Tag Archives: Victory

Victory for Ukraine?

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A year and a half after it got under way, the war in Ukraine shows no sign of coming to an end. Not coming to an end, it is interesting to explore what might happen in case Zelensky’s famous counteroffensive finally starts doing more than reoccupying half a godforsaken village here, half a godforsaken village there, but gains some real strategic traction instead. As, for example, by developing the following scenario.

In the flat, mostly open terrain that is Ukraine airpower ought to be the key to everything. Worried about Ukraine’s ground-based air defenses, Putin’s air force continues to make its existence felt mainly by its absence from the battlefield; a development which, ere hostilities broke out, few people predicted or would have predicted.

Next, so the scenario, Ukrainian forces put the Kerch Strait rail and road bridges out of action. Not just for hours or days as they have done at least twice in the past, but in such a way as to require extensive repairs lasting weeks or months. Armed, trained and supplied by the West, Zelensky’s troops break through key Russian fortifications somewhere along the front. They retake some occupied territory and cut their enemies’ land bridge that reaches from the Donbas along the Azov Sea coast all the way down to the greatest prize of all: the Crimea with its great port, Sebatopol.

With their logistics in a mess, and perhaps left without clear instructions from Moscow, major parts of Russia’s fighting force disintegrate. Others either retreat or surrender. Relying on combinations of modern technologies, including not just land-to sea missiles but perhaps unmanned surface vehicles too, Ukraine could blockade and barrage Crimea, trapping Russia’s Black Sea Fleet like bugs in a bottle. If Ukrainian forces appear to be preparing for a frontal assault on Crimea, risks of Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons might rise—with consequences that would require more than one separate article to think out.

Short of Putin resorting to the use of nuclear weapons a comparison of the forces on both sides, along with the outcome of recent combats, suggests that Ukrainian forces could prevail. Conversely, any major Russian attempt to take back even modest amounts of previously occupied territories would likely fail. Were Russia’s air force and antiaircraft defenses to suffer substantial losses, this could weaken the defense of Moscow or other Russian strategic assets.

Ukrainian forces appear not to be using Western arms to attack targets in Russia. However, with their home-manufactured weapons they are increasing indirect and direct fire strikes against headquarters and logistical facilities, transportation hubs, and troop formations deep inside Russia. Even early in the war, a Ukrainian Neptune missile was able to sink the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship. By now even Moscow, almost a thousand kilometers in the rear, has been repeatedly hit by Ukrainian drones. Not that they caused any great damage; as is also the case with their Russian counterparts, the warheads they carry are too small to kill more than a few people (mostly civilians) here, bring about the collapse of a building there. However, their psychological impact is said to have been considerable.

Such, seen from the point of view of Kiev and its Western backers, is the optimistic scenario. Note, though, the elephant in the room: namely, the fact that it leaves the Donbas, its natural resources and its industry, in Russian hands. Heavily fortified–fortification is an art in which, as Germans of all people should know, the Russians are past masters—and containing quite some mixed-population cities, it is a tough nut to crack. Disorderly, to be sure, but packed not only with regular Russian forces but with every kind of militia under the sun. Just look at the weeks-long struggle for Bachmut. And behind those cities Russia’s endless spaces, soon to be enveloped in the arms of General Winter, will be waiting.

Such developments will no doubt reduce Putin to dire straits. They will not, however necessarily bring about the end of the war. That could be achieved only in case he and his clique finally give in and ask for negotiations—something which, as long as he remains in control, is unlikely to happen.

So everything depends on Putin being removed by his own people, likely either the military, the various security services, or some combination of both. Speculation about such a coup has been rife right from the first days of the “special military operation.” With the exception of the rather strange and ill-understood Wagner “Uprising,” though, there are few signs to show either that Putin’s will is weakening or that he is losing control.

My conclusion? Even if Ukrainian forces book additional military successes like those outlined above, the real decisions will be political and have to be made in Moscow and specifically behind the walls of the Kremlin. Until they are, the war will go on.

When Enough is Enough

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The place: the area around Kursk, a Russian (formerly Soviet) city about 520 kilometers south of east of Moscow and 420 kilometers east of Ukraine’s capital Kiev. The time: spring 1943.

A few months earlier, on 2 February 1943, the German 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad. Some 90,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner; the total number of German losses may have been around 270,000. Perhaps even more ominously for the Germans, their remaining forces in the region, sunk as they were in sleet, snow and atrociously low temperatures, were confused, demoralized and disorganized. Nevertheless, thanks very largely to a single officer, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the German front held. Many considered him the mastermind behind the operation (“Case Yellow”) that had brought down France back in 1940; in truth, though, his performance on this occasion was even better.

By March/April the antagonists were once again facing each along more or less cohesive lines. At the center of the front, which reached from Leningrad to the Black Sea, was a huge Russian salient measuring some 250 kilometers from north to south and 150 kilometers from east to west. It was in and around this salient that the Red Army and the Wehrmacht deployed their most powerful formations, numbering about a million men on each side. In ordering the offensive Hitler was hoping to pinch off the salient while destroying as many Soviet as possible. That done, his troops would be free to move in any direction they chose. North towards Moscow, important because of its railway crossings and its arms industry; east to the Volga through which passed much of the American and Brutish aid to the USSR; and south toward Rostov, the key to the Caucasus where the Red Army got his oil.

It was not to be. Thanks partly to the fact that the German plans fell into Soviet hands, partly to Hitler’s hope that, by postponing the offensive, he would be able to bring up more of his new Panther and Tiger tanks, the Red Army was ready. Starting on 5 July, a week’s ferocious fighting did not lead to the desired result, forcing the Fuehrer to order his commanders to suspend their advance and switch to the defensive instead. But even if it had succeeded it would probably not have brought the Soviet Union to its knees. Given that, by this time, Stalin’s huge domain was fully mobilized and much of its industry evacuated hundreds of kilometers east towards the Urals, well beyond the Wehrmacht’s reach.

Almost exactly eighty years have passed. The forces on both sides are much smaller, so much so that they cannot form cohesive fronts but seem to be distributed in penny packets all over the huge theater of operations. However, the overall strategic situation is not dissimilar. This time it is the Ukrainian armed forces that are said to be preparing for a spring offensive. This time too any offensive that may be in the making keeps being postponed, allegedly because the Ukrainians are still waiting for sufficient weapons—tanks, ammunition, drones and anti-aircraft defenses—to arrive from the West. Whether the Ukrainians are going to attack eastward towards the Donbas and its industry, or southward, with the objective of cutting the narrow land corridor leading from the Donbas to the Russian-occupied Crimea, remains unknown. Finally, in 2023 as in 1943, whether a Ukrainian offensive, even one that is tactically and operationally successful, can be pushed to the point where the Kremlin is forced to give up the fight remains questionable.

Right or wrong, no one seems to be talking about a new Russian offensive. Possibly this is because Putin cannot muster the necessary forces; however, judging by events since 24 February 2022, such an offensive, even if it can be launched, is most unlikely to lead to a quick victory either. Overall the most likely outcome is a prolonged battle of attrition similar, say, to the one Iranians and Iraqis waged against each other from 1980 to 1988. And which will most likely be decided, not by events on the battlefield but by one of the two sides saying, perhaps after a more or less legitimate, more or less conspirational and violent, change of government: enough is enough.