I Still Don't Believe It

As of this morning, there's a new piece by Frank Ledwidge, Senior Lecturer in Military Strategy and Law, University of Portsmouth (UK), Ukraine: the battle for Donbas will be protracted and bloody – military expert. I found it by doing a web search on "Ukraine Donbas battle Kursk" and got a predictable result, and I think this is as good an example as any of the current respectable consensus:

The next two months will bring what US defence officials have called “a knife fight” in the area the Ukrainian army call “The Joint Forces Operation” (JFO). We know this region better as Donbas.

. . . After their recent defeat in the north, Russia has made some significant changes. . . . . the Russians will have a single command staff to co-ordinate and attempt to achieve a single focused and ostensibly realistic operational objective[.]

Russia is desperately trying to replace its considerable losses, up to 20% of its force already. [No, more like 30-50%; even the ISW has moved away from 15-20%.] Those efforts will make little difference. The conscript troops and reactivated reserves called up recently will not be ready for months. Nonetheless the force the Russians will amass will be formidable, and with shorter and better established supply lines into Russia they may be able to avoid some of the appalling foul ups which have characterised their war so far.

These forces are pitched against Ukrainian defenders deployed in several salients or “bulges” – areas surrounded on three sides by Russian-backed separatists. Throughout military history these have offered the possibility of trapping enemy forces in “pockets”. Military historians will recall the Ypres Salient (1914-1918), Verdun (1916), Kursk (1943) and of course the Battle of the Bulge (1944-45) as the most prominent examples of this.

The tone of that last graf is a bad sign: he's talking down to us. Wow! Salients! Verdun! Kursk! Never heard of those, Mr Senior Lecturer! Thanks for bringing it down to our level! He concludes,

Above all the ravages inflicted upon them by the Ukrainian armed forces have cut away at their manpower, equipment and morale. The next battle will begin within the next two weeks. Attempting to predict its precise course is ultimately futile, not even the opposing generals know that. It may well be that the Russian army’s fate has already been sealed in what is likely to be a long war.

Here's a tweet I found yesterday along the same line:

The #BattleofDonbas likely to be biggest tank battle in Europe since 1943 Battle of Kursk; may prove decisive in determining who comes out on top of #RussiaUkraineWar. Here's why https://t.co/Tku8QQOVbl @defpriorities @19_forty_five

— Daniel L. Davis (@DanielLDavis1) April 10, 2022

The points again are that the battle is yet to come, it's days or weeks away, and it's gonna be another Kursk. But my view is in this unnoticed passage from Sunday's ISW summary that I quoted yesterday:

Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Oleksiy Arestovych stated on April 9 that Russian forces have begun their major offensive on Donbas, which Kyiv expects to last 2-3 weeks.

So the big new Kursk has already begun? It's not gonna start next Thursday? Think of that! But where is it? Where are the massed formations of tanks and infantry slugging it out? Where's the knife fight that's depicted in the Kursk battle painting above? I think the answer is what we're already seeing, for instance in the drone footage below taken over the weekend, released by the Ukraine military:

Although it's identified as in Donbas, it's very similar to video released on March 10 from a Ukrainian ambush of a Russian column in Brovary, east of Kyiv, subsequently characterized as a battle. The scenes there depicted Russian tanks reversing in panic as they were picked off by highly accurate Ukrainian artillery, precisely what we now see in this video. The Brovary battle in hindsight was a major factor in stalling the Russian attempt to surround Kyiv. It destroyed most or all of a battalion tactical group and killed its commander. (You can see an analysis of the Brovary battle from the Austrian military academy here. My German's pretty good, but you can also turn on subtitles for translation.)

The Donbas ambush in the video above appears to have been even more effective in blowing up Russian tanks than the one in Brovary. If you followed the anecdotal reports at reddit r/ukraine conflict over the weekend, there were several ambushes like this one, not all as big, as well as major explosions at Russian ammunition depots. Frank Lewidge in the piece I linked above misses his own point:

Ukrainian commanders fully and completely understand from bitter experience the risks of being surrounded. They have demonstrated the qualities of agility and tactical innovation required for this kind of battle. Even better, they know what is coming. Nato air and space reconnaissance and surveillance as well as Ukraine’s own intelligence capabilities will ensure that there will be no surprise attacks.

No surprise attacks? Wouldn't the ambush in the video above qualify as one such? How about the ambush in Brovary? I guess the problem is that all the experts are expecting another Kursk, and the surprise attacks would be comiing from the Russians, while in fact the Ukrainians have figured out how to avoid something like that. They're ambushing the Russian units before they can form up for a battle they expect, while the Ukrainians are fighting the battle they want. (By the way, there was no surprise at all on either side at Kursk. Mr Ledwidge has dawn a false analogy here.)

This also raises questions yet again about those maps that have solid red areas under Russian control, like the experts at the ISW do. Comments on the Donetsk ambush in the video above draw an entirely reasonable conclusion that the column was attacked somewhere behind Russian lines, that is, in a solid red area on this kind of map. But it looks like the Ukrainians had to move artillery close enough to the road the column was traveling to hit those tanks and likely moved infantry close in as well to hit them with missiles. The reality of the solid red areas is that they consist only of thin thread-like lines along roads, and Ukrainian forces operate freely elsewhewre in those areas and can stage ambushes effectively.

The Battle of Donbas is under way, and it will look much more like the Battle of Kyiv than Kursk.