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Tag: Russian losses

  • Easily In Range Of Ukrainian Artillery, Kherson’s Airport Was A Death Trap For Russian Troops

    Easily In Range Of Ukrainian Artillery, Kherson’s Airport Was A Death Trap For Russian Troops

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    Three days after the Kremlin ordered its starving, battered forces to retreat from the right bank of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, Ukrainian troops liberated the international airport in the oblast.

    No one should be surprised at what the Ukrainians discovered at Chornobaivka Airport, on the northern edge of Kherson city six miles north of the river.

    The airport for months had been a veritable shooting gallery for Ukrainian artillery. And many of the victims of the months-long bombardment—wrecked tanks, trucks and radars—still were at the Chornobaivka when the Ukrainian vanguard entered the airport.

    Invading Russian troops captured Chornobaivka Airport on Feb. 27, just three days into Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. The Russian armed forces converted the airport into a major base for the 8th and 49th Combined Arms Armies and other formations comprising the Russian garrison in Kherson Oblast.

    Helicopter regiments set up shop on the tarmac. Engineers dug revetments for scores of armored vehicles. There were huge supply dumps. Headquarters facilities hosted several top generals and their staffs.

    There was one problem, however. Chornobaivka Airport lies just 23 miles south of Mykolaiv. And the Russian offensive north of Kherson ground to a halt well short of Mykolaiv, leaving the airport firmly within range of the Ukrainian army’s artillery and rockets—to say nothing of the Ukrainian air force’s TB-2 drones.

    So that huge concentration of troops and vehicles at Chornobaivka Airport became arguably the biggest, and easiest, target for Ukrainian gunners for six months until the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive that ultimately liberated Kherson Oblast right of the Dnipro.

    The first Ukrainian strike on the airport—by TB-2s firing laser-guided missiles—came with hours of Russian forces occupying the facility. Two weeks later, Ukrainian artillery bombarded the tarmac. A week after that, on March 16, Ukrainian gunners hit the tarmac again and destroyed at least seven Russian helicopters.

    After the March 16 raid, the Russians pulled their aircraft from the airport. But ground forces remained at the airport. And in strikes on March 18 and March 24, Ukrainian gunners killed two generals—one each from the 8th and 49th CAAs. “We caught them again in Chornobaivka,” chortled Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

    And so it went for the next five months. Every couple of weeks, Chornobaivka Airport erupted in flames. But Russian troops clung to the airport just like they clung to the rest of Kherson Oblast. Even as their front-line strength bled away and their logistics frayed.

    After months of preparatory bombardment, Ukrainian brigades in late August launched a broad counteroffensive across the Kherson front. The Ukrainians steadily advanced, taking a lot of casualties but likely inflicting far more casualties on the exhausted Russians.

    The end, when it came, was swift. The Kremlin on Wednesday ordered its forces right of the Dnipro to consolidate on the opposite bank of the wide river. That meant leaving Kherson city and Chornobaivka Airport.

    Two days later, the Russians were gone.

    The Ukrainian troops who cautiously entered the airport on Saturday discovered a veritable junkyard of wrecked Russian equipment, including at least one T-62 tank, several BMD fighting vehicles, Ural trucks, two Msta-B howitzers, a Buk air-defense system, a Zhitel radio-jammer and a Podlet-K1 radar.

    There also were two unflyable Ukrainian army helicopters—an Mi-8 and an Mi-24—that the Ukrainians had abandoned at the airport back in February and still were intact, if badly in need of maintenance, nine months later.

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    David Axe, Forbes Staff

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  • Fly Low, Get Aggressive—How Ukrainian Pilots Fought The Russian Air Force To A Standstill

    Fly Low, Get Aggressive—How Ukrainian Pilots Fought The Russian Air Force To A Standstill

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    For all its profound faults, the Russian air force has a lot of new and highly sophisticated fighter jets. They have better sensors, weapons and defensive gear than the Ukrainian air force’s own, less numerous, fighters do.

    And yet, Ukrainian pilots in their older, cruder jets fought Russian pilots to a standstill in the early weeks of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. They did it by flying low and being more aggressive.

    Russia’s roughly 200 Sukhoi Su-30SM and Su-35S fighters, none older than a few years, “completely outclass Ukrainian air force fighter aircraft on a technical level,” Justin Bronk, Nick Reynolds and Jack Watling from the London-based Royal United Services Institute wrote in their definitive study of the Ukraine air war.

    The Su-30 and Su-35 both are derivatives of the classic, twin-engine Sukhoi Su-27, but with improved electronics and weaponry. The big difference between the two is that the Su-30 seats two. The Su-35 is a single-seat plane.

