Ukraine appears to have won a decisive victory by driving Russian forces from the second largest city of Kharkiv and is now pushing them all the way back to the Russian border.
The Russian military has likely decided to withdraw fully from its positions around Kharkiv City in the face of Ukrainian counteroffensives and the limited availability of reinforcements. Russian units have generally not attempted to hold ground against counterattacking Ukrainian forces over the past several days, with a few exceptions. Reports from Western officials and a video from an officer of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) indicate that Moscow is focused on conducting an orderly withdrawal and prioritizing getting Russians back home before allowing proxy forces to enter Russia rather than trying to hold its positions near the city.
Ukraine thus appears to have won the Battle of Kharkiv. Ukrainian forces prevented Russian troops from encircling, let alone seizing Kharkiv, and then expelled them from around the city, as they did to Russian forces attempting to seize Kyiv. Ukrainian forces will likely attempt to disrupt at least the westernmost of the ground lines of communication (GLOCs) between Belgorod and Russian forces concentrated around Izyum, although Russia is using several GLOCs, including some further away from current Ukrainian positions than any Ukrainian counteroffensive is likely to reach soon. The terrain east of current Ukrainian positions may also favor the Russians attempting to defend their GLOCs, as large water features canalize movement and create chokepoints that the Ukrainians would have to breakthrough.
Russian troops continued efforts to advance all along the periphery of the Izyum-Donetsk city salient but made little progress. Russian forces attempted a ground offensive from Izyum that made no progress. We had previously hypothesized that Russia might give up on attempts to advance from Izyum, but the Russians have either not made such a decision or have not fully committed to it yet. Small-scale and unsuccessful attacks on the southern end of the salient near Donetsk City continued but made no real progress.
The main Russian effort continues to be the attempt to encircle Severodonetsk and Lysychansk from the north and from the south. Russian troops attacking from Popasna to the north made no significant progress in the last 24 hours. Russian forces coming north-to-south have failed to cross the Siverskyi Donets River and taken devastating losses in their attempts. The Russians may not have enough additional fresh combat power to offset those losses and continue the offensive on a large enough scale to complete the encirclement, although they will likely continue to try to do so.
Yeah, about that river crossing. There’s an awful lot of post-battle evidence that was an absolute disaster.
Attempting to cross a river near Bilohorivka, east of Lyman, a Russian mechanized battalion got blasted out of existence by Ukrainian artillery:
The better part of a Russian army battalion — 50 or so vehicles and up to a thousand troops — in recent days tried to cross a pontoon bridge spanning the Siverskyi Donets River, running west to east between the separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian artillery caught them at the river bank — and destroyed them. The rapid destruction of around three dozen tanks and other armored vehicles, along with the bridge itself, underscores Russia’s deepening woes as its troops try, and fail, to make meaningful gains in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
“We still assess Russian ground force in the Donbas to be slow and uneven,” an unnamed U.S. Defense Department official told reporters on Tuesday. The Russians’ inability to cross rivers might explain their sloth.
The Siverskyi Donets, which threads from southern Russia into eastern Ukraine then back into Russia, is just one of several water barriers Russian battalions must cross in order to advance west into Ukrainian-held territory. According to the Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff, the battalion that got caught at the pontoon bridge apparently was trying to strike at Lyman, a city of 20,000 that lies 17 miles west of the doomed crossing.
The Ukrainian army’s 17th Tank Brigade spotted the bridge, perhaps using one of the many small drones that function as the army’s eyes over the battlefield. The 17th is one of the army’s four active tank brigades. Its line battalions operate T-64 tanks and BMP fighting vehicles. But it was the brigade’s artillery battalion with its 2S1 122-millimeter howitzers that apparently got first crack at the Russian bridge.
The 17th’s shelling destroyed at least seven T-72 and T-80 tanks, 17 BMPs, seven MT-LB armored tractors, five other vehicles and much of the bridging unit itself, including a tugboat and the pontoon span.
It’s unclear how many Russians died or were wounded, but it’s worth noting that no battalion can lose three-quarters of its vehicles and remain capable of operations. In one strike, the Ukrainians removed from the battlefield one of the roughly 99 Russian battalion tactical groups in Ukraine.
Proving that some people (or institutions) don’t learn from their mistakes, Russia compounded their disasterous stupidity by trying the exact same thing again, with the same results.
