The book has all but closed on Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive.
To be blunt, it did not go very well for Kyiv. Retrospective on that to come.
But with a new season comes a new narrative. And as winter sets in,
the eyes of war watchers now turn to two locations,
which, at least for the moment, will dictate the winter campaign.
And unlike the last six months, when the initiative was almost exclusively Ukraine’s,
Russia is on the offensive in one of the locations,
while Ukraine tries expanding its horizons in the other.
With that in mind, let’s take a quick moment to discuss what is at stake at each of sites.
We’ll begin with where Russia is on the attack given that it is the deviation from the norm.
The target is the town of Avdiivka, just a stone’s throw north from Donetsk City.
Avdiivka will be a test of one of the prevailing narratives of
the war so far—and one that has not looked good for the Kremlin.
The performance of the Russian military in Ukraine has been a
major disappointment for those in Moscow.
The Battle of Kyiv was the centerpiece of the problem. It was a disaster that
the Russian armed forces have never fully recovered from.
Corruption, among other things that we have covered before,
shredded the organization’s effectiveness.
However, size matters. And the fact is that Russia’s
military is substantially larger than Ukraine’s.
At the end of the day, that meant that Ukraine had to pull back many
of its troops from the east in order to protect the capital.
Russia took advantage of the gaps that Ukraine left behind to push the front line westward.
But since the Battle of Kyiv ended,
Russia has only made real progress in one location: Bakhmut.
Russia, of course, gets the asterisk there because the
Wagner Group was doing most of the heavy lifting during that battle.
Well, we all know how that one ended. Yes, Wagner still exists,
but without Yevgeny Prigozhin pulling the strings,
it will not be partaking in the same way now as it was before.
Thus, the question is whether Russia proper is capable of
mounting an effective offensive at this point.
Moscow aims to answer that question in Avdiivka,
a city that seemingly has no tactical business still being in the hands of Ukraine.
It is not just that Avdiivka is only a half hour drive from the center of Donetsk City,
the capital of the proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic,
and ever since this signing ceremony back in September 2022,
the capital of an oblast of the Russian Federation by Russian law.
It is also that Adiivka
has been flanked by de facto Russian forces for almost a decade now.
And yet somehow the town with a population of 31,000—
well, now without the three—has held on.
Once upon a time, the Russian political narrative of the war was that the Luhansk
and Donetsk breakaway republics needed to be saved from Kyiv.
But the bulk of the attention once the invasion began
was not there: it was in closing the Crimean Land Bridge.
Russia also did once capture most of the Luhansk Oblast,
until Ukraine’s September 2023 counteroffensive undid some of those gains.
However, the front in Donetsk has barely budged.
There was the initial push along the south toward Mariupol,
which was merely a part of the land bridge campaign.
And as well there was the aforementioned Wagner spear-headed Battle of Bakhmut.
But that is about it.
Avdiivka gives Russia the opportunity to demonstrate
that the line can still move to the left.
And prepare yourself for a season’s worth of narratives that the Battle of Avdiivka
is 2024’s version of the Battle of Bakhmut.
After all, they are fairly close together within Donetsk.
And do you remember how Russia and Ukraine
spent substantial time fighting over a garbage dump in Bakhmut?
Well, the literal high ground is Avdiivka is this waste center.
Let the trash wars continue.
Sticking with the Bakhmut connection,
casualty ratios will be the question for Ukraine on this front.
Ukraine traded territory to eliminate a larger proportion of Russian troops last winter,
at least toward the beginning of the battle.
But that strategy appeared predicated
on thinning the Russian lines in preparation for the 2023 offensive.
That strategy did not pan out.
Will Ukraine want to double down, betting that this time Russia
will not be able to sustain things? Or will it be time for a new strategy entirely?
We have discussed before how the counteroffensive strategy itself shifted toward attrition,
so it is within the realm of possibility.
Meanwhile, to the southwest in Kherson, we have Ukraine’s opportunity
to shake the narrative of a failed counteroffensive.
This one is more of a roller coaster, so strap in.
Call it the Battle of the Left Bank. You have Kherson City right here,
and Ukraine attempting to cross the Dnipro River that runs across it.
The river flows in this direction—
hence someone facing downstream would view this as the left bank.
See? If we swing things around, now it is on the left. Not in the least bit confusing.
Annoying as the naming convention is,
the media will be reporting on it like this, so it is important to know.
Anyway, the story here is complicated and traces back to the Kakhovka Dam.
Following its breech in June 2023,
Russia took the opportunity to reallocate many of its defenses further east.
This was timed just as Ukraine was getting its counterattack underway,
throwing a wrench in that plan.
The flood of water downstream made any cross-river attacks more difficult,
hence making some of Russia’s Kherson troops superfluous.
