Feb. 21 — Day 728 — HIMARS hits hard, Adviivka coffee grounds, Falling like snowflakes

Hi All!

I thought that once the Avdiivka battle ended I could just write about that and be done with it, and then just coast until the 24th and the two-year anniversary, but that’s not how it’s worked out.

First thing, Navalny dying I’ll leave to others, not important to me.

Second thing, Reuters is reporting Iran is sending Russia 400 (!) ballistic missiles, some of which no doubt will be shot at my stuff here in Kyiv, so I am even less thrilled by the performance of the US Congress, than I was before, which is saying something. Some missiles not pointed at me yet, pictured.

Iranian ballistic missiles of the type that will be sent to Ukraine and shot at me. Not personally but that doesn’t make me feel better. Homeowners should not have to worry about ballistic missiles, try to insure for that, I dare you.

Third thing, yesterday reports came out of a truly gruesome HIMARS strike hitting a Siberian unit formed up for an inspection, sixty killed at least, maybe hundreds wounded, not so far from Volnovakha. Short version, and I too am wondering why there’s not more splinter damage on the corpses, if I have to guess which source to trust (my day job, actually), I’d bet it’s probably true.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/28404

Avdiivka:

The main aspect of this battle that I would point out is that this was the first time in a very long time, if ever, that we have seen the UAF commit an entire brigade to combat with a very clear operational objective and that objective was achieved. I’ll get into guesstimates about casualties and implications a bit lower, as have others, but what struck me was how bog-standard military and regular army the commitment of 3rd Assault to Avdiivka was. Lots of times one gets the impression the UAF is just so short of resources and planners it’s making ops up as it goes along, this wasn’t the case with the 3rd at Avdiivka.

First, the brigade appears to have gone into combat at near full strength, in good morale, and I monitor enough of their internal chat channels to have been surprised first at their security discipline and second and the absence of griping. Normally, when a UAF unit gets thrown into combat, low level soldiers immediately surface griping about how higher has no idea what they were doing. Not this time. From what I can see, they knew where they were going and what the job was: get 110th Brigade out of a near-encirclement and then retire lines to prepared positions.

They went in near full-strength and aggressively, with the clear goal of creating enough space for the retreat to have a chance. I’ve read reports that the 3rd got beefed up to the equivalent of six or seven battalions, which is a little misleading because since they are a UAF unit skilled at recruiting and finding volunteer funding, they have TOE three infantry battalions, and a “battalion” each of artillery, drones and armor.

They lost a very few POWs and captured POWs. Comms points knew where to go and casualty evacuation appears to have worked. They had been training for urban fighting and the infantry that I saw was armed for that. It seems like they did what they needed to do: extract the remains of the 110th and then facilitate a retreat of about 5 km. to prepared positions on high ground, and it took about five days.

Which is not to paint the UAF’s loss of Avdiivka as military miracle, it was a defeat, zero questions.

My point is, that for close to two years I’ve been watching the UAF like a hawk for cases where I can clearly say a UAF area commander made an operational decision involving an entire brigade, and the UAF gets a result it wanted. Almost always, overwhelmingly, when the UAF has had a battlefield crisis, the response has been to throw bits and pieces of multiple brigades at the problem. This makes defending more sustainable as that means the organizations of multiple brigades feed reinforcements into a fight, but the UAF force is inherently impossible to maneuver, and if casualties go on then doomed to die in place because rotation of pieces of the force is really complicated.

That’s not what happened at Adviivka, and for me it was striking. A single brigade (with attachments) went in, it had a mission, it completed it, and then it went on to its next mission. The military brainiac crowd would call it all a competent commitment of force on an operational level, and in and of itself it’s a respectable achievement. Moving a brigade into combat and then keeping the situation under control isn’t easy in training, it’s hard in a war, it’s harder in a unit commanded by non-career officers and with limited sergeants, and it’s even harder on unfamiliar ground.

That 3rd Assault managed it is mostly a testament to the combat experience of the soldiers and junior leaders, two frigging years a lot of them, but even more, very strong evidence that at least in one Ukrainian brigade there is a functional staff that can plan an operation and then manage its subordinate formations so that the op comes off roughly as planned. If this is a one-off, well, we all know the 3rd recruits around Kyiv and so that’s better-educated soldiers and more volunteer donations. Image attached, it’s from the 3rd, so you can decide for yourself if they’re typical UAF or not.

Publicity photo from 3rd Assault, up to you to decide whether these are slovenly untrained infantry prone to panic and unlikely to perform on the battlefield, or members of crack brigade that just pulled off a pretty competent op at Adviivka. Dudes are smart enough to sleep pretty deep underground, it looks like.

If it’s not a one-off, then we have just seen the light of a horizon for a time when UAF formations are actually capable of conventional operational maneuver. Again, this is not to deny it was overall a defeat, or to claim really the Ukrainians one. Rather, it is to point to something the UAF did, that a lot of us have been waiting for the better part of two years to see them do.

That being said, there are a lot of brigades in the UAF, this was just one. Off-hand I suspect maybe of the 30 or so combat brigades the UAF fields, maybe 3 or 4, tops, would have probably been able to do what the 3rd just did.

