Russo-Ukraine war: knowns and unknowns

The Russo-Ukraine War has entered its ninth month. Termed a “special military operation” by the Kremlin, the war was supposed to last at most three months. Instead, it has dragged on and bogged down the Russian military. By all indications, it will continue into 2023.

War termination theorists are generally agreed that three variables — information, credible commitment and domestic politics — must be resolved before any space can open up for ending a conflict. So far, that has not happened.

Ukrainians, given their stiff resistance, some successes and a large US-NATO support-base believe they can push harder and win. The Kremlin believes that when it brings its firepower to bear on Ukrainian targets, it will be able to break Kyiv’s will to fight. In other words, informational asymmetry continues.

There’s no space for bargaining because neither side can offer credible commitment, i.e., the distrust on both sides has only increased. Domestic politics remains the crucial third point of this trinity of variables: Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has invested his entire future and legacy on defeating Ukraine. He cannot afford to lose. To that end, he will double down and gamble for resurrection.

On Kyiv’s side, external support and national pride, spurred by the resistance to Russia’s putsch means any talk of negotiations without reclaiming lost Ukrainian territories — including Crimea — is a big no. This is clear from Kyiv’s strong negative reaction to statements by foreign leaders stressing a dialogue.

Professor Hein Goemans, the author of a seminal work on war termination told The New Yorker a couple of months ago that “Sometimes war generates its own causes of war.”

As I have noted before in this space, for any war termination, the Kremlin’s minimum negotiating position would be to retain captured Ukrainian territories and absorb them into Russia. This irreducible minimum collides with Kyiv’s minimum demand that Russia withdraw from Ukrainian territories. For the Kremlin, Kyiv’s minimum position is a maximalist demand that simply cannot be accepted.

So, what could possibly bring this war to an end?

This question is important for two reasons: in the east, there’s ferocious fighting going on, especially along the forward contact line from Svatove in the north to Kremmina in the south. Further southwest, in Donetsk, the two sides are dug in and fighting for the town of Bakhmut. Reports indicate the fighting in that sector now resembles the trench warfare of WWI. According to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, “The costs associated with six months of brutal, grinding, and attrition-based combat around Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut”.

It’s the same in the south. The Russians have withdrawn from Kherson to the left bank of the Dnipro and built a layered defence: fortifications, trenches, revetments, pillboxes, tank traps et cetera. From these positions, the Russian artillery continues to pound the city of Kherson.

Unless the Ukrainian army can cross the Dnipro, advance on the left bank and break through Russian defences, the Russians will continue to pound Ukrainian positions. Most observers, however, believe that crossing the Dnipro and pushing the Russians back will be difficult, given that the bridges over the Dnipro were earlier destroyed by the Ukrainians. That, plus the Russian layered defences, would mean a very high casualty rate for a Ukrainian offensive. For perspective, it’s instructive to remember the Syrian tank offensive in the Golan in October 1973 and the response of out-numbered Israeli armour using tanks in hull-down positions for engaging Syrian armour.

The second reason relates to logistics and supplies. Modern warfare requires a very complex logistics and supply system with multiple tiers. The Table of Organisation and Equipment, a document in modern militaries, not only details the wartime mission, capabilities, organisational structure, and mission-essential personnel but also supply and equipment requirements for military units.

Tanks, Armoured Personnel Carriers and Self-Propelled Artillery, essential components of manoeuvre warfare are terribly logistics-heavy. Martin Van Creveld, in his book, Technology and War writes: “In 1940-41, a German Panzer division engaged in active operations already required 300 tons a day. By 1944-45 an American armoured division was consuming twice that amount, and the most recent estimates are of the order of 1000-1500 tons and more.”

A typical armoured division would have supplies based on troop strength, such as rations; items listed and identified in the TOE (clothing, personal equipment, vehicle replacements, etc); POL (Petrol, oil, lubricants); supply requirements for damaged equipment which cannot have a fixed quantity and would depend on attrition rates; and, yes, ammunition.

Combined arms offensive manoeuvre(s) increase the probability of attrition. Also, such manoeuvres rely on speed. But speed creates its own logistics nightmares. Supplies have to be transported by road. The supply points remain vulnerable (especially in modern war where a number of technologies allow adversaries to locate fixed positions and target them), as do long convoys of vehicles carrying supplies. Further, as is evident now, tanks have become vulnerable to drone attacks.

Attrition also means the depletion of both men and material. As the US Rear Admiral Henry Eccles said, “logistics is the bridge between military operations and a nation’s economy”. This is where replenishment and stocks come in. While Ukraine is being supported by a number of NATO-EU countries — they now have a potpourri of combat systems and platforms — stocks are stretched and, in some cases, running low.

By most counts, though exact numbers cannot be determined, Russia’s cruise missile stocks are also depleting. One estimate puts the cost of use up until now at $3 billion. This is one of the reasons the Russians are relying on Shahed-136 as a direct attack munition and Mohajer -6 for locating and engaging targets from the air. Mohajer-6 is a reusable drone and can return to base and rearmed for the next mission.

The use of these drones is important for two reasons: they are cheap and quite often the missiles used by ground air defences to engage and destroy them are far more expensive. Also, extensive use of expensive surface-to-air missiles runs the problem of cost and depleting stocks.

To offset this, Lithuania has given EDM4S (Electronic Drone Mitigation System), commonly referred to as SkyWiper, to the Ukrainian units. The gun is a point-and-shoot electromagnetic pulse weapon and jams the drone’s communication signals to force it down or return to base. It handles like a standard infantry rifle.

Russia’s new strategy, as devised by General Sergey Surovikin, Kremlin’s lead commander for the war, is two-pronged. At the strategic level, Russia will target — as it is doing — Ukraine’s energy grids, water supplies, military nodes and infrastructure. This means missile and drone strikes deep into Ukrainian territory. Second, at the theatre-tactical level, Russia will hold tenable defensive lines in the northeast, east and south to offset the kind of surprise it suffered on the Kharkiv front in early September. The withdrawal from Kherson to the left bank of Dnipro is part of the same strategy in the south.

The idea clearly is to degrade Ukrainian infrastructure at the strategic level and attrit Ukrainian forces in the contested theatres while defending tenable lines. That shifts the onus of offensive strikes in the Donbas and Kherson onto the Ukrainian army, exposing it to the danger of high losses in men and material.

At the strategic level, it also forces Kyiv and its NATO-EU partners to decide whether they are prepared to subject military and civilian infrastructure in mainland Russia to the kind of strikes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine.

The calculation in such a decision would be Russia’s reaction. Would that bring more Russian fury down on Ukraine and possibly further west or make Putin’s war more unpopular in Russia; the second calculation would be the reaction of those EU states that have often voiced the need for a dialogue. It could go either way and is a high-risk strategy.

The writer is a journalist with interest in foreign and security policies