Supplied with NATO weapons and Western intelligence, Ukraine has launched a counter-offensive against its Russian occupiers, and it is going extremely well, so far. Foreign Policy reports, ‘They Are Pushing Everywhere’: Kyiv Goes on the Offensive:
After weeks of stalled fighting in and around the eastern Donbas region, Ukrainian troops began pushing Russian forces back from the country’s second-largest city of Kharkiv six days ago, threatening to cut vital supply lines for the Kremlin’s assault. And videos posted to social media showed that the snap offensive wasn’t just racking up Russian casualties but rows of prisoners.
NBC News reports: Russia withdraws from key areas in Ukraine’s east after surprise offensive:
Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a Telegram post Saturday that “a decision was made to regroup” some of its troops from the Balakliya and Izyum areas — Izyum had been a major base for Moscow’s troops — and transfer them to Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
The move was made “in order to achieve the stated goals of the special military operation to liberate Donbas,’” the ministry said, referring to the industrial heartland in Ukraine’s east that became the focal point of the Kremlin’s war after it was forced to give up on its assault on the capital, Kyiv.
The Ukrainian military has recaptured nearly 300 square miles of territory in a lightning dual counteroffensive in the south and the east of the country, a top Ukrainian general said Thursday, marking perhaps the most significant advance in the war in months.
The Ukrainian push on two fronts, striking both east toward Kharkiv and south toward Kherson, has put Russian forces on the back foot. Russia moved troops south when the big punch came in the east. “My understanding is that they are pushing everywhere,” said Tymofiy Mylovanov, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
But the quick succession of military advances by Ukraine in the past several days, including into Balakliya and Shevchenkove—perhaps the largest of the war since Russian troops were pushed out of the Kyiv suburbs in late spring—has surprised some of the higher-ups in Kyiv, who expected the lightning offensive to move more slowly. On Wednesday, Colin Kahl, the U.S. Defense Department’s policy chief, referred to the Ukrainian moves as an “offensive,” the first time the Biden administration has used that word.
“They’ve done a lot of damage to the Russian forces” near Kherson, Kahl said at a defense conference near Washington. Ukraine’s armed forces said on Thursday that they had recaptured 20 settlements in the Kharkiv region from Russia. The push was made possible, in part, by long-range U.S. artillery.
“This is Ukraine cleverly spotting thin Russian lines with bad opportunities for redeployment, coupled with new, longer-range capabilities that can impact Russian forces,” said Oscar Jonsson, a researcher at the Swedish Defence University. The attacks also gave Ukrainian forces hope of retaking Izyum, captured by Russia in the early days of the April offensive in the Donbas region, and of cutting off the major supply junction at Kupyansk.
Yet just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced plans to mobilize 137,000 more troops by January—likely in a bid to stem troop losses in Ukraine—Ukrainian officials believe that the defenders have been able to take advantage by seizing on a moment to attack thinner Russian forces in Kharkiv just as they have shuttled in more reinforcements toward Kherson, which has been effectively ranged with U.S.- and European-provided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems.
“It seems like the Russians can’t hold the defense for the whole theater,” said Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker from Odesa. “They need to increase their presence somewhere. They need to take forces from somewhere.”
Goncharenko, a member of the opposition in Ukraine’s parliament, said Russia has also backfilled its ranks near Kharkiv with less experienced troops, such as those in Rosgvardia, Russia’s rough equivalent to the U.S. National Guard. But others said the Russian manpower shortages may be even more dire. “There are villages in eastern Ukraine where they have recruited [forced conscription] everyone,” said Mylovanov, the advisor to Zelensky. “No one is left.”
The advances also show Ukraine’s increasing urgency to reconquer ground ceded to the Russians after Putin launched his full-scale invasion in February before a brutal winter sets in that is likely to bring heavy snowfall throughout the country and send temperatures below zero. Ukrainian officials told Foreign Policy that they are not eager to leave the liberation of Kherson, one of Russia’s biggest strategic prizes so far in the war, until after the winter. Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, said Ukrainian forces are likely to be knocking on the door of the city within the week.
“They are literally running away,” Ustinova said.
But even with $675 million more in U.S. military aid heading to Ukraine starting Thursday, including more artillery and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems that have pounded Russian lines in the south, top Ukrainian officials are still complaining about shortages in ammunition. Officials said artillery shortages are most acute with 152 mm Soviet-era artillery, which has become impossible to source and which the United States and other Western allies are trying to backfill with NATO-standard 155 mm artillery.