    The Russian air force around five years ago began acquiring the Su-30SM and Su-35S to replace hundreds of Soviet-vintage Su-27s and buy time for Sukhoi to continue developing and producing the new—and troubled—Su-57 stealth fighter.

    The Russian air force has deployed most of its Su-30s and Su-35s for the war in Ukraine, staging them at air bases in southwestern Russia, Belarus and occupied Crimea. At the start of the wider war in late February, the Su-30 and Su-35 regiments—along with regiments flying Sukhoi Su-34 bombers—surged their jets into the air, racking up around 140 sorties per day, according to Bronk, Reynolds and Watling.

    “Su-35S and Su-30SM fighters flew numerous high-altitude [combat air patrols] at around 30,000 feet in support of the medium-altitude Russian strike aircraft operating widely during the first three days,” the RUSI analysts explained.

    They outmatched—and also outnumbered—the Ukrainian air force’s 30-year-old Su-27s and MiG-29s. The Russian jets’ Vympel R-77-1 air-to-air missiles were a key advantage. The R-77-1 boasts active radar guidance. A pilot briefly turns on his radar, designates a target, fires a missile then switches off his radar and takes evasive action. The missile then uses its own internal radar to guide it to its target.

    By contrast, the Ukrainians’ older Vympal R-27R/ER missiles are semi-active, meaning a pilot must continuously illuminate a target as the missile closes in. He can’t go silent. He can’t turn away. What’s more, the R-77-1 ranges as far as 60 miles. The R-27’s own range usually maxes out at 50 miles.

    So Russian pilots were shooting at Ukrainian pilots from farther away than the Ukrainian pilots could shoot back—and were also capable of much more effective evasive maneuvers than the Ukrainians could pull off.

    As a result, Russian regiments quickly shot down several Ukrainian Su-27s and MiG-29s. Each loss eating away at the Ukrainian air force’s pre-war inventory of around 30 Su-27s and 50 or so MiG-29s.

    Yes, the Ukrainians eventually would replace many of these losses by restoring old, once-unflyable airframes and recalling pilots from retirement. In those heady early weeks, however, it might’ve seemed like the Russian air force was going to drive the Ukrainian air force to extinction.

    But that’s not how it turned out. Ukrainian pilots adopted new tactics—and held their own, Bronk, Reynolds and Watling wrote. “Deeply unequal radar and missile performance compared with Russian fighters, as well as being tactically outnumbered by up to 15 to two in some cases, forced Ukrainian pilots to fly extremely low to try to exploit ground clutter and terrain-masking to get close enough to fire before being engaged.”

    Ukrainian MiGs and Sukhois, flying at treetop level, would sneak up on Russian Sukhois, blending in with the landscape before—at the last moment—popping up to fire their missiles. “Aggressive Ukrainian tactics and good use of the low-level terrain during the first days of the invasion led to multiple claims and several likely kills against Russian aircraft, although Ukrainian fighters were often shot down or damaged in the process,” the analysts added.

    Ukrainian pilots downed just enough Russian pilots to spook the Kremlin. “After three days of skirmishing in which both sides lost aircraft, there was a notable pause in Russian strike and fighter sorties venturing deep behind Ukrainian lines, which lasted for several days,” Bronk, Reynolds and Watling explained.

    After that, the Russians changed their tactics. Attack pilots flew extremely low, just like the Ukrainian crews had been doing. Fighter pilots conducting air-to-air patrols meanwhile flew higher and stayed on the Russian side of the front line.

    That of course risked putting the air-superiority patrols too far from the front to intercept Ukrainian planes. It’s not for no reason that, by this summer, the Russian air force was heavily leaning on its 90 or so Mikoyan MiG-31BM interceptors for combat air patrols. The MiG-31’s Vympel R-37M missile can strike targets as far as 200 miles away.

    “The long range of the R-37M, in conjunction with the very high performance and high operating altitude of the MiG-31BM also allows it significant freedom to menace Ukrainian aircraft near the front lines from outside the range of Ukrainian defenses,” the RUSI team wrote.

    It’s telling that, of the 60 fixed-wing planes the Russians have lost in the war, just one was a MiG-31—and it accidentally crashed. But the R-37M isn’t foolproof, and not every missile hits. The MiG-31s are bleeding the Ukrainian air force, but—so far—not fatally.

    The Ukrainian air force since February has written off 51 fixed-wing planes. Proportionally, Ukraine’s losses are much steeper than Russia’s are. But the Ukrainian air force still is flying and fighting—making up with aggression and creativity what it lacks in numbers and high technology.

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    David Axe, Forbes Staff

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  • The Russians Have Lost Nearly 300 Aircraft Over Ukraine—Mostly Drones

    The Russians Have Lost Nearly 300 Aircraft Over Ukraine—Mostly Drones

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    Ukrainian troops have brought down 278 Russian aircraft in the eight months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, said last week.

