Russian Offensives Status Report

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Missile and Drone Attacks

There has been considerable escalation over the past couple of weeks by both Ukraine and Russia in their missile, drone and bombing attacks. Ukraine was hitting Russian oil refineries at the beginning of this round, but it appears that Washington was unhappy with the consequences that this might have for international oil prices, although some commentators expressed skepticism that Ukrainian hits would make much difference to prices given that the bulk of Russian oil exports are for crude rather than refined oil product.

In any case, for the time being at least, these kinds of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries appears to have stopped. However Ukraine has continued to subject Belgorod City and Grayveron to heavy drone attacks (principally) as well as some missile attacks. While Russia may claim to shoot down 95% of these. it is clear that many missiles are hitting targets, usually civilian.

This has prompted the evacuation of some 19,000 children so far; it appears to have significantly degraded the quality of life, work and leisure in Belgorod. There is a possibility of significant public anger over Belgorod’s vulnerability and the level of support that local and Federal authorities are providing to help the population cope with what for the Russians is a new and dangerous phase of the war. It is true, on the other hand, that the citizens of Donetsk City have had to put up with this and for a very long time, and that so far as we know there has been no public outcry against Russian authorities since Moscow formally integrated the Donetsk People’s Republic into the Russian Federation in 2022.

In Ukraine, which has suffered far more extensive shelling for much longer than Belgorod. there has been little visible civilian unrest against the authorities, despite the declining popularity of Zelenskiy and weak level of willingness on the part of young people to fight. Hence the constant stream of stories about civilian men being press-ganged into service, and the inability of the RADA to pass a new mobilization law. In Russia, by contrast, there has been a stready flow of volunteers to sign up as contracted soldiers, to a total of around 240,000 at the close of 2023 and presumably continuing to rise. If anything,

The challenges to Russia of maintaining close observation over and protection of the border appear to have contributed to volunteer recruitment.

Russian shelling, drones and guided missiles over the past week or so have been extensive and appear primarily to have targeted energy facilities such as major centers of population, notably Kharkiv and Odessa which have experienced widespread energy disruptions. As of yesterday Kharkiv was largely in darkness. It was restored later but the power being sent to eastern Ukraine is being sent from western Ukraine putting more strain on the entire energy system.

A major missile and drone offensive was launched Friday night, usingc kinzhal hyposonic missiles and sea-launched missiles which could include zircon hypersonic or kaliber supersonic missiles, KH101 cruise missiles with a maximum range of around 5,000 kilometers (which can be made more deadly and accurate with the sacrifice of some of this range) Geran 2 drones against power, air defense facilities and energy (power production stations and distribution networks) targets all of which, according to the Russian MoD, were engaged. With declining Ukrainian air defense capability Russia is using fewer decoys and attaching more data receivers to missiles that enhance their accuracy.

Russia likely uses these power disruptions in order to interrupt Ukrainian troop movements, particularly electric trains, and to better understand how Ukraine’s air defense systems are working and identify its weak points.

Upcoming Offensive

Recent advice by the government of Kazakhstan to Kazakhs resident in Kharkiv and Odessa that these cities are threatened by a high level of instability and that Kazakhs should evacuate, along with a statement by Hungarian leader Orban that there should be a buffer zone along the Russian border with Ukraine (something to which the Putin administration is already committed), together with major concentrations of both Russian and Ukrainian forces in these northlands, all suggest that there could be major new activity here very soon, especially once the muddy ground begins to harden, as it will by mid-April.

On the other hand, it remains the case that the most intense combat and the largest numbers of casualties are still occurring in the Avdievka-to-Bakhmut area, so that it could be here that Russia may be most tempted to punch a hole through rather feeble and recently constructed Ukrainian fortifications, in order to facilitate a Russian rush for the Dnieper river (which is where many of the power stations recently hit by Russian missiles are to be found).

Crocus Concert Hall

We can soon expect to hear more from Russia’s FSB’s investigation of the Crocus Concert Hall attacks. Information already released indicates that the terrorists were paid in Crypto currencies by sources said to be “Ukrainian nationalists.” It appears that on the day, March 7, of the US public warning of a potential attack in Moscow, the FSB disbanded an ISIS cell in Moscow, which together with their stepping up of security at the March 9th concert on International Women’s Day, which passed off without incident, and given FSB doubts about US intentions behind its warning might understandably have led the FSB to drop its guard by the time of the actual attack on March 22nd.

Lessons of War

What lessons can we learn from this proxy war about war itself in these times? Some to be going on with:

(1) New technologies are transforming war: satellite and other aerial surveillance; drones and missiles, many of them guided and some of them guidable in flight, and electronic jamming; remote mine-layers and mine-destroyers.

Missiles such as zircons, kinzhals, that can travel at hyposonic speed and carry nuclear warheads, greatly escalate the potential damage of war. Some are launched from ships, some from submarines, some from the air, some from land. The extensiveness of surveillance instills caution, fear and confusion and is a major reason why the war proceeds so slowly;

(2) a war of attrition radically impacts decisions about when to advance, when to hold, and when to flee, by reducing the relative importance of territory in favor of the diminution of an opponent’s men and machines; wars of attrition invite different conceptions of time and value and invite attention to relative production capability of different parties and their allies.

The logic of attrition is such that it is not always to the interest of one side that it’s opponent considers itself defeated or withdraws; time after time we see Russian forces delay final blows in order to prolong battles.

