﻿Remember that time Putin managed to lose an entire battalion trying to cross a small
river during his offensive operations in eastern Ukraine? As Ukraine prepares to embark on similar
operations with the goal of severing Russia's supply lines, cutting the land-bridge connecting
occupied Crimea and Russian positions further east, and causing a general Russian collapse,
it’s time to take a closer look at what exactly went down in the Battle of Bilohorivka.
On May 12, 2022, just three months after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,
drone footage was released to the public by the Ukraine Armed Forces revealing a small
portion of the Siverskyi Donets River winding its way through Bilohorivka in Ukraine’s eastern
industrial heartland. The footage revealed the aftermath of a lopsided encounter. Dirt
roads approach the river from both sides. On them, the burnt out hulks of several
tanks and armored vehicles are clearly visible. Partly submerged and arcing halfway across the
river, a wrecked Russian pontoon bridge attests to the tactical objectives the Russians had in mind.
River crossings in any war are among the most risky maneuvers. This one,
conducted by Russian military officials under a lot of pressure to achieve the Kremlin’s tactical
objectives in the Donbas, was haphazardly planned and even more haphazardly executed.
With the intention of striking Lyman, a city of 20,000 some seventeen miles west,
the Russians installed a lightweight pontoon bridge over the muddy waterway and in early
May began their attempt to transfer an entire Battalion Tactical Group to the other side.
Ukrainian forces of the 17th Tank Brigade caught them in the act. According to a
Ukrainian engineer and EOD officer, his unit could see the Russians massing on the other
side of the river. As early as May 6, his commander asked him to conduct a forward
reconnaissance mission along the river to gauge the enemy’s intent. The next day,
he and a recon unit went to the area of Hryhorivka and Bilohorivka to get a first-hand look.
It did not take long for the engineer to get a sense of what was happening. Given the river’s
not insignificant current, he predicted the Russians would have to deploy motor boats to
build the pontoon bridge. Since such bridges were mostly modular and could be trucked to the front
in large sections, it would, he predicted, take them two hours–at least–to finish the
job. After a day of watching he notified the unit watching the river to listen for motorboats and
report back as soon as they heard them. This last warning was prescient, since visibility,
he claimed, was horrible. Compounding the fog already in the area, the Russians had
set parts of nearby forests on fire and deployed massive smokescreens to conceal their actions. The
observers had to hear the boats, he reiterated. Then, the Ukrainians would know it was on.
Observations in hand, the engineer returned and reported his findings
to his superiors. On the morning of May 8, they heard the boats. Like clockwork,
they sent up a drone. True to the engineer’s word, the Russians were
building the pontoon bridge–right where the Ukrainians had predicted it would be.
Reports shot back to the nearby Ukrainian command headquarters. They could not see Russian infantry,
but they could make out the bridge being constructed. Coordinates were relayed to
Ukrainian artillery batteries. The guns were trained on that small crossing. By then,
the Russians had built seven of the eight bridge sections and
started the slow process of moving men and materiel across the river.
And then, the shelling began.
It had only taken twenty minutes from first warning to the order to
open fire. Aided by drone surveillance and forward observers, heavy Ukrainian
artillery batteries unleashed a hellacious salvo which caught the Russians entirely by surprise.
“I was still in the area,” the engineer remarked after the engagement,
“and I have never seen [or] heard such heavy combat in my life.”
The shelling sparked pandemonium and terror. Direct hits on leading vehicles at the water’s
edge caused others to reverse up the river’s muddy banks. Further hits on escaping vehicles
boxed in the rest. The east bank of the river was torn apart by exploding munitions. Fleeing
Russian soldiers abandoned the pontoon bridge, one section destroyed outright, the other left intact.
Allegedly, 30-50 vehicles became trapped on the Ukrainian side, with no way to get back across.
They certainly tried, using bits of broken bridge to try and float back. It was all to no avail.
They then tried to arrange a new bridge to be built. The Russian high command could not deliver.
