The Campaigns of Ukraine, Part 1
A May 2024 update on the various campaigns being conducted by Ukraine
It is 876 days since the large-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia commenced. I have regularly produced campaign updates during the war but haven’t produced one for a few weeks for a variety of reasons. In this article, I return to the topic of progress in Ukraine’s various campaigns. I promise to get back to writing these more regularly!
The past few weeks have been difficult ones for Ukraine. It has not been able to reconcile shortages in manpower and firepower and this has resulted in further losses of territory in the northeast, east and southern regions of Ukraine. As Lawrence Freedman recently wrote, “this was always going to be a difficult time for Ukraine. In recent weeks, steps have been taken to rectify the two great failures of the past six months – the Ukrainian dithering on mobilising extra manpower and the US’s congressional dithering on supplying Ukraine.”
In the past week, news from the new Russian axis of advance in the Belgorod-Kharkiv region has dominated much of the news cycle. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it is a new offensive by the Russians in an area where they have not conducted significant offensive operations since the September 2022 Ukrainian offensives in that region. Second, the Russians appear to have achieved a measure of tactical surprise and seized a significant portion of Ukrainian territory. At least one Ukrainian commander has been removed since the new Russian Kharkiv offensive commenced.
Russian forces occupied an additional 278 square kilometres between May 9 and 15 in this latest offensive, which represents their largest territorial gains since the end of 2022. The fighting on this new front is also a demonstration of just how stretched the Ukrainians are now, and how the Russians are seeking to maximise their tactical opportunities before Ukrainian manpower and firepower shortfalls are addressed in the coming months.
At the political level, President Zelenskyy this week called out the problems with current Western strategy for this war. In an interview with AFP, he noted that “the West wants the war to end. Period. As soon as possible.” But he went on to state that for Ukraine, “we are in a nonsense situation where the West is afraid that Russia will lose the war. And it does not want Ukraine to lose it.”
He is restating what has been obvious for some time; the West’s strategy for supporting Ukraine is about helping it defend itself but not about the defeat of Russia in Ukraine. This is increasingly difficult to reconcile and must change, as must the resourcing for Ukraine. There are both strategic and moral imperatives for this change in Western strategy and resourcing for the war.
Despite this strategic dilemma for Ukraine and the west, the war goes on. And Ukraine is managing an array of different campaigns to fend of the brutal Russian invasion.
The Ukrainian Campaigns of 2024
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have honed their capacity to plan and execute military campaigns and operations on a wide scale. The Ukrainian campaigns, being executed in the east, north, and south of the nation, in the skies above, in the Black Sea and in the information and cyber domains, possess an inherent complexity that can be difficult to appreciate in their totality.
There are six discernible Ukrainian campaigns being executed at present. These are their defensive land campaigns on seven different axes; the air, missile and drone defensive campaign; the operational and strategic strike campaigns; the training campaign and their strategic influence campaign.
I will explore each of these and provide an overall assessment. We cannot, and must not, judge progress in the war by overfocussing on one Russian axis of advance in one part of Ukraine. An examination of all Ukrainian campaigns is necessary to make better judgements about the trajectory of the war.
The Land Campaigns
Currently, Ukraine is running a defensive campaign against Russian thrusts on seven ground axes of advance. This represents a ‘crescent of fire’ for Ukraine. Fortunately, Ukraine occupies interior lines at the operational level, and will find responding to these marginally easier than Russia will in conducting their advances. The key Russian axes of advance at present are: Belgorod-Kharkiv; Bakhmut; Avdiivka; Kupyansk; Novopavlivka; Robotyne; and,Kherson
One of the more dangerous Russian axes of advance right now is that in the Belgorod-Kharkiv region, which began just over a week ago. At this point, the Russian operation appears to have achieved the following:
It has established a buffer zone in line with Putin’s March 2024 comments.
It has projected to a Russian domestic audience that it has responded the Ukrainian incursions from this region in the past year.
It has supported Russian misinformation campaigns about Ukrainian capacity and the inevitability of Russian victory.
The offensive has forced the Ukrainians to deploy very scarce manpower and firepower reserves to the area, which could create opportunity for the Russians elsewhere in the east and south.
Speaking with reporters during his visit to China last week, Putin was asked if Russia's goal was to capture the city of Kharkiv. Putin described how “there are no such plans today…I said publicly that if this continues, we will be forced to create a security zone, a sanitary zone. So that's what we are doing.”
Of course, relying on the word of Putin is a good way to experience a strategic catastrophe.
