Information coming out of the Russo-Ukrainian War can be hard to verify, especially given how untrustworthy the mainstream media have made themselves. But Ukraine seems to have launched a successful counterattack in the key city of Severodonetsk.
Russia is “suffering huge losses” and losing hard-fought ground in the Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk after invading units started retreating from the key industrial center, Ukrainian officials asserted Saturday.
The dramatic turnabout, which could not be independently confirmed, represented a rare successful counter-offensive against Russian forces, which had recently been steadily advancing in Ukraine’s eastern territories.
It was the first time Ukraine claimed to have conducted a large counter-attack in Severodonetsk, a city of 100,000 and the last major municipality in the disputed Luhansk oblast under Ukrainian control, after days of losing ground in the country’s embattled east.
Russia had “previously managed to capture most of the city,” Sergiy Haidai, the governor of the Luhansk region said in a televised address Saturday, The Guardian reported. “But now our military has pushed them back.”
Later Saturday, Oleksandr Stryuk, the head of the city’s military operations, said that Ukrainian forces were able to build a line of defense in Severodonetsk, according to The Kyiv Independent.
Both sides of the war have claimed to have inflicted huge casualties in the fighting for the city — a battlefront that military experts believe could determine which of the two countries has the momentum for a prolonged war of attrition in coming months.
Here’s a quick Livemap snapshot:
A more detailed annotated map from Random Guy On Twitter (grains of salt apply):
SEVERODONETSK / 2245 UTC 04 JUN/ UKR forces continue to consolidate holdings and advance. Present line of contact reported to be the E side of the park area paralleling Centralny Prospect. With Ukrainian forces in the ascendant, RU morale is now a factor. pic.twitter.com/cBmov2De6z
— Chuck Pfarrer (@ChuckPfarrer) June 4, 2022
There’s some talk on Twitter of Ukrainian forces luring Russia into a trap and using the high ground in Luhansk to rain artillery on Russian positions:
Ukrainian positions in Lysychans'k are raining precision artillery fire on Severodonetsk Russian positions. The high ground of Lysychans'k proves to be very helpful for supporting fire.
— WarMonitor🇺🇦 (@WarMonitor3) June 4, 2022
Here’s Denys Davydov, AKA Ukrainian Map Guy, on the action (usual caveats and grains of salt apply):
When faced with the task of taking large hostile cities, Russian doctrine has been to bomb them flat with artillery first. Historically, urban warfare has not been a source of happiness for the Russian military. They got torn up badly in Grozny, and seem to have forgotten all the painful lessons learned there.
Russia may have a hefty supply of old tanks, but it’s supply of competent ground forces absent a general mobilization (which Putin has thus far refused to authorize) is quite finite. Russia has even resorted to forced mobilization of troops in the area it occupies, a desperation tactic likely to make things worse for an army that already suffers from low morale.
Says ISW:
The Ukrainian government and military are furthermore discussing the battle of Severodonetsk in increasingly confident terms and are likely successfully blunting the Russian military’s major commitment of reserves to the grinding battle for the city. While Russian forces may still be able to capture Severodonetsk and Lysychansk and Ukrainian forces are likely more degraded than Haidai’s statements imply, Ukrainian defenses remain strong in this pivotal theater. The Russian military has concentrated all of its available resources on this single battle to make only modest gains. The Ukrainian military contrarily retains the flexibility and confidence to not only conduct localized counterattacks elsewhere in Ukraine (such as north of Kherson) but conduct effective counterattacks into the teeth of Russian assaults in Severodonetsk that reportedly retook 20% of the city in the last 24 hours. The Ukrainian government’s confidence in directly stating its forces can hold Severodonetsk for more than two weeks and willingness to conduct local counterattacks, rather than strictly remaining on the defensive, is a marked shift from Ukrainian statements as recently as May 28 that Ukrainian forces might withdraw from Severodonetsk to avoid encirclement.
The fog of war and the paucity of competent in-theater reporting makes things hard to analyze, but at this point in time, it appears that Ukraine is winning the Battle of Severodonetsk.
Tags: Foreign Policy, Luhansk, Military, Oleksandr Stryuk, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Sergiy Haidai, Severodonetsk, Ukraine
What people miss in all of this is the fact that the Russians were already deficient in trained infantry. Seriously, war-losingly deficient.
