Logistics remains the pivot for the progress of the war as Russia is running out of reserves and is being held back in a number of areas where the Ukrainians are resisting. The Siverskyi Donets battle remains monumental even if it may not be a decisive moment in the war. Mariupol finally falls into Russian hands as defenders leave. The London Times reports on Putin’s micromanaging tactical plans in the warzone.
Western sources believe that Putin’s micromanagement of the war could be contributing to the military failures in the Donbas region, where Russian troops are failing to take cities.
Putin, a former KGB officer, revealed several years ago that he commanded an artillery battalion during the Soviet era. “I received the rank of lieutenant as an artilleryman, as the commander of a howitzer artillery battalion . . . 122mm [calibre],” he said during a visit to Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, according to video posted by the Kremlin.
Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, head of Britain’s armed forces, said in parliament yesterday that Ukraine was winning the war against Russia because it was an “existential fight for its nation”. He said he believed that the survival of the Kyiv administration was guaranteed.
Igor Girkin, also known as Igor Strelkov, a former FSB agent who orchestrated the annexation of Crimea in 2014, said in comments circulated on social media that Russia’s operation in Donbas had failed. “In more than two weeks of fierce hostilities, only tactical successes have been reached,” he wrote.
www.thetimes.co.uk/...
Key Takeaways
- Russian and Ukrainian authorities negotiated the evacuation of 264 wounded Ukrainian servicemen from the Azovstal Steel Plant on May 16.
- Ukrainian forces reached the Russian border north of Kharkiv City.
- Russian forces continued unsuccessful ground operations in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts and did not make any confirmed advances on May 16.
- Russian forces continued to fortify their positions in Zaporizhia Oblast.
Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
- Subordinate main effort- Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
- Supporting effort 1 — Mariupol;
- Supporting effort 2—Kharkiv City;
- Supporting effort 3—Southern axis.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely complete their withdrawal from the vicinity of Kharkiv City but attempt to hold a line west of Vovchansk to defend their GLOCs from Belgorod to Izyum. It is unclear if they will succeed.
- The Russians will continue efforts to encircle Severodonetsk and Lysychansk at least from the south, possibly by focusing on cutting off the last highway connecting Severodonetsk-Lysychansk with the rest of Ukraine.
- A Ukrainian counter-offensive around Izyum will likely begin soon.
- The Battle of Mariupol may be coming to an end.
Pentagon Briefing: Obviously, we assess that Russian forces continue to attack Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region. They did not make significant territorial gains in that region, both sides exchanging artillery fire even over the last 24 hours.
The Russian forces seem to be focusing their efforts largely near Izyum and -- and to the north of Lyman. So the -- sort of -- if you draw a line between those two, Izyum and Lyman, to the southeast, that's where the preponderance of their efforts seem to be again over the last 24.
We do continue to see the Ukrainians regain some ground around Kharkiv, even though they've been -- Kharkiv continues to be hit by airstrikes and bombardment, artillery is being used obviously in and around Kharkiv, but we assess that the Ukrainians have pushed Russian forces to within three to four kilometers of the Russian border.
We've seen some reporting out there that they've gone up to the border. We can't refute that. So as -- our general assessment is they're right near that border, in terms of pushing them up to the north. And that continues. So there is still active fighting in and around and to the north of Kharkiv. I don't have an update on how far to the east of Kharkiv Russian forces are. I don't -- I just don't have anything new on that.
Let's see. We do -- have seen -- in the last 24, we have seen some heavy fighting in the vicinity of Donetsk and we haven't talked about Donetsk very often -- but we're doing -- we are seeing some heavy fighting there near Donetsk, moving basically east to west, and we do assess that the Russian forces are making some small gains to the west of Donetsk.
And again, not entirely clear what the goal is there but I would remind you that if you look just to the west, a little bit south of west from Donetsk, you get that town of Velyka Novosilka, which is where the Russian forces have stopped advancing south of that, coming up out of Mariupol. So it could be an attempt by them to link up with their Russian forces that have sort of been stuck south of Velyka Novosilka. We don't -- again, don't know, but we are seeing that over the last 24.
It appears as if they have made no progress with their -- trying to cross over those pontoon bridges, over the Donets River, about 30 kilometers northwest of Luhansk. They have been stymied -- just about every effort by the Ukrainians.
