Putin's War, Week 93. General Winter Hits the Brakes, Offensive Postmortems and Funding Fights

By streiff | 10:46 AM on December 07, 2023
The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.
CREDIT: Public domain

Week 93 of Vladimir Putin's three-hour tour looks a lot like Week 92 and maybe Week 91. 

As I reported last week, the center of gravity has moved from the battlefields of Kharkiv, Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson to Brussels and Washington. There are two main topics.

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The budget fight underway on Capital Hill presents a number of false equivalencies. 

The US has provided $46.6 billion in defense aid, $26.4 billion in economic aid, and $3.9 billion in humanitarian aid. Thus, on the scale of governmental spending, Ukraine aid is barely a rounding error. In short, there may be philosophical and political arguments for not providing aid to Ukraine, but don't be a clown and act like saving it or spending it is really important.


Source: Council on Foreign Relations

The argument "we should be spending that money on our own border" is vapid and silly. Its underlying premise is that the funding is zero-sum (it isn't) and that we fully funded border security before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine (we weren't). There is literally no legislative or logical connection between the two, but it fits nicely on a bumper sticker or a fundraising email header, and here we are. The other false equivalency is that we have to choose between supporting Israel and Ukraine. Again, there is little similarity between the two. Israel is drawing heavily on 2,000-lb bombs. Ukraine has the largest need for 155mm artillery ammunition and ATGMs. Ukraine's war will last at least another year, and Israel's will be over in six weeks, tops. In short, the only reason not to support them both is because we've decided not to. Again, there may be valid reasons to opt for that course of action, but let's not make up nonsense.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was supposed to address the US Senate via video link. But you know how that works.

Senators had expected that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine would join their briefing via secure video to make a personal appeal for more aid. But Mr. Zelensky canceled at the last minute, leaving the pitch to Biden administration officials: Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken; Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III; Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and leaders from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Republicans complained that the roster of speakers included no border officials, accusing Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, of refusing to engage on the issue.

The reason he canceled the pitch was because:

A classified briefing with administration officials called to shore up support devolved into a partisan screaming match on Tuesday afternoon, with Republicans angrily accusing Democrats of trying to steamroller over their demands for a border crackdown.

Smart move by Zelensky's staff. You never want to walk into the middle of a domestic dispute. It is also good to see Zelensky's team avoiding the foot-shot in 2022 when their support for Democratic candidates in the US was pretty blatant.

There is no huge crisis here. While I have sympathy for the GOP trying to tie funding for Ukraine to border security, I don't see how that works. I can't see Mike Johnson having the clout to hold a majority together on linking border security with funding for Ukraine and Israel. Once the linkage is severed, the funding pieces will fall into place. Ukraine is in no immediate danger of running out of funding.

Q: ... the -- the current figure of how much PDA, Presidential Drawdown Authority, is still available? And once that's exhausted, don't -- do the services have other sources they could tap for Ukraine?

GEN. RYDER: Yeah, so right now, there is roughly $4.8 billion in restored presidential drawdown authority still available, and there is $1.1 billion in existing resources available to backfill U.S. stocks.

So in terms of funding -- as I highlighted, without funding, we will not be able to provide Ukraine with the critical security assistance it needs to protect its cities, its people, its critical infrastructure, and we may reach a point where we can't sustain the current level of security assistance support to Ukraine.

Part of the anxiety over funding is tied to Ukraine's army underperforming expectations over the summer. The Washington Post has an interesting postmortem on the subject (Part 1/Part 2). I take a lot of it with a grain of salt because failure has an anonymous baby daddy and a dope who gets stuck paying child support. This is my assessment.

1. Failure to adhere to the principles of war (particularly mass, economy of force, maneuver, and surprise) and tactical principles (reconnaissance, planning, security, and control). The offensive was telegraphed for weeks. One fear I commented on leading up to the offensive was the possibility that, for political reasons, the NATO-trained and equipped units would be divvied up between commands rather than held as a strike force. That is what happened. The best-trained troops were divided between three areas, so two-thirds of them were absent from the heavy fighting around Robotyne and Verbove, where the breakthrough was supposed to occur. Ukrainian units were surprised by the density of minefields in front of their own positions, showing an absence of patrolling. If you are surprised at what is between your lines and enemy lines, you will discover very unpleasant things over the first ridge line.

