Ukraine — 8 months on
So, 8 months on, Ukraine are striking back.
Following my last post, in May, Russia spent the summer slowly advancing through the Ukrainian defences in Donbas, grinding through a line of fortifications the Ukrainians had carefully built over the previous 8 years. Russia’s vast superiority in long-range firepower, artillery and air power allowed them to create a sufficient density of fires to be able to advance. One by one, Popasna, Liman, Severdonetsk, Lysychansk and other heavily-fortified cities in the region fell, reduced to ruins by the violence of the Russian bombardment. Wisened by the losses of elite troops killed and captured during the siege Mariupol, the Ukrainians retreated, always falling back to a new set of fortifications.
Ukrainian counter-attacks failed to either stop this slow but palpable onslaught or push back the Russians elsewhere. And yet, Western experts said to not worry. Russia was using up too many resources for too little gain. Ukraine was able to save their more experienced troops and a lot of equipment by timely retreats. With some Western long-range artillery, Ukraine would be, they claimed, able to take territory back.
So it proved. By August, the Russians declared an operational pause, having successfully conquered the entirety of the Luhansk region and advanced in the north of the Donetsk region. By this time, the long-range American HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) system, long asked for, started hitting Russian targets in occupied Ukraine. On the 6th of September, Ukraine launched their counter-offensive in the North, liberating swathes of territory. In the space of four weeks, Russia lost Kupyansk, captured in the early days of the war, then both Izyum and Liman, captured with such effort in spring. At the same time, Ukraine pushed in the south, threatening the occupied city of Kherson. Russia keeps slowly pushing in Donbas, but has come to a standstill outside the town of Bakhmut.
The sudden reversals in the north finally induced Vladimir Putin to call a mobilisation, a call he had been resisting since the beginning of the war. Despite being both partial and shoddily conducted, sending badly trained conscripts with inadequate weapons straight into action, it will definitely help Russia’s chances. This will not be just through greater numbers, but also through the closure of a loophole that hitherto allowed already serving personnel to ‘opt out’ of the fighting by leaving the Russian army without any risk of punishment, citing the fact this was a special military operation and not an actual war.
The tell-tale signs are not good for Russia however. The most striking of those is the reaction of Russia’s allies and pro-Russian voices in the West. Their CSTO allies, bar Belarus, have all but abandoned them, and even Belarus have so far refused to send their own troops into Ukraine. Further afield, only Iran and North Korea have — clandestinely — sold weapons. The reaction of the BRICS nations has ranged from sitting on the fence to offering verbal support only — not even the sale of discounted oil could convince China and India to send military technology. Clearly, none of those countries would not contemplate harming their ties with the West to help Russia against an ally of the West, which could mean their own analyses of the Russian military performance are rather damning.
Right-wing politicians in the West, of the kind that tended to be pro-Putin in recent years, have too been unable to openly support him, even if, like Silvio Berlusconi, they are privately sympathetic. Partly this is due to the stunning success of the pro-Ukrainian narrative in the West, but partly because the Right, much like China, loves winners. Russia have not looked like winning for much of the war and it seems their allies in the West, too, do not believe they can reverse that trend.
Another hint came in mid-September after Azerbaijan invaded Armenia. This was not a war in Nagorno-Karabakh, like in 2020, but an attack on Armenia proper, across much of the border. Azerbaijan advanced by several kilometres in some places and several instances of torture and execution of Armenian POWs surfaced. Armenia, a CSTO member, invoked the alliance’s collective defence clause. Nothing happened. In the end, it was the US who leaned on Baku to stop the invasion. It points to both a political and a military weakness of Russia: Putin could neither risk his relations with Baku and Ankara nor felt that fighting Azerbaijan’s modernised army, with its Israeli and Turkish-supplied weapons, would be an easy task for Russia, stretched as it is in Ukraine. Even the exposure of the CSTO as a sham organisation unable to give any real guarantees was not enough of a disincentive.