    That’s almost certainly an exaggeration. But not by much. Independent analysts have confirmed, through photo and video evidence, the destruction of 184 Russian aircraft. The Ukrainians have captured another 73 aircraft from the Russians for a total of 257 confirmed Russian losses.

    But here’s the catch. Most of the losses—and all of the captures—are small drones, which don’t cost very much and are easier than crewed aircraft for the Kremlin to replace.

    That caveat doesn’t abrogate Zaluzhnyi’s statement, however. Russia’s aerial losses over Ukraine are steep. “During the full-scale aggression, defenders of Ukraine destroyed twice as many Russian aircraft as the Soviet Union lost during the 10-year war in Afghanistan,” Zaluzhnyi claimed.

    Ukrainian fighters, ground-based air-defenses and saboteurs since February have destroyed 55 Russian fighters and 54 helicopters. Another five fighters and a transport plane have crashed while operating in or around Ukraine.

    That’s just three percent of the entire active inventory of crewed aircraft belonging to the Russian air force, navy and army. But the losses are concentrated among the newest and most sophisticated front-line types. The Kremlin has written off 15% of its best Sukhoi Su-34 strike fighters and no less than a quarter of its top attack helicopters, the Kamov Ka-52s.

    Foreign sanctions on the Russian aerospace industry, which have tightened since February, have squeezed the industry’s ability to replace the losses. The Kremlin wasn’t buying new aircraft very quickly even before the tighter sanctions.

    Now it’s buying them even slower. “Russia’s aircraft losses likely significantly outstrip their capacity to manufacture new airframes,” the U.K. Defense Ministry explained. It could be a decade or more before flying regiments are back to full strength.

    The manpower crunch might be worse. It’s unclear how many pilots have died in the shoot-downs and crashes. The reasonable assumption is: a lot. The two-man Ka-52 crews likely are dying at an especially high rate. To understand why, watch any video of a Ukrainian missile striking a hovering Ka-52.

    The loss of experienced crews could be even more catastrophic to the Russian air arms than the loss of airframes is. “The time required for the training of competent pilots further reduces Russia’s ability to regenerate combat air capability,” the U.K. Defense Ministry said.

    There’s growing pressure for the Russian air force, navy and army to speed new crews through flight training. But inadequate training already was a factor in Russia’s heavy aircraft losses. A training shortfall is likely to become an even bigger factor as green crews rush into combat.

    At the same time, Ukrainian air-defenses are expanding with the recent arrival of U.S.-made NASAMS and Spanish-made Aspide missile-batteries. Germany meanwhile has supplied Ukraine with 50 Gepard mobile guns. The sky over Ukraine isn’t getting safer for Russian crews.

    The only comfort for Russian planners and pilots, and it’s a cold one, is that Ukraine has lost a lot of aircraft, too.

    True, Ukrainian losses—51 fighters, four transports, 18 helicopters and 48 drones—are half as bad as Russian losses. But the Ukrainians have fewer aircraft to spare. The Ukrainian air force began the wider war with just 125 or so active fighters and bombers and by now has written off 40% of them.

    Just three things are preventing the Ukrainian air force’s extinction. The steady reduction in the Ukrainian loss-rate as Russian capabilities erode; the pipeline of spare parts from foreign donors that helps the Ukrainians keep existing planes flying; and Ukrainian technicians’ incredible ability to restore old airframes left over from the Soviet era—in particular, Sukhoi Su-24 bombers.

    As the war grinds into its first full winter, both sides are losing pilots and planes at rates they can’t sustain. As a result, neither side has a clear advantage in the air. What’s striking, however, is that the Ukrainian air force with 125 combat aircraft has managed to fight to a standstill Russian air arms together operating 10 times as many front-line planes.

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    David Axe, Forbes Staff

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  • Russian Marines Are Getting Killed And Wounded By The Hundreds In Ukraine

    Russian Marines Are Getting Killed And Wounded By The Hundreds In Ukraine

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    In April 2021 the Russian navy’s 40th Naval Infantry Brigade, based on the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia, was busy showing off what it could do on an Arctic battlefield.

    In one photo-opportunity, brigade troopers wearing white camouflage boarded An-12 and An-26 transport aircraft, parachuted onto a snowy Arctic expanse and donned skis in order to march across the frigid landscape.

    A year later, the brigade was en route to eastern Ukraine, far more temperate country than it had trained to fight in. Having buried or sent to hospitals as many as 50,000 of the 125,000 or so troops it had deployed to Ukraine back in February, the Kremlin this spring was desperate for reinforcements.

