Russo-Ukraine war: locked and loaded

The war in Ukraine is poised to enter another phase. But let’s first recap the ground situation.

Sergei Surovikin, a Russian air force general appointed on October 10 to lead the invasion, has admitted that the situation in the Kherson region (southern theatre of war) has become “very difficult”. He spoke in the wake of reports coming in that Ukrainian forces were pushing ahead with their offensive to take Kherson back, the first city to fall to Russian forces within five days of the invasion.

Surovikin told state television Rossiya 24 that the army will “ensure the safe evacuation of the population [of Kherson]”. In the same interview, he said “The enemy is persistently attempting to attack Russian troop positions”.

Quoting Surovikin, Al-Jazeera reported that Russian forces in the region have been driven back 20 to 30 kilometres in the last few weeks and are at risk of being pinned against the western bank of the Dnieper [Dnipro, as it’s called in Ukraine] River that bisects Ukraine. Surovikin also said that Russian positions in the towns of Kupiansk and Lyman in eastern Ukraine and the area of northern Kherson between Mykolaiv and Kryvyi Rih were under continuous attack.

The news about reversals have come in the wake of repeated assurances from the Kremlin (and Putin himself) that the “special military operation”, Putin’s term for the offensive, was going according to plan and Russia was achieving the objectives it had set for its forces. The decision to mobilise, which became an exercise in chaos and forced hundreds of thousands of military-age males to flee Russia, was a clear indication that things were not going well on the ground. The retreat from the northeast, parts of the eastern theatre, especially the recapture by Ukraine of the strategic town of Lyman, and Ukrainian advance in the south have since drawn criticism even from Putin’s close aides and the military bloggers considered close to the Kremlin.

Ukraine first used preparations in the Kherson as a feint of sorts to force Russia into redeploying some of its battle-hardened troops to the Kherson Oblast. The troops were pulled out of Donbas, thinning the Russian defences in the northeast and eastern theatre. Ukraine took advantage of that when it launched its offensive in the northeast on September 6, recapturing a large territory in the theatre and also advancing in the east.

But it never changed its focus in Kherson where it has used a mix of tactics. Working against an estimated 30,000 Russian troops in the Oblast, it did not go for an initial combined arms sweeping manoeuvre. Instead, Ukrainian forces used long-range artillery and missile and drone strikes to target Russian supply lines, ammunition depots and POL dumps. The Ukrainians also struck two important bridges Antonivsky at Kherson (the bridge provides a strategic crossing over Dnipro and towards the city of Mykolaiv, an important junction) and further upstream near Nova Kakhovka to increase the vulnerability of Russian supplies. At the same time, the Ukrainians have been engaging Russian defenders in close combat at points of their choosing.

By most military and media accounts, the tactics have kept the Russians under pressure, made it difficult for them to operate freely and are aimed at corroding the Russians will to fight. After a month-and-half of these engagements, the Ukrainians then went for a tank assault to break through the Russian lines west of Dnipro.

On the Russian side, President Vladimir Putin has embarked on his own strategy to put pressure on Ukraine. He got the referenda done and declared the four occupied regions part of Russia. In the past week, he has also taken the war further west and deep into Ukraine through missile strikes and by using the Iranian Shahed 136 (renamed Geran 2 and upgraded) against critical Ukrainian infrastructure. The drone, which is more a direct attack munition than loitering munition, has proved quite effective. These top-down attacks, which will likely increase, have caused power blackouts and also affected water supply. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was reported as saying that some 30 percent of the country’s power plants have been destroyed.

On Wednesday October 19, a day before the writing of this article, Putin declared martial law in the four Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine. “In televised remarks to members of his Security Council, Putin boosted the security powers of all Russia’s regional governors and ordered the creation of a special coordinating council under Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin to step up the faltering war effort.”

It is clear that, despite setbacks, Putin is doubling down. That’s not surprising. Defeat in a conventional war against Ukraine is not an option for Putin, both for his own position as well as for Russia as a world power. Russia’s military prestige has already taken a major hit. This is what creates a paradox. Ukraine, on the offensive now, is not prepared to back off. It was aggressed against, its forces have fought it out, brought the Russians to a halt and are on the offensive now. As the Ukrainian Presidential Adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said on Twitter: “This [Putin’s new declarations] does not change anything for Ukraine: we continue the liberation and de-occupation of our territories.” Ukraine is in no mood to negotiate.

For his part, as noted above, Putin can’t afford to negotiate even though, having started this war, he is the one who can stop it. But how does he do that from a position of weakness, especially when Ukraine has repeatedly stated that the only objective for Kyiv is to liberate its territories, including Crimea, which Russia occupied in 2014? Put another way, where and how can the two sides find a middle ground and a modus vivendi?

At this point, we get into another problem. Ukraine does not consider its demand that Russia withdraw from all its territories as maximalist; in fact, for Kyiv that is the irreducible minimum. For Putin, the absolute minimum, in theory, is for Kyiv to accept what Russia has captured and now physically possesses. Corollary: the twain are unlikely to meet, at least at this point.

A further complication is that Ukraine is on the offensive and wants to retain the momentum and the pressure. For his part, with his initial plan gone awry, Putin is trying to find one that can work. Most analysts, including Russian ones, agree that Putin is struggling to cope with the situation and turn it around against increasing odds.

With Kyiv’s minimum (throwing Russia out of Ukraine) running against the Kremlin’s minimum (retaining captured Ukrainian territories), the situation is locked and loaded with little space at this point for any negotiated settlement or what the late Prof Philip Windsor called the “culminating point of victory”.

But that point, as history tells us, is vital. Take the Korean War. Within a month of Inchin landings, the United States and allies had liberated Seoul and pushed the North Korean forces to north of the 38th Parallel. With US credibility established, it should have ceased hostilities. Instead, it decided to push beyond the 38th Parallel to invade North Korea and achieve Korean unification. As Windsor noted, “that turned out to prove a classic case of going beyond the culminating point of victory”.

Predictably, it brought China into the war. Peking (now Beijing) had “through various channels…given out a warning that it would regard a US invasion of North Korea as a threat to its own security”. Result: before long “the US and other UN forces in North Korea found themselves being driven remorselessly back”. The first US defeat, before Vietnam, came in this phase of the Korean War with General Douglas McArthur demanding that the US use a nuclear weapon. He got the sack for that.

By then the Chinese had successfully driven the US/UN forces south of the 38th Parallel. But despite the truce talks taking place, the Chinese began to push south of the Parallel, forcing President Eisenhower to threaten that “the United States would after all contemplate the use of nuclear weapons if the Chinese persisted”. That resulted in a truce and created the situation that stands today with a DMZ separating North and South Koreas.

In the end, the warring sides have to come to the table. Question is, when will one or both sides get to that point in the Ukraine war.

The writer is interested in security and foreign policies