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2. There seems to have been a bit of kabuki going on at the war games held in Germany. The Ukrainians didn't buy into combined arms warfare; they were convinced that kind of warfare could not work in their war. So, they went about the initial attacks without believing in what they were doing and then pulled the plug on that operational concept. That's fine, but the time to voice distrust of the planning was while it took place instead of spending two or three months planning for something you did not intend to execute.

3. Relationships between top US and Ukrainian commanders seem to have completely broken down; "The commander of US forces in Europe couldn’t get in touch with Ukraine’s top commander for weeks in the early part of the campaign amid tension over the American’s second-guessing of battlefield decisions." My guess is that the Ukrainians had decided how they were going to fight the war and didn't want to argue about it.

There is some nonsense in the story about how the US was surprised to find most of the newly formed units going through training didn't have "combat experience." What hogwash. Zero percent of the troops in Desert Storm had combat experience. Combat experience gained while losing or fighting in an ineffective way of no use. My first job in the Army was in a Basic Combat Training company. The hardest kids to get through rifle marksmanship were the ones who had grown up shooting because you had to un-teach all their bad habits. 

I hope the lessons the West has learned from this is that the Ukrainians know their war is as much political as it is military. As such, senior officers are political power centers, and they will all get their fair share of whatever goodies are doled out. So, we can put away the idea of doctrinal combined arms assault focused on one point. Second, you can take the boy out of the Red Army, but you can't take the Red Army out of the boy. So much of what went wrong can be directly attributed to senior officers, no matter how faithfully they mouthed NATO doctrine, to step away from their early training. Third, without air supremacy in the area of attack, and that can be from having such a density of anti-aircraft systems that the Russian drones and aircraft can't operate, nothing moves. Fourth, the Ukrainians have been fighting this war since 2014; our guys need to show them respect of understanding what the battlefield is like before moving on to telling them how to do their jobs.

I'm sure lessons have been learned from this; the big question is if the relationships of trust and mutual respect still exist so they can be acted upon.

I'm pulling this tweet up top because it does give hope. The Ukrainians have established air supremacy over the lodgement across the Dneiper River in Kherson.

An interesting comment that reminds what I wrote a month ago about Zaluzhny. He is trying to implement on a limited scale the necessary conditions to move from positional to maneuver warfare, and in fine win the war.

If this can be scaled up, it may mark a change from the "one yard in a cloud of dust" tactics both sides are using.

Here are some of my past updates. For all my Ukraine War coverage, click here.

Putin's War, Week 92. Ukraine Gets Its Own Divine Wind and With Friends Like China, Who Needs Enemies 

Putin's War, Week 91. Mud and Snow Beats Fire and Steel, and Tumbleweeds Are Blowing Through Sevastopol – RedState

Putin's War, Week 90. Grain Corridor Reopens and Russia Hints at Another Major Retreat 

Putin's War, Week 89. Zelensky Gets an EU Invitation, the EU Looks East and the Russians Have a Timetable

Putin's War, Week 88. Zelensky Is Blindsided by TIME Magazine and the Offensive Gets a Postmortem 

Putin's War, Week 87. The Battlefield Shifts to Washington and Brussels

Putin's War, Week 86. The Very Resistible Force Meets the Immovable Object in Donbas

Putin's War, Week 85. The Curtain Goes Down on the Ukrainian Offensive and Russia Rolls for a Hard Six

Putin's War, Week 84. Slovakia Stops Ukraine Aid as the Spring Offensive Nears Culminating Point

Putin's War, Week 83. Zelensky Gets ATACMS From Biden and a Cold Shoulder From McCarthy

Putin's War, Week 82. Russia Dissed at the UN and the War Moves Toward Rasputitsa

Many more are available at this link.

Politico-Strategic Level

Public Support for Ukraine Still Strong

I've mentioned several times that the center of gravity in this war, absent a catastrophic collapse by one party or another on the battlefield, is in Washington and Brussels. As long as public support for Ukraine is not negative, aid for that country will continue, and, as we're seeing from the decrepit state of our defense production base, that is a good thing. 

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A new series of polls shows that Ukraine retains strong support among Americans.

The baseline is a November 2 Gallup Poll showing that 55% of Americans think we are doing the right amount or need to do a lot more.

The 2023 Reagan Institute Summer Survey found a strong majority in favor of supporting Ukraine.

Three-quarters of Americans say that it is important to the United States that Ukraine wins the war against Russian aggression, including bipartisan supermajorities of Democrats (86%) and Republicans (71%). Independents lag significantly behind partisans at 58%. Americans are less sure of who is currently winning the war between Russia and Ukraine, with 31% saying Ukraine, 27% saying Russia, 25% saying neither, and 17% saying that they do not know.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs had similar findings.

