October 12 — Day 962 — Kursk, Wunderwaffen and Real Weapons
Hi guys!
Kursk Revisted Again, Another time
This week saw the Russians launch one big push on the left/western face of the Ukrainian salient in Kursk Oblast’, and possibly, a pair of secondary pushes. The battle is over whether the Ukrainians can sever Russian supply to territory even further to the west which, if the Ukrainians manage to advance, would be isolated because supply to there is over bridges over the Seym River. The Ukrainians can and have hit the bridges.
Or, from the Russian side, if the Russians hold the Ukrainians and then push them back, then a Russian offensive attacking the left/western face of the Ukrainian salient could be cut off at the base, because supply to Russian forces making those attacks would be strong.
Since that’s possibly — ahem — confusing to read, I’ve drawn a rare map with some red arrows to illustrate that. I took the latest map from DeepState, who it is safe to say are pro-Ukrainian but try hard to deliver accurate information, for a fix on who owns what ground in south-west Russia right now. As you can see, there is a dark gray area that’s probably fully-controlled by the Ukrainians, and a gray area that is just that, it’s not clear who is in control. You should not take it is gospel as it’s clear lines are fluid and movin. But DeepState is fairly diligent and what they published this morning checks out with how most others are reading the situation, so it’s reasonable to take a screen shot of their latest situation map.
On that map, I’ve drawn a goose-egg in orange to show you the area where Russian MIGHT be cut off, and currently their supply has to be iffy, because they have the Ukrainians on three sides and an unfordable river on the fourth side, in the north.
I’ve also highlighted a slice of territory to the east of that potential isolation zone, which the Russians control but it’s narrow and threatened. If the Ukrainians control it, the Russians are cut off. If the Russians control it, then then Russian have a clean, well-supplied way to attack the Ukrainian incursion. That’s why that piece of Russia is operationally important and the scene of fighting right now. I’ve marked it in yellow.
This Russian attack went down the route of the big red arrow. As you can see it there really was nothing clever here, the Russian army is obviously trying to reduce the Ukrainian incursion at one of its most extended points and at the same time get access to the base of the Ukrainian salient. It has been Russian operational doctrine in Ukraine, since about mid-2023, to deal with Ukrainian strongpoints if possible by cutting off supply to them first. This is exactly what is going on here.
The Russian push out of Korenovo towards Sudzha seems very clearly to have overwhelmed forward Ukrainian positions and, as of Thursday night, it wasn’t clear whether the Ukrainians could contain it.
Reports were of “dozens” of Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers “breaking through” Ukrainian lines and motoring off into the rear, Ukrainian artillery gunners and drone operators being forced to fight like infantry. Meanwhile the rah rah Russia channels were all proud and happy that the Russian marines, or maybe it was airborne paratroopers, had overwhelmed Ukrainian defenses and Mother Russia’s holy soil was soon to be liberated. Here’s a Friday morning write-up for reference.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/40368
By Friday afternoon the situation seemed to be a good deal less catastrophic, and by evening it was pretty clear the Ukrainian main line had held, that there may or may not have been counterattacks, but there for sure were heavy Russian casualties. Again, the “how” was nothing new: Ukrainian drones taking out lots of Russian armored vehicles mostly, plus Ukrainian artillery catching Russians moving in the open. The Russian maximum advance appears to have been a a couple of kilometers.
People started remembering that at bottom this was by scale a battalion-sized attack, so maybe 50 armored vehicles and several hundred men, which is a lot different than a major offensive across say the entire northern front. I’ve inset a map of the region next to the tactical map.
However, there were zero reports of actual ground regained by the Ukrainians, so, from the Russian point of view if casualties aren’t a factor, this was a successful attack. And as everyone in this war knows, if the Russians do it once and it works, you can bet they’ll try it again. The implication is that given force ratios Ukraine getting kicked out of Russia is only a matter of time.
The qualifier is, Russian supplies of trained troops and good equipment aren’t bottomless. The Russians clearly committed capable troops, albeit almost certainly only shells of actual full-strength formations to the assault. Yes they gained ground, but how many trained soldiers and small unit leaders did they burn through to gain the ground. We have aleady seen that the Russian army can run out of competent units far more quickly then it does untrained soldiers.
