March 19 — Day 389a — Bakhmut tilting point or not, Euro Ammo, Germany does the Right Thing
Hi FB!
No opening images this time, let’s get right into it.
Bakhmut
I think we all can agree the UAF looks likely to hold Bakhmut for some time. What’s more, indicators of a local UAF counterattack are not only piling up, there are signs the Ukrainian push has already started, or put better, in the Bakhmut sector it really looks like the Russians are out of steam and now the Ukrainians are looking for opportunities to hit out and take back some ground.
According to the Russians, Wagner fighters are still making progress in the city’s “industrial zone”, and earlier this week images popped up demonstrating their control of the Vostokmash plant. (Image).
The most obvious Ukrainian move was (yet another) meeting of the national security council on the subject of Bakhmut with all the big cheeses identified as participating: Zelensky, Yermak, Budanov, Zaluzhny, Shmygal, Danilov, commanders of military branches and operational areas. The outcome of that in terms of public information was: the UAF says it should and can hold Bakhmut.
Multiple information sources by mid-week reported actual Wagner assaults — and this could be something as small as a dozen guys attempting to move forward and getting spotted by drones — have dropped off considerably. One UAF military Telegram channel said the reduction was from 90–100 “assault” in a 24 hour period, to 25–30.
The Ukrainian military media, meanwhile, has now not only widely identified three veteran brigades with excellent fighting records operating in heavy strength in this sector — 93rd Mech, 3rd Assault, and 80th Air Assault — and some fighters from these units are claiming they’ve begun local counterattacks, have regained ground, recovered a few lost positions, killed small numbers of enemy and taken prisoners, etc.
Multiple videos are cropping up of substantial concentrations of UAF armored vehicles opposite Bakhmut, particularly in Chasiv Yar. They certainly were there last week, so to some extent this may not be as much UAF moving more troops in, as enough time passed for images of their presence to surface into open sources. Videos attached.
If I sound overly confident about the UAF’s ability to hold in this sector, remember, I’m bearing in mind that the Ukrainians not only have the armored vehicles in the videos, but odds are there has to be a lot more equipment out there that didn’t get vidoed by some soldier willing to break Opsec, and meanwhile and to oppose this kind of firepower Wagner has light infantry that literally lacks anti-tank weapons and the training to use them.
Wagner boss Evgeney Prigozhin, meanwhile, is continuing his public information campaign that although Wagner is the toughest, meanest fighting force in all Russia it is facing an unfairly difficult task by having to try to capture Bakhmut. He made his personal prediction for a major Ukrainian offensive in this sector: Middle of April.
Speaking of which, the pro-Russia platform Readovka put out a handy-dandy graphic on equipment incoming to Ukraine
Spike in POW videos _ Avdievka and possibly Kreminne
Over the last week we’ve seen a few other soft indicators that the Ukrainians, at some locations, are actually advancing. One is simply new Russian prisoner of war videos, there have been several. This is not just from Bakhmut sector but around the front.
https://t.me/rf200_nooow/16240
https://t.me/rf200_nooow/16251
https://t.me/gruz_200_rus/5278
https://t.me/rf200_nooow/16372
Another indicator is that the UAF is claiming it is, in fact, counterattacking. On March 15th 59th Mech Brigade, a unit that appears to have had a rocky start to the war but now is showing signs of having become a quite competent formation, put out what amounted to a press release claiming that in Avdievka a combined infantry/artillery force took back several positions recently occupied by Russians and among other units took prisoners from Russia’s 2nd Battalion, 110th Motor Rifle Brigade. By itself this would be just an unconfirmed unit claim, but in the context of a small spike of Russian POW videos, we can at least suspect that the UAF is telling the truth.
If you are really into reading tea leaves, then I offer you a video from the Russian side, claiming a brilliant Russian strike destroyed a Ukrainian pickup truck and the people in it. We have been seeing dopey announcements like this for a year, but my point is, if your propaganda people are reduced to playing up an attack on a single pickup truck, when you’ve trained your audience to expect news of crushing artillery strikes and massed tank offensives, how well is the war going for you really?
Finally, the Saturday UAF kill claim estimate added another 21 Russian tanks, 23 armored vehicles, 8 artillery pieces, and 3 anti-aircraft systems the list of Russian equipment the Ukrainians say they’ve destroyed over the last 24 hours, which is a lot and not really consistent with battle reports, which for Saturday amounted to some ground fighting but not dramatically more than any other day for the last week or two.
One possible explanation is, the UAF bean counters got around to working through a bunch of backlogged drone video documenting kills over the last couple of weeks and put out the claims as if they took place over a single day.
