from today's WSJ -- apologies if posted earlier

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Ukraine Enters New Phase of War With Russia: Dig, Dig, Dig

Under pressure after recent battlefield losses, Kyiv is bracing for a Russian spring offensive

By Matthew Luxmoore and Daniel Michaels     | Photographs by Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal      Updated March 7, 2024 12:01 am ET

POKROVSK, Ukraine—Russia is attacking Ukrainian forces at several points along the 600-mile front line as it seeks to capitalize on its recent capture of the eastern city of Avdiivka, its first major battlefield victory in months.

Moscow knows Ukrainian units are short on fresh soldiers and ammunition. The U.S. and Europe are failing to rearm Kyiv quickly. Ukrainian officials and military commanders say Russia’s current tactic of probing attacks is meant to take advantage of Moscow’s battlefield initiative before what they see as a likely major Russian offensive as early as this spring.
What Russia’s Capture of Avdiivka Means for the Ukraine War

“What’s happening right now is what Russia has spent a long time preparing for. It has gathered enough forces and resources to pressure various axes all at once,” said Maksym Zhorin, deputy commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade, which withdrew from Avdiivka last month.

Ukraine’s military, struggling to respond, is husbanding its ammunition and seeking opportunities to hit Russian forces on the move, an approach known as active defense. To halt a better-manned and better-equipped foe, Ukrainian troops are also digging in.

West of Avdiivka, excavators more common to a construction site than a battlefield are carving up the earth to create antitank ditches and trenches. The Ukrainians are attempting to replicate the physical obstacles that Russia created on its side of the front more than a year ago, with deadly effectiveness in stymying Ukraine’s offensive last summer.

Ukraine says around $800 million has been allocated for the construction of fortifications.

Ukraine in November announced a campaign to build an extensive network of fortifications along the front lines, especially in the areas near Avdiivka. President Volodymyr Zelensky called for accelerated construction and urged private companies and donors to get involved.

“On all the main fronts, we need to dig in, speed up the pace of construction,” he said at the time. “The priority is obvious.”

Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Monday that almost 31 billion hryvnia, or around $800 million, had been allocated for the construction of fortifications.

But Western officials and Ukrainian soldiers say that the campaign hasn’t yielded significant results, and the absence of progress is proving a liability for Ukraine as Russia steps up its assaults. In recent days it has pushed Ukrainian forces out of a string of villages west of Avdiivka, although hills and bodies of water a little further west can serve as natural obstacles for Kyiv that are easier to defend.
Ukrainian front line

“The lack of layered defenses along the front line should be of some concern for Ukraine,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based defense analyst who recently toured front-line areas in the eastern Donbas region. “The situation will get quite critical for the Ukrainian forces.”

Soldiers in the area say troops assigned to combat missions are being forced to dig trenches, often under fire. The complexity of the task means manpower alone won’t suffice.

“In the circumstances we’re in, we have to dig, entrench and build by ourselves,” said Zhorin. He said he hopes a line of defense toward the city of Pokrovsk to the west is sufficiently developed to withstand an expected Russian assault in the coming weeks.

When Ukrainian forces launched their major offensive last summer, they quickly became bogged down in an elaborate network of obstacles Russia had spent months preparing. Its main defensive belt had multilayered trench lines, antitank ditches, concrete blocks and extensive minefields that proved almost impossible to traverse.

Ukrainian troops encountered such defensive lines last summer when their attacks got bogged down in an elaborate network of Russian obstacles.

Building physical defenses is now vital for Ukraine, not least because it is also struggling to mobilize troops. The country has so far pursued an unusual policy of only conscripting men 27 and over and exempting anyone below that age. Fathers of three or more children, carers for disabled people, and workers in critical sectors are exempt. In most countries, military service is more common for men or women starting around age 18.

A revision of Ukraine’s mobilization law that aims to expand the pool of recruits, and lower the recruitment age to 25, is stuck in parliament.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior Zelensky aide, said last month that of Ukraine’s one million-strong standing army, fewer than 300,000 troops had taken part in active combat.

Ukraine’s military command is scouring brigades that were created for last year’s counteroffensive, seeking to bring into combat the thousands of troops currently fulfilling support roles, said Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at Ukraine’s government-linked National Institute for Strategic Studies.

Supporting troops are vital to a large army, though their number relative to combat troops—a proportion known as the tooth-to-tail ratio—can vary. Ukraine deploys almost three support troops for every combat troop, a high number that is a legacy of its Soviet military structure. Reallocating these soldiers could risk weakening the force.

Russia has its own problems on the battlefield, largely relying on mass assaults of poorly prepared troops that often result in high numbers of casualties.

