It has been expected for weeks that the Ukrainians would launch a summer offensive but it was also expected that they would launch it at the static front in Eastern Ukraine. Instead they attached North into Russia itself.
A couple of things.
First, the fact the Ukrainians could launch the offensive and encounter little to no resistance is a testament to Russian hubris. They firmly believed that the Ukrainians would never have the temerity to actually launch ground operations into Russia itself so they never actually defended against such a possibility. Make no mistake, if they had the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk Region would have been nothing more than a raid in force, ending almost as soon as it began.
This could change the strategic situation on the ground somewhat. With this incursion the Russians are going to have to spread their troops a little thinner to prevent a repeat of it after the Ukrainians finally withdraw. Up until now the Russians could concentrate their forces in the Donbass region, effectively outnumbering the Ukrainians at the point of attack. Now they are going to have to put more troops on the other borders with Ukraine. Where are those troops going to come from? They will either come from Eastern Ukraine for from Russia itself. In the first instance that will lead to the weakening of the Russian lines in the East and in the second instance it will lead to less reinforcements being available to replace the losses they have been experiencing in the the war of attrition taking place in the east. Either way, things just got harder for Russian commanders.
The question that this incursion does not answer is whether the Ukrainians, with their superior equipment, training and morale, can outlast the Russians, with their greater number of soldiers and their total lack of concern about casualties. That has been the question of this war since it began.
1 comment:
The question that this incursion does not answer is whether the Ukrainians, with their superior equipment, training and morale
You are joking are you not?
It looks like Ukraine has pulled off a rather brilliant tactical move in invading the Kursk Oblast. Russian intelligence clearly screwed up though it could be that the intelligence work was correct but no one at General Staff level could believe the Ukrainians would do anything this stupid.
The Ukrainian forces in the Kursk Oblast are basically in a huge salient with extended logistical lines and no air support. I'm not quite sure what Kiev thought it was doing, but it looks like it has made a strategic mistake while executing a brilliant tactical move.
Ukraine has almost no reserves to speak of and by throwing what looks to be 10,000 or 12,000 of their best troops into the Kursk Oblast they have had to thin out the troops in the Dombass where they already have been under staffed.
Ukrainians do not have superior equipment. They have a jumble of Soviet-era equipment, plus a mixture of all sorts of NATO equipment. It's questionable that the NATO equipment is any better than the Russian.
Ukrainians also have the problem that they have equipment from practically every NATO country. This means that instead of having standardized equipment that you can train your men on and keep maintained you have, as an example, French-built tanks, US built tanks. German built tanks, and British-built tanks. It gets worse after that but if we're just looking at the tank situation, you have to have maintenance staff trained to repair four different kinds of tanks, plus you have the logistical problem of supplying four different sets of parts and tools to the maintenance people. It's a nightmare.
There's no indication that Ukrainians have better training do it looks like it was as good or possibly a bit better at the start of this fiasco, in fact there's been fairly believable reports in the US and British media that Ukraine is feeding new conscripts into combat units with no more than 2 months or possibly even less training. I'm not sure that this is likely to keep morale high. The Canadian recruit gets 13 weeks of basic training before going on to learn anything about his specialty.
By my, admittedly very back of the cigarette package, calculations last year the Kievian-controlled parts of the Ukraine had a population of 18 to 22 million when you look at all the lost territories and the millions of refugees that are fled both west and into Russia. Russia, not including any of the newly acquired territories, has a population of around, I think, 145 million.
Official Russian reports, that are probably reasonably accurate, say that Russian Armed Forces up until the Kursk incursion were getting roughly 30,000 volunteers a month and the rate has jumped in the last few days. If I'm reading this correctly, most or all of these volunteers will have already served one year as a conscript and so will already have had basic training.
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