Russia Advances in the East
Russia is exploiting opportunity and improving its military effectiveness
The situation at the front worsened. Trying to seize the strategic initiative and break through the front line, the enemy concentrated the main efforts on several directions, creating a significant advantage in forces and means.
General Syrsky, C-inC of Ukrainian Armyed Forces, 28 April 2024
The last few days has brought a flurry of grim reports from the frontline in eastern Ukraine. In this article, I wanted to examine how the Russian advances are the convergence of them exploiting multiple opportunities, and as well as improvements in Russian military effectiveness.
At the same time, it is worth bearing in mind that despite recent Russian advances, this war has seen the Russians advance before only to be forced back eventually by the Ukrainians. And, with the Ukrainians now mobilising more personnel and recieving an influx of military assistance, the situation is likely to evolve considerably in the coming weeks and months.
Russian Opportunism in Eastern Ukraine
The Russians have been on the offensive for several months, in both the east and the south of Ukraine. Their offensive operations are exploiting several tactical, operational, and strategic opportunities that have become apparent since the back half of 2023.
First, the culmination and failure of the Ukrainian offensives in southern Ukraine will be something that even the most mediocre of Russian senior officer would recognise as an opportunity. The culminating point was a concept explored by Clausewitz in On War and has been included in the doctrine and tactics of military forces in many nations. One of the reasons that military leaders and planners are taught about culminating points is because of the opportunity it then offers for counter attacks and exploit the weakness of an adversary.
The Russians probably realised early in the Ukrainian counteroffensive that things were not going well and would have begun planning to counterattack. Once the Ukrainians culminated in the back half of 2023, the Russians will have been well placed to resume the offensive given the lack of major Ukrainian breakthroughs, and the time they had been provided to reconstitute since their failed early 2023 offensive operations.
This is one element of operational opportunity the Russians are exploiting.
The other is the shortfall in Ukrainian defences constructed in the east. While the Ukrainians eventually began building several lines of defences in the east, it has been a slow process and it wasn’t until late in 2023 that the Ukrainian president publicly accepted the need for them (even if tactical commanders had long since been developing them).
So, the Ukrainians are behind the eight ball in constructing their defensive zones, which need to include various anti-vehicle and anti-personnel obstacles and mines as well as the surveillance systems to keep them under observation and the direct and indirect fires required to target the enemy which is shaped into killing zones by the obstacles. As the map below from @War_Mapper demonstrates, there is a lot of work to be done in getting defensive zones of appropriate length and density, as well as secondary and tertiary defensive lines, built in eastern Ukraine.
It is also interesting to compare the current state of Ukrainian defensive zones with those constructed by the Russians Brady Africk’s excellent work on this subject is worth checking out. One of his products showing Russian defences constructed during this war, and since the first Russian invasion a decade ago, is shown below.
A final point: some of the obstacle belts have not been as well designed as they might be. As Tom Cooper points out in his most recent post, these defences need to be oriented in different directions. If defences in the east all run north-south, even the dullest Russian will eventually figure out they can be out-flanked or attacked from their edges. This is what has appears to have occured happened in several instances in eastern Ukraine.
The Russians are certainly making the most of two converging tactical opportunities: the shortfalls in unit strengths of Ukrainian front-line units, and the shortfalls of munitions for Ukrainian artillery and battlefield air defence. These have been reported on and have been obvious to the Russians for some time. Their operations, even though they have also resulted in large Russian casualties, have been based on overwhelming the Ukrainians through the sheer quality of men and firepower.
However, the Russians will be anticipating Ukrainian mobilization and an increased flow of western military assistance eventually narrowing this gap between Ukrainian and Russian manpower and firepower (it probably won’t close it). Until that happens sometime in the coming weeks (or months), the Russians will be seeking to exploit this tactical opportunity to the maximum extent possible.
Finally, in the wake of the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive, the Russians will have identified a strategic opportunity that could be exploited – western resolve for the support of Ukraine. The failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive resulted in significant finger-pointing about failure in the back half of 2023, which Russia saw as an opportunity to double down on misinformation in key capitals. The most obvious success – at least for several months– was the influence this had on some lawmakers in the U.S. Congress.
But the Russians also wanted to back up their influence operations about the inevitability of Russian success with actual battlefield success. The repeated attacks by Russia, which eventually led to the fall of Avdiivka, where the leading edge of this latest campaign of offensive operations by the Russians. Despite the massive losses, the Russians were able to project this as a victory, supposedly demonstrating again why the Russian Army is destined to win this war. Too many in the west, including Australia, buy this narrative without any critique.
The most recent Russian gains in the past week, to the west of Avdiivka, will further reinforce Russian strategic messaging. It is yet another example of how the Russians can turn small gains in territory into strategic messaging quickly, and influence many in the west and the global south who lack an understanding about how war is full of twists and turns. Even the very best armies in history sometimes lose ground and lose battles.
Russian Military Effectiveness Improves
Russia’s recent gains, in addition to showing their ability to exploit tactical, operational, and strategic opportunities, also show that the Russian military is improving its military effectiveness.