  • Majorities of Americans continue to support providing economic assistance (61%) and sending additional arms and military supplies to the Ukrainian government (63%), down slightly from a year ago. About half of Republicans agree.
  • A narrow majority of Americans say that the $43 billion in weapons, equipment and training that the United States has provided to Ukraine has been worth the cost (53% vs. 45% not worth the cost). Six in 10 Republicans say it has not been worth it.

An Emerson College poll conducted on behalf of the Association of Marshall Scholars found that 76% of respondents felt that NATO members should continue to support Ukraine.

This means that there will be Congressional support for Ukraine funding for the near future.

Putin Hints He Will Tune Up Latvia

For nearly two years, I've concentrated on one theme regarding Putin's War in Ukraine and why it is vital that he visibly lose. That reason is that he's told us for at least three years that he doesn't recognize any of the land lost to the Russian Empire since the reign of Nicholas II. He's been very clear that he doesn't acknowledge the loss of the Baltic States, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova as legitimate, and he intends to reverse them. I think he's been equally clear that his goal is to bring them back under rule from Moscow.

He continues to have the conceit that Russia has an extraterritorial authority over ethnic Russians and the right to intervene politically or militarily if he disagrees with the way they are treated. In the case of Latvia, steps are being taken to make Latvian the official language and require all public school instruction to be in that language. That is a quintessentially domestic issue and should not concern Russia at all. But if Putin is the protector of ethnic Russians, then he has to act. 

If Russia does not come away from this war with a solid "L," get ready for more of the same.

Why You Never Make Agreements With Russia, Part I.

The prelude to this was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurance, signed by Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, the US, and the UK. Part of that pledged the signatories to, among other things:

2. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

3. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the Principles of the CSCE Final Act, to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.

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What Ukraine should have learned is obvious. If you believe anything Russia says, you deserve what you get.

Why You Never Make Agreements With Russia, Part 2.

Ukraine and Russia signed a treaty on the status of the Sea of Azov in 2003. This new action shows why a negotiated end to Putin's War without a Ukrainian victory in the field is simply impossible. Russia has now annexed five Ukrainian oblasts and is poised to do the same to a large body of water. There is no universe in which Putin's Russia renounces those actions.

Rheinmetall Begins Building Armored Vehicles In Ukraine

Rheinmetall hopes to produce its first armored vehicles in Ukraine in 2024.

A mere 20 updates ago, Rheinmetall announced it was opening a factory in Ukraine to build Leopard tanks (Putin’s War, Week 72. Ukraine Misses NATO Membership but Still Wins and Ground Combat Gains Velocity). 

Ukraine had a creditable arms industry before the war started, and the infusion of Rheinmetall capital and intellectual property is going to show up in Ukrainian artillery and missile systems.

Ukrainian Ammunition Production Goes Extraterritorial

If this isn't simply the product of crappy English, there is some news here.

We knew Ukraine was producing artillery ammunition. We didn't know it was producing artillery ammunition outside Ukraine. I guess Ukraine has taken over a Soviet-era ammunition plant in a former Warsaw Pact country, brought it out of mothballs, and cranked up production. If it was done in one place, I can't imagine it not being done elsewhere.

Russian Casualties and Shenanigans

The UK Defense Intelligence put out this bulletin on Russian casualties.

Some keen followers of that account objected.

Given what we've seen of Russian casualty care operations, I don't believe that there are between 3.5 and 4 Russians wounded for every KIA. I do know where that number comes from. And it is sort of disturbing that an intelligence agency would put out an analytic statement this flimsy. I think the revision of the UK number downward is due to the inability to grasp the level of slaughter at places like Avdiivka and thinking, "Holy balls, I know what the number says but If we report it I'll never hear the end of it, so let's just report what we did last time."

Even at the, I think, low-balled UK number, that means that more Russians have been killed or wounded in Ukraine than were in the invading force.

Gazans in Chechnya?

This is bizarre...it is also quintessentially Russian. I think looking at the politics of Russia's upcoming fake election is a mistake. This is playing to the pro-Hamas demonstrators on the streets of NYC, DC, and London.

Russia Suppresses Dissent by Soldiers's Wives

Russia's war in Afghanistan was brought to a close by Russian women, primarily mothers, opposing conscription. The Putin regime is keenly aware of this and is also aware of the growing opposition to the war by wives and mothers of soldiers. There seems to be an official effort underway to tamp down this dissent.