That’s when Ukrainian aircraft showed up on the scene. They concentrated even more
firepower on the shattered bridgehead while the artillery continued churning water, mud,
blood, and body parts up and down the shoreline.
The result was devastating. By May 10, photos of the disaster started to emerge online. More
than seventy vehicles, including six-dozen tanks and other armored vehicles, the bridge itself,
all disabled or destroyed in a matter of hours. The best estimates were that more than
a thousand troops perished in the maelstrom of artillery and air-delivered destruction.
That is equivalent to an entire Battalion Tactical
Group wiped off the earth faster than it could say “Spasiba, Comrade Putin.”
There were four other attempted crossings at Bilohorivka alone, all of which were
promptly destroyed by the Ukrainian armed forces leading up to May 13. On that day,
the last remaining Russian troops in the area finally fled back to their side of the river,
officially ending the Russian thrust on Lyman.
Offensive operations can be disastrously costly, remember? Just ask the Russians.
Now, there’s another takeaway from this analysis that we should bear in mind as
we contemplate the outcomes of the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive. It is this:
You can’t stop your analysis with one bad tactical engagement. The devastating loss
of an entire battalion barely impacted the overall weight of the Russian offensive in the Donbas that
spring. Even though the Russians failed to get to Bilohorivka from the north in their crossings,
adjacent forces were able to concentrate on Lyman from the east and Bilohorivka from the south and
east. A month later, they successfully occupied Sieverodonestsk and Lysychansk.
Ukrainian defenders tried to hold the line there, but ultimately failed. By July 3,
Lysychansk capitulated, and the entire Ukrainian front collapsed
under the weight of Russian pressure aggregating from the east. Ukraine had
no choice but to retreat and reform behind a new defensive line around the city of Siversk,
and thus ended the first battle of Bilohorivka. The result? Russia claimed control of the entire
Luhansk Oblast, achieving their overall objective. But the story doesn’t end here.
There are three levels to war: the tactical level, the operational level, and the strategic level.
Students of military history are often quick to confuse tactical virtuosity with military
genius–he who wins a key battle is often the one we remember most. The operational level is where
battles get strung together into campaigns–and it is here where the Russians seemed to have finally
overwhelmed their Ukrainian enemy in the case we’ve just discussed. The Ukrainians
were able to deliver a stunning victory along the Siverskyi Donets River, obliterating an
entire Russian battalion. But the Russians were able to exert pressure elsewhere, causing the
significance of this isolated engagement to dim in the overall operational picture.
If you stop your analysis at the operational level, however,
you still miss out on arguably the most important level–the strategic one–where
states deploy all the means at their disposal, be they political, economic,
military, and financial, to achieve clearly discernible aims and objectives.
Continuing the story after the fall of the Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine reevaluated its position during a
crucial operational pause. Russia seemed set on shifting its focus to the Donetsk Oblast,
where it had fought for eight years already. It was intent on controlling Bakhmut and its
surroundings, a city whose name would become synonymous with attrition in
the months to come as the site of appalling bloodshed and devastation. In the interim,
Ukraine knew it had the breathing space to conduct a much-needed mobilization that summer,
something it did as it received new injections of western military equipment and training.
Strategically, this was a crucial period. Somehow content with their operational
gains (despite having presided over a string of embarrassing failures given
their starting point in February 2022), the Russian high command decided to send
significant amounts of its forces on leave to recuperate and rest. This enabled the
Ukrainians to blunt ongoing western Russian advances at little cost. From July onward,
“only positional and trench battles took place on the Siversk-Bilohorivka route.”
If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Ukraine, between July and September,
was cooking up a special surprise for Putin’s special military operation. By
applying pressure elsewhere, the Ukrainians were able to liberate adjacent cities which
unblocked their approach to Bilohorivka. As part of the stunning early September counteroffensive,
they managed to retake Bilohorivka from Russian control and set up a defensive
line outside the city. The city was targeted by Russian artillery and
like so many cities around it in the Luhansk Oblast, was completely razed to the ground.