So how bad a “defeat” was Adviivka?

Many of you will have seen the NYT report saying that hundreds of Ukrainians may have been taken prisoner in a chaotic retreat out of Avdiivka. The sources are a pair of unnamed US military analysts and a pair of Ukrainian military memebrs.

At the very great risk of contradicting a major media platform with a lot of skill inside of it, me, I don’t see the evidence.

What I have seen believable evidence of is:

- Ukrainian prisoners taken in the very low double digits

- Russian prisoners captured in similar numbers

- Retreat by dozens of Ukrainian infantrymen through an urban area under periodic indirect fire and drone observation, but nothing remotely approaching a gauntlet

- A coherent, new Ukrainian defense line the Russians clearly are unable to overwhelm at the moment

- Zero sign, meaning gripes, belly-aching, images of massed betrayal or incompetence by mid-level Ukrainian command

- That the 110th soldiers physically in the Zenit fortification that got captured, were wounded and immobile. This appears to have been less than 20 men and probably six.

- That the place that the local UAF command failed to evacuate wounded was the Zenit fortification

- That elsewhere, casualty evacuation worked

- I am looking very hard for complaints of sub-units left out to be overwhelmed, and I am not seeing them

- I am looking very hard for Russian trophy images of captured Ukrainian combat vehicles and military equipment, and I am not seeing it

- I am looking very hard for Russian images of the hundreds of POWs NYT reports may have been taken, and I am not seeing them

- I am looking very hard for finger-pointing on the Ukrainian side for failure at Adviivka, and I am not seeing it

- I am seeing a consistent view from low-level soldiers right straight through to joint forces that although Avdiivka was a Russian victory, it was a victory bought with tanker loads of Russian blood and if Russia keeps winning victories like that, they will lose the war

- I am seeing, consistently, complaints in the Russian mil-blogger community that Avdiivka was a textbook Phyrric victory, that the Ukrainians fell back in good order, and at the of the day the Russian Federation traded 16,000 dead for a single, ruined town.

- One of the loudest Russian mil-bloggers complaining about that, a guy named Murz, real name Adrei Morozov (pictured) just committed suicide because Moscow propaganda central ordered him to censor his negative reports about Avdiivka, and pretend it was a great Russian military success. Wrote a will and a final testament and everything and stuck it on the internet. (Maybe he doesn’t subscribe to NYT, har har)

This Russian blogger guy just killed himself because, suicide note said, the Kremlin was supressing information about huge Russian casualties at Avdiivka. Meanwhile, back in the US, the Gray Lady reported the battle was a pretty bad Ukrainian defeat.

- Once the Ukrainians fell back to new lines, if they were holding them, it was reasonable to expect to see new reports and videos of the inevitable Russian probes getting cut up approaching the new positions, those images are available.

- The Tavria joint forces command shifted itself and just put out a statement that stories like the NYT one are just wrong, although they say “some western media”

- Ukrainian media, zero, I say again zero corroboration of the NYT story.

- Massed panic and hundreds of POWs sure isn’t what the relatively small sample of Ukrainian service personnel I talk to, are telling me.

As an aside, developments like Avdiivka are an excellent way to weed out the pure Kremlin mouthpiece Telegram channels from the weirdos that are rah rah Russia but actually have their own opinions, the former parrot the Moscow line while the latter attack the former for lying and betraying the troops.

So with the greatest respect to NYT, their latest story of Avdiivka, I see a lot of evidence contradicting it. But I’m not there either, so take that FWIW.

Russian stuff getting shot down

There’s been another round of expensive Russian airplanes shot down, with the most likely suspect once again the Ukrainians have taken a supposed-to-be-mostly-stationary Patriot battery and set it up where the Russians didn’t expect. Seven combat jets, all late models, in the last 96 hours.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/28375

It is of course just possible that the Ukrainians got some spiffy new system they’re not telling anyone about, but more likely, the Ukrainian air defense guys calculated correctly where the Russians were going to fly in quantity, over a week or more, and have set up ambushes accordingly. In general the intercepts have been in the east, so Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

This is, of course, not a level of losses sufficient to ground the Russian air force. It is however more than enough to give the Russian air force pause, and that is breathing room for the UAF.

So these things are getting shot down one a day, $36 million a pop, it may be the Ukrainians have figured out a counter-tactic to stand off glider bombs.

For those of you looking for silver linings, certainly it can be said to be heartening that two years into the war and still the Ukrainians are more agile and clever than the Russian military, although the Russians are not stupid tactically clearly their army and air force is so big and bureaucratic that adapting to an opponent fast on his feet is really hard for them. Still.

For those of you from northern places where it’s not so sunny, and pessimism is baked into the national psyche, you can ask yourself how is it possible that two years into a conventional war the West still hasn’t stuffed enough firepower into the UAF’s hands, to just shoot down the Russian air force and be done with it. Clearly they could and if they did, no more worries about Russian bombers hitting Madrid or Prague or Riga or whatever. If you can’t kill the monkey holding the grenade, then just blow up the grenade, that sort of logic.