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Russian Women...Not Just For Lonely Americans Anymore

These ads have started appearing on some Arab language television stations. According to the ad, which may be as truthful as your typical Pfizer claim about its COVID vaccine (Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Sues Pfizer for 'False, Deceptive, and Misleading' COVID Vaccine Claims), men are in short supply because of the war, lots of women are available, if you marry a Russian woman you can get Russian citizenship, and, everyone's favorite, free money. The bonus is getting conscripted for duty in Ukraine (Putin's War, Week 92. Ukraine Gets Its Own Divine Wind and With Friends Like China, Who Needs Enemies).

Operational Level

Ukraine Digs In

I've posted for a few weeks that, absent a catastrophic 1917-style event in the Russian Army, the campaign season is over for Ukraine until after the first of the year. The level of activity and the imagery all say that winter has set in, The Wall Street Journal reports that President Zelensky has ordered the military to place the highest priority on constructing fortifications.

Zelensky’s announcement came after a day traveling the northeast and southeast for meetings with military commanders and soldiers, as well as a tour of schools operating from underground bomb shelters and subway stations because of the threat of Russian shelling.

One meeting, he said, concerned fortifications “on all the main fronts, where we need to dig in, speed up the pace of construction.” He said the focus would be the east and northeast, where Russia has sought to advance for months, achieving small gains at heavy cost. But he also noted that fortifications should be built in the Kyiv region along with others that border Russia and Belarus, from where Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

I think there are a lot of good reasons for that. Improved positions conserve the strength of the units defending the frontlines, protecting them from the Russians and the weather. Fortifications require fewer men to hold them and allow more men to move to rest areas. I think it can be argued that some of the difficulties facing the Ukrainian Army north and south of Bakhmut are due to not digging in properly when they had the chance before the new Russian counterattacks materialized.

More Spare Equipment

Last week, I showed the fields of armored personnel carriers sitting at Red River Army Depot, preparing to be made into beer cans and razor blades (beat your M113s into beer cans has a Biblical ring to it). This video shows M1 tanks and other vehicles parked at Sierra Army Depot in Herlong, CA. Trivia: I spent a week there on an Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercise reacting to a simulated terrorist threat to the nuclear weapons stored there at the time (I don't know if they are still there). It adds a new level of meaning to "desolate."

This all points to how little effort the Biden White House is putting on what I think will be seen as the critical European affair of the last 40 years.

Combat Operations

Attack Stopped By Terrible Tactics and Artillery...But Mostly by Artillery

This is a Russian attack somewhere on the Avdiivka Salient. This is a platoon in terms of peacetime strength, but I'm willing to bet that this grouping is called a company or battalion. It's the type of thing that drives an infantryman nuts. At 0:24, you see the Russian advancing in single file into a row of trees. There is sporadic indirect fire in their area; my guess is mortar fire. At 0:41, they bunch up and are promptly hit by a larger caliber artillery round. The shelling continues, and no one moves. I'm guessing that at this point, the leader is dead, and the troops have gone to ground. At 1:07, another large caliber round explodes, and at 1:10, DPICM hits. At 1:22 DPICM and a large caliber round hit. By the end, there's no movement. If there were survivors, they are no longer a threat to anyone.

Patriot Downs Russian Strike Fighter

A US Patriot system employed near Odesa shot down a Russian Su-24 strike fighter over the Black Sea. The fighter was approaching Snake Island for an attack.

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Critical takeaways from this incident.

This is the first evidence that Ukraine has redeployed Patriots to Odesa. That signifies that it intends to actively contest Russian air attacks on its Danube ports.

The Russian fighter was well over 50 miles from the missile launcher when it was shot down. This shows that Russian aircraft have lost the ability to operate in the southwestern sector of the Black Sea. Russian surface combatants lost the ability to operate in this sector months ago. This seems to open the possibility of Ukraine grain exports next summer with or without Russian consent.

Finally, this is not the first time Patriot has made an unexpected appearance to discomfit the Russians. In May, a Patriot system shot down four aircraft over Russian territory; see Four Russian Aircraft Were Shot Down Over Russia in a Couple of Minutes and No One Is Giving Straight Answers – RedState.

War Crimes

I'm just bringing this up because it was a social media bubble over the weekend. While not excusing cold-blooded murder, which this is based on its World War II experience, the British Army found in close-range fighting; it was almost impossible to surrender safely. "Too late, mate," was allegedly the reply to a white flag if you had to fight through positions. 