I’m seeing a similar dynamic in the eastern Porkovsk/Kurahove sector where, you may recall, pretty capable Russian units scored gains. The situation there is that yes the Russians are still attacking both objectives, but the scale and pace of those attacks has dropped off from a couple of weeks ago.
Is this the fall-out from the Russian ammo bases the Ukrainians hammered during September, or maybe Russia’s Donbass offensive has run through most of its trained, combat-capable units committed to that sector and until they train up and deploy more, they can only maintain moderate pressure on the ground? That would be my guess, because that’s what we’ve seen in the past.
The Mighty Russian Air Force Shoots Down One of Its Wonder Drones — The Ukrainians Got The Debris
On Oct. 5 civilians and military in the Chasiv Yar/Kostiantinivka sector in Donbass were treated to the broad daylight spectacle of a Russian fighter jet — this was clear because Ukrainian fighter jets basically don’t exist and when they do fly it’s never high and near the front lines — pouring on the coal and afterburners in the direction of Ukrainian air space, chasing another winged object, and then shooting it down with a missile. It was a pretty close engagement, probably only a few miles which is point blank in air wars these days.
The aircraft blasted by the Russian fighter turned out to be a flying-wing type drone the size of a big airplane itself. When the civilians and then the local military and then (I am told) very quickly the cops and then the special ops boys showed up, everyone figured out that for reasons best known to the Russian Air Force, they had just shot down an S-70B wingman drone which, as anyone who watches Russian state-controlled media knows, is Russia’s high tech answer to US robot wingman technology. Only, Russian state-controlled media assures us, it’s better than what the Americans have, and of course it works perfectly with Russia’s world-beating Su-57 fifth generation fighter jet.
According to open sources only four were ever built and the one now being analyzed by the Ukrainians — based on the serial numbers — was the last and most recent one. Something like $80–100 million a pop.
The outer wing of the S-70 landed largely intact, and the engine, though damage was in one piece. Inside the wrecked fuselage there were pieces of a glide bomb, which didn’t explode.
Even before the secret squirrel people whisked it away for NATO scientists to study, the Ukrainian internet backed enthusiastically by the world military aviation geek internet (trust me, there are more of them than people live in several east European countries I could name) had a field day reporting how yet another weapons system advertised by the Kremlin as world’s best, turned more marketing that sounded great but unfortunately didn’t match actual performance in an actual war. It’s supposed to be stealth but it has rivets and engine exhausts that make it visible to radar, etc.
There is a very mouthy rah rah Russia mil-blogger called FighterBomber, apparently a former Su-25 pilot, who over the course of the war has become sort of an unofficial spokesman for the Russian air force not least because of his ability to find and post pretty photographs and videos of Russian military aircraft.
According to him, it was an operational bombing test in progress and really the tech loss was not important because the drone is about to go into serial production so soon the evil Ukrainians will be bombarded even more viciously by the mighty and moral Russian Air Force.
However, as all manner of pubs out there (I read airandspaceforces.com) point out, any mission of a test bed stealth drone that flies into enemy air space and then can’t be turned back to friendly air space and so has to be shot down, is not what most air war professionals would call a successful sortie.
So the real question is, of course, did the drone go rogue because of bad design or a glitch, or was it the evil NATO electronic warfare guys that somehow took over control of the drone?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know the Iranians managed to do much the same thing, to much the same kind of flying wing robot plane, when they commandeered a US Air Force RQ-170 Sentinel in 2011, and landed it in Khorasan province. The Americans first said the evil Iranians shot it down in Iraqi air space, but it later turned out it was more than a hundren kilometers into Iranian air space, and that the Iranians tricked the drone into thinking a military airfield in Khorasan was the drone’s real airfield in Iraq.
My thinking is that if the Iranians, certainly without NATO assistance, managed that in 2011, is it reasonable to guess the Ukrainians might have the same capacity, in 2024, with NATO assistance?
I have little choice but to close this section with this bon mot now making the rounds in Ukraine:
- Why did Russia have to shoot down their super-duper S-70 stealth drone?
- Because when they turned its artificial intelligence on the drone figured out who the enemy was, and decided to defect to the Ukrainians.
Can You Say ‘Concert of Europe’?
