The Russians' Biggest Problem In Eastern Ukraine? Synchronization.
Russian troops struggle to coordinate their attacks.
This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.
Russian troops are slowly marching toward and around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two big free cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.
The Russians have a standard playbook for taking a Ukrainian city, and running it means doing two things at the same time. Along the nearly 100-km Kramatorsk front, they don’t have the infantry to do both at once. Every time a Ukrainian brigade holds somewhere, the Russians have to move men to cover it—and something stalls somewhere else.
That strategy is simple in concept but difficult in practice. The idea is for Russian forces to advance along a city’s under-protected flanks in order to put pressure on the main supply lines of the city’s garrison. As the flank attacks squeeze the garrison’s logistics, Russian infiltrators slip into the city, hoping to create a lodgement for follow-on forces.
The final assault through that lodgement comes late in the campaign, after the Ukrainians are already weakened by a lack of supplies.
The strategy only works when the troops on the flanks and those in the middle work together. The former squeezes. The latter infiltrates. The problem for the Russian Center Group of Forces on the Kramatorsk front is that it’s not squeezing and infiltrating at the same time. That delays the overall Russian advance and buys time for Ukrainian forces to dig in, reinforce, and hope for a miracle.
“Russian offensive planning at the operational level remains disciplined,” mapper and analyst Vitaly explained. But only “on paper,” Vitaly added. “Groupings are sequenced, axes are assigned, objectives are staggered.”
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.
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