The reason you didn’t see troops with their heads out, maintaining situational awareness for the vehicle, during the early days of February’s invasion? They weren’t there. I noted that, and wondered “Where the hell are the air guards?”
You’re now seeing Ukrainian captures of Russian frontal aviation ground crew who were pushed into infantry roles and sent to the front. Remind you of anything? Like, maybe Luftwaffe ground crew being turned into German infantry replacements during the latter stages of WWII?
I’m not saying this is a done deal, but I’m reasonably certain we’ll be seeing a collapse of the Russian war effort here, fairly soon. They’ve got no more trained troops to push in, and they don’t stand much chance of getting any more, either–I’ve heard rumors that there ain’t nobody reporting into Russian conscription centers, this year. Couple that with the fact that they’ve pretty much eaten through their cadres, and won’t have anyone with experience to train the new conscripts, anyway…?
Putin is a military/strategic genius, I’m telling you: He started this war to keep Ukraine out of NATO, and he’s got two more NATO member states on his borders now, and the odds are excellent that Ukraine will eventually be inside NATO on a de facto basis, if not formally. About the only thing he could do that would produce even worse results for Russian territorial ambitions would be to hazard Kaliningrad for something equally stupid, and lose it. Or, invite the Chinese to recover their lands in Siberia…
Anyone lauding Putin as a Russian leader is delusional. The idiot has done more to destroy Russia than anyone since Stalin…
A Russia that can’t afford to throw endless warm bodies at every military problem still seems so… unnatural. And yet, here we are.
The propaganda was overwhelming, but it still seems possible that the Russian resistance to the Germans was built on at least a leavening of a mystical love for Mother Russia plus the idea they didn’t want to get invaded. The troops were not well-trained to start with and the hurried mobilization didn’t leave time for the training per the Sales Brochure.
Still, those guys did a lot better, it seems in retrospect, than we see today. Speaking of effort and morale.
Dang Kirk, After your comment, there’s nothing left to do but get some windex and a paper towel.
Russia will fight to the last chechen.
I’ve been wondering all along whether an assault on Kaliningrad by somebody would end this all immediately. I doubt Putin could wage both wars at once. Certainly not one that required going deep into NATO areas to wage.
Dave said:
“Dang Kirk, After your comment, there’s nothing left to do but get some windex and a paper towel.”
Honestly can’t tell what you’re getting at, with that, but… What the heck.
I’ve been watching this thing as best I could from where I’m sitting, and the thing that just stands out about the Russian videos I keep seeing is what I’d have to term the utter ineptitude on display. The stalled armor columns, the lack of troops, the clusters of what troops there are, standing around in nice, tight groups ideal for dropping indirect fire on or shooting up with automatic weapons. The lack of low-level discipline, the looting, all that crap. You’ve got troops filling their AFVs with loot, and riding on top. You’ve got tactical sites that look like dumps, trash everywhere, no discipline on display at all.
I did a tour as an observer/controller out at the National Training Center, so I’ve got a pretty good handle on what “right” looks like. The Russians do not “look right”, at all. The Ukrainians aren’t perfect, but they look a lot closer to what I’d term “right”, and I expect this mess to wind up with Russia looking even worse. You can’t regenerate forces you’ve totally expended, and that’s precisely what they’re doing. Where are the combat-experienced cadres going to come from, to train the new conscripts? The way the Russians are doing the manning on their BTGs, and how they have things set up, the only things left back at their decentralized training centers are the dregs they refused to take with them on the 24th of February. That’s going to cripple efforts to fix their problems, which I do not see them doing with the things they’re actually doing. Russia is trying to win this war in a hurry and on the cheap, with a corrupt and mostly incompetent army. Fixing that isn’t going to be something they do in months, but will take years, if not decades. The state of their “military culture” with its endemic dedovschina and many abuses linked to a lack of a professional NCO corps is going to put paid to any notions of “fixing things” on an effective and permanent basis.