    The 40th Naval Infantry Brigade, one of several Russian marine corps units that had spent years preparing for Arctic warfare, was available. A few months later, it would suffer devastating casualties in a doomed assault on the Ukrainian garrison in Pavlivka, 28 miles southwest of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

    The 40th Naval Infantry Brigade along with the 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade, its sister formation in the Russian Pacific fleet, lost as many as 300 troops killed, wounded or missing in assaults on and around Pavlivka no later than Friday.

    At their peak, the two brigades together oversaw some 6,000 troops. The 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade lost much of its strength trying, and failing, to capture Ukraine’s capital city Kyiv in February and March.

    The 40th Naval Infantry Brigade—which like its sister brigade includes several motorized brigades, a tank brigade and supporting engineers, artillery and air-defense troops—arrived later, after the 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade already had redeployed from Kyiv Oblast to eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

    The 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade and 40th Naval Infantry Brigade arrayed along the sector of the eastern front stretching the five or so miles from Pavlivka to Yehorivka. They faced battle-hardened Ukrainian forces including the 72nd Mechanized Brigade.

    On paper, the Russian marines at least were an even match for the Ukrainians. In reality, the Ukrainians were better-armed, better-supplied and better-motivated than the Russians were.

    The Ukrainians with their new Polish-made howitzers and American-made rocket-launchers in May began targeting Russian supply lines. By August, the Russians were starving and running out of ammunition—and the Ukrainians knew it.

    Ukrainian brigades counterattacked in the south and east. The Russian reeled, leaving behind many hundreds of tanks, fighting vehicles and artillery pieces as they fled. In a heady few weeks of relentless attacks, the Ukrainians liberated thousands of square miles of Russian-occupied territory.

    While most of the Russian forces in Ukraine retreated, a few airborne and marine brigades—as well as mercenaries working for The Wagner Group, a shadow mercenary firm—in recent weeks launched isolated attacks that, in the wider scheme of things, made little military sense. Analysts assumed The Wagner Group was trying to project strength in order to grow its market-share in the Russian war industry.

    What the 40th Naval Infantry Brigade and 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade were trying to achieve last week in their lonely assaults on or around Pavlivka, is unclear. In any event, they both failed. Russian sources claim at least 63 of the 155th GNIB’s troopers died in four days. That apparently is more than perished in the worst fighting in Chechnya more than 20 years ago.

    Another 240 or so marines from the 155th and 40th Brigades were killed or wounded or went missing, Russian sources claimed. The same sources reported the two brigades lost half of their equipment—potentially scores of T-80 tanks and BMP and BTR fighting vehicles—in the dead-end attacks on Pavlivka.

    Brigade troopers blamed the new commander of Russia’s Eastern Military District, Lt. Gen. Rustam Muradov.

    But the problem is wider than that. Ukrainian troops are advancing. Russian troops are falling back. A few isolated countercounteroffensives can’t change that. “Once again we were thrown into the incomprehensible offensive,” the 40th Naval Infantry Brigade veterans moaned on social media.

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    David Axe, Forbes Staff

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  • The Russian Black Sea Fleet May Have Lost Another Flagship

    The Russian Black Sea Fleet May Have Lost Another Flagship

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    The Ukrainian navy for months has been hunting the Russian navy frigate Admiral Makarov. It seems the Ukrainians finally got a shot at the 409-foot, missile-armed vessel in her home port of Sevastopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea.

    The Ukrainian government on Saturday released dramatic videos apparently depicting a successful nighttime strike on Makarov or her sister ship Admiral Essen by at least one unmanned surface vessel.

    The speedboat-size USV, possibly packing hundreds of pounds of explosives, dodged Russian helicopters and small boats and drove directly at the frigate, approaching to within a few feet before the video feed went dead.

    There aren’t yet any photos or videos circulating online that can confirm whether the frigate suffered any damage. In the best case, her crew blew up the drone boat before the drone boat blew up them. In the worst case, Makarov or Essen suffered the kind of waterline damage that quickly can sink a ship. To say nothing of any fires that might have resulted from the blast.

    The daring robotic raid is history repeating itself. Makarov became the flagship of the depleted Russian Black Sea Fleet in April after Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles and shore-based missile crews worked together to sink the previous flagship, the 612-foot cruiser Moskva.

    Even if Makarov remains afloat—and that’s a distinct possibility—the Ukrainians still can count the nighttime strike as a win. There are reports of other Black Sea Fleet ships suffering damage in the raid. And to avoid future USV attacks, the Russians either will have to devote significantly more resources to protecting Sevastopol, or pull the Black Sea Fleet’s three dozen or so surviving vessels from Crimea.

