ReportWire

Tag: Ukrainian counteroffensive

  • 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

    [ad_1]

    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.”

    Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here. Send me a secure tip. 

    [ad_2]

    David Axe, Forbes Staff

    Source link

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

    Ukraine’s Busiest Tank Brigade Is Fighting On Two Fronts

    [ad_1]

    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.

    Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here. Send me a secure tip. 

    [ad_2]

    David Axe, Forbes Staff

    Source link

  • 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

    [ad_1]

    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.

    Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here. Send me a secure tip. 

    [ad_2]

    David Axe, Forbes Staff

    Source link