Sorting Out The Current Situation In Ukraine

BTG wipe out

The video above gives an idea of the challenge in trying to sort through what's going on in Ukraine. Its title is fairly straightforrward, "Ukraine War: 15.03.2022 Aftermath of battles in Kherson region", but you definitely can't trust the date: that appears to be when it was uploaded, and possibly even about when the drive-by video was taken, but that doen't say much about when the battle took place. It looks like the photographer was able to pass over the road in a truck, so this suggests that rubble had been cleared, bodies and body parts removed, and Ukrainian forces had already scrubbed the scene for usable trucks, supplies, ammunition, and intelligence, -- a day or more earlier, I would think.

For now, I'll trust them for the location, near Kherson. This would suggest it was a Russian thrust north from that city toward Mykolaiv along the axis in the map below:

Media accounts generally imply that this is part of an effort to reach Odesa. If it is, that ain't gonna happen. The conventional narrative that the Russians are "closing in on Kyiv" or "closing in on the land bridge" is fantasy at this point.

The big thing I noted in watching this video a couple of times is that you can see seven or eight out-of-action tanks along the road, in addition to various trucks and armored infantry vehicles. The number of tanks suggests to me, based on my efforts to educate myself, that this is a battalion tactical group:

A battalion tactical group (Russian: Батальонная тактическая группа, batal'onnaya takticheskaya gruppa), abbreviated as BTG, is a combined-arms manoeuvre unit. . . A BTG typically comprises a battalion (typically mechanised infantry) of 2–4 companies reinforced with air-defence, artillery, engineering, and logistical support units, formed from a garrisoned army brigade. A tank company and rocket artillery also typically reinforce such groupings.

. . . Each BTG has approximately 600–800 officers and soldiers, of whom roughly 200 are infantrymen, equipped with vehicles typically including roughly 10 tanks and 40 infantry fighting vehicles.

So just a minute. If a BTG has 10 tanks and I could count seven or eight out of action along the road, this means the combat effectiveness of the whole BTG was simply wiped out. Other videos that emerge from Ukraine every day suggest that a good number of the vehicles in a BTG are abandoned in operating order by fleeing Russians and driven away either by the Ukrainian army or local farmers and gypsies.

I haven't seen authoritative estimates of how many BTGs went into Ukraine in the February invasion; one number I've seen is 30. There could certainly be more, but the confirmed count of Russian tanks destroyed, abandoned, or captured in the invasion on the Oryx site as of this morning is now up to "229, of which destroyed: 85, damaged: 3, abandoned: 39, captured: 102". The Oryx site counts only those for which there is confirmed photographic evidence; it links a specific photo to each item in the tally, and it makes the point that since they're counting only those with photos, the actual numbers are greater.

In short, if there were 30 BTGs in the invasion, that means there were 300 tanks, of which 229 are no longer available as of this morning. For 30 BTGs, that would mean 18,000-24,000 men, while Russian casualty estimates at this point amount to 6,000-13,000. Another estimate says

A few days ago something like 20-30 BTGs were confirmed to have been rendered combat ineffective out of the 100-130 sent into Ukraine.

While yet another says

The claim is that 40% of units have lost their combat capability. A Russian BTG is considered ineffective if it loses just a fraction of its force. This is actually a thing that happens, because their battalion tactical groups have a certain ratio of forces of each type (unlike NATO-style battalions which Ukraine is likely using now), and if you lose just one of those forces it leaves the BTG unable to do combined-arms missions.

It appears that the drone video of the attack on a Russian column in Brovary that I linked last Thursday was also an attack that destroyed the combat effectiveness of another BTG. BTGs are the main offensive element of the Russian invasion. There are only so many of them. Nobody has been itemizing these attacks, but it's hard to avoid thinking from video evidence that Ukraine has worked out a formula for eliminating BTGs: use intercepted radio to predict their movements; stop them on the road with anti-tank missiles like Javelins, NLAWs, and Panzerfausts, and finish them with accurate artillery.

The very sketchy reports on the Institute for the Study of War site minimize the situation. For instance, the most recent report:

Local company- and battalion-level attacks by Russian forces northwest of Kyiv on March 14-15 likely indicate the largest-scale offensive operations that Russian forces attempting to encircle Kyiv can support at this time. Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations northeast of the city, around Sumy, and only limited (and unsuccessful) attacks southeast of Kharkiv. Russian force generation efforts, including reservist and conscript call-ups and the ongoing transport of Syrian fighters to Russia and Belarus, are unable to change the balance of forces around Kyiv within the coming week. Russian forces have not conducted simultaneous attacks along their multiple axes of advance across Ukraine since March 4 and are unlikely to do so in the next week.

The problem is that their main force components have been largely destroyed by the Ukrainians, and importing untrained, unspecialized, and unreliable Syrians and conscripts won't help, especially if they don't have the tanks and other equipment to re-form the BTGs.

The retired US general talking heads have been largely absent from the media over the past several days. I don't know if they're extending some sort of professional courtesy to their Russian army colleagues or what.