The study of military effectiveness is something I have applied in many of my commentaries on this war. It was a subject I covered in some depth in War Transformed because it’s a concept that is at the heart of ensuring military organisations are ready to succeed in modern
In Military Effectiveness, Volume 1, Millett and Murray define military effectiveness as “the process by which armed forces convert resources into fighting power.” In Creating Military Power, Brooks and Stanley define military effectiveness as “the capacity to create military power from a state’s basic resources in wealth, technology, population, and human capital.”
The concept is further broken down into political, strategic, operational, and tactical effectiveness. Tactical effectiveness is essentially the capacity to bring together training, equipment, leadership, and other military endeavours to win battles and keep winning them in a changing battlefield environment. Political and strategic effectiveness are about the convergence of good policy and strategy to effectively wield all elements of national power – people, ideas, industry, information, alliances, etc – to win war.
This is a topic that is relevant now because it has been clear for some time that Russian military effectiveness has improved over the course of the war. Its most recent gains have shown their ability to learn about tactics, the application of drones and electronic warfare, and their capacity to link tactical actions with strategic influence and industrial production initiatives.
As I wrote earlier this year about the Russian capacity to learn and adapt:
The longer this war lasts, the better Russia will get at learning, adapting, and building a more effective, modern fighting force. Slowly but surely, Moscow will absorb new ideas from the battlefield and rearrange its tactics accordingly. Its strategic adaptation already helped it fend off Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and over the last few months it has helped Russian troops take more territory from Kyiv. Ultimately, if Russia’s edge in strategic adaptation persists without an appropriate Western response, the worst that can happen in this war is not stalemate. It is a Ukrainian defeat.
This should concern western strategists for several reasons.
First, and most immediately, a more effective Russian military can be more successful in the offensive operations they are conducting now and over the next few months. This tactical success, as explored earlier, also has strategic impacts for Russia.
Second, a more effective Russian military is better able to link tactical operations within campaigns and link them to Russian strategy. This was something they were poor at in the first few months of the war for a variety of reasons, including bad assumptions and pure arrogance. But a more effective Russian military has been able to industrialise the war and ensure that it can sustain both the personnel and materiel needs to sustain the war over the medium term. Without an effective western counter, ongoing assistance to Ukraine will be difficult.
Third, a more effective Russian military, which appears to have undertaken reforms in the past 26 months that it should have been undertaking under Gerasimov since 2012, will be an ongoing danger to its neighbours. And not just European neighbours. We should remember that Russia has a presence in the Pacific (although many of its ground forces have been redeployed to Ukraine).
Finally, a more effective Russian military provides lessons to other predatory authoritarians. In some cases, Russia is probably sharing lessons directly with China, North Korea and Iran in return for dual use technologies and weapons. So, the more military effective Russia gets, the more this has the potential to lift the effectiveness of other potential threats to the west in the medium term.
Besides the moral and strategic imperatives to defend Ukraine and liberate all of its territory taken by Russia since 2014, we must also ensure the defeat of Russia as quickly as possible to deny them more opportunities to learn about modern war and help their strategic partners to do so. All wars are learning opportunities; we must deny this learning to Russia as much as possible.
Everyone Culminates
Returning to the earlier reference to the Ukrainians reaching a culminating point in the back half of 2023, the Russians have identified this and have been very energetic exploiting it.
But all offensives culminate at some point. There is no army ever designed or built that can carry on offensive operations indefinitely. Humans have limited reserves of strength, armies have limited numbers of units and munitions, the terrain and weather interfere, and the enemy always gets a vote.
Therefore, as we saw with the Russian’s culminating before Kyiv in 2022, the Ukrainian offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson eventually culminating in 2022, the Russian offensive launched in January 2023 and the Ukrainian counteroffensive last year, the current Russian offensive will also reach its culminating point in the near future.
The key will be the Ukrainians being able to manage the current challenge of holding terrain and combat power deficiencies while they build up their capability with the influx of mobilised troops and western weapons. For last few months, given the significant shortfalls in personnel and munitions, the Ukrainians have struggled to reconcile two key imperatives: saving their army and holding their territory. Both are militarily and politically vital.
At least according to this account from Stefan Korshak at the Kyiv Post, the new Commander in Chief is managing this nearly impossible balancing act, and appears to have accepted that at least for the time being, giving up ground is at times preferrable to giving up combat formations in combat.
A Grim Situation
The Russians are taking small bites of ground in tactical fights, and these eventually aggregate into achieving operational objectives. The coming few months will reveal whether the Ukrainians can accept some Russian tactical gains but deny them the likely key operational objectives of securing the entire Donbas, which will support one of Putin’s key political objectives in this war.
The battlefield situation at present is grim but not disastrous. The Russians have the initiative and will be pushing hard to make the most of their opportunity before US military aid arrives in the coming weeks. But as this conflict, and all previous conflicts have shown, nothing is certain in war. There is potential for significant surprises, from both sides, in the weeks ahead.
😢 Too little support, too late. Biden signed the new packet a week ago, where are the supplies? I hope Ukraine can stabilize things soon enough, but I do fear a real breakthrough from the Russians.