    The Ukrainian navy has been shockingly successful, considering it no longer has any big ships. In the early hours of the initial Russian bombardment on Feb. 23, the crew of Hetman Sahaidachny, the Ukrainian navy’s flagship and only large surface combatant, scuttled the frigate at its moorings in Odesa, Ukraine’s strategic port on the western Black Sea.

    For the first two months of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the Russians dominated the Black Sea. Sailing and flying with impunity, they captured tiny Snake Island, 80 miles south of Odesa, and—using the island plus some gas platforms they’d captured from Ukraine as bases for air-defenses and surveillance gear—enforced a blockade of Odesa that effectively cut off Ukraine’s vital grain exports.

    The Black Sea Fleet was poised to attempt an amphibious landing around Odesa. Capturing the port would complete Russia’s conquest of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and cut off the country from the sea, permanently strangling its economy.

    Russian forces meanwhile captured or scattered the rest of the Ukrainian navy’s ships, including one landing ship and a clutch of armored patrol boats. When the Ukrainians struck back, they did so with land-based missiles, UAVs and USVs.

    The tide began to turn on March 23, when a Ukrainian Tochka ballistic missile hit the Black Sea Fleet landing ship Saratov while she was pierside in the occupied port of Berdyansk. The explosion sank Saratov, damaged at least one other landing ship and underscored the danger Russian ships might face in a direct assault on Odesa.

    Then, on April 13, a Ukrainian navy anti-ship battery put two Neptune missiles into the side of the Russian cruiser Moskva, eventually sinking the 612-foot vessel.

    In a single strike, the Ukrainians deprived the Black Sea Fleet of its main air-defense ship with her S-300 long-range surface-to-air missiles. Desperate to preserve their surviving large warships—in particular, the two Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates including Makarov—fleet commanders pulled back the bigger ships 80 miles from the Ukrainian coast.

    That exposed the rest of the Black Sea Fleet—in particular, support ships that can’t effectively defend themselves—to attack by Ukraine’s missiles and drones. “Russia’s resupply vessels have minimum protection in the western Black Sea,” the U.K. Defense Ministry stated.

    Ukraine meanwhile reinforced its Neptune battery with U.S.-made Harpoon missiles, compounding the risk to Russian ships in the western Black Sea. The missileers coordinated with drone operators flying Turkish-made TB-2 drones to hunt down and sink several of the Black Sea Fleet’s Raptor patrol boats and landing craft.

    In early May there were rumors a Ukrainian missile had struck Makarov. That turned out to be untrue. But a Harpoon did hit and sink the support ship Vsevolod Bobrov while she made a supply run to Snake Island on May 12.

    Ukrainian missiles also struck at least one of the gas platforms the Russians were using for observation. Ukrainian drones, fighters and artillery bombarded Snake Island, rendering the treeless rock uninhabitable.

    The Russian garrison fled the island on May 31. A week later, Ukrainian commandos hoisted a Ukrainian flag. Snake Island’s liberation signaled to the Ukrainian merchant marine that the western Black Sea was safe for commerce.

    Odesa was still under blockade—and would remain so until Turkey brokered an end to the port blockage in late July—but ships now could get grain out of Ukraine via canals connecting small river ports near the Romanian border to the western Black Sea.

    The river route might regain its previous significance in the wake of last night’s Sevastopol raid. The Kremlin announced it was ending its agreement with Kyiv to allow big grain ships to sail from Odesa.

    The Russians aren’t acting from a position of strength. Unable to replace the Black Sea Fleet’s losses as long as Turkey controls the Bosphorous Strait joining the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, Russian commanders have focused on protecting what remains of the fleet. Ships hug the Crimean coast, staying inside the range of land-based aircraft and S-400 surface-to-air missiles.

    But the Ukrainian drone boats struck the Black Sea Fleet well inside that protective umbrella. Between the ballistic and anti-ship missiles and airborne and seaborne drones, the Ukrainian armed forces have plenty of ways of sinking Russian ships.

    The Black Sea Fleet isn’t safe in the western Black Sea. It isn’t safe in Sevastopol. The only place it might be safe is the only place where it’s totally irrelevant to the wider war: in ports in Russia proper, tied up pierside and closely guarded around the clock.

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    David Axe, Forbes Staff

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  • The Russian And Ukrainian Armies Brace For The Dreaded ‘Wet Cold’ Winter

    The Russian And Ukrainian Armies Brace For The Dreaded ‘Wet Cold’ Winter

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    There are two winters in Ukraine. The first, in the final couple months of the year, are cold—but not cold enough for a deep freeze. That means mud. Deep, sticky, frigid mud. “Wet cold,” is how the U.S. Army described it in an official winter field manual.

