What's The Real State Of Play In Ukraine?

By yesterday, I grew increasinghly frustrated with what I was hearing, especially from US corporate media (including Fox), on what is actually going on in Ukraine. The retired US general talking heads seem to have settled on a consensus that, for instance,the 40-mile column stalled north of Kyiv will get moving any time now and begin reducing the city with artillery. That's how Russia operates.

But this hasn't happened, while I get the impression that Ukraine is learning how the Russians operate, is following a coherent strategy, and is having increasing success in the field. I worked hard for most of the day to find better sources. One of them is in the link above; it concentrates on the level of corporate corruption, nonfeasance, and incompetence in the Russian armed forces that explains some part of their current predicament.

Another source I found just this morning, a post on the Chicago Boyz blog, concentrates on actual Ukrainian military strategy that's another clear component of their success.

The head and first dozen or so kilometers of the southernmost column north of Kiev have been stuck there for EIGHT DAYS. The Russians have since rammed more and more vehicles into this monster traffic jam (idiotically “following the plan” Soviet-style) so the whole thing is now 65-70 kilometers long (almost 40 miles).

And, because the trucks can’t go off-road due to the Rasputitsa mud and tire problems, they’re stuck on the roads and the roads’ shoulders three vehicles wide for the whole @40 miles. That means fuel and resupply trucks can’t move on or off road to deliver anything to anybody.

So all the columns’ heads are now out of fuel and battery power. They can’t move north, south or sideways, and everything behind them is stuck because of the mud, and rapidly running out of fuel and vehicle battery charge too (assuming they haven’t already). Nor can any of those columns defend themselves because they’re too densely packed. They’re just targets waiting for the Ukrainians to destroy them.

Only the Ukrainians had something better to do. They opened the floodgates of reservoirs around those columns to flood them and turn the surrounding areas into impassable quagmires for months – probably until July or August. (See photo below) Probably several thousand Russian vehicles in those columns will be irrecoverable losses. Hundreds of Russian soldiers might have drowned.

This was not just a debacle, but an EPIC one. About 1/5th of the Russian force in Ukraine is now flooded or trapped, and are definitely out of the war for good.

This confirms my view that with the column north of Kiev essentially out of action, the Ukrainians aren't spending scarce resources destroying the column completely, as the US might do with a surplus of air power.

He then shifts to the Ukrainian overall strategy:

[T]he Russian advance has been slowed down in a major way. This buys the Ukrainians time to do other things to defeat the Russians. The most important thing the Ukrainians need is time. They have to take it from the Russians with ground operations & airstrikes.

For various reasons, I have the distinct impression that the Russians are now operating on a three-day decision-reaction cycle. If a major attack being planned is suddenly down to one key bridge connecting its assembly area to supply bases in Russia. It takes three days for the Russians to send a ground combat battalion to defend that bridge.

That is more than enough time for the Ukrainians to move one of their raiding companies there to destroy the bridge. I.e., the Ukrainians are clearly operating inside the Russians’ Observe, Orient, Decide, Act [OODA loop] a la USAF air strategist John Boyd.

The current consensus model of the Ukraine invasion in corporate media is that Ukraine will eventually see a Russian occupation of some sort once Kyiv and Kharkhiv are reduced, but there will be an indefinite guerilla-style resistance. My impression is that the Ukrainians are not following a strategy with this as a contemplated end state. One thing that confirms my view is that the news from the field is not a steadily diminishing number of reports on, say, Russian units destroyed in ambushes or helicopters shot down with missiles. Instead, especially with what is now likely resupply from the Western alliance, these reports continue, while even Russian successes appear to be equivocal.

So I think the actual situation is fairly clear: Russia utterly failed to take out Ukrainian defenses in the first days of the war; Ukraine has survived with a credible continuing military force that has at worst forced Russia to a stalemate. But even, as the US retired general talking heads suggest, Putin moves in reinforcements, they're limited by the same constraints of incompetence and corruption that crippled the original invasion force. Meanwhile, Ukraine is gaining more experience with the Russians every day and is being resupplied, while they're following an overall strategy of attrition and defeat in detail that's showing success.

But then, I'm a contrarian by nature. And Zelensky is anything but a defeatist. But this raises another issue: Sen Graham has been widely criticized for wishing that someone would assassinate Putin. But he misses the point -- in World War II, Churchill and his advisers rejected the idea of assassinating Hitler on the basis that if Hitler were out of the picture, someone might take over who knew what he was doing. Same applies to Putin, it seems to me.