And so it's going to be difficult for them to make any significant gains in the Donbas area until they can reposition forces or find less well-defended areas to cross that river, but they just haven't been able to make much progress.
In the air domain, pretty much consistent. Again, they were flying about 250 sorties, strikes are focused again on the Joint Forces Operation area of the Donbas -- Kharkiv and Mariupol. So again, no big, major changes to that.
We did see that, over the last 24, they -- the Russians did fire some long range missiles into or -- well, in -- in the vicinity of Lviv. It looked -- it looks as if they were trying to target the Yavoriv training area that you guys are all familiar with.
We don't have perfect BDA but what we are comfortable saying is that there was minimal damage, from what we can see, but again, I don't have perfect -- I know I said I don't have perfect visibility on -- on those strikes but they do appear to have been targeted at that training facility. And again, what we -- what we can see from our perspective is minor damage to a few buildings but nothing major.
On the security assistance front, really nothing much new to report. On the 155 ammunition, 64 percent of the total -- and the total, I would remind you, now that we've announced that $150 million package, is 209,000 rounds total have been committed for 155 rounds, and more than 130,000 of them are -- have been transferred into Ukraine, and more -- you know, more gets in every day.
Three of the Mi-17s of the 11 that were left to be transferred -- three of them have been transferred to Ukraine, and we got feedback from the Ukrainians that one of them -- the first one that was transferred of the 11, the first one that was transferred has already flown two missions for them. I don't know what missions, I don't know where. I don't know what they did. I'm just telling you we got feedback from the Ukrainians that it's already flown two missions.
And on training really nothing new to report. Training continues on all the platforms we've talked about, including the M777, the maintenance course for the M777, the Pumas. All that stuff is -- the training continues on that.
Oh, back on security assistance. In the last 24 there were 10 deliveries via airlift from seven different nations into the region, so we're continuing to coordinate the delivery of assistance from other countries as well.
Okay, so not a whole lot of unique progress or different things to mention today. The strikes into -- near Lviv, that's new. The fighting west of Donetsk, that's new. And the focus of the Russians on that axis between Izyum and Lyman, although that's not new, I mean, that just seems to be where they're focused right now because they just haven't made really any progress up there at all over the course of the weekend.
And then lastly, the only thing else was new was Kharkiv and the Ukrainians pushing the Russians very, very close up to the Russian border.
www.defense.gov/...
Russian military bloggers continued to post analysis that is skeptical of Russian efforts and increasingly in-line with Western assessments of Russian military failures in Ukraine. One such blogger, Igor Strelkov, claimed that the Russian offensive to take Donbas has ultimately failed and that “not a single large settlement “has been liberated.[1] Strelkov even noted that the capture of Rubizhne is relatively insignificant because it happened before the new offensive in Donbas had begun. Strelkov stated that Russian forces are unlikely to liberate Donbas by the summer and that Ukrainian troops will hold their positions around Donetsk City. Strelkov notably claimed that Russian failures thus far have not surprised him because the intent of Russian command has been so evident throughout the operation that Ukrainian troops are aware of exactly how to best respond and warns that Russian troops are fighting to the point of exhaustion under “rules proposed by the enemy.” The continued disenchantment of pro-Russian milbloggers with the Russian war effort may fuel dissatisfaction in Russia itself, especially if Moscow continues to press recruitment and conscription efforts that send poorly-trained cannon-fodder to the front lines.
understandingwar.org/...
Some of these [instances of] Ukrainian forces recapturing territory have been reported as Ukrainian counteroffensives when they are [actually] counterattacks. What's really important [now] is that the Ukrainians need to be able to turn some of these smaller-scale attacks into a truly larger counteroffensive. When you look at the way that these [counterattacks] are going [at the moment] it's just [capturing] one or two or three villages at a time. But we've not yet reached the point where the Ukrainians [are] able to truly push back hard against an entrenched Russian position.
In fact, it's not entirely clear to me from the open source [material] exactly how much resistance the Ukrainians are encountering with some of these counterattacks. Some of these [maneuvers] look more like the Russians actually withdrawing from positions and then the Ukrainians moving in [or] the level of resistance the Russians are putting [up] is fairly limited.
www.rferl.org/...
2/ Caveats
- Did not include fuel and water, which are obviously critical. I will look into that upon more study and info.
