Forget Soledar: Russia cannot sustain the offensive initiative
Tom Rogan
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Much is being written about Russia’s claim to have captured Soledar, a town in southeastern Ukraine. Regardless of Kyiv’s claims to the contrary, it seems likely that Russia has indeed taken the town or will do so in the very near future.
Russia says it will now encircle Ukrainian forces around the nearby town of Bakhmut, sitting on the strategically valuable M03 highway. If Bakhmut falls, Russian forces would hope to push north toward the city of Slovyansk.
These might sound like significant developments, but they are not. Soledar is not the major strategic victory for Vladimir Putin’s forces that some are suggesting. Putin’s focal problem is that his strategic objective of regime change is incompatible with the military means currently available to him. Russian forces cannot sustain the offensive initiative in a manner that would allow for major advances toward Ukraine’s bisecting Dnieper River. As in Soledar, Putin risks expending significant forces for limited tactical victories. This victory is Pyrrhic — the resulting force depletion restricts Russia’s means of resisting the coming Ukrainian counteroffensives.
Top line, in 2023, the battlefield situation is unfavorable to Russia for three reasons: geography, inadequate maneuver potential, and ineffective logistics.
WHY DID RUSSIA’S DMITRY MEDVEDEV BECOME AN ULTRA-HAWK?
Let’s say Russian forces do seize Bakhmut (which is no sure thing). They’d still be 125 miles from Dnipro City on the Dnieper River. And they need to take Dnipro and Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine if they are to establish a defensive line for the territories currently taken — most crucially Crimea — and to provide a foundation for future offensives into northern and western Ukraine. But Kharkiv’s defense is holding firm. And Russia’s capacity to get the 125 miles to Dnipro is almost nonexistent.
Where motivated Ukrainian forces operate under clear chains of command, Russian command and control are openly shambolic. The Russian military has shown itself incapable of sustaining combined arms offensives or defensive actions at scale. Its forces are poorly equipped, poorly led, and beset by morale issues. Most Russian commanders lack the respect of their men. When it comes to Russian auxiliary forces, we see Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov making 80s-style action movies while his forces operate largely independent from the Russian military. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group is taking unsustainable casualties as it leads ground offensives.
At the same time, Prigozhin and Kadyrov offer unrestrained disdain for Russian military commanders. So significant is this discordant force structure that Putin was forced to step into the breach this week by promoting a commander whom Kadyrov and Prigozhin had previously criticized. Putin also appointed Russia’s top military officer, Valery Gerasimov, as commander of the Ukraine operation.
Then there’s the logistics disaster. Russia can throw legions of newly conscripted troops into Ukraine, but lacking equipment, training, and enabling support, they are little more than cannon fodder. They will break when Ukraine launches counteroffensives in force. And the body counts born of that breaking may bear significant political costs for Putin.
Moreover, Russia’s enabling forces crisis is unsolvable. Russia has suffered heavy losses to its armored vehicle, gunship, and tank forces. Running short on artillery munitions and operating units (the targeting of which Ukraine is understandably prioritizing), Russian artillery fire has declined by as much as 75%. Guided by British Army doctrine and advice, Ukrainian special forces have also adeptly struck logistics hubs deep behind Russian lines. Russia lacks the means to reconstitute these enablers at a rate that allows for sustained operations.
If Western support for Ukraine sustains, the Russian industrial base faces an impossible task — one akin to that which the Nazis faced during the post-1943 period of World War II. Hence we see the Kremlin’s increasingly desperate creation of various schemes designed to pluck one hundred more tanks, ten thousand more artillery shells, and 30,000 Belarusians out of a hat.
To be clear, this is the challenge Russia faces today, as it conducts only tentative offensives in close range of its border and rear logistics hubs. The notion that Russia can sustain coordinated offensive operations at scale and at range has been debunked by the events on the ground. Expect Putin to reiterate his nuclear threats as a means of pressuring the West into cutting support for Ukraine. He’s running very short of alternative strategies.
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