Over the ensuing months, Bolohorivka remained the site of heavy fighting as the war of
maneuver ground to a halt. Ukraine liberated Kharkiv, and was soon to liberate Kherson in
the south. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces managed to hold on outside the line at Bilohorivka,
repulsing heavy Russian assaults through October. Strategically, holding in Bilohorivka was part of
a broader intention of maneuvering elsewhere. For the Ukrainians it worked. For the Russians,
they became hyper-focused on reclaiming lost territory in this single eastern region.
After a dogged fight to recapture Bilohorivka in November by the Wagner Group and the 6th Cossack
Regiment of the Luhansk People’s Republic, they trained their sights on Soledar and Bakhmut,
central nodes just fifty kilometers to the south where, as we all know,
Russian and Ukrainian forces became bogged down in a winter of heavy attritional battles.
Launching their own offensive in February, Russia poured its forces back into the
meat grinder to reclaim lost territory during the Kharkiv counteroffensive.
Most of these actions occurred south of Kreminna, in and around Bilohorivka and down through
Bakhmut. It took consistent and, to western eyes, suicidal frontal Russian attacks to make minimal
progress. The Russians sustained catastrophically high losses during this bloodletting period,
and while the Ukrainians suffered severe losses as well, they have kept their eyes
on the wider strategic prize–preparing for the current offensive all the while.
So how will Ukraine’s counteroffensive unfold?
According to Dr. Jack Watling, senior research fellow at London’s Royal United
Services Institute, Ukraine has to accomplish three things for their offensive to succeed.
First, they will do what they have been doing for some time now: Engage in counterbattery
missions and artillery duels with the enemy. Using GMLRS and Storm Shadow missiles, they will target
Russian command and control posts and munitions stockpiles, in an aim to cripple the Russian’s
ability to organize and counteract the next phase of Ukrainian operations. There are indications
that this is already bearing fruit–at the time of writing, a HIMARS strike killed hundreds of
Russian soldiers “while waiting for a commander to deliver a motivational speech” near Kreminna,
confirmed by several Russian military bloggers shortly after a face-to-face meeting with
President Vladimir Putin to discuss the war in Ukraine. Apparently, the goal of this meeting was
to “assuage widespread discontent in the Russian information space’ about recent attacks in the
Belgogrod region, drone strikes inside Russian territory and ‘border security in general.”
Aaaand, within hours, they caught wind of the HIMARS strike. One prominent blogger,
Starshe Eddy, fumed on telegram in the aftermath of this episode: “If by the middle of the second
year of the war there are commanders who…[gather] personnel in one big pile, and then wait for the
enemy artillery to strike, then such commanders should be shot,” he complained. “Near Kreminna,
a tragic accident occurred in one of the divisions that were about to go on the offensive. For two
hours, people stood in a crowd in one place and waited for their division commander to
say his motivating word…but instead of him, the HIMARS and enemy artillery had their say.”
Along with these types of precision strikes, Ukraine will try to do the
next step–get Russia to commit its third-line reserves into frontline positions that are
currently being probed and assaulted by the leading Ukrainian units. Only by pressuring
the Russians broadly across the entire front and getting Russian reserves into the battle
can they see the weakest points–those ripe for penetration. This will also
dampen Russia’s ability to scramble its reserve forces to the point Ukraine ultimately chooses.
Finally, with this achieved, Ukraine will have to successfully breach the
first line of Russian defenses in depth. Once this has happened,
Ukraine will choose to commit its forces. Offensive operations will then enter a
decisive phase. From then on, there are only two outcomes–success or failure.
The offensive is still not close to reaching its decisive phase. Some
experts predict that it might take up to two months for that to happen. There are
some indications the Ukrainians have successfully breached certain forward
Russian defensive positions in isolated areas, but the hard part still lies ahead.
But what do you think? Will Ukraine’s counteroffensive be successful? Let us
know in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe for more military analysis from military experts.