“We can’t indefinitely postpone the issue of mobilization,” said Bielieskov. But the task of making military service more appealing is difficult amid a shortage of weapons for recruits and the brutal reality of defending against relentless Russian assaults.

Offsetting Ukraine’s problems are Russia’s own battlefield shortcomings. While Moscow has more men and resources at its disposal than Kyiv, it has struggled to focus them and instead relies on masses of poorly prepared soldiers to overwhelm Ukrainian positions in a tactic that Ukrainian troops say is costing Russia thousands of lives.

“Russian commanders are struggling to orchestrate complex joint efforts,” said a senior official at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “They are ordering undermanned, inexperienced units to achieve unrealistic objectives due to political pressure.”

While Ukrainian defenses are spotty and uneven “we don’t see that Russia has the capability to exploit breakthroughs” and make significant gains, the official said.

Still, Russia is making progress. It is pushing along four different axes in Ukraine’s east, throwing thousands of men into the fight in a bid to push back Ukrainian troops who have had little time to establish robust defensive lines. Unusually dry weather has facilitated the Russian advance, contrary to expectations that muds common to late February would impede it.

Ukraine has few remaining military strongholds in Donbas that could rival Avdiivka or Bakhmut during periods when these cities served as major hubs for Ukraine’s resistance, said Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That means that with each Russian advance, Ukraine must retreat to often underprepared positions.

Strategic retreats are among the most difficult combat maneuvers for troops to carry out because they must fight advancing forces while covering their own positions and seeking sanctuary. They are the type of operation that well-established militaries drill frequently—and one Ukraine’s forces aren’t uniformly adept at, especially because many of the country’s best-trained troops have been killed or wounded over the past two years.

Russia’s pressure makes the job harder.

Serhiy Cherevaty, a Ukrainian military spokesman, said that across large parts of the eastern front line, Russia is firing seven artillery shells for every shell Ukraine fires.

Bielieskov, at the government-linked think tank, said Moscow wants to wear down Ukrainian forces, staging probing attacks along the front line instead of full-scale assaults aimed at taking new territory. The attritional strategy aims to exhaust Ukraine’s manpower reserves and force it to use up precious ammunition, Bielieskov said.

“They’re in quite a comfortable situation,” he said. “They’re laying the ground for a major push in the second half of this year.”

While Ukraine grapples with manpower problems, Russia is adding around 30,000 men to its armed forces each month, according to Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence.

But Russia is also losing men at a rapid pace. Ukrainian soldiers who have recently engaged Russian forces in battle say they are astonished by the Russians’ apparent disregard for the value of human life. Russia paid an enormous price for the capture of Avdiivka, with one Russian military blogger saying 16,000 men died.

It also lost more than 400 tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy armor, according to the NATO official. The British Defense Ministry said in an intelligence briefing this week that an average of 983 soldiers a day had been killed or wounded in Ukraine during February—the highest casualty rate since Moscow launched its large-scale invasion two years ago.

“I’m not sure they can keep up this tempo of advance for long, because their losses are crazy and hard to wrap your head around,” said Zhorin. “But at the moment, they have the forces to do it.”
Building physical defenses is now vital for Ukraine, not least because it is also struggling to mobilize troops.

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at [email protected] and Daniel Michaels at [email protected]

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Looks like it has been broken many times

What happened to the Krynky bridgehead? Still going or no?

Scott Ritter and Jackson Hinkle would like a word with you

I wonder what this could be related to? I know the Russians have been having some issues with the Russian republic of Ingushetia, which is Sunni Muslin dominated. Perhaps they are planning for a little Sudden Jihad Syndrome on Moscow like we witnessed a few times from the Chechens?

If you want to hear it from Putin himself 1:13:40.  The following few minutes are "must watch" as well.  Anyone who hasn't seen this documentary yet and doesn't understand why the Ukrainians are fighting like they are should watch the entire thing.  (It was released in 2008 so other than predicting the future, no one can say it was made as propaganda for this war.)

??Shoots of combat work of army aviation Video - Ground forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.  #UkraineRussiaWar #UkraineWarNews #UkraineWar #UkrainianArmy pic.twitter.com/xlWfm2IpUd

— ?? Hunter UA ? \uD83C\uDDFA\uD83C\uDDF8\uD83C\uDDFA\uD83C\uDDE6 (@UaCoins) March 7, 2024

The porn video producer is back!

I don’t know…admiring the subway and going grocery shopping?

50 minutes ago.