Whilst at the start of the war I did say that Ukraine will not lose, I, like most people, vastly underestimated just how well they would contain the Russian advance. Even though Western military analysts insisted that Russia was over-stretching itself, pointing to inefficiencies in the Russian army that were costing them dear, even though (anonymous) separatist blogs corroborated the important parts of their analyses, throughout the summer there was always a niggling doubt. After all, aren’t they biased Westerners, following a narrative in which Russia must always be the bad guy? Weren’t Ukraine just far better at the information war, their own manpower and equipment losses being much less publicised? Didn’t films of Ukrainian Bayraktar strikes, so plentiful earlier on, stop, possibly because the Russians worked out how to deal with them? Wasn’t Russia steadily advancing, continuing to hit targets throughout Ukraine, fending off Ukrainian counter-attacks with relative ease? And yet, and yet.
And yet, there were some clear tells. Russia’s use of some weapons was strange and showed evidence of shortages of certain specific munitions. Demining cables used to bomb buildings, aircraft firing their missiles upwards to increase their range, anti-ship and anti-air missiles used against land targets, and many other instances besides pointed at shortages. The sightings of various quite old weapon pieces around Russia suggested problems with finding functioning equipment. The attrition rate of top staff — both from being killed in action and from being replaced — was high. Unencrypted radio comms kept being intercepted, suggesting problems with communication. POWs and those who left the army talked of low morale and poor logistics. But perhaps these were minor teething problems, inherent in such a large-scale campaign?
The separatist bloggers, on their part, described an army run down by corruption, short of equipment and specialist personnel, hamstrung by poor officers and disregard for the soldiers’ lives and well-being. Even the early victories were obtained at a human cost that was unsustainable without a mobilisation — that took 7 months to materialise. Some parts of the Russian formations are actively at odds with others. The regular army, the paratroopers, Rosgvardia, Wagner, the Chechens and the separatist battalions are all notionally separate, with their own, specific to them, equipment, and in addition all bar the latter could, until the mobilisation was declared, leave at any time. Russian border guards actively stopped equipment getting to separatist forces, Russia-installed DNR and LNR authorities threatened some separatist fighters forcing them to leave; Strelkov, one of the more effective commanders from 2014, was prevented from taking part until very recently, reduced to snarling from the sidelines of his Telegram channel.
This at a time when effective warfare requires increasingly precise coordination — between the various constituents (infantry, tanks, anti-air, artillery) of a unit and also between the different units. For instance, tanks must be protected by infantry, or become a target for a Javelin. But infantry is very vulnerable to the enemy’s vehicles. So artillery and/or air support, including the drones used for reckon and for aiming the artillery, need to be on stand-by. Multi-layered air defence against the various aerial threats from the enemy is a must. If coordination is not good, if communication is not secure, then people and vehicles will keep being lost, and this is consistent with the pictures of captured and destroyed Russian vehicles we have been seeing. It is also consistent with so many communications being intercepted — when people are desperate, when comms equipment is malfunctioning, they will start communicating on open channels.
All this makes sense to non-experts, however what if it is untrue? Perhaps it is the bias of Western experts to suggest it would be decisive? Perhaps they are just CIA shills? Perhaps the separatists, anonymous and with plenty of axes to grind, were lying about how bad the situation was? Perhaps the Russian artillery barrage will make up for the lack of coordination through sheer firepower? Perhaps the concurrent Ukrainian losses, of men and equipment, were unsustainable? How could we have known, back in July and August, that the situation was reversible, that Ukraine, having been steadily pushed back, could retake the initiative?