Russia has made another failed attempt to cross a Donbas river where an entire battalion was wiped out by Ukrainian artillery – losing more men in the process with survivors forced to swim to safety.
Putin’s troops were trying to rescue men and vehicles that had got stranded on the wrong side of the Donets River, near Biolhorivka, after the first attempt on May 8 ended with their pontoon bridges being sunk by an artillery barrage that destroyed dozens of armoured vehicles and may have killed more than 1,000 troops.
But their rescue mission was found out and subjected to the same fate. Fresh satellite images taken near Biolhorivka show yet another sunken pontoon bridge along with half a dozen destroyed or abandoned vehicles.
Russia has lost more than 70 vehicles and seen two infantry battalions mangled in four days of attempts to bridge the river.
Here’s some decent drone footage of the aftermath:
Conducting a river crossing under enemy fire has always been a difficult undertaking, which is why Clausewitz devoted two chapters to the topic. Even the most basic combined-arms operations are difficult to carry out under the best of circumstances. Difficult operations become impossible ones if you’re stupid.
Tags: Bilohorivka, Donbas, Donets River, Donetsk City, Foreign Policy, Izyum, Kharkiv, Lyman, Lysychansk, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Severodonetsk, Siverskyi Donets, Ukraine, video
The old Red Army put great emphasis upon river crossing operations because of so many European rivers run north to south. Their engineer units were equipped with specialized bridging gear to facilitate the rapid crossing of river obstacles.
That said, this latest incident seems to indicate that the leadership of the new Russian Army has neglected the lessons of WWII. Russian operational planning doesn’t seem to exist, and the new Stavka is not at all able to absorb the lessons of even the most elementary of After Action Reviews. Still, the Ukrainian Army must be near exhaustion and hanging by a thread. Russia’s potential reserves of manpower and equipment still have not been committed.
It would seem that political considerations will be the ultimate decision makers in this cluster phuck.
Honestly doubt that the US Army would do much better, these days.
Systemically speaking, they don’t seem to be able to learn from personal experience or the experience of others. The Ukrainians are under a lot of pressure; they’re learning. US Army? LOL… Not hardly. Go look and see what they’re doing about the need for permanent in-MTOE Personal Security Detachments, a thing we learned we’d have to have the hard way when in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you don’t have an element dedicated to getting your commander around the battlefield, and keeping his ass alive, you’re not going to have the commander influencing much of anything outside the wire or the TOC. Yet, have we stood up permanent PSD elements in any MTOE? Nope; everyone makes believe that there’s gonna be some wunnerful, wunnerful predictably linear battlefield like in WWII.
Reality is this: You want to command? You’re going to have to get out there, and you’re not going to get out there all by yourself. You’ll need a security team, transportation for it, and likely your very own set of accompanying aerial RPV assets to provide overwatch and protection.
Ya wanna know why so many Russian senior officers are dead? This is the reason; the Ukrainians have implemented total area warfare. There are no lines, no safe spaces. You go out and about, get spotted? You die. If you want to command, you need a dedicated security detachment, dedicated ELINT capability, dedicated RPV capability, and a bunch of other stuff that I can’t possibly even begin to list in short format. Without it, you will not be able to influence the battle first-hand; you’ll have to remain static, like some WWI general in a chateau, well away from the action.
War is changing; it’s becoming distributed and that means it is everywhere in a zone. Things will be far more diffuse, going forward; you won’t have a linear battlefield. Instead, it will be a spectrum of intensity, with PGM strikes on logistics nodes and base areas, and all sorts of nastiness wandering around looking for things to kill by calling in fires or directing their own weapons at. You want to know what war will be like in the next twenty-thirty years? Look at what the Ukrainian SOF units are doing, and how they’re destroying the Russian forces by bits and pieces.
[…] Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, and Russian forces seem to be making a slow, grinding advance on the strategic city of Severodonetsk in eastern Ukraine. “Moscow has poured thousands of troops into its assault on Severodonetsk and its sister city of Lysychansk. The twin cities, straddling the Siverskyi Donets river, have been in Russian sights for months. They currently comprise the lone Ukrainian redoubt in the Luhansk oblast.” Taking Lysychansk will require Russians to cross the Donets, previous attempts at which have been disasterous for them. […]