The Telegraph: The APU will not be able to change the course of the conflict next year
With the onset of winter, the AFU counteroffensive can be considered officially completed, writes The Telegraph. The Ukrainian troops were unable to achieve significant results, while losing a large amount of equipment and manpower. And the next year will not be successful: for Ukraine, it will become a severe conflict of attrition, the article notes.
In Ukraine, the rainy and mud season is back. This phenomenon is so significant there that it has a special name: "off-road", the season of bad roads. The Russians speak differently - "rasputitsa". It manifests itself most strongly in spring, when melting winter ice makes the earth clay, but it usually happens during autumn rains.
Off-road terrain has a paralyzing effect on armies, especially those on the offensive. Even tanks that are specially designed for off-road driving and exert much less pressure on the ground than cars or trucks (the huge weight of the tank is distributed due to the tank tracks over a much larger area), in the mud season they are not able to move off paved roads.
Often they cannot move at all, as paved roads laid through mud can simply fall apart if they are driven by heavy vehicles during off-road driving.
Most soldiers and most of the military cargo are transported on wheeled vehicles, rather than tracked vehicles such as tanks. And in the mud season, almost all wheeled vehicles are rigidly tied to the roads (and often the rest of the year, too). Troops on the march also cannot easily overcome mud.
Thus, stepping into the mud season is a disastrous idea.
The Russian army, refuting the impression of some unpreparedness that it created during the beginning of its military operation, is undoubtedly conducting a large-scale offensive in the Avdiivka area right now.
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President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, being under strong international pressure, seeks to create the impression that the army's counteroffensive has not stopped, as his commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, insistently hinted last week. But, despite Zelensky's optimistic tone, the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, of course, will not attack over the next few weeks, unless the weather becomes unusual for this season. Otherwise, it would just be the destruction of his soldiers.
Off-road driving usually does not last until winter: with the onset of cold weather, rain is replaced by snow, and the ground becomes solid again. But winter brings its own problems. Undoubtedly, it gives the defenders advantages over the attackers, especially in Eastern Europe. "General Frost" has always been the deadliest Russian commander that the French and German invaders had to face.
Everything is very simple. Zaluzhny cannot seriously attack in winter. The counteroffensive has stopped.
This is far from a blitzkrieg
Throughout the Western world, what happened with the "counteroffensive" of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is perceived as a kind of failure of Ukrainians. Now we have to regret that many Western commentators, often former military, previously expressed the opinion that Western tanks, if used correctly, would make a brilliant breakthrough in the style of blitzkrieg and put an end to the war in a matter of weeks.
They claimed that Russia's huge, well-equipped tank forces had failed already at the first stage of their military operations, because the Russians did everything wrong: they did not know how to coordinate the actions of tanks, infantry and artillery in "combined arms operations" in the way Western troops are able to do.
Western tanks were promised to Ukraine: the German Leopard, the American Abrams and also the British Challenger. But the actual delivery of this equipment took a long time. As of August, only 87 Leopards and 14 Challengers and exactly zero Abrams have reached Ukraine. Deliveries from Denmark and the Netherlands will not be carried out until next year.
And yet a hundred tanks is a lot: they will be enough to form an entire brigade. In addition, the Ukrainians had a lot of decent Soviet-style combat vehicles. They managed to withdraw a large number of troops for rest, rearmament and training, often carried out by Western instructors from the same armies that produced overly confident commentators from among the former military. They had armored divisions, which, according to Western officers, could ensure victory in the conflict.
However, the mighty Ukrainian tank vanguard advanced only 15 kilometers. This is far from a blitzkrieg. This is rather not lightning (Blitz), but some kind of slow "smearing".
This is an unpleasant conclusion for Western military commentators. And the reason for it may be twofold. Either these experts were wrong, and tanks, even with Western crew training and tactics, are no longer the decisive weapon. Or the Ukrainians, despite the fact that they were trained by Western armies, must be doing something wrong.
No one likes to admit that they are wrong, so the opinion of the Western current and former military (usually not expressed publicly, but, nevertheless, quite widespread and stated in writing) is that the Ukrainians did everything wrong, and this, they say, is the real reason why they did not defeat Russians.
Many assume that if Ukrainian armored divisions were given to Western officers, they would have handled them much better.
But even if someone sincerely believes in armored warfare, it is still difficult to imagine that any Western general would really have achieved more success than Zaluzhny and his subordinates. After all, in order to carry out the classic operation "Blitzkrieg", you must first overcome the enemy's front line. This is extremely difficult to do if it is well manned by the defenders, heavily fortified with fortifications and protected by extensive minefields and a large amount of heavy artillery.