What differentiates pro-Western experts and OSINT professionals — such as the Institute for the Study of War, Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, Bellingcat and others — from their pro-Russian counterparts is their relative consistency. During war, truth is the first casualty after all, and trust has to be earned. With evidence from OSINT slightly breaking the fog of war, this is more possible than previously. In my opinion, what makes both the Western experts and separatists trustworthy is their consistency and greater accuracy of their predictions. Their narrative of a technologically superior but poorly run army burning through their resources too fast through catastrophic errors of judgement and incredibly bad leadership was constantly being confirmed. They predicted Russia would fail to take Kiev and Khakov, and they did fail to take them. The Russian side insisted up to the eve of the war that no invasion was forthcoming, then insisted that the war will be over in a few weeks, or even days, then claimed the retreat from Kiev was ‘tactical’ as the target was Donbas all along, then claimed that the NATO-supplied weapons were being stolen and destroyed (they mostly weren’t, and are hitting Russian forces as we speak), claimed the Ukrainian army was on the point of collapse (just before they went on a huge offensive) and so on.
The true weakness of post-truth politics is exposed when it comes up against real events. War is a real event, now observed with many more eyes around the world the before, and the typical post-truth approach — to question everything, to engage in conspiracy theories, to constantly suggest alternative explanations, no matter how ridiculous, is very good at sowing doubt, but very poor at producing a consistent narrative. It works far better for a ‘low-information’ war — a war not covered by the world’s media — as it relies in a large part on apathy. When it comes to a war that is at the centre of attention, it fails, because you need that consistent narrative to oppose the dominant narrative of ‘Western ally brutally attacked by stronger neighbour’. It has had more success at swaying public opinion outside the West, further away from Ukraine, with less coverage of the events there, but within the Western information sphere pro-Russian voices appear to be contradicting the things they only just said previously. The Tories can get away with these contradictions as they are not called out by the mainstream media enough, Trump could get away with them because of his incredible personal appeal, but with the Western mainstream media on the side of Ukraine, with any pro-Russia voices overshadowed by Zelensky’s own huge appeal, post-truth stood no chance.
Indeed, Russia seems to be a country built around ‘the post-truth approach’. Everyone is busy trying to offer a pretence that things are going swimmingly. Various people in the military clearly lied to their superiors about its state, about the equipment, about the personnel numbers, about its ability to fight a major war. When exposed by real-life events, they continued to lie, even at the cost of their own troops. The order to not retreat from Liman until it was too late (and the escape routes became exposed to Ukrainian fire) was most likely given by a person, or people, who felt their own standing in the Russian hierarchy was more important than the lives of their men. Putin is as complicit in this behaviour as anyone else: far from being the ‘poor tsar mis-informed by his boyars’ that he’s sometimes portrayed as, his response to setbacks was to, in turn, lie to the Russian population.
Putin’s responded by declaring a truly lamentable ‘referendum’ in the four Ukrainian provinces Russia managed to capture. Never mind that two of them were not captured fully, never mind that the capital of Zaporozhye was in Ukrainian hands, along with 30% of Donetsk, never mind that Liman, by this crazy logic, became part of Russia only to immediately be ‘occupied’ by the Ukrainian forces: the tsar needed a spectacle. He repeated, on a larger scale, what his underlings in the army were doing: he put on a show to lie about and obscure the true state of events.
The pattern repeated itself after Ukraine — themselves no strangers to a big publicity stunt — sabotaged the Crimean bridge. On Putin’s 70th birthday, no less. In return, Russia launched a pointless missile barrage that hit few military targets but managed to almost destroy a footbridge in the centre of Kiev. Such is the post-truth world: you are having to waste expensive long-range missiles just to keep up the pretence. All the same, it betrays the fact that you cannot achieve a quick result on the battlefield and so have to resort to long-range strikes on targets dubious immediate military value.
Subsequent missile and drone attacks were better thought-through and more potent, targeting the Ukrainian infrastructure. A large part of the country is without power. The winter will be hard, of that there is no doubt. Putin has no off-ramps, no ways to exist gracefully, the lies he told his people about the need to fight this war make a tangible result, a gain in territory, imperative. And yet, things are also looking better for Ukraine than they did at the height of summer. The ukrainians have proven that they can roll back the russians, not just hold back their advance.