But Ukrainian military officials still worry that they are vastly outranged by Russian weapons, despite Ukrainian attacks on Crimean supply hubs last month. In a blog post published on Wednesday, Ukraine’s top general, Valeriy Zaluzhny, and parliamentarian Mykhailo Zabrodsky urged the United States and other powers to more quickly provide long-range weapons such as the Army Tactical Missile System, which the Biden administration has yet to send to Ukraine for fear of provoking Russia into further escalating the war.
Despite the Ukrainian gains, Zaluzhny and Zabrodsky said they expect the war to drag into 2023 and that Russia could try to push on Izyum and Bakhmut in the east or advance farther toward Zaporizhzhia in the south. “Success in the south, provided it is used quickly and correctly, can have a double effect,” they wrote. “The prospects for capturing Mykolaiv and Odesa are quite real.”
Yet there also appears to be a consistent theme of Ukraine’s offensive: using long-range attacks to make it difficult for Russian troops to resupply themselves. Zaluzhny confirmed that the August attack on a Russian air base in Crimea was carried out by missiles and that it could mark a target for a later Ukrainian offensive. And other Ukrainian officials see the current pattern as building up to that.
“It’s a consistent strategy of weakening the supply lines and degrading the military capacity of Russia,” Mylovanov said. “So I think if they keep doing it, they’re going to make the Russian force collapse.”
Back in July, “the chief of Britain’s intelligence service [predicted] that Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine was likely to “run out of steam” in the coming weeks, amid shortages of material and manpower, as Moscow’s invasion is about to enter its sixth month.” Russia to ‘run out of steam’ soon in Ukraine: U.K. intelligence chief. U.S. Russia expert Fionna Hill agreed. Fiona Hill: Putin’s Running Out of Time (excerpt):
[P]utin, himself, may also be running against time limits. He wants that we are the ones who are on the backfoot, always wondering about whether we can make it, whether we can persevere. This is part of an information war. This is the kind of messaging that’s really coming out of the Kremlin.
The reason that I want to stress this is because of the magical date of 2024. We know from polling that [U.S. President Joe] Biden is getting no boost whatsoever for his commitment to Ukraine, although support for Ukraine remains fairly robust at the popular level in the United States as it does in Europe. It is actually hurting the United States and other Western politicians because of inflation and the pressures on energy and food security.
But Putin also has to get reelected in 2024. He launched this special military operation, saying it would be over in a matter of days. But this has dragged on for Russia as well. And all of the messaging from Putin saying, “We haven’t begun yet. We haven’t hit the tip of the iceberg of the carnage and destruction,” is messaging so that we will pull back because he is also concerned about the implications for the stability of his own system. By the time we get out beyond those magical depths of the winter and into next year, the impacts on the Russian economy from all of the sanctions that have been taken, irrespective of high oil and gas prices, will start to be felt.
A recent Yale study finds that economic sanctions “are catastrophically crippling the Russian economy.”
Last month, Politico reported Ukraine has hobbled Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Could it turn the tide of the war?:
Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was once considered central to Vladimir Putin’s attempted conquest of Ukraine.
But that fleet and its accompanying air wing have been battered by innovative Ukrainian missile and drone attacks, turning the once-feared force into something of an afterthought in Europe’s largest war in seven decades.
[K]yiv has seized the initiative as missile strikes and mysterious explosions have wreaked havoc on the Russian fleet, sinking several vessels — including its flagship cruiser the Moskva — and devastating its Crimea-based air wing in a dramatic attack this month.
While the Black Sea Fleet has been strong enough to hold the small Ukrainian navy at bay, it has never been the pride of the Russian navy.
[T]he Crimea-based fleet was expected to play a large role in holding Ukrainian forces in the south to defend against an expected amphibious assault that never came, while shoring up the occupied peninsula. While Russian submarines do fire into Ukraine from time to time, the fleet hasn’t lived up to the expectations set at the start of the war and has settled into what amounts to a defensive crouch either in port or well offshore to avoid Ukrainian attack.
Since the spring, the Black Sea Fleet’s problems have added up, the result of poor leadership, aging equipment, and a hubris the Ukrainians have been only too happy to exploit.
The string of military disasters led to the firing of the fleet’s commander, Adm. Igor Osipov.
That resistance has been fierce. Ukraine’s domestically developed Neptune anti-ship missile, which sank the Moskva, and Harpoon missiles donated by Denmark that sank a Russian resupply ship this spring, have forced the fleet to stay well offshore, and out of the fight, for months.
