UKRAINE HOLDS BACK RUSSIAN OFFENSIVES

It’s fair to say that Russia has so far failed to impress with its summer offensive. It has chosen key areas and seemingly failed to get any of them off the ground. Sizable attacks for this stage of the war contain maybe fifteen armoured vehicles, some of which are little more than a contraption of some kind intended to defend it from drone attacks.

These armoured ‘thrusts’ are usually eradicated as soon as they appear. Russia has the edge with fibre optic drones at the moment but it’s rapidly diminishing and the advantage is largely range related. They can fly around 12km, Ukrainians around 5km. However Ukraine’s ability to design, trial and put into production updated types is so fast such differences don’t last more than a week or so.

One of the new secret weapons for troops is a pair of scissors, to cut the fibre optic cables. Even in combat zones troops are becoming concerned that the trees in wooded areas are so full of fibre cables running like a dense spider web in the canopy, they might soon impair the very movement the drones rely on. Between them both sides are using some 3,000,000km of fibre optic cables a month. It’s everywhere – in fields it’s so think at times you can’t walk through it, tree canopy’s are criss-crossed. Nobody is thinking of the long term consequences of all this super fine glass on the environment, there’s a war to be fought.

The Russians have a logistical problem. This much is very clear.

The loss of support trucks and vehicles is shocking. They can’t possibly build enough to cope with daily losses that for years have run in the 50-200 per day range.

The concentration points for Russian soldiers are as much as 15-20km from the front, and they mostly have to walk. The level of transport available is shockingly mediocre – even when it exists.

That leaves troops exposed for lengthy periods to artillery and mostly drone attack. In some areas such as Lyman, where the Russians have gotten over the Sheravets river, they then have to get over the river pretty much on their own, and then make their way to the front lines. It’s a high risk activity that results in dire casualties. Unsurprisingly few make it.

Russia’s artillery superiority has long gone. They have only enough when they make it a matter of principle to concentrate their efforts. For the most part the artillery is old and dated D-30 field guns from the 1950/60’s. New artillery is incredibly rare and as Ukraine takes out an average of 32 pieces per day – often higher – it’s not like the factories can produce anything like that – in fact they don’t even try. The industrial backbone that held up the Soviet era war machine has long crumbled to dust.

And this seems to be the story across the frontline. In Sumy 50-80,000 men were allegedly assembled and they made it just 3Km over the border where they remain stuck. There hasn’t been a major Russian advance or breakthrough with the exception of finally re-taking the occupied territory in Kursk.

Wherever we look along the front, Ukraine is holding the Russians off and making them pay dearly for every last minute they spend there. They don’t get everything their own way, but Russia is fighting an uphill battle now, pouring men almost on drip feed into the meat grinder.

I was watching a translation about a Russian commander complaining they had found what they presumed were missing men. Because there is no food or water catering support and front line troops are virtually scavengers, one of them had killed the other and eaten him over the course of a week. He then died from what appears to be rotten human flesh he hadn’t cooked sufficiently well. When your troops are so poorly supplied they resort to cannibalism, you surely have to ask questions? But these are Russians, so why would you?

Nothing tells you how bad logistics and troop support have become as a story like that. We know it’s always been bad, we know corruption runs rife, but it’s worse now than it was at the start. Nothing appears to be improving. In fact other than the quality and quantity of Russian drones, all I can see or hear is a list of slowly deteriorating Russian fighting strengths.

Does it matter if they can recruit 89,000 men a month when the loss rate is around 65,000 a month or more? They play this as if its a numbers game and as long as more fill the places of the dead, that’s all it will take.

Despite recruitment, despite reserves, the general consensus is that Russia is incapable of more that its currently undertaking.

Putin sits there regurgitating Hitlerian statements reworded to suit his own agenda, ‘wherever a Russian soldier steps, it becomes ours’, but he’s got no idea what it’s like on Russia’s frontline. He isn’t winning this war, not even close.

Behind the lines, Ukrainian saboteurs and drones destroy fuel trains, blow bridges, disrupt the rail network. The factories that support the war are now top-tier targets.

What does Russia do? Hit cities and apartment blocks. That won’t change the war, it will just breed loathing and resentment. Ukraine’s military campaigns will eventually win it the war, hard as that may be to believe right now.

Whatever Russia had in the way of Soviet era reserves has largely gone. Its manufacturing industry is not capable of matching losses let alone improving on them. In many ways it’s industrially spent, and what it is spending money on is the one thing that will not let it win. This is so Germany in 1944-45. Huge resources were being spent on V-1 and V-2 missiles to hit civilians and it made zero difference to the war. Those resources spent on the Me-262 and the bolstering the army might just have made a difference to have stretched the war out – lost as it clearly was. Putin still has the option but not the means, and at this stage I suspect he too, is too late to the party. He can sit there dreaming but he isn’t getting what he wants. Every day is another day to Ukraine actually turning this tide. It took five and a half years to destroy Nazi Germany, it may take as long to defeat Russia in Ukraine, but each day makes me believe even more strongly it’s going to happen.

The Analyst

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