PUTIN’S INVASION OF Ukraine began on 24 February – almost two months ago.
Following eight weeks of combat, the Russian military have achieved very little on the ground. The Ukrainian military have inflicted heavy losses on Putin’s forces.
The Russian Defence Ministry stated this week that they have lost 1,351 soldiers killed in action with 3,825 seriously wounded. NATO believe that these figures do not represent their true losses and estimate that up to 15,000 Russian troops have been killed with over 30,000 wounded in the fighting.
The median estimate of Russian losses, at approximately 10,000 combat deaths, would represent an eye watering and unsustainable attrition rate.
Russia’s failure to mount a coordinated combined arms operation on Kyiv, and its subsequent retreat, has seriously undermined the Russian military’s reputation for attritional ground combat.
As more evidence of war crimes are uncovered in areas liberated around Kyiv, Russia’s reputation for brutality, indiscriminate use of force and lack of command and control is writ large. In short, Russia’s military prestige and its capacity to project force in what it terms the ‘near abroad’ has been seriously undermined by events in Ukraine.
Mariupol
The renewed assault on the Donbas region, which began on Monday, is in part an attempt to re-frame the narrative around Putin’s catastrophic intervention in Ukraine.
Today, Putin has declared his first tangible ‘victory’ with the destruction of Mariupol and the mass murder of its inhabitants. His Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu has confirmed that Mariupol is now effectively ‘secured’.
In Putin’s words, this means ‘besieged’ to the extent that not even ‘a fly’ can get in or out of the city. If this is what victory looks like, Putin’s grand design for Donbas implies a nightmare scenario where Ukrainian cities are surrounded, destroyed in detail and their civilian populations starved and butchered into submission.
The only remaining resistance in Mariupol is at the Azovstal Steel Works – with uncomfortable echoes of the Soviet heroic defence of Stalingrad at the Volograd Tractor Plant against Hitler’s invading forces in 1943.
Putin’s tactics in Donbas also have uncomfortable echoes of the Nazi’s ‘scorched earth’ policy of ‘total war’ with the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure throughout Ukraine and Russia during World War 2. The destruction of Mariupol is a pyrrhic victory for Putin. However, it does deliver to him a ‘land corridor’ from the Crimean peninsula, through Donbas to Russia proper.
The current Russian offensive has started slowly. Putin’s reconfigured and reorganised armoured units have taken a number of small towns – Rubizhne, Popasna, Kreminna – on an apparent axis of advance towards Kramatorsk.
This appears to be Russia’s main thrust at present – to strike at the cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk in an effort to expand their control of the Donbas region to include all of the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts. The Governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Saidai has stated that Putin’s forces have now expanded their control of Luhansk from 60% of the district – held since 2014 – to approximately 80% of its territory.
This has been achieved with the almost complete destruction of the city of Izyum, which is now the main staging area for the Russian military advance on the Ukrainian military hub of Kramatorsk.
Attempt to re-assert control
Under the command of General Aleksandr Dvornikov – the ‘Butcher of Syria’ – the Russians have moved from a multi-axis assault on Ukraine to a concentration of its forces under one centralised command system.
This represents an attempt to re-assert control and coordination of their combined arms forces and to restore the Russian military’s reputation as an effective fighting force. Dvornikov appears to be following the strategy and tactics used in Russia’s support of President Assad’s forces in Syria.
In that conflict, Russia used artillery and close air support – including the use of barrel bombs on civilian targets – to surround Syrian cities, targeting their infrastructure and terrorising their populations into submission.
This would appear to be the playbook for what Russia will now attempt in Donbas. In seizing Izyum for example, Putin’s forces destroyed 80% of the city’s civilian infrastructure, buildings and residential districts.
Putin has a narrow window of opportunity to transform the narrative around his intervention in Ukraine from one of humiliation to one of a credible victory.
The forces he has concentrated in Donbas are drawn from professional army units previously deployed to Georgia in South Ossetia and Abkhazia along with other recently re-equipped and re-trained units deployed to Armenia and Tajikistan.
These armoured units will be supported by massed Russian field artillery as they attempt to roll over well prepared Ukrainian defensive positions in eastern Ukraine. There has been a significant increase in Russian air force activity in the area as they provide close air support to the ground units involved in this renewed offensive.
Russian artillery will concentrate their fire on Ukrainian defensive positions in the coming days. With a range of approximately 30km, Russia’s conventional 152mm artillery pieces and multi launch rocket systems will target Ukraine’s military positions en route to Kramatorsk in an attempt to fully seize the coal and steel rich Donbas region for Putin.
This is one of the reasons that President Zelenskyy has called for heavy weapon systems – such as 155mm artillery systems and tanks – to counter this expected Russian strategy and to give effect to counter battery fire. Ukraine will also need air defence systems to deny Russia total dominance and control of their air space in the coming weeks.
War of attrition
For now, Russia has superior numbers of combat troops in the Donbas region. However, it will not be possible for them to sustain full combat operations in the area for more than a few weeks.
The initial kinetic phase – the move on Kramatorsk – will likely deteriorate into a grinding war of attrition against Ukraine’s forces. There are major challenges for Putin’s general.
First and foremost, their offensive strategy is well known to Ukraine’s forces and its international partners. There is no surprise element to Dvornikov’s full frontal assault – as far as we know. It is a conservative plan which robs Russian commanders of much of their initiative in the coming battle for Donbas.
Russian troops have experienced serious losses in Ukraine in the last few months. Their motivation to fight – their will to locate, engage with and destroy the enemy – is seriously eroded. Like many armies in disarray, they have targeted civilians indiscriminately, venting their frustration and fear on innocent men, women and children. The Ukrainian military on the other hand have nothing to lose.
They are literally fighting for their lives in terrain that they are very familiar with – in defences and prepared withdrawal and secondary defences that they have been preparing since 2014.
It is believed by some analysts that Putin needs to achieve a credible victory in Donbas by 9 May, Russia’s traditional Victory Day celebrations. For symbolic, propaganda and practical reasons – maintaining a full tempo combat operation in Ukraine – Putin has a few weeks to turn things around in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian military face a severe challenge in the coming weeks. They are likely to withstand Russian artillery barrages – which despite converged fire, is unlikely to penetrate all prepared defences over a very wide front – and to bring the fight to Putin’s forces.
Ukraine will try to deny Putin’s forces set-piece tank battles, which would give Russia a strategic advantage. Rather, they will use creative tactics: the use of state of the art western missiles, drones and air defence systems to inflict unsustainable casualties on Putin’s forces.
Whatever the outcome in the coming weeks, any ‘victory’ for Putin will likely consist of the occupation of most of the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts with a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula.
If denied this victory by conventional means – if halted in the field by Ukrainian resistance – Putin and his general may resort to the use of non-conventional weapons, such as chemical weapons, to accelerate matters.
In such a scenario, it is difficult to avoid the prospect of a major escalation of this conflict. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has not gone to plan. As one of the world’s richest men, he and his super-wealthy oligarchs have sent thousands of young men – from the most disadvantaged communities in Russia – to slaughter innocent Ukrainian men, women and children who simply lack the means to flee.
It is an age-old pattern of warfare, but carries with it the unique risk of escalation to a wider European war. Hopefully, Ukraine with western support can halt Putin’s assault.
And hopefully, at some point, Putin and his enablers in the Kremlin will one day be held to account for their war crimes in the region.
Dr Tom Clonan is an independent Senator and former Captain in the Irish armed forces. He is a security analyst and academic, lecturing in the School of Media in DIT. You can follow him on Twitter.
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