    The second winter, in the first couple months of the new year, is cold enough to freeze the mud. The U.S. Army labeled this as “dry cold.” While chillier, it’s much less hostile to troops and equipment.

    In late October, the wet cold is just beginning. It’s going to get worse. Analysts for months have been predicting a pause in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine as the mud grows deeper and colder. The Kremlin for one is counting on that pause to make good its devastating losses and regain some offensive combat power.

    Ukraine by contrast has momentum right now—and doesn’t want to lose it. Can Kyiv’s forces fight through the wet-cold and the dry-cold and maintain their hard-won battlefield advantage through the spring?

    It’s unclear. What is clear is the dire meteorology that’s about to wage war on the Ukrainians and Russians while they’re waging war on each other.

    The United Nations’ refugee agency in 2019 profiled four Ukrainian civilians in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region—where Ukrainian troops for five years had been battling Russian and separatist troops—in order to illustrate the sheer unpleasantness of the Ukrainian winter.

    “The temperature can get as low as -10 Celsius [14 degrees Fahrenheit],” a 71-year-old woman named Stefania told the U.N. “Shelling makes things difficult at this time of year. When it starts, the first thing you do is run to the cellar, but it is very cold there. When my house was shelled in 2015, I brought all the warm clothes and blankets I had. Even then, it was cold.”

    It arguably is even worse for troops out in the field, especially in the wet-cold months. “The ground becomes slushy and muddy and clothing and equipment becomes perpetually wet and damp,” the U.S. Army explained. “Because water conducts heat 25 times faster than air, core body temperatures drop if troops are wet and the wind is blowing.”

    “Troops become casualties due to weather if not properly equipped, trained and led. Wet-cold environments combined with wind is dangerous because of the wind’s effect on the body’s perceived temperature. Wet-cold leads to hypothermia, frostbite and trench foot.”

    While soldiers struggle to stay dry and warm, commanders struggle to keep battalions moving. “Under wet-cold conditions, the ground alternates between freezing and thawing because the temperatures fluctuate above and below the freezing point,” the U.S. Army explained. “This makes planning problematic. For example, areas that are trafficable when frozen could become severely restricted if the ground thaws.”

    Engineers become indispensable. They grade roads and forest tracks, tow mired vehicles and bridge rain-swollen rivers. But they too struggle with the elements. “Heavy equipment and combat engineer operators exposed to the elements rapidly become fatigued and require regular relief after short periods,” according to the U.S. Army.

    It’s apparent the Russian army, having lost 100,000 men killed and wounded since February, has no intention of mounting offensive operations in Ukraine this winter. Battered battalions in Donbas are digging in, sowing rows of concrete anti-tank defenses and hoping to receive as reinforcements some of the 300,000 men the Kremlin drafted this fall.

    The Ukrainians might try to fight through the wet cold, however. After all, waiting until spring to continue attacking could give the Russians all the time they need to rebuild damaged formations—and restore battlefield parity. By the same token, if Ukrainian brigades mount an early-winter offensive, they might be able to hit mud-bound Russian forces while they’re at their weakest.

    It’ll require careful planning, robust logistics, expert engineering support and incredible grit from the front-line troops. Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army general, said he’s bullish. “We may see more adaptations by the Ukrainians to use winter to their advantage.”

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    David Axe, Forbes Staff

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  • Russian Troops Could Cause A Lot Of Damage And Death As They Flee Southern Ukraine

    Russian Troops Could Cause A Lot Of Damage And Death As They Flee Southern Ukraine

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    The Russian army is retreating from Kherson. It’s poised to leave behind it a lot of destruction and dead bodies.

    Kherson, a port at the mouth of the Dnipro River on the Black Sea, was one of Russia’s biggest prizes as its forces rolled into Ukraine in late February, widening a war that began eight years ago with Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

    In Macth, disorganized Ukrainian forces gave up Kherson, with its strategic port and railyard and prewar population of 300,000, without much of a fight. For the next seven months, Kherson anchored Russian positions on the southern front.

    As summer turned to fall, liberating Kherson was a top priority for Kyiv. Holding on to the city was one of Moscow’s top priorities. In May, the Ukrainian army—recently rearmed with new American-made howitzers and rocket-launchers—began striking Russian supply lines around Kherson, and even holed the Antonovskiy Bridge, the city’s main span across the Dnipro.

    The 49th Combined Arms Army and other Russian forces in Kherson Oblast frayed. The Kremlin shifted from the east to the south to bolster the 49th CAA, but that left gaps in Russian lines in the east—gaps the Ukrainian army exploited with a counteroffensive starting in early September.

    Ukrainian troops in the south counterattacked at the same time. The southern counteroffensive faced more resistance than the eastern counteroffensive did, but it still made swift progress east of Kherson.