But another could be: advances pretty much always spike Ukrainian claims of eliminated Russian equipment, which was almost always just broken and impossible for the Russians to evacuate. In and of itself, the spike means little, but in the context of the other bits of information, it inclines me to think the Ukrainians have actually started the “pre-offensive offensive”, if you will, because we can detect small-scale infantry “offensive activity” at multiple locations.
To be clear, if this is what’s happening, it is a precursor to Zaluzhny’s Spring Offensive, and not the Real Deal. We’ll know that when we see it, trust me.
Believe the commander
Also, the record needs to reflect that after the commander of 46th Mech Brigade — a very high profile, “new” unit filled out primarily with the first enlisted soldiers trained in Britain — was demoted and transferred to training after telling Washington Post newspaper that his men needed more practice before being sent into combat, and also, there were chronic weapons shortages. He got his walking papers (formally, he resigned) 48 hours after the Post ran the story, which is fast for the UAF.
The UAF put out a statement saying that in the first place the former commander, a very experienced officer named Anatolii Kozel (image) in the first place violated rules banning talking to the press, and in the second place had falsely described the situation in his unit, and the situation in the UAF as a whole.
By “very experienced”, I mean, he was fighting in a war since about 2014. It was guys like this that built the UAF into a competent fighting force over the next eight years, and in my personal view it was the training and leadership of officers like this — beyond, of course, the soldiers and civilians that did the actually fighting — that are most responsible for the failure of the Russian attempt to conquer Ukraine in a week, at the start of the war. Already the Ukrainian military Telegram channels are calling his removal a mistake and a scandal, and calling on the UAF leadership to face facts and tell the public the truth, rather than censor veteran leaders on specious OPSEC grounds.
I have my own opinion, but I think the best comment is from his own troops — who recorded a rather clumsy and unscripted but without question authentic appeal to the powers that be, to give them back their commander. Soldiers in a war never, and I mean never, do this kind of thing unless they think highly of him.
Reaper over the Black Sea
Since it was giant international news I won’t go into painful detail of the Russian shoot-down of the US Reaper drone over the Black Sea, if you are reading this blog there is basically zero chance you have missed that news item, and most likely hours of fulmination and analysis from any number of talking heads you like or don’t like. I’m sure you are all aware the Americans immediately said the overflights would continue, full stop, and that Global Hawk drones went right on flying around next to Crimea — and by Russian definitions violating Russian national air space. In Cold War days everyone would be twisting their hankerchiefs worrying about nuclear escalation and WW3, but this is a new age. It will be very interesting to see how this confrontation between a real superpower — the US — and a former superpower — Russia — plays out. This is not only atmospherics and public perception: As we watch, new rules and limits (or lack thereof) of behavior for US-Russia relations are being established.
First, early in the week Turkey announced it would allow US warships through the Straits if the Americans want to attempt a recovery operation, and since then we’ve seen and heard nothing about US warship movements in the area. The most likely explanation is the US Navy either hasn’t the right ships on hand to do that, or, Washington decided fishing for sunk Reaper bits with a bunch of Russian warships in the area trying to do the same thing, wasn’t worth the risk of a direct confrontation with Moscow.
But the possibility also exists the Turks took off their “honest neutral broker” hat and put on their “loyal NATO member” hat, and are cooperating with the US Navy and the Americans on operations involving the shot-down drone, and as America’s (temporary) best buddy Ankara is applying its impressive powers to throttle the movement of information to the general public. The upshot here is that it’s worth watching NATO air and naval activity in this area extremely closely, because no matter what they decide to do or not do, that will be a real yardstick to measure how confrontational Joe Biden wants to get with Vladimir Putin. Picture of a Reaper and the Straits attached.
Rostov and Mariupol strikes, and Putin
First a quick piece of fresh information, on Sunday the Ukrainians fired eight (!) HIMARS at targets around Nova Kakhovka. Big fire. This is a potential Dnipro River crossing site, but what a big HIMARS strike like that means exactly, I don’t know. Video.
Thursday saw a big explosion and an epic fire at a Russian border troops headquarters inside Rostov Russia (officials said it was short circuit, which even the Russian internet laughed at) and the same day Mariupol region ammo dump blew up at several locations. Video of the Rostov “short circuit” fire attached.
Then, on Saturday, Vladimir Putin (or his double) appeared in Mariupol for a series of photo ops, none of which, effectively, recorded him saying even a single word to reporters. He also visited a military headquarters in Rostov.
Was the UAF messaging it knew Putin’s itinerary, or maybe the FSB knew where the Ukrainians were going to shoot, and held off Putin’s trip until they did? Or maybe just coincidence? Don’t know, but the fact remains that 48 hours after the Ukrainians pulled off a pair of very long-range strikes seeming to cause quite embarrassing damage to Russian claims they have the situation under control, Vladimir Putin (or his double) shows up there to create content messaging that Supreme Ruler saw for himself things are just hunky dory in Rostov and Mariupol.