[B]oth on land and at sea, “Russian forces are much more vulnerable than they thought they were,” before the war, a senior Defense Department official told reporters this month.
According to British estimates, Russia has already lost approximately one-third of the 190,000-strong invasion force assembled in February 2022. The Russian military is now using conscripts and freed prisoners to replenish its heavy manpower losses, and providing them little or no training before throwing them into the frontlines. Ukraine is no longer fighting a professional discliplined army. Russia has also been forced to turn to Iran for surveillance drones, and to North Korea for weapons and ammunition. The sanctions are crippling the Russian war machine.
What we are learning is that Russia is a third-rate military, but with nukes – its ace up the sleeve. Never forget this.
Taras Kuzio wrote at the Atlantic Council, Vladimir Putin is running out of options to avoid defeat in Ukraine (excerpt):
Russia’s crippling military losses and the practical limitations of a possible mobilization mean that Putin’s Ukraine war is fast becoming unwinnable against an opponent which enjoys high morale and unprecedented international support. As Ukrainian forces receive further weapons from the West and continue to launch successful counterattacks, we can expect to see the slow but steady degradation of Russian forces. Eventually, this may lead to a 1917-style collapse as morale within the Russian army continues to plummet.
The failure of his Ukrainian adventure will have disastrous domestic consequences for Putin personally. It will shatter the myth of the all-powerful dictator and lead to calls for dramatic political change within Russia. The exact nature of the ensuing crisis is impossible to predict, but it already looks highly unlikely that Putin will remain president for life.
Maybe Vlad and Donald will seek sanctuary in exile in North Korea.
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The Daily Beast reports, “Surrender Fever Sweeps Through Putin’s Troops After Russian Collapse in North”, https://www.thedailybeast.com/putin-troops-surrender-fever-sweeps-through-ranks-in-ukraine-after-russian-forces-collapse?ref=home
A Ukrainian Armed Forces spokeswoman, Natalia Humeniuk, reported Monday that a number of “separate” Russian units around the southern city of Kherson had begun suing for peace and were “trying to negotiate with the Ukrainians on surrender and transfer under the auspices of international law.”
With morale seemingly at rock-bottom in Vladimir Putin’s exhausted, hollowed-out army, her claim was entirely credible. The question is how many Russian troops in the Kherson pocket might follow suit and what happens to Putin’s war if his forces in Kherson melt away or give up like those in Kharkiv and the Donetsk region. Could the experts who predicted a long and grinding war over the coming winter, and beyond, be proven wrong?
The Kharkiv offensive, which has seen Ukrainian forces recapture thousands of square kilometers of territory in just a few days, has been a stunning success. Ukrainian forces are said to have reclaimed a further 20 settlements on Monday as Russian forces desert ever greater swaths of occupied land and flee back across the border. Soon Ukraine, whose forces have already reached the Russian border at some points, will be threatening areas held by Russia since Putin’s first invasion of the Donbas in 2014.
The Guardian newspaper reported over the weekend on how the long-rumored Kherson offensive, and the way it was repeatedly foreshadowed by Ukrainian officials, had been a “big special disinformation operation” designed to lure the Russians into reinforcing positions around Kherson. Once that had happened, Ukraine unleashed its newly acquired HIMARs rockets on the bridges across the Dnipro, cutting off the Kherson grouping from reinforcements and supplies.
[B]ut while the Kherson offensive was not quite a complete “feint”—fighting did pick up pace—the real action was about to unfold hundreds of kilometers away, where a well-armed, well-trained Ukrainian force launched a surprise assault on poorly defended Russian lines, capturing key strategic towns such as Balakliya, Kupiansk, and Izium over the space of a few days. Hundreds of Russians were killed and thousands reportedly captured in the assault.
[T]he Russian collapse has thrown Putin’s TV propagandists and warmongers into chaos, uncertain who should take the blame, and Putin himself refuses to acknowledge the crisis.
The New York Times reports, “As Russians Retreat, Putin Is Criticized by Hawks Who Trumpeted His War”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/world/europe/russia-ukraine-retreat-putin.html
As Russian forces hastily retreated in northeastern Ukraine on Saturday in one of their most embarrassing setbacks of the war, President Vladimir V. Putin was at a park in Moscow, presiding over the grand opening of a Ferris wheel.
