Russian Military Reddit - How to understand the new phase of the Ukrainian war - and why, in general, Russia has probably already lost.
Ukrainian soldiers stand next to their armored personnel carrier in Izyum, southeast of Kharkiv, near the front line with Russian troops on April 18. Anatoly Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images
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This week, a new phase of Russia's war in Ukraine took shape. It is a war for control of Donbass, the eastern Ukrainian region where Russia has supported a separatist rebellion since 2014.
While the war, which began with Russia's February 24 invasion, previously spread across the country and focused on Russia's push to capture Ukraine's capital and most populous city, Kiev, its latest offensive is narrowly focused on a region several hundred kilometers to the east. .
"Russian troops have started the battle for Donbas," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday.
This is, in a sense, a smart move by the Russians. Its attempt to capture Kiev in the early days of the war was decisively repulsed not only by Russian incompetence, but also by an unusually strong Ukrainian resistance, which benefited from defenses in difficult urban environments. The terrain in Donbas - less suburbs, more open land - gives defenders less of an advantage. In the east, Russia can concentrate its forces and move into battles where their superior artillery and air force can be used with devastating effect. Territorial gains in the Donbass could blunt the narrative of Russian military incompetence and give the Kremlin a more credible argument that its war has achieved something real.
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However, Ukraine also has advantages. The forces it currently has in Donbas are some of its most hardened fighters, having spent the past eight years clashing with Russian-backed separatists. It receives vast amounts of Western aid and continues to have excellent morale and logistics – crucial factors in fending off Russian advances elsewhere. According to military observers, it can numerically match the theoretically much larger Russian army.
For these reasons, the outcome of the new phase is far from clear, even for leading experts on the Ukrainian war. In our conversations, they indicated that possible outcomes range from Russia successfully taking control of the entire Donbass to actually retaking the territory. The fighting is likely to be long and bloody, regardless of where the lines end.
Russian military vehicles on a highway in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces near Mariupol, Ukraine, April 18, 2022. Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, has been besieged by Russian troops and separatist forces. -proclaimed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine for more than six weeks. Alexey Alexandrov/AP
But all the sources I spoke with agreed on one thing: Overall, the outcome in Donbass may be less important than it seems. That's because Russia's ultimate goal — regime change in Kyiv, or at least forcing Ukraine to submit to a Russian-dominated political future — has been out of reach for weeks. Russia can continue to launch missiles at Ukrainian cities in other regions and terrorize civilians, but it cannot currently threaten to actually seize these population centers or overthrow the government of President Volodymyr Zelenksy.
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"Politically, Russia has [already] lost the war," says Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military. "When it retreated from the north around Kyiv, it eliminated any momentum Ukraine might have had for settlement."
Thus, Russia's offensive in the Donbass is best understood as an attempt to limit the cost of its mistake: a campaign to string together gains significant enough - such as the capture of Mariupol - to soften the blow of its overall strategic defeat.
The easternmost region of Ukraine, stretching from Luhansk to the vicinity of Mariupol in the south, Donbas directly borders Russia and Russia in the south of Ukraine. Occupying the south of the region would create a corridor under Russian control that would connect the occupied Crimea with Russia itself, a so-called "land bridge", which would make the supply of Crimea a little easier.
The population of Donbas has long been more pro-Russian than the rest of Ukraine, although this may be exaggerated and may have changed since the war began. The region was at the center of Russian wartime propaganda, concocting claims of "genocide" against ethnic Russians in the region to justify the invasion. It is rich in natural gas.
Russian Mp And A Us Army Soldier Talk After Their Convoys Bumped Into Each Other On The M4 Highway In Northern Syria, May 2020. [2500x1667]
And yet none of those reasons were enough to make Donbass the center of the initial Russian invasion. That's because the first goal was regime change in Kyiv - Putin's now infamous proclamation of the "denazification" and "demilitarization" of Ukraine.
The new focus stems from March 25, when the Russian General Staff announced its intention to move offensive combat operations to the Donbass region. At the time, Russian troops were engaged in fighting in the north, east and south of Ukraine, as you can see in the following map from the Institute for the Study of War (a Washington-based think tank).
At the end of March, Russian troops fought on several fronts in Ukraine. Institute for the Study of War
Over the next month, Russia strategically withdrew much of the front, especially around Kyiv and Chernihiv. By April 20, the ISW map shows a reduced Russian presence focused primarily on fighting in and around the Donbass.
Russian National Guard [810x1080]
At the end of April, Russian troops moved almost entirely into the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Institute for the Study of War
This change mainly reflects the inability of Russian forces to capture the capital of Ukraine and overthrow its government in one go. "Putin really started to reassess strategic goals in Ukraine after the massive strategic setback in Kyiv," says Rachel Rizzo, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's European Center.
In Kyiv, Russia tried to rush troops and armor forward to capture and/or surround the capital. These moves assumed light Ukrainian resistance, which ultimately did not occur, and were undermined by poor logistics and the decision to travel on open roads that created easy opportunities for ambushes.
The Ukrainians took advantage of this, raiding Russia's weak supply lines and stalling the Russians in brutal interlocking fighting in Kiev suburbs like Irpin. Russia's air force, on paper far superior to Ukraine's, was unable to control the skies, allowing Ukrainian drones to wreak havoc on Russian armored units.
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A Ukrainian flag flies near a destroyed building in the Borodjanka residential area, northwest of Kyiv and Irpin, on April 17. Sergei Chuzavkov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The war in Donbass is different. Russia's main military objective is to cut off the Ukrainian military in the region, known as the Joint Forces, from the rest of Ukraine by seizing territory west of its positions. If the Russian effort succeeds, the United States will lose its supply capacity and its ability to continue fighting — which would allow Russia to consolidate control over a large area of the Donbass.
That plan avoids many of the pitfalls that plague Russian troops in the Kiev area. This mostly requires the Ukrainians to capture open ground instead of engaging in an urban environment that favors defenders. It means fighting in a concentrated area rather than a series of scattered fronts, which in theory should create less vulnerable supply lines. And Russia currently has such air superiority in the Donbas that it has never had anywhere else.
"If they mass forces, which they're trying to do now, mass them in the right place and use a lot of artillery and airstrikes, they can still have tactical success," said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. . Eurasia Program. "That's why Donbas plays to the strength of the Russian army and mitigates some of their weaknesses."
Russian Military Police [2500 X 1667]
That is why we should expect a different kind of fighting in the Donbass: fewer attacks, more large-scale conflicts between armies. That should favor the Russian troops, who always outnumbered the Ukrainians in armor, artillery and aircraft.
Ultimately, some analysts say, Russia's goal here is to capture enough territory to sell its own population — and the world — on the idea that its campaign has succeeded despite setbacks around Kyiv.
Ukrainian soldiers maintain their positions in a trench on the front line with Russian soldiers in Luhansk on April 11. Anatoly Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images
If Russia can secure control of the breakaway republics in the area controlled by pro-Russian separatists - the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics - they can claim to have achieved the pre-war goal of ending the "genocide".
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"Now they have bet on the 'defense' of Donbass," says Olga Oliker, the International Crisis Group's program director for Europe and Central Asia.
If we've learned anything in this conflict so far, it's that Russia's theoretical advantages don't always translate into success on the battlefield. And there are reasons to believe that Ukraine can once again fend off a Russian attack.
The nature of Russia's plan opposes its military
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