WATERSHED: IS RUSSIA FACING ITS BIGGEST NIGHTMARE?

This war has been one of the most communications driven conflicts in mankind’s bloody history. The near instantaneous ability to see the entire battlefield and react almost as quickly is why both sides have found themselves in a near stalemate. The lines of control barely move. Russia uses manpower to bully its way forward almost to the point of a meter at a time. Ukraine uses drones to slaughter that manpower in a way nobody even began to consider as possible four years ago.

So when one side decides to remove one of the arms of its communication through the Telegram network because it doesn’t like the loss of informational control it cedes to milbloggers and the military in general, as they describe the deprivations of their own army and its failings, let alone that of the government, you have to wonder if they’re losing the plot to paranoia after all.

Even more so when they remove that access just after having lost the one thing that the Russian army was infinitely more reliant upon than anyone had perhaps truly realized. The loss of Starlink to Russia is actually verging on catastrophic.

True command and control has been running through the Starlink system – an entirely illegal co-opting of the system that for his own reasons Elon Musk permitted to continue. Until Poland’s foreign minister in conjunction with the new Ukrainian Defence Minister, Budanov, a younger man able to talk to Musk in a way he ‘gets’, pointed out that SpaceX who owns Starlink, is about to have an IPO potentially valued at over $1 trillion. Investors would not be happy if they knew it was supporting Russias campaign of war crimes against Ukrainian civilians and aiding and abetting an illegal war of aggression. Musk agreed to shut the Russians down by using a whitelist system.

Ukraine would provide all of its systems ID’s and anything not on that list would be shut out. Russia lost Starlink inside 36 hours. Nothing was working. The result on the front was immediate. Attacks dropped off, the Starlink controlled Russian strike drones vanished.

In a war where little changes very quickly on the front because of the all pervasive nature of the intelligence gathering, that’s fed at light speed into the command and control brains of both sides, when both sides are using an effectively bulletproof communications system – the same system indeed, and one loses it? Its absolutely fundamental to the way the war is being fought.

Russia simply does not have alternatives. There is no Russian system that can do what Starlink does on this scale, and replicating it would take years. Russia, largely because of a mix of incompetence, budget cuts and corruption, managed to destroy its only operating space launch base at Baikonar last November during the launch of Soyuz MS-28. The Gazprom satellite system is tiny and next to useless and was never designed for this.

No amount of crowd funding Chinese radios and botched up systems is going to change this. Russia doesn’t have a unified all-purpose comms system – an astonishing oversight in some ways but not exactly surprising with what we have seen from them this past four years. That puts Ukraine in a shockingly advantageous position.

If I was C-in-C and you walked into my office and told me that the enemy’s entire comms system backbone had ceased operating permanently and that they were no longer in full control of their operations, I would have leapt out of my chair and been planning an offensive so fast my boots would catch fire. And almost out of nowhere there are increasing reports that on large parts of the front the Ukrainians have begun to move against Russian positions.

They have to do it. They have no choice. No military commander in his right mind would risk missing this opportunity. The chance to inflict a defeat on the Russian army and send some of it packing, maybe even a rout in some sectors – or better still, mass surrenders Amy be just down the line. We know how broken much of the soldiery are.

If the Air Force and every other resource can be scrambled with the army to set the front line alight, the opportunity to strike a meaningful blow that can actually achieve something is there before them. Is it risky, of course it is, but some times you have to take that risk, you simply have to.

And you know the Russians are squirming when they’re asking their agents in Ukraine to do anything and everything to get Russian Starlinks onto the whitelist – offering 10,000 Hyrivnas to anyone who does so – they’d be idiots but there’s always someone willing to sell out their country for money, ask Nigel Farage.

The fact that there’s enough information to say that Ukraine is launching a counter offensive is one thing, that they have a golden opportunity is unquestionable. That they’re keeping it quiet is understandable.

It’s not going to stop the Russians using many of their drones – they just won’t have the means of processing data and making local tactical or wider strategic decisions or coordinate them – especially with artillery and the now standard 200km range glide bombs.

We know that the Ukrainians are conducting operations around the Zaporhizia region, Hulaiapole, Pokrovsk and Kupiansk. Russia has been pushing in Sumy taking some small villages. But these aren’t going to change the wider war. If Ukraine can crack even one front line and force a breakthrough, then we might see a major change in the way this war proceeds.

So, where will this go, how will it end? We cannot know and it will only become clear when Ukraine decides to tell us or it leaks out. We must hope for the best, prey they know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. This could be the beginning of the end. We can only hope.

The Analyst

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