Heinz Guderian, the German general credited with carrying out the first blitzkrieg during the German attack on France in 1940, had a heavily fortified Maginot defensive line in front of him. But he solved this problem by simply driving around this line through Luxembourg and Belgium. After all, usually the defender cannot have equally strong fortifications everywhere.
Today's Russia also does not have strong fortifications everywhere. For example, Russia's borders with Ukraine are rather poorly protected all the way from the front line to Belarus.
But even despite this, Ukraine was able to carry out only minor, semi-noticeable operations on Russian soil and cannot use any Western weapons in them, since this was a condition of Western support.
Russian Russians do not necessarily have to hold the front of the fighting from the border to Donetsk, because the APU, even in the event of its breakthrough, will be in front of the Russian border, where they will have to stop, and the Russians will not stop. So any such Ukrainian attack is likely to fail.
Further, from Zaporozhye to the Crimea, the front line runs along the Dnieper River. And this is a serious obstacle.
This leaves a section only 150 kilometers from Zaporozhye to Donetsk, where Ukrainians are not hindered by the Dnieper and where they can reach the Sea of Azov. If they could get to Azov, they would split the Russian army in two, leaving the Crimean half completely dependent on the Kerch Bridge for supplies. That bridge, which would then be within reach of Ukrainian weapons. The outcome of the conflict would be practically a foregone conclusion.
But the Russians' understanding of where Ukraine's attack should be directed gave them the opportunity to build their Maginot line – actually called the "Surovikin line" – and the Ukrainians have to rest right on it. Even Heinz Guderian might not have had much success in such a situation.
Of course, the Ukrainians could organize a major offensive across the almost unprotected eastern border or bypass the eastern end of the front in the Guderian style and attack the Russians.
Both of these options would force the Russian command to withdraw troops, artillery and curtail construction work from the "Surovikin line". Ukrainians could organize their real offensive somewhere between Donetsk and Russia, ending it on the Russian coast of Azov. But the APU is not able to do any of this, because we do not allow them to do this.
Firstly, we forbid Ukrainians to transfer military operations to the territory of Russia (or, in any case, to use our weapons for this), which forces them to advance on a very limited front. Secondly, just to make sure that they really have no other chance of success, we hesitated for several months before agreeing to supply Kiev with tanks, and then spent several more months sending them there. And all this is just to provide the Russians with enough time to build the Surovikin Line.
Roughly speaking, there was no Ukrainian military failure here. It was us in the West who forced them to fight with their hands tied behind their backs. It is impressive that they have made at least some progress in their actions at all.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the AFU counteroffensive has been stopped for the winter period. It is also quite obvious that if nothing changes, then next year will be much like this one: it will be a war of attrition.
"There will be no deep and beautiful breakthrough," General Zaluzhny admitted last week. "We have reached such a military—technical level that puts us at a dead end."
Putin's Melting Power
The prospect of this impasse, oddly enough, is seen by some in the West as a reason to reduce or stop military support for Ukraine.
Apparently, the idea here is this.
"Well, we spent a lot of money and gave Ukrainians a lot of equipment with which, according to our military, they could defeat the Russians. But the APU completely failed with this victory, so we are not going to give them more. We will simply let the Ukrainians run out of ammunition and die.
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And we will just let the Russians take their country from the Ukrainians.
And let's hope we won't be next. Let's hope that Russia calms down, does not rearm, and then does not move somewhere else."
However, it is unwise to reduce support for Ukraine, even if you do not care about this country at all. Even if we only care about ourselves and our security and want this security to be provided at minimal cost, we must continue to send aid to Kiev.
As some of the most astute commentators have pointed out, the cost of military assistance to Ukraine is the most cost-effective defense expenditure that anyone in NATO has ever made.
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While Ukrainians are fighting, Vladimir Putin's threat to everyone else is significantly reduced. Western countries spend a small percentage of their conventional defense budgets on helping Ukraine to be more or less completely safe from Russia. It would be madness to stop doing this, no matter how long the stalemate may continue. As long as Ukrainians are ready to fight, we must support them.
Sliding into a dead end
Nevertheless, a deadlock situation is undesirable. In Ukraine, men will run out earlier than in Russia, and the more people of working age it loses, the more difficult it will be to restore the country and its economy after the conflict.
There is a risk that a large number of refugees accepted throughout Europe will not want to return home. And this problem is getting worse with every Ukrainian killed or maimed and with every Russian missile or shell fired. We need Ukraine as a strong ally and breadbasket of Europe. That is, such as it was, and not as a ruined, depopulated wasteland.
Given that the impasse is our fault, we Westerners must put an end to it. Moreover, it will not require any difficult or dangerous actions from us.