This section could easily, oh so very easily, have morphed into yet another pummel fest on US military assistance to Ukraine and a level of incompetence in Washington DC that makes Brussels and NATO look efficient, which is saying a lot.
But I think it’s better for every one if I just lay out the information. Bottom line, simple terms, this week saw enough fresh information hit the internet for us to get get a pretty clear picture of how Europe intends to sustain Ukraine over the next twelve to eighteen months at least. Trump or no Trump, US or no US. Simply put, the plan looks very much like a 21st-century version of David Ricardo’s comparative advantage, applied to war production and material supply.
Britain — Announced they have pledged to Ukraine £12.8 billion since the start of the war, £7.8 billion for for military assistance, £3 billion for 2024/25. The boilerplate list of stuff includes tanks (excellent quality but limited quantity, air defence systems (short range) and Storm Shadow missiles, long range but limited quantity and Ukraine isn’t allowed to hit targets deep in Russia with them.
The UK has earmarked £3.5 billion of British taxpayer money to buy “modern military equipment from British producers”, which at British prices, will likely mean the Ukrainians will spend as much of it as they can on medium- and short-range anti-aircaft missiles (Thales), on a piece of British artillery ammo production, and on spare parts for British vehicles already operated by the UAF, particularly with Sheffield Forgemasters, who make 155mm cannon/howitzer barrels.
A key line of the latest British announcement was, Britain will spend money to develop weapons production inUkraine.
Norway — is one of Ukraine’s biggest military suppliers thanks to excellent quality and very deep Norwegian pockets, but the thing that caught my eye was an Oslo announcement that Norway was going to spend about $90 million on arms production in Ukraine. This specifically is rocket and missile engines, and explosives components. Nammo, the big Norwegian ammunition manufacture, I think has to be involved. A Norwegian annoucement said production would be not just for Ukraine, but “Norway and allies.” Boys and girls, this is what NATO-financed arms production in Ukraine looks like.
Denmark — is leading the pack actually when it comes to NATO developing arms production in Ukraine. Formally, AFAIK, they are the only NATO state actually producting weapons in Ukraine right now. The news this week was that Denmark earmarked more than $600 million to increase capacity. Producing what? Yep, ammo.
France — made a very big deal this week about French assistance to Ukraine, I assume because President Macron adjudged making the information public right now was in his best interest, but, one must always consider the possibility all the news was just inertia-induced, it was scheduled for Rammstein so the bureaucracy couldn’t change plans when Rammstein was rescheduled.
Be that as it may, the biggest news is that the French say they have 26 (!) Ukrainian combat pilots in the pipeline meaning that France has eclipsed the US as Ukraine’s primary source of combat pilots by a significant margin, and combat pilots are one of the rarest and most valuable military resources there are, because it costs so much and takes so much time to train them.
These are pilots for Mirage 2000 jets, a fighter roughly comparable to the F-16s the Ukrainians are getting from the Danes, Dutch and Norwegians. As we all know Ukraine has been promised between 60–80 F-16s but so far all of NATO has been able to train six Ukrainian pilots in 14 months. The bottleneck primarily is training slots in the US combined with a wind-down of F-16 pilot training in Europe.
The Mirage 2000 according to reports will be configured for ground attacks, meaning launch of guided bombs or anti-radar missiles, mostly. Supposedly an unspecified number of Mirage 2000s will be operational, in Ukraine, with pilots, in the first quarter of 2025. Most of this we already knew, but the scale of the French training program we did not.
Along with the pilot training, France this week put out a mass of material trying to convince media like me that not only is France’s training of a Ukrainian combat brigade proceeding, it is moving ahead full pace and there will be a fully France-trained Ukrainian combat brigade in the field by early 2025. This is — were are led to believe — to be a beefy, NATO-scale brigade with 2,500 men, excellent Caesar howitzers, less-than-excellent AMX-30 turreted armored vehicles, etc.
Once in the field, this brigade (named “Anna of Kyiv”) will be the first fully western-trained brigade to reach the field in Ukraine. As we saw, partially western-trained brigades (46th and 47th Mech, in that order) went into combat bravely but clearly suffered from lack of practice coordinating companies and battalions, never mind artillery fires and engineering work. Not all soldiers got the foreign training.