Russian momentum here appears to have slowed over the last few days. The Russians may have underestimated Ukrainian capacity to respond in the area and overestimated their own ability to penetrate deeper into Kharkiv, even though they allocated two Army Corps to the operation (the 11th and 44th).
A large part of this force remains uncommitted and might be employed in a subsequent phase of the operation to menace the city of Kharkiv, and potentially undertake another operation to penetrate deeper into Ukraine. This would posture the Russians to hold Kharkiv at threat, increase the potential for artillery fire into the city and potentially provide a launch pad for any future, expanded Russian advance on the city.
Despite the significant advantage Russia has in manpower at present, and its massive dominance in firepower, the recent Russian gains in the northeast and east of Ukraine are not impressive. This indicates that they still have problems with higher level coordination of operations and with the overall quality of their ground forces.
Additionally, there has been recent speculation about a Russian ground offensive on Sumy. This is a city that the Russian 1st Guards Tank Army attempted to seize, and failed, in February 2022. Intelligence chief General Budanov was recently quoted saying that "as for the Sumy region, the Russians actually planned an operation in the Sumy region from the very beginning... but the situation did not allow them to take active actions and start the operation." Whether Russia has the forces to begin such an advance remains to be seen but remains a possibility.
West of Bakhmut, the Russians are making some progress in their advance upon Chasiv Yar. Possibly hoping that reserves in eastern Ukraine will be siphoned off to deal with the Russian advance in the Kharkiv region, Russian forces here as well as on the Avdiivka, Kupyansk and Novopavlivka axes of advance continue to press home attacks. These continue to result in large casualty numbers for the Russians. But even if they lose 1000 thousand soldiers every day, their current monthly recruiting numbers appears to be able to replace these numbers. Ukraine, on the other hand, has much larger challenges in replacing its smaller casualty numbers.
The Air, Missile and Drone Defensive Campaign
Ukraine is continuing its campaign to defend against Russian air, missile, and drone attacks. This campaign, which began on the first evening of the war, has seen constant adaptation by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. They have absorbed multiple short, medium, and long-range Western air defence systems, and integrated these with older Soviet-era systems to produce an effective air defence network.
However, in the past six months, the intercept rates of Russian missiles has declined. Able to intercept over 70 percent of missiles in 2023, this dropped to 60 percent of such attacks in late 2023 and early 2024 and dropped again to around 50 percent for the large-scale Russian strikes against energy infrastructure from March 2024. Drone interceptions, which can use simpler defensive approaches (including soldiers with machine guns on the back of 4x4s) sits around 80 percent.
A couple of factors are driving this. First, the Russians have learned and adapted their tactics for aerial attack over the course of the war. There have been several evolutions in their approach including the large-scale adoption of Shahed drones, and a changing mix of drones and missiles, more complicated attack route planning, and increasing use of harder-to-hit ballistic missiles, which I described in an article about strike operations in the wake of my most recent visit to Ukraine.
As I wrote in that piece:
It appears that Russia has now developed the ability to plan and execute a large-scale air campaign. This was a key capability deficiency at the beginning of the war which it appears to have remediated. It has stepped up production of key missiles and there has been a significant increase in the past six months of glide bombs and Iranian-designed Shahed drones against military and civilian targets.
A second factor has been the growing shortage of interceptors. This has been driven by the six-month delay in approving US military assistance to Ukraine, as well as shortfalls in Soviet era missiles. This has necessitated the retrofitting of Western missiles onto Soviet-era launchers. But with the six-month gap in US assistance, again, even Soviet launcher systems ran short of missiles.
A final driver is that the Russians have stepped up the quantity of attacks just as the Ukrainian interceptor stocks have declined. The Russians fired an average of 423 missiles and drones per day in the six-month period to October 2023. In the latest six-month period, this has increased to over 600 per month.
While US aid has begun to flow again, the focus in the short term will be replenishment of interceptor missiles. But at some point, Ukraine will need additional radar and launcher systems to cover more of the country if it is to significantly reduce the capacity of the Russians to attack their country’s infrastructure.
Recent commitments of air defence batteries from nations like Germany will help. But more will be required if Ukraine is to ‘close the skies’ to Russian attacks from the air.
For those who want to read more on this, excellent recent articles have been published by the Wall Street Journal and the Institute for the Study of War.
That concludes part one of my May campaign update. Part 2 will be published shortly. It will examine operational and strategic strike campaigns, strategic influence and training.