    A regiment of Russian coastal troops shattered. A Russian mountain brigade retreated as a Ukrainian mountain brigade advanced. A Russian airborne division briefly held off a Ukrainian marine brigade as desperate Russians fled south toward Beryslav, where a dam across the Dnipro offers a durable escape route out of Kherson Oblast north of the river.

    Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the recently appointed commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, on Tuesday told Russian media “a difficult situation has emerged” in Kherson.

    The escape began two weeks ago and accelerated this week. “Russian forces continue to reinforce crossing points over the Dnipro River, and have completed a barge bridge alongside the damaged Antonovskiy Bridge in Kherson,” the U.K. Defense Ministry said.

    More and more Russian troops—and their civilian support personnel—crossed the Dnipro, sometimes under Ukrainian bombardment. Russian occupation authorities even ordered civilians in Kherson to cross the Dnipro. It’s not clear many will obey.

    As Ukrainian brigades and the wet Ukrainian winter approach, the Kremlin is prepared to give up Kherson. On its way out, it’s going to inflict as much pain as possible—on its own forces and the Ukrainians. There are reports the Russian army is forcing recent draftees, who nearly to a man are unfit and untrained, to fight a rearguard action in order to buy time for better troops to reach Beryslav.

    Meanwhile, Russian occupation officials are opening the dam, sending more water downriver toward Kherson and the river delta adjacent to the city. The flooding could complicate Ukrainian operations.

    There’s an apocalyptic option. Once they’ve brought across the river all their best troops—and whatever loot they can grab—the Russians could blow the dam. Flood waters would inundate Kherson and even creep north toward the nearby free city of Mykolaiv, a major base of operations for Ukrainian forces in the south.

    The clock is ticking. The weather is getting colder and wetter and the mud is getting deeper. Most units on both sides of the conflict aren’t ready to wage war in the mud. The Russian retreat, and the Ukrainian offensive, both are likely to slow in the coming weeks.

    If the Russians are going to blow the dam, they’re probably going to do it soon. Ukrainian commanders know this, and they’re not without options to limit the damage.

    They could land special operations forces on the dam. They could speed up the pace of their operations, aiming to liberate Beryslav and Kherson before the Russians do their worst. If the Ukrainians move faster, Russia’s retreat could turn into a rout. “Russian forces likely intend to continue that withdrawal over the next several weeks,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., said Friday, “but may struggle to withdraw in good order if Ukrainian forces choose to attack.”

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    David Axe, Forbes Staff

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  • Ukraine’s Busiest Tank Brigade Is Fighting On Two Fronts

    Ukraine’s Busiest Tank Brigade Is Fighting On Two Fronts

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    Amid relentless fighting and heavy losses, the Ukrainian army has struggled to form new tank brigades. But the tank brigades it has formed are fighting hard on the war’s two main fronts—in the east in the Donbas region and in the south around the Russian-occupied port of Kherson.

    No unit is busier than the 17th Tank Brigade. It appears the brigade has split its three armored battalions, each equipped with as many as 30 T-64 tanks, between the east and the south. It’s a single brigade with just a few thousand troops, spread out across hundreds of miles of front.

    The 17th TB sparked excitement on Russian social media yesterday when one of the brigade’s battalions joined the elite 128th Mountain Brigade for an advance on Beryslav, a city on the Dnipro River 35 miles east of Kherson that’s widely considered the Russian army’s safest way across the Dnipro and out of Kherson Oblast in the event the Ukrainians seem poised to liberate the oblast.

    Following an intensive artillery barrage supported by TB-2 drones, the 128th MB attacked toward Beryslav. When the mountain troops suffered casualties, a company from the 17th TB—reportedly, the reserve force for the operation—joined the fight.

    It’s unclear how much ground the Ukrainians gained, if they gained any. Photos that appeared online today reportedly depict some of the 17th TB’s victims around Kherson, including a howitzer, two MT-LB armored tractors and a cargo truck.

    Those kills aside, Kyiv’s southern counteroffensive, which kicked off in late August just days before a second and parallel counteroffensive in the east, seems to have slowed as the looming winter turns the landscape into cold mud.

    Exhaustion might also be a factor. The Ukrainian army has suffered far fewer losses than the Russian army has since Russia widened its war on Ukraine starting in late February. But the Ukrainians never had the same reserves of manpower and equipment that the Russians did.

    Even as Kyiv’s foreign allies donate more and more tanks and artillery and Ukrainian troops capture more and more Russian equipment, the Ukrainian army has struggled to form new heavy brigades. The army began the war with five or six tank brigades, each with around a hundred T-64 or T-72 tanks. Today the army still has just five or six tank brigades.