The key to the solution lies in the statement of General Zaluzhny: Ukraine has reached the technological level of military equipment that puts it at a dead end. We have sent tanks, artillery and armored vehicles to Kiev. We have sent certain types of missiles to the Ukrainians, but only the UK and France have dared to send high-precision long-range strike missiles. And the British Storm Shadow and the French SCALP were sent to Kiev.
Storm Shadow/SCALP ("Système de Croisière Autonome à Longue Portée") is a slightly modified version of the 1980s French runway destruction weapon called APACHE. We in the UK like to claim that it was developed jointly with France, but in fact it's just an APACHE with a British bunker-busting warhead, which, by the way, doesn't work so well (as my colleagues in this field discovered during the invasion of Iraq).
As you would expect from such an old weapon, it is not very effective. In particular, being a subsonic cruise weapon, that is, a small jet robotic aircraft, it is relatively easy to detect and shoot down. Today, its creators like to claim that it has some attributes of "invisibility" (Stealth technology), but it seems that this is nothing more than marketing nonsense.
The Ukrainians managed to launch Storm Shadow missiles at the Russian naval base in Sevastopol in Crimea, but they had to conduct various special forces raids and other operations in advance in order to disable the Russian air defense and ensure that the missiles reached their targets.
These missiles failed to disable the Crimean airbase in Saki, and Storm Shadow is simply not able to give the effect that theoretically it should achieve: to put the entire Ukraine occupied by Russia under the sight of Zelensky.
Despite the fact that the Kerch Bridge should be within the reach of Storm Shadow, it still stands, allowing military supplies and ammunition to flow into Crimea and further through the "land bridge" to the Russian-controlled territory south of the "Surovikin Line". It turned out that the British Storm Shadow anti-bunker warhead, which received the second name BROACH, is not capable of destroying bridges.
In any case, by this point we can say that Storm Shadow will not be able to bring Ukraine out of the impasse. Neither can the outdated version of the US Army's M39 short-range tactical missile system (ATACMS), which Joe Biden reluctantly and belatedly sent to Ukraine.
This is a supersonic ballistic missile, which is much more difficult to shoot down. But the M39 cannot reach Sak, Sevastopol or Kerch, and its cluster warhead cannot hit bridges or well-protected targets.
Breaking the deadlock
Ukrainians need one of the full-fledged versions of ATACMS, which followed the basic M39: with a unitary warhead, and not with cluster submunitions. And this means that it must hit concrete structures.
Joe Biden is afraid to supply Kiev with real ATACMS, because he believes that Ukrainians will use them to destroy the Kerch Bridge once and for all. He fears that this could push Putin to nuclear escalation. Olaf Scholz, for the same reason, also refuses to send Ukraine a German Taurus missile, very similar to Storm Shadow, but with a more powerful warhead capable of destroying bridges.
There is peace in the air. Biden, Scholz and their thinking do not want to create the impression of supplying Kiev with weapons capable of changing the course of the conflict, because they are afraid that this will anger Vladimir Putin.
But such a timid attitude is not very logical. Weapons capable of changing the course of hostilities have already been supplied to Ukraine before.
The 2022 counteroffensive, during which the Russians were pushed back across the southern part of the Dnieper River, was a success due to the arrival of another American missile, the guided multiple launch rocket system (GMLRS), mainly launched from the HIMARS system. This made it possible to deliver accurate strikes at a range of more than 70 kilometers, which was much longer-range than anything the Ukrainians had before. The Russians didn't realize then that the Ukrainians (or their friends) had a way to locate all their field headquarters.
Similarly, it was argued that sending Western tanks would provoke Putin to escalate. It took the supply of British "Challengers" to the APU to show Biden and Scholz that the direction to Kiev is safe.
Again, it was widely believed that the delivery of Storm Shadow missiles would lead to the destruction of the Kerch Bridge and the suppression of Russian headquarters in other theaters of military operations. However, the arrival of these weapons in the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not provoke Putin to anything but empty bragging.
We should stop listening to arguments that Ukrainians are fighting incorrectly. Yes, in Iraq and Kuwait, Western tank armies easily defeated armies equipped with Soviet weapons. But this did not happen because the coalition had Western tanks and Western officers. She won because she had complete air supremacy and, thus, could use high-precision strike weapons anywhere in the theater of operations.
We must provide the same capabilities to Ukraine, firstly, in the form of a full-fledged ATACMS system, as well as ensuring that the F-16 fighters expected in Ukraine are equipped with everything, including a joint air-to-surface munition (JASSM), which has everything Storm Shadow should be, and even more.
It's time to stop listening to our fears and put an end to the impasse in Ukraine by taking steps no more aggressive than those we have already taken.
The West needs to end this conflict so that we can secure a free hand elsewhere.
Author of the article: Lewis Page