The split-screen contrast was stunning, even for some of Mr. Putin’s loudest backers. And it underscored a growing rift between the Kremlin and the invasion’s most fervent cheerleaders. For the cheerleaders, Russia’s retreat appeared to confirm their worst fears: that senior Russian officials were so concerned with maintaining a business-as-usual atmosphere back home that they had failed to commit the necessary equipment and personnel to fight a long war against a determined enemy.
“You’re throwing a billion-ruble party,” one pro-Russian blogger wrote in a widely circulated post on Saturday, referring to the Putin-led celebrations in Moscow commemorating the 875th anniversary of the city’s founding. “What is wrong with you? Not at the time of such a horrible failure.”
Even as Moscow celebrated, he wrote, the Russian Army was fighting without enough night vision goggles, flak jackets, first-aid kits or drones. A few hundred miles away, Ukrainian forces retook the Russian military stronghold of Izium, continuing their rapid advance across the northeast and igniting a dramatic new phase in the war.
The outrage from Russian hawks on Saturday showed that even as Mr. Putin had succeeded in eliminating just about all of the liberal and pro-democracy opposition in Russia’s domestic politics, he still faced the risk of discontent from the conservative end of the political spectrum. For the moment, there was little indication that these hawks would turn on Mr. Putin as a result of Ukraine’s seemingly successful counteroffensive; but analysts said that their increasing readiness to criticize the military leadership publicly pointed to simmering discontent within the Russian elite.
“Most of these people are in shock and did not think that this could happen,” Dmitri Kuznets, who analyzes the war for the Russian-language news outlet Meduza, said in a phone interview. “Most of them are, I think, genuinely angry.”
The Kremlin, as usual, tried to minimize the setbacks. The defense ministry described the retreat as a decision “to regroup” its troops, even though the ministry said a day earlier that it was moving to reinforce its defensive positions in the region. The authorities in Moscow carried on with their festive weekend, with fireworks and state television showing hundreds lined up to ride the new, 460-foot-tall Ferris wheel.
But online, Russia’s failures were in plain sight — underscoring the startling role that pro-Russian military bloggers on the social network Telegram have played in shaping the narrative of the war. While the Kremlin controls the television airwaves in Russia and has blocked access to Instagram and Facebook, Telegram remains freely accessible and is filled with posts and videos from supporters and opponents of the war alike.
The widely followed pro-war bloggers … are divulging far more detailed — and, analysts say, accurate — information about the battlefield than the Russian Defense Ministry is, which they say is underestimating the enemy and withholding bad news from the public.
One of the bloggers, Yuri Podolyaka, who is from Ukraine but moved to Сrimea following its annexation in 2014, told his 2.3 million Telegram followers on Friday that if the military continued to play down its battlefield setbacks, Russians would “cease to trust the Ministry of Defense and soon the government as a whole.”
[By] this weekend, some analysts estimated that the territory retaken by Ukraine amounted to about 1,000 square miles, a potential turning point in what had become a war of attrition this summer.
“It’s time to punish the commanders who allowed these kinds of things,” Maksim Fomin, a pro-Russian blogger from eastern Ukraine, said in a video published on Friday, claiming that Russian forces did not even try to resist as Ukraine’s military swept forward this week.
[A]mong some bloggers, the anger over the Russian military’s mistakes reached a fever pitch on Saturday. One called Russia’s retreat a “catastrophe,” while others said that it had left the residents who collaborated with Russian forces at the mercy of Ukrainian troops — potentially undermining the credibility of the occupying authorities all across the territory that Russia still holds.
And while the Kremlin still maintains that the invasion is merely a “special military operation,” several bloggers insisted on Saturday that Russia was, in fact, fighting a full-fledged war — not just against Ukraine, but against a united West that is backing Kyiv.
The stunned fury reflects how some analysts believe many in the Russian elite view the war: a campaign rife with incompetence, conducted on the cheap, that can only be won if Mr. Putin mobilizes the nation onto a war footing and declares a draft.
“I am sure that they reflect the opinion of their sources and the people they know and work with,” Mr. Kuznets said. “I think the biggest group among these people believes that it is necessary to fight harder and carry out a mobilization.”
Both Western and Russian analysts said that Mr. Putin would need a draft to sharply expand the size of his invading force. But he appears determined to resist such a measure, which could shatter the passivity with which much of the Russian public has treated the war. In August, 48 percent of Russians told the independent pollster Levada that they were paying little or no attention to the events in Ukraine.
As a result, analysts say, Mr. Putin faces no good options. Escalating a war whose domestic support may turn out to be superficial could stir domestic unrest, while continuing retreats on the battlefield could spur a backlash from hawks who have bought into the Kremlin narrative that Russia is fighting “Nazis” for its very survival.