- Not a logistics expert
- This take is very preliminary and the result of a few hours of research on the topic over the weekend. A lot more work is needed
3/ Returning to this map, I've ID'd 4 likely operational level supply points and their approximate distance from the frontline BTGs. These are along major rail lines. As noted by many, Russian rely heavily on rail for logistics. From there, they use trucks to get to the units.
4/ The distance to the frontline BTGs to the noted supply points slightly exceeds rough Soviet era norms for the division level. Couldn't find norms for army level, but suspect they are in the same ballpark.
5/ The 40km radius is a mostly notional outer limit for rocket assisted projectiles for conventional tube artillery. They are in range of systems such as the Smerch and Tockha, but at least safe against sustained conventional artillery fire for now.
6/ Finally, delving into supply requirements for Russian units. Documents provided by
@KofmanMichael suggested a BTG of 600 personnel would require 1.03 tons of food (mostly) and kit a day. To check this, 3 MRE's weight 2.2kg, so assuming 3 MRE's per person gets you 1.3 tons.
7/ Ammo is far more heavy. A BTG carries roughly 3 days worth of ammo with it. Using a list provided by again, I came to a # of 128 tons of ammunition, + 3 tons of other supplies previously mentioned. Per day this is 43.6 tons, ~10 tons of this are BM-21 rockets.
8/ Translating this into truckloads, again, is very complicated and I've simplified it due to the absence of knowledge. A Ural-4320 has a max payload of 7.9 tons. Assuming an average load factor of 60%, means about 4.74 tons of this is used on average for cargo.
9/ Load factor is maximum cargo weight capacity vs capacity used. As items take up room unevenly, a truck is almost never going to use its full capacity. A 2011 study suggested this number was 57% for civilian trucks. I don't have a similar number for military trucks yet.
10/ The excellent article "Feeding the Bear" suggested each MLRS launcher takes an entire truck for reloads. I'm not 100% sure about that, or which specific launcher type it was referring to. I've used that assumption to move forward though:
11/ Here is the preliminary end result. 14 truckloads are needed each day for BTG ammo, food, and kit resupply. 6 for BM-21 reloads. Using typical equipment counts from Artillery Brigades and Rocket Brigades resulted in 13 and 19 truckloads for them.
12/ On balance, I feel like this might be low. Militaries typical expend more ammunition and supplies than expected in wartime. So I started looking for historic examples. Unfortunately, there isn't an abundance of hard data for the Russians, there is for the Americans though.
13/ VII Corps in Desert Storm may offer a useful comparing point and there is a lot of literature about their supply operations. Among them the paper "A Study of Ammunition Consumption" by William Freeman and "The Long Haul" edited by Keith Beurskens are excellent.
14/ VII Corps in Desert Storm consisted of about 3089 armored vehicles and 42 maneuver (mech infantry and armored) battalions and needed 6,075 tons of ammunition per day.
15/ Translating that into BTGs of course tedious and potentially flawed. Assuming a BTG has ~60 armored vehicles, VII Corps had enough to fill out 51.5 BTGs. If we count maneuver battalions, 42. Doing the math suggests a BTG *might* expend 3 times the ammo they expect to.
16/ To date, I think we've only seen about 3 BTGs active in combat operations at any given time in each operational direction. I applied the tripled expenditure factor to 3 BTGs in each direction to give a high end level of truckload capacity needed.
17/ On the topic of truckloads per day, I've used the same math as "Feeding the Bear." A decimal number between 3 and 4 is suggestive of some trucks being able to do 4 trips, while others only do 3.
18/ Returning to the map, this preliminary analysis suggests they may need more trucks on the Popasna axis, while the others have sufficient support for now. As the distance increases, this will change.
19/ However, if a truck only does 1 or 2 trips a day, the assessment would change. If the MTO brigade trucks only did 1 trip per day on average, there would likely be ammunition and other supply shortages.
20/ Likewise, there are not enough trucks to support all the BTGs on each axis if we apply the high end expenditure estimate based on Desert Storm. That suggest their is an upper end estimate on number of BTGs they can use offensively at one time that is less than the total
21/ Info that would help refine this estimate would be counting the number of trucks at the supply points, footage of them loading or unloading supply trucks (measuring the time it takes), and knowledge of Russian load planning.
22/ The number of MTO Brigades deployed in each area is also a knowledge gap, as increasing or decreasing that number will hugely sway the results. Until then, I hope this preliminary take has been interesting and informative.