\uD83C\uDDFA\uD83C\uDDE6??\uD83C\uDDF7\uD83C\uDDFA Zaporizhzhia Front, Orikhiv Operational Sector: Russian forces deployed a yet to be identified, highly capable EW system in the Robotyne area which is disrupting the efficiency of FPV drone missions. Not a major cause of concern. Report as of 01:00 AM. pic.twitter.com/7fTb8G6NDm

Astraia Intel  (@astraiaintel) March 7, 2024

They are giving aid and comfort to a hostile nation with which we are not in declared war.

Documentary on Italian journalist Andrea Palmerri:

What's in Khmelnytskyi?

Airport and air bases is my guess, rail junction and industrial sector.

I agree completely. But the UN seems to be ABOUT dictatorships and FOR dictators and a way to suppress and intimidate free democracies.

I'm assuming that only the large caliber cannons were visible from afar while the small stuff was not.

As we started repatriating them months after the war, we heard rumors that many were being executed. No idea if true or if it was just a few officers or whatever. I believe in my enclosure it was just enlisted dudes, conscripts. Officers and especially known Republican Guard guys were kept in separate enclosures.

I bet some fought in 2003. Maybe someone I had tea with in the camp became some ISIS asshole. Who knows.

A lot of that is statistical/observation bias depending on the makeup of the Russian armored force as a whole.  Perun devoted part of a video to that.  The T90s weren’t involved in the first couple of months but after that they were sent in.  They were never that numerous compared to T72/T80, and since then their percentage of the force has remained fairly constant, their losses have remained fairly constant, and their overall numbers have remained fairly constant because they are still in production and being made at about the same rate they are lost.  OTOH, T72s and T80s are both out of production and their loss rates are declining because their percentage of the force is declining with every loss.  T55s and T62s are now trending upward in losses because they are replacing T72s/T80s.
As to exactly why T90s weren’t in the initial invasion, they weren’t being nice guys, they probably just didn’t think it was necessary.

Sounds like Macron is using Trump's playbook. Dont ever tell the enemy your boundaries. Let their imaginations wonder about how crazy you are.

The typical State dept. deplomat-weeinies always insist on every option being openly disclosed and believing every threat from assholes like Putin.

Well yeah, it’s not that they aren’t reactivating any complete SPGs.  However, in Perun’s latest video on that a couple of weeks ago, they identified a lot of otherwise complete SPGs sans barrels, still in depots.  If they’ve pulled the barrel it stands to reason they’re pulling every other part they need from it too and that it’s no better than a parts hulk.
In the same video Perun was more curious about the massive amount of towed artillery that has disappeared, including obsolete WW2 types with extremely short ranges.  It isn’t clear what they’re doing with this stuff, as it hasn’t really been seen in Ukraine yet en masse.

Wow! Those "Abrams tourists" got more than they expected...

Maybe that thing can be recovered to keep those RU filthy paws off it.

I almost wonder if UKR knew it would be bait for Russians trying to recover?

It may be a good way to give him international diplomatic and political experience...grooming for political office?

I think almost everything we saw in that video was PKM fire.

We need more posters, since some of the longtime contributors have been run off. I second this motion: more posters from people besides 'the usual suspects.'

The “Ukraine the Latest” reporter was very clear that Zaluzhny has political ambitions.  I don’t really know their internal politics well enough to speculate.
But if I had to guess, the job gets him out of Zelensky’s and Syrski’s hair in Kyiv while also not being an irrelevant posting.  He can make contacts and learn the international political ropes in London, probably better than anywhere else.

Tube wear is a big deal, keeping in mind that they're firing thousands of rounds a day. At two years into the war, at the rates of fire we've seen, I have no doubt the number of tubes that are now scrap numbers thousands. I have no idea what their production rate is on gun barrels, but it would be nice to see attrition exceeding production. It would be nicer to see whatever facility makes the barrels get hit by a smoking accident. That image of the deep storage facility for towed artillery getting 100% depleted really brought that home.

Russia is going to need lots of drones just as badly as Ukraine, which makes EW all the more important. Just like Zaluzhny said last November. EW superiority is a critical need.

We did.  However, their best isn't fairing too well.  They are keeping T14s and newest aircraft away to avoid embarrassment.

As in boxing, in a title fight, the challenger must beat the champ.  A tie goes to the reigning champ.  In this case, the reigning champ is Ukraine, because it is their land.

Deep down Russia (and everyone else) knows this SMO is a clusterfuck.  Russia will continue to be in denial until it becomes too painful.  It might take another year or two, especially with slow and shorter range armament deliveries from the West.

Hat-tip to KaerMorhenResident

Adding 30K men per month is huge. Ukraine MUST stand up more forces. The civilian leadership was balking, but Zaluzhny was 100% right. They should have been mobilizing from November-February to get a credible force trained up by May-June.