(3) war is generally about much more than offensives and defense; a successful advance may require many offenses, many defeats, great resilience, great subtly. Judgments about progress must encompass long periods of time and include assessment of the likelihood of successful counterattacks; frequently apparent reverses are intended for the purposes of forcing the opponent to disclose their positions, or to disclose their air defense locations, so that they can be attacked in a future offensive;

(4) A significant part of battlefield tactics has to do with the hope of surrounding an opponent’s forces, sometimes leaving exits open in order to encourage an opponent’s flight; conversely armed forces are motivated to avoid being caught in such cauldrons;

(5) Wars have to be understood both in terms of the formal pretexts for war and the objectives which these seem to presuppose, and in terms of the meta-narratives for war, that structure the thinking of major sponsors and financiers of wars behind the formal hierarchies of military and political decision making.

(6) The growing extension of war through both formal alliances and through supply chains, coupled with development of ever longer-range weaponry ensures the comprehensiveness m and immediacy of unstoppable conflagration.

(7) Integration, harmonization and coordination of units and weapons systems, in which all parties have been trained and have had experience o is vital to battlefield success. In this respect NATO and Ukraine are at a disadvantage.

(8) The important targets of war are often not the forces of the opposing side, but the power infrastructures and supply routes on which these depend, and, through propaganda campaigns, the morale and understanding of politicians and civilian populations of the contending parties.

(I shall come back to this topic, leaving it a very rudimentary first draft stage for now)

Battlefields

In continuation of trends established weeks ago, it looks like Russia is making further progress in the Marinka area on Novomykhailivka, Pervomaiske (which Ukraine has evacuated), and Krasnohorivka, and, in the Bakhmut area, Chasiv Yar, Ivanivke and Klishchiivka and, further northwards to Lyman, Siversk and Terny. The Tonenka-Orlivka-Berydchi line west of Avdievka has been broken, giving greater Russian fire purchase on Berdychi and Semyonika where two of Ukraine’s best brigades have been holding. The overall narrative, slowly evolving, is the fall of a few large and many small settlements west of the original north-south combat line, with Russia pushing Ukrainian forces further West, giving Ukraine insufficient time to build sufficiently robust new fortifications but also raising the question as to what extent Russia is prepared to undertake advances on the few larger population centeres between their current positions and the Dnieper. Russian control over the energy system is making this more likely but hardly a done deal, nor a quick deal, even if it will be a faster deal with the end of the winter. Zelenskiy meanwhile is talking again (to David Ignatius of the Washington Post) about the need for more shells. He says Russia is firing 8,000 a day as against Ukraine’s 2,000. The international arms market is raising the price of shells beyond the ability of the Czech Republic capacity to pay on Ukraine’s behalf, as admitted recently by Estonia’s defense minister. Yahoo news reported yesterday that “the Czech-led initiative to secure critically-needed artillery shells for Ukraine’s armed forces still lacks the funds needed to purchase them, Estonia’s Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said on March 29. Czech President Petr Pavel said in February that Czechia had identified 500,000 155 mm shells and 300,000 122 mm shells outside of Europe that could be bought and sent to Ukraine after the necessary funds were allocated.”

Zelenskiy also talks about creating a shorter combat line so as better to be able to adjust to funding shortages. This is something on which surely Russia would have some say. Zelenskiy seems to believe that Ukraine could fall back in small steps until such time as it is ready to launch a new counteroffensive, even with a dilapidated air defense infrastructure and Zelenkiy seems to believe that Ukraine’s pin-prick attacks on Russia are comparable to Russia’s missile campaigns each day against Ukraine.

Zelenskiy’s rhetoric is in part political pressure on Washington to release the $60 billion aid package that has been help up by the Republican House leader Mike Johnson. There are indications that Johnson may relent when Congress reconvenes after Easter, though there will be a significant political cost for the Republican party in public support, given a context of growing doubt about the wisdom of the US involvements in Ukraine and realization of the vast scale of the crisis of uncontrolled immigration via the southern border of the US.

Why a further $60 billion will make much difference after the expenditure of hundreds of billions so far has produced only failure. Zelenskiy appears to put great store on Ukraine’s successful hits on a cluster of Russian ships in the Black Sea. He pays in sufficient attention to the number of its missiles that are shot down, to the continuing viability of the vast bulk of the Russian navy, and to the resilience of Russia’s submarine fleet.

There is good reason to question Zelenskiy’s hold on reality. Is he delusional, or is he clinging on to power for as long as he can, simply because darker forces behind him allow him no choice or because beyond his tenure there lies only a range of even less pleasant futures, in much the same way as in Israel, Netanyahu is driven in part by his fear of imprisonment when his tenure on power is finally terminated.

I think too little attention is paid to the sheer economic cost of all of this, the economic interests that are most impacted as the lines of combat move westwards, the extent to which these interests are recruited into the role of financiers of the war or are motivated to strive for a cessation of hostilities, the extent to which and the methods by which Russia can seek compensation for the costs of war by extending its own regimes of tax collection and revenue generation and redistribution of economic resources.

The Russian economy is doing surprisingly well, of course - and to the chagrin to all those Western leaders who thought that Russia could so easily have been brought down with sanctions or, if not by sanctions, then by oil price caps or, if not by oil price caps, by stealing Russian reserves trapped (mainly) in Europe, or, if not by stealing the reserves then by stealing the interest payable by those reserves (resistance from central banks to these proposals is building sharply, given that they will undermine confidence in the entire Western banking system and can hardly take favorable traction in non-Western financial centers such as Singapore, Doha or Tokyo). Etc. and so forth. There is an argument that the Russian economy has indeed been boosted by the demands of war on the armaments industries, but there is clearly much more to the equation, and it seems to me far more likely that Russia will benefit and expand in a far more sustainable and healthy manner with an economy that is not weighted by the heavy costs, demands and cares of war.