The vaunted Russian military ain’t looking quite so vauntish, from what I’m seeing. I’m also seeing all the classic signs of incipient collapse coming, the same ones they highlighted in my intel training as key indicators of a military collapse. That repurposing of ground crew to infantry is a telling one; you have to spend a lot of time with technical training of those guys, and they’re usually much more carefully selected than the usual run of people they put into the infantry, especially under the Soviet/Russian systems. We did much the same thing after the Battle of the Bulge, transferring all those ASTP cadets from college to the Army as infantry replacements, but that was mostly because they realized that the war was going to be over before we needed them as officers and technical personnel. The transfer of Russian Frontal Aviation ground crew to infantry smacks more of the desperation demonstrated by Nazi Germany re-purposing Hermann Goering’s personnel excesses as infantry, and it’s not a good sign for Russia, at all.
Though, I suppose that if they can’t use those guys to generate air strikes, they might as well be doing something productive. But, it’s still a massive waste of trained manpower that should be turning wrenches on aircraft instead of lugging (inexpertly) an AK into direct combat.
This happens in nearly every war; nations seem to shortchange the infantry, every time. Russia is going to pay a huge price, because I don’t think they’re going to have an easy time of regenerating that force with all the losses they’ve taken. Many of those BMPs you saw earlier in the war only had, at most, 3 or 4 of the six or so dismounts they’re supposed to be carrying. I’m told that the reason so many Russian tanks are seen abandoned is that they’re only crewed by two men, and if one goes down for whatever reason, they have to leave the tank. You can’t drive and fight the tank with one crewman…
No depth to the manpower, out in the combat units. We have had some similar issues with our own forces, but nowhere near this bad.
I am with Kirk.
As a retired SGM who spent years as a First Sergeant, reserves only but with 2 tours…you can do a lot with pride.
When troops don’t have pride in their unit, they have low expectations and low motivation. “Why am I gonna bust my ass for this brokedick unit?” kind of attitude. Its the 1SG’s job to unscrew that.
A good 1SG can do it at the Company level but how do you accomplish it at an Army level? What we are seeing in Ukraine is the complete annihilation of some of the most storied units from the Soviets in WW2. Now they are gone.
You just can’t take a big group of guys, slap a patch on them and say, “You are the successors to the Great General Zhukov!” No, that lore travels in a unit from Soldier to Soldier. Once those Soldiers are gone, the lore, and the pride that comes from it, is gone forever.
So the lack of conscripts showing up tells the tale. Despite the propaganda, the Russian people are figuring it out and the pride is gone. I don’t see how a country like Russia can rebuild that pride.
It actually goes a lot deeper than that, SGM. I’ve studied the Soviet and Russian military for most of my adult life, and while that’s not definitive, I think I have a good handle on their strengths and weaknesses.
First and foremost, they don’t have an NCO corps. At. All. The absence of adult supervision in the barracks after the officers go home has led to a literal “Lord of the Flies” atmosphere in the barracks since WWII. Westerners just don’t grasp the depth of their issues, and what sort of behavior that creates in the troops. The atrocities and lack of discipline/control you see exhibited everywhere? Indicators that they still have this going on in the ranks. Dedovschina is a pernicious and destructive force, in more ways than one. I’ve been reading the various reports coming out of this war, and the Russians are royally screwing the pooch with the way they take care of their troops. I think they’ve burnt through their cadres, and what they’ve got left are not the men they need to fix things. Most of the young men who’ve gained experience in Ukraine are now sadly disillusioned, and doing their best to avoid further military service. Because Putin did not do the mobilization order, he has no legal authority to do the things he’d need to do in order to force those men back into the ranks.
I’m going to guess that this whole thing lasts probably until fall, and if the Russian military hasn’t collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and Ukrainian pressure, I’ll be amazed. I don’t think they’ve got what it takes to stay the course, and if a few more generals get killed, Putin may have himself a little surprise coming from inside the ranks. Whatever the end state for this, Russia is f*cked. I don’t see them being able to regenerate forces, or generate much in the way of new formations. The problem is that they’ve built themselves a little Potemkin Village of an army, and now that they’ve actually tried living in said village…? All the contradictions and frauds are coming to life.
Kirk and SGM,
My dad was one of those Air Corps trainees that got pulled into the Infantry. He enlisted in June ’44 and was only 24 days short of completing his school the following January, when he was pulled.
Unlike the current Russian transferees; my dad had two months of Infantry TRAiNING before being shipped overseas.
Of course, once he hit the repple depple in France, he was reclassified as a Combat MP and went to an MP unit, so…