Ukraine Counteroffensive A "Suicide Mission"

As I look at this morning's news, I'm beginnoing to think Austrian Col Markus Reisner buried the main insight in the presentation I linked yesterday. I quoted him there:

The West will only support Ukraine as long as the West believes it is important to support the war against Russia, and the West believes the Ukrainian forces are winning.

For now, the second part of his statement is key, and it sounds as if President Zelensky is acutely aware of the problem, especially since Ukraine's winter counteroffensive didn't happen at all, and the spring counteroffensive, which Zelensky announced only on June 8, has apparently now been paused after only a week.

But even as of June 8, the day Zelensky announced the start of the counteroffensive, Forbes reported problems:

A Russian artillery strike on a Ukrainian vehicle column during a daytime assault on or around the town of Novopokrovka—35 miles southeast of Zaporizhzhia city in southern Ukraine—apparently knocked out at least one Leopard 2 tank on Wednesday.

A Russian drone orbited overheard as the shells rained down, its crew presumably helping to direct the strike and assess the resulting damage. The Russians posted the drone’s video on social media, finally achieving what Russian propagandists earlier had tried and failed to do: posit the destruction of a Ukrainian Leopard 2.

The Leopard 2 and other armored vehicles were traveling in an uncomfortably tight column along an unpaved road outside Novopokrovka or nearby Mala Tokmachka—both occupied by Russian troops—when the artillery struck.

By June 10, Asia Times reported deeper issues:

American and European military observers in Ukraine described the Ukraine Army’s efforts of the past two days as a “suicide mission” that violated the basic rules of military tactics. “If you want to conduct an offensive and you have a dozen brigades and a few dozen tanks, you concentrate them and try to break through. The Ukrainians have been running around in five different directions,” complained a senior European officer.

“We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with proper infantry support and then do what they can,” the officer added.

“They were trained by the British and they’re playing Light Brigade,” the officer added, referring to the 1854 disaster at the Battle of Balaclava when misreported orders sent British cavalry into massed cannon fire.

Ukraine’s tanks charged directly into minefields without deploying mine-clearing vehicles first, contributing to the loss of 38 tanks during the night of June 8, including numerous of the newly delivered Leopard II tanks.

Modern Diplomscy added three days later,

Of the 14 Leopard tanks Germany has provided to Ukraine, 3 have been destroyed, along with several of the Leopards provided by Poland.

The Institute for the Study of War, as far as I can determine, deletes each of its daily Ukraine assessments after a few days, so I've been unable to go back to the period June 8-June 12 to see if its reports reflected any of the issues in the links above. However, its June 20 assessment now says,

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported on June 19 that Russian forces have committed significant forces to stop Ukrainian offensives, making Ukrainian advances difficult. Malyar added that ongoing Ukrainian operations have several tasks that are not solely focused on liberating territory and that Ukrainian forces have yet to start the main phase of counteroffensive operations.

Except that in the effort announced by Zelensky June 8 as the start of the counteroffensive, they quickly lost dozens of tanks, including several of the advanced types just sent by the West, in what military observers called a "suicide mission". How's the "main phase" going to go when, or if, it starts?

Both Col Reisner and the ISW refer to an "information space" that, looking more closely at their context, is much better characterized as a "propaganda war". Last year, Ukraine was winning this hands down, with videos showing scenes like farmers towing away abandoned Russian tanks with their tractors. One thing I've noticed in more recent months is there's been nothing new for the Ukrainian side. The war porn on YouTube and Twitter shows just the same old vignettes of Ukrainian drones dropping grenades on Russian trenches, with occasional analyses showing Ukrainian missile attacks on bases in Crimea accomplishing nothing.

Beyond that, Oryx, the open-source intelligence blog that had become the go-to place that documented equipment losses on both sides of the Russo-Ukraine war, announced over the past several days that it was ceasing operations:

I would hereby like to inform you that I will be ending Oryx on October 1st. I originally started Oryx Blog 10 years ago to cure my boredom. Little did I know Oryx would escalate into the all-consuming project it is today. All of us work on the articles and lists in our free time. It's not our job. We don't get paid. Though I hoped our work would one day lead to a job, no such thing occurred. Oryx just doesn't make me happy anymore, and continuing with it prevents me from finding a happier place in life.

According to Wikipedia,

The blog gained international prominence through its work during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, counting and keeping track of material losses based on visual evidence and open-source intelligence from social media. It has been regularly cited in major media, including Reuters, BBC News, The Guardian,The Economist, Newsweek, CNN, and CBS News. Forbes has called Oryx "the most reliable source in the conflict so far", calling its services "outstanding". Because it reports only visually confirmed losses, Forbes claimed that Oryx's tallies of equipment losses have formed absolute minimum baselines for loss estimates.

There is no question that since the start of the war, Oryx was seen as objective support for Ukraine's side. Oddly, it doesn't look as though anyone saw fit to give it financial support, although the ISW gets heavy funding from the US defense industry -- but try as the ISW might, it's never carried Oryx's credibility.

All this adds to a sense that since last fall and the lack of any new counteroffensive, Ukraine was losing, and had begun to recognize it was losing, the "information space", or better expressed, the propaganda war. Just as spring was about to end without any promised spring counteroffensive, Zelensky announced this had begun -- but it sounds as though within a week, and probably even within days, this had effectively been called off, with lame explanations that it hadn't really started anyhow.

Col Reisner is correct, though, the West will only support Ukraine as long as it thinks Ukraine is winning. My own position on the war in the middle of last year was also based on the assumption that Ukraine would keep winning -- but it's important to recognize that the wartime leaders to whom I compared Zelensky at the time, Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt, were acutely aware of the need for victories to sustain public support for wartime sacrifice. Thus they needed, and knew they needed, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, El-Alamein, Midway, and Guadalcanal, and they pushed hard to get them.

For whatever reason, Zelensky seems to have lost sight of that important part of his job, and it looks right now as if, belatedly recognizing it, he's now desperate. This doesn't augur well, and it lends support to the Trump-Tucker Carlson view of rhe war.