to shell the hell out of the entire battlefield. That's why they have the newly mobilized soldiers there instead of the veterans. Russia doesn't care if those dudes die.
It'll be sort of like when Ramsay Bolton has his archers send volleys of arrows into the melee at the Battle of the Bastards, killing both the enemy fighters as well as his own. Ramsay didn't care, neither does Vlad.
Now, look at the green lines, the rail supply upon which the Russian military is so dependent. Why would they attack into the hellhole that will be Kherson when they could saw off the entire southern half of the Russian forces by attacking where those blue arrows are (the Zaphorizhia front)? If they cut off that east/west rail line and hit the Kerch Bridge, then the entire southern front collapses. Russia does not have the naval logistics to supply via Sea of Azov. All those soldiers, when they run out of ammo, will be homeless people in winter.
That would be the smart thing to do. I have zero information as to whether or not Ukraine will do that, or if the Russians are too strong in defense there and Ukraine will have to attack somewhere else. I do know that Ukraine has always done the smart thing in this war. That's part of what's allowed them to inexorably turn the tide. They have the will. They have ever increasing amounts of Western allied weapons. And they are always smarter. They are as smart as the Russian MOD is dumb.
My predictions are just speculation. As always, my information is incomplete and my conclusions could be completely wrong.
This is a stream of consciousness essay (not edited) so please excuse any grammatical errors.