Ever since Russia retreated in April from its attempt to capture Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s goals in the war have been unclear, disorienting Mr. Putin’s supporters, said Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
“The Ukrainians’ war effort is obvious, it’s understandable, whereas on the Russian side, it was always a question of: What is Russia doing?” Mr. Lee said in a phone interview. “The goals aren’t clear, and how they achieve those goals isn’t clear. If you’re fighting a war and you’re not sure what the ultimate goal is, you’re going to be quite frustrated about that.”
Stars and Stripes reports, “Amid Ukraine’s startling gains, liberated villages describe Russian troops dropping rifles and fleeing”, https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2022-09-11/ukraine-kharkiv%C2%A0russian-retreat-7297297.html
ZALIZNYCHNE, Ukraine — In the end, the Russians fled any way they could on Friday, on stolen bicycles, disguised as locals, abandoned by their units. Hours after Ukrainian soldiers poured into the area, hundreds of Russian soldiers encamped in this village were gone, leaving behind stunned residents to face the ruins of 28 weeks of occupation.
“They just dropped rifles on the ground,” Olena Matvienko said Sunday as she stood, still disoriented, in a village littered with ammo crates and torched vehicles, including a Russian tank loaded on a flatbed. The first investigators from Kharkiv had just pulled in to collect the bodies of civilians shot by Russians, some that have been lying exposed for months.
“I can’t believe that we went through something like this in the 21st century,” Matvienko said, tears welling.
The hasty flight of Russians from the village was part of a stunning new reality that took the world by surprise over the weekend: The invaders of February are on the run in some parts of Ukraine they seized early in the conflict.
On Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that Russian forces had retreated from the Balakliia and Izyum area in the Kharkiv region, saying a decision was taken to “regroup.”
On Sunday, Ukraine’s commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny, said Ukrainian forces had retaken more than 1,864 miles of territory, a claim that could not be independently verified, adding that they were advancing from the east, south and north.
“Ukrainian forces have penetrated Russian lines to a depth of up to 70 kilometers in some places,” reported the Institute for the Study of War, which closely tracks the conflict. They have captured more territory in the past five days “than Russian forces have captured in all their operations since April,” its campaign assessment posted Sunday said.
The apparent collapse of the Russian forces has caused shock waves in Moscow. The leader of the Chechen republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, who sent his own fighters to Ukraine, said if there are not immediate changes in Russia’s conduct of the invasion, “he would have to contact the leadership of the country to explain to them the real situation on the ground.”
The Russian Defense Ministry’s own daily briefing Sunday featured a map showing Russians retreating behind the Oskil river on the outskirts of the Kherson region.
Evidence of the Ukrainian gains continued to emerge Sunday, with images of Ukrainian soldiers raising a flag in central Izyum, after it was abandoned by Russian forces, and similar images from other towns and villages such as Kindrashivka, Chkalovske and Velyki Komyshuvakha.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declined to elaborate on his army’s next moves, except to say in a CNN interview, “We will not be standing still. We will be slowly, gradually moving forward.”
[It] is not over by any means, military experts warned. Russia still holds about a fifth of Ukraine and continued heavy shelling over the weekend across several regions. And nothing guarantees that Ukraine can keep recaptured areas secure. “A counteroffensive liberates territory and after that you have to control it and be ready to defend it,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov cautioned in an interview with the Financial Times.
But as Ukrainian soldiers continued Sunday to sweep deeper into territory that had been held by Russia, more of them were willing to see the campaign as a possible turning point.
[T]he residents were scared of the Russians, several village residents said. But they almost pitied them in their scramble to escape the recent Ukrainian onslaught.
Half of the soldiers fled in their vehicles in the first hours of the offensive, they said. Those stranded grew desperate. Some residents overheard their radio pleas to unit commanders for someone to come get them.
“They said, ‘You’re on your own,’ ” Matvienko recounted. “They came into our houses to take clothes so the drones wouldn’t see them in uniforms. They took our bicycles. Two of them pointed guns at my ex-husband until he handed them his car keys.”
Buoyant Ukrainian officials said they would no longer negotiate a peace deal that would let Russia keep an occupying presence in any territory, even in Crimea and part of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by Russia or Russian-backed separatists for years.
“The point of no return has passed,” Reznikov, the defense minister, said at the Yalta European Strategy summit in Kyiv on Saturday.