WASHINGTON – Stung by the strength of the Ukrainian resistance, Russia is looking to launch a major offensive in more favorable conditions after failed attempts to take Kyiv and other major cities. The new offensive will focus on the Donbass region, a contested part of eastern Ukraine that includes two Moscow-controlled breakaway regions.
“They want to achieve some physical, tangible targets in Donbass within the next few weeks,” a senior Pentagon official told reporters during a briefing on Thursday.
But amid ongoing challenges, Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to deliver the knockout blow he’s desperate for, analysts say. Any territorial gains Russia makes are expected to be significantly smaller than what Putin envisioned when he launched the invasion of his much smaller and less powerful neighbor in late February.
A Ukrainian soldier guards the Donbass. (Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images)
Furthermore, these gains could come at the expense of a continued deterioration in preparedness, morale and other factors already working against Russia.
The final border between Ukraine and the Russian armed forces “might not be that different from the current one,” it said Phillips P. O’Brien, a scholar of military strategy and history at St Andrews University in the UK, argues against viewing the conflict solely in terms of territorial gains. “What matters is the state of the armed forces, not where they are on the map.”
The initial invasion was planned by top Russian general Valery Gerasimov as a rapid, ruthless, multi-pronged assault designed to stun the Ukrainians. Kyiv should be overthrown within days, and the entire “special operation” – as the Russians still insist on calling what is now evidently a full-fledged war – should be as relatively painless militarily as the previous invasion of the Ukraine, in 2014.
A spirited Ukrainian resistance, supported by Western anti-aircraft systems and other materiel, turned Gerasimov’s plan upside down and forced the Russians to retreat. “They didn’t plan for this to be a long, drawn out fight,” Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank, said in an interview with Yahoo News. “You’ve changed your mind now.”
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According to the Pentagon, the Kremlin has deployed 65 tactical battalion groups, or BTGs, on Ukraine’s eastern border. The question is whether this force will be sufficient to consolidate and expand Russia’s gains – or whether the same flaws that plagued the first phase of the war are inherent in the Russian military as a whole, meaning that the second phase will not all this will be different.
A satellite image shows the deployment of troops, tents and vehicles west of Russia’s Zoloti, near the border with Ukraine. (Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies)
To lead the new offensive, Putin appointed General Aleksandr Dvornikov, who was deployed to Syria in 2015 in Russia’s (ultimately successful) effort to shore up dictator Bashar Assad. Before that, he fought in Chechnya in a year-long campaign that may repeat some of Ukraine’s fears.
Dvornikov’s appointment could be taken as a sign that Putin “seems ready now to embrace time-honored principles of war: simplicity, unity of effort, and concentrated logistics,” as a retired US brig. General Mark Kimmitt wrote in The Wall Street Journal earlier this week.
Kimmitt added that if precedent holds, the Dvornikov offensive is expected to launch soon in Donbass and will feature the predictable mix of “large armored formations and enormous concentrations of artillery, rockets and missiles.”
However, the change in military leadership could also be less a sign of fresh thinking and more a recognition that the Kremlin simply had to do something to show the world – and ordinary Russians – that it is doing everything in its power to help rescuing an invasion he thought would be over by the spring thaw.
“You don’t fire victorious generals,” says military historian O’Brien. Dvornikov will command the same poorly trained army that NATO estimates has already killed thousands.
Putin almost certainly envisioned a triumphant parade on May 9, when Russia celebrates its victory in World War II. Now he must stave off complete defeat, a scenario that would have been unthinkable just two months ago. The sinking of the flagship Moskva earlier this week was a reminder of how incredibly effective the Ukrainian resistance has been.
(FILES) File photo dated August 29, 2013 shows the Moskva, the flagship missile cruiser of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, entering Sevastopol Bay. The Russian warship Moskva was hit by two Ukrainian missiles before sinking in the Black Sea, a senior Pentagon official said Friday, calling it a “major blow” to Moscow. / AFP / Vasily BATANOV
“It’s likely that this part of the war will be crucial,” Friedman said. “Victory-victory doesn’t seem likely” for the Kremlin, he told Yahoo News, envisioning a protracted conflict with few meaningful attempts at a peace resolution in the near future.
The Russian army underwent a much-heralded restructuring in 2008, but the ill-prepared units fighting in Ukraine are more reminiscent of the clumsy and bloody first campaign in Chechnya – launched in 1994 by Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin – than the kind of technical precise, efficient effort that a Western military could have launched.
However, a campaign aimed at eastern Ukraine offers Russia some advantages, including open terrain and shorter supply routes. “The Russians will want to take the Ukrainians out into the open, into the steppe,” Friedman said. “It’s less urban terrain. They will probably at least be able to fight more outside of the cities.”
But even newfound topographical advantages could be wiped out for the Russians if, some believe, spring rains turn dirt roads to mud and make tanks and armored vehicles difficult to maneuver. In the autumn of 1941, German troops met this fate even before the brutal Russian winter succumbed, as they advanced on Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).
“The weather will certainly be a factor in the war, as it always is,” the defense official told reporters Thursday, “and the fact that the ground is softer will make it difficult for them to do anything outside of paved highways.” do.” especially in replenishment logistics.
And, the official said, poor visibility could prevent Russia from gaining air superiority over Ukraine, a crucial factor in any major offensive. “It’s going in and out,” O’Brien said of Russia’s current air campaign. “Come in, drop your bomb, go.”
The lack of air support for ground units, coupled with the relatively small size of the force now preparing for the eastern campaign (the initial invasion was 130 battalions, twice what Dvornikov will have at his disposal), make him skeptical of Russia’s prospects.
Ukrainian soldiers in Donbass last week. (Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images)
Ukrainians agree. They have called on the West to help them deal a devastating blow. “Ukraine can win the next phase of this war with timely and adequate Western support,” Nataliya Bugayova wrote in a briefing for the Institute for the Study of War, where she is a fellow.
“The outcome of this phase is far from decided,” added Bugayova.