However, months have passed at this point,
and the reservoir sitting behind the former dam has long since drained—
including, it should be noted, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant’s cooling pond.
What that means is that the Kherson area is
seemingly back in play for Ukraine to conduct offensive operations.
And after months of brief expeditions to the other side,
it appears that Ukraine is now trying to make a serious play on it further upriver from the city.
It is hard to overstate the upside of the mission for Ukraine within the broader context of the war.
The optimistic hope for the counteroffensive was to break through Russia’s front lines,
expose Russia from the flanks,
and then march up and down the land bridge. However, that never came to fruition,
with Ukraine’s realized advance only going to about here.
Nevertheless, Ukraine can take this same general idea and apply it to Kherson.
The only major differences for Ukraine
are the downside that it can only go one way on the land bridge,
and the upside that it applies almost immediate pressure to the Crimean Peninsula.
And in some ways, it would be worse than a breakthrough in Zaporizhzhia
for Russia’s long-term military planning.
Although the contested front line is very long,
a sizeable segment of it is actually just the Dnipro River.
If that river is possible to cross, then Russia
will essentially have to undo what it did at the start of Ukraine’s
2023 counteroffensive and do something that it desperately wants to avoid:
it will need to reallocate its troops from the northeast.
And to make matters worse for Russia, remember General Sergey Surovikin’s
defensive lines that hampered Ukraine out in Zaporizhzhia?
They are not nearly as abundant in Kherson—remember,
the river was supposed to naturally play that role.
In other words, crossing the river is the hard part for Ukraine,
and redeployments are the critical counterplay for Russia.
In that regard, these two tweets from Zelensky’s official account are telling.
For one, they show the basic technology that Ukraine is using for the operation.
But the fact that they exist at all indicates that Ukraine believes
that it is making serious progress.
Now think about the next level strategy there is for Kyiv to employ.
With the lines thinned everywhere else to buff the river crossings,
Ukraine might have the opportunity to make good on its original counteroffensive hopes.
To add further intrigue, Russian news media reported
that command was ordering a tactical retreat.
Those reports then quickly disappeared without much explanation,
and Russian troops did not actually do that,
leading analysts to wonder what the heck was going on.
A few possibilities:
One, remember when Russia mobilized in September 2022 but needed to stall for time further? The
way they solved that was to retreat from Kherson City and go across the river.
The retracted reports came one year later. Maybe they somehow got duplicated,
and whoever mistook the 2 for a 3 is now getting fired.
Two, it is Russia, where weird, inexplicable things just tend to happen,
and all you can do is embrace it, like we Americans do with the state of Florida.
To be clear, all of these headlines happened in the past week,
and it only took me about five minutes to pull them from the papers.
This guy in particular is fantastic. Live your gimmick.
Anyway, option three is that Russia has prepared plans to retreat—including the
corresponding press releases—but had not yet pulled the trigger.
Given the difficulty of establishing a beach landing of sorts, it would
not make sense for Russia to just concede the territory.
But there may be good reason to withdraw if Ukraine does succeed in establishing a beachhead.
Take another look at the satellite photos of Kherson pre and post dam break.
Most of the flood plain is on Russia’s side of the front line.
In other words, Ukraine has the high ground.
And while high ground is not everything—apologies to Master Kenobi—it certainly helps,
particularly for anyone who wants their artillery to go further—
and last I checked, that is basically everyone.
Going back to the map,
the options are not great for Russia. Ukraine’s main effort is here,
a decent distance away from the city. There is a little bit of high ground here.
However, the better high round is all the way over here.
Maybe Russia will eventually want to retreat to there.
But that is a lot of ground to just give up— it is basically to where the dam used to be.
In other words, Ukraine appears to have a long way to go before that comes into the picture.
And let’s not forget that this is still winter—and
probably not one as cold as advertised in this photo.
That means the ground is never going to truly firm up,
so any aggressive driving is liable to lead to mud problems just as it would in the spring.
That will then raise deeper questions about a stalemate
and whether to negotiate an end to the war.
But that is a lines on maps question better suited for another video.
If you want to know more about the invasion…
hey, wait a minute, that’s not…
oh, yeah, I have a new book out this week: How Ukraine Survived:
Inside the Strategy to Stop Russia’s Invasion.
In fact, if you were paying close attention to the first few seconds of this video,
I cheekily put its opening pages on the screen.
Think of the book as a coherent narrative of all of the pivotal
moments from the first sixteen months of the war,
including Russia’s decision to invade,
the Battle of Hostomel Airport, the Battle of Kyiv,
Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensives, and the Wagner Thunder Run.
It’s also about 50% longer than previous book.
And although it does not have any lines on maps, that is what the old school option is for.
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