    To be fair, an huge influx of heavy equipment has allowed the Ukrainian command to up-armor many of its lighter brigades, adding tanks and fighting vehicles to formations that once traveled by truck or armored tractor. The army might not have more tank brigades, but overall it’s got more tanks.

    Still, Ukrainian commanders are extremely judicious with how and where they use their few dedicated tank units. At the same time a battalion of the 17th TB was backing up the 128th MB north of Beryslav, a separate 17th TB battalion was “somewhere in eastern Ukraine” helping to liberate towns from a collapsing Russian army, according to the defense ministry in Kyiv.

    Photos that circulated online in recent weeks depict the 17th TB’s eastern battalion in action—as well as one of its prizes, a T-80 tank the Ukrainians captured intact from the Russians. It’s one of around 200 usable tanks the Ukrainian army has seized from its retreating enemy since early September.

    Prizes like the T-80 help to keep the Ukrainian army’s heavy formations in fighting shape as the war grinds toward its first full winter. But there aren’t yet enough of them for brand-new tank brigades.

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    David Axe, Forbes Staff

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  • Blow Up Russian Trains, Liberate The Coast: Ukraine Has A Plan To Win The War

    Blow Up Russian Trains, Liberate The Coast: Ukraine Has A Plan To Win The War

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    It’s going to take engineers nine months to finish repairs to the Kerch Bridge after Ukrainian forces blew up the strategic span, connecting the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula to Russia proper, on Oct. 7.

    According to AFP, the Kremlin ordered repairs to the $4-billion, 11-mile span to wrap up in July 2023. Until then, Russian forces in southern Ukraine will depend on just one overland supply route—a rail line through eastern Ukraine that’s well within range of Ukrainian artillery.

    All that is to say, the Russian field armies in and around the port of Kherson on Ukraine’s temporarily-occupied Black Sea coast are in trouble. They were struggling with resupply before the Ukrainians blew up the Kerch Bridge, twisting its twin rail lines and dropping one of its two road lanes. Now the struggle will get worse.

    The partial destruction of the Kerch Bridge “presents the Russians with a significant problem,” tweeted Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army general.

    And that sets conditions for what some analysts say is Ukraine’s plan to end the eight-month-old war. As Russian forces fray in the south, gaps could form in their defensive lines stretching from just north of Kherson 250 miles west to the terrain between occupied Mariupol and free Zaporizhzhia.

    If Ukrainian brigades can exploit those gaps and liberate the ruins of Mariupol, they will “sever the Russian armed forces in Ukraine into two pieces that cannot mutually reinforce,” according to Mike Martin, a fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College in London—and almost entirely isolate the Russians in the south.

    After that, “you’re going to see a general collapse of the [Russian armed forces], a change of power in Moscow and a deal that involves Crimea being handed over,” Martin added. “Or, the Ukrainians will just take it.”

    The Russian army traditionally relies on trains to move the bulk of its supplies. That explains why the army never had the big, robust truck units that, say, the U.S. Army takes for granted. The Russians’ truck shortage got a lot worse this spring when the Ukrainians blew up hundreds of trucks trying to resupply Russian battalions rolling toward Kyiv on a doomed mission to capture the Ukrainian government.

    The Kremlin’s problem, now that Ukraine has cut the main rail line into Kherson Oblast, is that the only other rail line connecting Russia to a railhead anywhere near Kherson, terminating in occupied Melitopol, lies just a few miles south of the front line near Volnovakha, north of Mariupol. Ukrainian troops could hit the line, and any trains rolling along it, with 120-millimeter mortars, 155-millimeter howitzers and High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems.

    Realistically, Russian commanders have few options short of surrender. They can feed small quantities of supplies into Kherson by truck, by boat and by plane—and hope that the garrison in the south can hold out until July, when the Kerch Bridge might fully reopen.

    The problem is that Ukrainian commanders know they’ve got nine months to take advantage of Russia’s logistical problem. Nine months to add a third counteroffensive to the counteroffensives they launched in the east and south six weeks ago. That third attack almost certainly will target Mariupol in order to cut in two the Russian army and starve half of it.

    With the Russians on the defensive and the Kremlin’s desperate nationwide mobilization mostly feeding hapless old men into a war they’re not equipped to fight, the momentum clearly lies with the Ukrainians. They get to choose when to launch a third counteroffensive. Russian sources already are anticipating the possible attack.

    It’s likely only the coming winter can dictate terms. The first few months of Ukraine’s winter are wet and muddy. The last few are cold and icy. The former are hostile to ground combat. The latter, somewhat less so. If Kyiv aims to end the war on its terms before, say, January, it might need to make its move soon.

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    David Axe, Forbes Staff

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