Though my gut feeling is that "take no prisoners" is much closer to the norm in the Russian Army than in the Ukrainian, it still happens.

An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints, 

Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;

Neither do men stuck in an incredibly brutal situation where life is cheap and who have lost hope of living through it.

Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures

FPV Attack

First Person View (FPV) drone attacks have become the signature image of this war. Here, you have the opportunity to be inside a vehicle hit by a Russian FPV drone.

How Not to Run a Convoy

This 11-vehicle convoy was found stopped on the road in a formation that in the infantry would be referred to as "a**hole to belly button" and paid the price. From the lack of activity, it seems that the truck crews might have been taking a break. 

This is just another indicator that because of the losses the Russian Army has racked up since February 24, 2022, it has learned nothing from the war. It may even know less now than it did when it started. You can't stop trucks in a combat zone (or in training) bumper-to-bumper for any reason. Everyone should know by now that you have to operate under the assumption that you have been observed; the lack of dispersion and any attempt to conceal the vehicles can only be explained by lack of experience. That lack of experience is best explained by the Russian Army killing off experienced soldiers before they have the chance to pass on "lessons learned" to new soldiers.

Don't Be This Guy

This is a video of a couple of Russians trying to outrun an FPV on a two-man ATV. I don't know if they were successful or if this is a posthumous contribution to the video history of the war.

Northern Front

Kharkiv

Kupiansk

The situation is essentially unchanged 


Donbas

Bahkmut-Klishchiivka-Andriivka

The situation is static, with occasional attacks by both sides. Russian sites have reported gains in two areas on the map below, but I can't confirm their existence.


Avdiivka

Russian attacks continue unabated around Avdiivka; all of this indicates that taking Avdiivka is a political rather than military goal. The attacks have not achieved measurable progress.

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f

Partisan Activity

Oleg Popov, a quisling member of the "People's Council of the Luhansk People's Republic," was killed when his car exploded.

Southern Front

Zaporizhzhia

Robotyne-Verbove- Novoprokopivka;

This area of the front continues to be quiet.


Kherson

This sector was mostly quiet over the last week.


Rear Areas

Crimea

Something Big in the Works?

The fact that Ukrainian Special Operations Forces announced this attack. Second, the target array tells you that Ukraine is opening an air corridor for cruise missiles or fixed-wing aircraft...most like cruise missiles.

Partisan Operations

Russia

Partisan Activity

Last week, I posted on an oil tanker fire in a tunnel linking Russian Siberia with China; see Putin's War, Week 92. Ukraine Gets Its Own Divine Wind and With Friends Like China, Who Needs Enemies. The Ukrainians claimed it was the result of special operations forces, and the Russians are now calling it a "terrorist attack."

The next night, another tank car train exploded near the same location, at the Itykit-Okusikan crossing in Buryatia. 



The train allegedly consisted of 50 cars, 41 of which were tank cars filled with diesel and three tank cars loaded with aviation fuel.

According to BBC, the first explosion disabled the main line through the tunnel. The second explosion blocked a 35-meter-high bridge on the alternate route.


Political Assassination

What's Next

I think we can drop the curtain on military activity in 2023. Winter has arrived with a vengeance, and both sides will be more focused on survival than fighting. The political battles over Ukraine support are taking shape. It remains to be seen if Putin's bet on the flea-like attention span of the US and EU will be exhausted and move on to the next shiny object. I think Ukraine funding survives in 2024, but if we are at this same point in 2025, then I may not be as confident.

On the operational side, I think we can expect continued Russian attacks all along the line of contact. None of those efforts are accomplishing much. The attacks as Avdiivka will continue as long as someone in the Kremlin thinks it is important to show they've done all they can do to take the area. The Ukrainian operations in Kherson are still a bit of a puzzle, but the fact the Ukrainians have shut down Russian ISTAR (or whatever it is being called this week) and moved Patriot missiles within range of the operation hints that more is going on there than we're aware of.

Streiff

Former infantry officer, CGSC grad and Army Operations Center alumnus. Also an amateur historian (Colonial America) and a dabbler in historical fiction.
RedState member since 2004. "He would rather pinch off his own head than admit he's wrong" -- Daily Kos. Follow me on Twitter. 

Read more by Streiff
Tags: UKRAINE VLADIMIR PUTIN PUTIN'S WAR

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