A bit of history — Vuhledar
You may remember the name of this place as somewhere the Russians attacked and failed.
I came across an interesting analysis of the Vuhledar sector that is worth passing along. One thing to remember about this sector is that, generally speaking, it’s part of the belt of terrain that the Russians (at the time much of the West said it was “separatists”, but now it’s politically-correct to call them Russians) and Ukrainians were fighting over from 2015–2021. A Ukrainian analyst took a look at Russian advances since the 2022 main force invasion, in this sector, and mapped where the actual engagements took place, and when.
Bottom line: In a year the Russians have managed to advance two to eight kilometers. In terms of cost, no hard data on that, but as I’ve pointed out several times, Vuhledar was the scene of a flat out serious defeat of a major Russian attack, led by two Russian Marine Infantry brigades (40th and 155th), which got eviscerated advancing across open terrain. This was the battle that saw the first major use of artillery-deployed anti-tank mines. The Ukrainian brigades mainly involved are now a matter of record: 35th Marines, 72nd Mech, 54th and 55th Motorized. Map attached.
Stuff for Ukraine
155mm ammo and the EU — Probably the biggest news here was that the Europeans effectively announced that they are going to announce (formal declaration is coming tomorrow, it seems) the creation of some kind of coalition or corporation to manufacture 155mm artillery ammunition collectively. Reuters said a senior (but unnamed, you know, because why be responsible for what you say) EU official said “many” of bloc’s 27 countries would be part of the project.
Logically, this is basically cross-EU cooperation so the steel projectiles are made in one (or several) place(s), the explosives manufactured elsewhere, the fuzes elsewhere, the packing materials elsewhere, and so on; the idea being basically to leverage Ricardan relative economic advantages into the most efficient and capable manufacturing operation possible. Local reports identified Romania as a definite participant. Reuters goes on to quote the unnamed EU official as saying that this is a really great achievement as the agreement on who would do what “was agreed upon really fast”.
I try and avoid sarcasm in these blogs on the principle of let the facts speak for themselves, but, from where I come from a bureaucrat saying “we’re great we had a bunch of meetings and we agreed on some stuff faster than we usually do” is not an achievement, but a textbook definition of bloated bureaucracy that wastes taxpayer money and resists reform and efficiency. Meetings are not a real world outcome. A result and success for the people receiving big salaries in the bureaucracy, is when the shellls get to the units. Not when they send a bunch of emails and then have a press conference. It is insulting to voters, who after all are not only are going to pay for the shells but the salaries of the responsible officials.
Anyway, the European Defense Agency is going to oversee production with 1 billion Euros as a start-up fund. Also, the report said, the EU will spend another 1 billion on “procuring” 155mm ammo already sent by EU members to Ukraine. If this is short-term procurement, obviously, the EDA will wind up competing directly with the Ukrainians for scarce 155mm ammo. But I assume the procurement funding is actually for ammo actually produced somewhere later down the line, so it amounts effectively to seed money for the iniative.
In other words: There will be an announcement on Monday of 2 billion Euros of EU money for production of 155mm ammunition as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and odds are, not a single shell financed by that plan will wind up in Ukraine any time soon. Meanwhile the officials will tell us what a great job they are doing.
UAF tank ammo — News reports early in the week said the UAF now is producing its own 125mm tank ammunition, which it didn’t before, “with the assistance of a NATO partner”. Pictures of main gun rounds were widely available (attached) but details on where or with whom weren’t.
As it happened I wound up in proximity with several politically-connected and so according to them extremely well-informed Ukrainian political reporters over the last few days, and I was told that this may well have been the reason the Russians hit government facilities in Dnipro (or Kharkiv, theories varied) because that’s where the Ukraine-NATO ammo production is taking place.
An alternative theory I personally like more is a restart to ammo production lines that functioned during the Cold War in Socialist states but got shut down and mothballed after the Berlin War, particularly in Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria. This is exactly the sort of thing German heavy industry institutional money could get behind, in my opinion.
Big German general sacked
Germany’s new Defense Minister Boris Pistorius this week sacked the country’s Chief of Defense Staff, General Eberhard Zorn, according to German news reports because Zorn last year questioned Ukraine’s ability to establish major land gains against the Russian forces. My source on that is AFP. Usually, when the civilians fire the head of an army, it’s because the army head disagrees with the direction the politicians what to take the military, and as always, disagreements like that are always an acid test on what the general thinks is more important: personal principle or adhering to military discipline and following orders he disagrees with. Bild image attached of Zorn.
I think it’s safe to assume the German national leadership decided it wanted a top general somehow more focused on more traditional military priorities like, you know, organizing and equipping the German army so it actually could fight.
Looks like a turning point, walks like a turning point, sounds like a turning point