The thinking is that a western-standard-trained brigade from private to general should function a lot more effectively and make less mistakes before it finds its feet in combat. We shall see.
Although far from all of the UAF brigades are high-skill, more than a few of them are seasoned, veteran outfits, and they got to that point without a minute of formal NATO training.
How will a France-trained unit compare? We aren’t being told when the training started and when it will end. However, it’s clear that if France and its army training base can train up a full-strength Ukrainian brigade once, they can do it again.
Netherlands — The news from the land of tulips, bicycles and ganja smoke this week is that the Netherlands allocated EUR 400 million for a Ukrainian drone action plan, which by the standards of cottage Ukrainian drone production, where ten grand US already is serious money, is astronomic.
As the exploding Russian oil refineries and ammo dumps document, the Ukrainian government is also pretty effective at developing and operating drones as well.
In terms of money, the Dutch this week announced they were budgeting €10.4 млрд to Ukraine support, not clear on the timeline so I’m guessing 2025. This is funding for F-16 jets, stuff for F-17 jets, and Patriot missiles (probably the single most critical imported weapons system after 155mm artillery shells).
Germany — Rheinmetall the big German ammunition manufacturer announced it had “invested” since February 2022 around €1 billion in expanding existing and building new production lines and factories, and as a result of that had increased 155mm shell production from 70,000 a year in Feb. 2022 to 700,000 right now.
A lot of this increase is from Rheinmetall’s purchase of practically all the shell production capacity in Spain, but we won’t go into that. Further, the plan is to develop new production in Ukraine and Lithuania to put total per year production at 1.1 million shells by 2027.
Scholtz this week announced some fairly impressive hardware assistance coming Ukraine’s way from Germany in 2024, worth at least €600 million and including top need air defense systems like IRIS-T, Skynex and SPAAG Gepard air defense systems.
Also en route are howitzers and self-propelled guns, armored vehicles, combat drones and radars; and as the war continues German assistance to maintenance — no matter what company donated them, all those Leopard tanks operated by the Ukrainians need German parts and German-standard maintenance — is going to be a big deal if the Ukrainian army is to fight effectively.
But the point to this Germany factoid is, the European plan to make more artillery shells, at scale, is advancing and as should be no surprise to anyone it is corporate Germany that is doing it.
Czech Republic — Depend on the Czechs to get in early when there is a competitive advantage to be had. This week the news out of Prague was that the CSG Group had signed a contract with the private company Ukrainian Armor to produce 155mm shells in Ukraine.
I know the Ukrainian company a bit and with all respect to their capacity and staff, this has to be a greenfield, from-the-ground-up initiative and the director of the company recently told me making money selling arms in Ukraine is difficult because of capital shortage and, not unconnected, law limiting possible profit from arms sales.
So you have to be impressed, not only is CSG moving forward, they’re doing it when the Ukrainian company is telling reporters it’s a difficult business to be in, AND when Rheinmetall and Nammo with their massive capital are visibly moving into Ukrainian arms manufacturing as well.
The Czech plan is mixed Czech-Ukraine production with 100,000 shells in 2025 and 300,000 in 2026.
Poland — Somebody needs to deploy a major force next to Russia so that the Russians cannot deploy all the force THEY have, against Ukraine. The Poles are arming at a pace not seeen in Europe since World War Two. In about a year, Poland will field the most powerful ground force deployable against Russia excepting Red China, and that’s including the Americans.
The United States — Like I said at the beginning of this section, adding the US contribution aspirational or probable would require too much politics and angst to go into here. There’s some. It could be a lot. It might be nothing. We’ll see.
The point is that no matter what the US does or doesn’t do about Ukraine 2024–25, fairly serious wheels are turning in Europe to sustain substantial Ukrainian resistance. The RPMs are low, for instance the limited progress on artillery shells we’re seeing now is the outcome of decisions made in mid-2023. But Europe’s direction and intent is clear, and if the Kremlin is even half-honest to themselves they cannot mistake it.
Great summary of European commitments to Ukraine and a very intelligent assessment of the Kurst situation. Thank you.
Thank you for another very informative read, well done. Best wishes to Ukraine from the Swiss alps:
Slava Ukraine!