23/ As noted to me, if there is an additional transloading between the BTGs and the rear supply points I've depicted, it would add additional time to trips that would need to be accounted for! For now, I haven't accounted for that.
24/ Currently, in using the same math that the "Feeding the Bear" uses, there is 1 hour for loading and 1 hour for offloading. It's primarily done by hand.
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The numbers of most interest are killed in action (KIA) and total casualties. How you get there is going to be closely tied to your assumptions about KIA, and the ratio of wounded in action (WIA) to KIA. Here is a brief blog post from C. Lawrence. 2/
Here is another table from a CRS report to consider in devising plausible ranges despite the lack of data.
sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/RL3… 3/
Also, some militaries report more wounded, and even some branches within the same military may report this a bit differently. Russians don't necessarily report wounded the same way we might. But this is getting into the weeds. 4/
There are other types of losses, POW, MIA, and a soldier could be taken off the line due to illness or non-combat related injuries, etc. These could further increase the gap between total casualties which degrade unit effectiveness and just KIA. 5/
Where I'm going with this is that KIA are likely to represent a fairly small share of total casualties. Some wounded may still fight, but units can be rendered combat ineffective by virtue of the number killed, wounded, and other casualty types. 6/
A fair ratio, assuming weak availability of field hospitals & poor combat medicine might be 3.5x WIA for every KIA. This is simplistic, ignores other casualty types & I'm just scratching the surface. For example, 10k KIA would result in 35k WIA, and a total of 45k casualties. 7/
As one potential data point, 1st Guards Tank Army figures published by UKR through March 15th could be genuine. They show 61 KIA, 209 WIA, 44 MIA, and 96 POW. This is during a high period of RU losses in the war. That's 3.4 WIA to KIA, and 5.7 overall.
So how can we figure what might be plausible Russian KIA and total casualties? First, its hard to go off of oblique official estimates and selective intel releases. Things won't add up. No good way to know what is being counted or how. Also, it can change over time. 9/
For example, it appears at some point US official BTG counts started to include the DNR/LNR units whereas before it seemed they did not. So the initial BTG counts of 125-130 may not have included the 'separatist' corps or Rosgvardia. 10/
Also, these estimates are done in ranges and with confidence levels. Governments typically release these figures without explaining the estimate range, or their confidence level in those figures. So you might be hearing a conservative or a high estimate. 11/
Combatants in war will often overstate opponent losses and understate their own, or not release those figures at all. This is to be expected. The numbers are intertwined with information operations, considerations of own troop morale, external support, etc. 12/
The first problem is figuring out Russia's initial force. As we've come to learn the average BTG size was probably not 800, or 750, but probably closer to 600. Not all units deployed as BTGs, but the main maneuver force was possibly 80-90k. 13/
Auxiliaries such as 'separatist' army corps, and Rosgvardia might be another 20-25k. And an unknown amount of non-BTG dedicated support units. These are difficult to estimate, but they would not dramatically inflate the force involved. 14/
Making a third of BTG formations combat ineffective (50% casualties) could require just 3.3k KIA. Indeed, 10k KIA could easily add up to 45k total casualties or more. 15k KIA would take it towards 75k. I'm using just 3.5 as a multiplier here (imagine applying x5.7). 15/
The problem with higher range KIA counts is that you quickly develop input/output problems. There are more casualties than could feasibly be involved in the fight. That is, certain numbers become implausible given the size of forces involved. 16/
What about Russian reinforcements? Well, assuming 10-15 BTGs additional from the rest of the force, and other sources like mercenaries, you might be looking at another 10-12k troops in the war during the second phase. It does not dramatically alter the picture. 17/
Alternatively, one could assume 150k forces massed on UKR borders on Feb 23rd (not 190k total op related force). Here I'm doing what I advised against, using opaque official figures, but I know it is tempting. 1/3 of that figure, as total casualties, could come from ~12k KIA. 18/
This is all circling around a target. Given the gaps, my own confidence is quite low, but I think some of the figures out there don't reconcile well. Based on what I suspect, but ultimately don't know, I think 7k is low, 15k is high, and 10-12k KIA might be the middle. 19/
To me this is a high casualty figure both relative to the potential size of the force involved, and Russian casualties in other wars. However, others might have a different take on this.
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