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5 May 2023

Ukraine Is Really Muddy Right Now. It’s A Risky Time For A Counteroffensive.

David Axe

A Ukrainian Humvee mired in bezdorizhzhia mud before the current war.VIA SOCIAL MEDIA

Every fall, Ukraine gets wetter—and it’s not yet cold enough for the rain to freeze into ice. Every spring, as the winter ice melts, Ukraine again gets wetter—and it’s not yet warm enough to dry out.

The result is two seasons of mud. Mud that’s so deep and sticky that it renders thousands of miles of unpaved roads—to say nothing of forests and fields—impassable for vehicles. The Ukrainians call these muddy seasons “bezdorizhzhia.” That means “roadlessness.”

Bezdorizhzhia works against both armies in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, but it’s a bigger problem for whichever army is trying to go on the attack while it’s muddy. “Poor [cross-country mobility] typically provides some military advantage to defending forces,” the U.K. defense ministry explained.

Right now, that means the mud favors Russian forces, which mostly have begun shifting to a defensive posture in anticipation of a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The spring bezdorizhzhia tends to be worse than the fall bezdorizhzhia is. “Spring is the nightmare season for fighting in Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. noted. And this year, amid warmer weather across Europe, the spring bezdorizhzhia has persisted through late April. Prolonging the nightmare.

That might help to explain why Ukraine hasn’t yet launched the main efforts we might associate with a counteroffensive.

Yes, there have been Ukrainian raids across the Dnipro River into Russian-held territory left of that wide river in southern Ukraine. And yes, Ukrainian officials claim their forces are beginning to push back against Russian assaults in the ruins of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

But we haven’t yet observed a major Ukrainian armored assault anywhere along the 600-mile front that stretches from the mouth of the Dnipro in southern Russian east toward Zaporizhzhia then northward up through Donbas to the Russian border near Kharkiv. An assault that might begin with a complex and risky effort to breach Russian fortifications.

A Ukrainian BTS-4 recovery vehicle.UKROBORONPROM PHOTO

The mud is so bad that even the vehicles that are supposed to recover other vehicles that get stuck themselves are getting stuck. A video that circulated online on social media on Saturday depicts a Ukrainian BTS-4 armored recovery vehicle practically glued to a forest track somewhere in Ukraine.

A BTS-4 is an old T-54/55 tank chassis with a front-mounted dozer blade and a 12-ton hydraulic crane in place of its turret. The Ukrainian army began the current, wider war with around 20 BTS-4s, at least 10 of which went through an extensive overhaul at the Lviv vehicle plant back in 2021.

ARVs such as the BTS-4 are essential for armies that fight on the move in difficult conditions. They winch out and unstick stuck vehicles; tow away damaged and immobilized vehicles so they can get repaired; and even support engineers breaching enemy defenses.

It’s not for no reason that the U.S. Army has 1,200 M-88 recovery vehicles to support 2,700 active M-1 tanks. That’s slightly more than two tanks per ARV.

The Ukrainian army, on the other hand, had only around three dozen BREM-1, BREM-2, BREM-M, BREM-64 and BTS-4 ARVs when Russia widened its war on Ukraine 14 months ago. That’s 36 or so ARVs for a pre-war tank force with nearly a thousand T-64s, T-72s and T-80s. One recovery vehicle for every 25 tanks.

Donations from foreign allies have helped to grow the Ukrainian ARV fleet, as has a local effort to rebuild captured Russian T-62 tanks into improvised recovery vehicles. It’s possible the Ukrainians have around 50 more ARVs than they started the wider war with.

That’s still too few ARVs by American standards. Too little recovery capacity to unstick an army that, for now, is stuck in the mud of the twice-a-year bezdorizhzhia season.

Especially as the ARVs themselves also are getting stuck. Until the ground dries a bit more and vehicles can move without high risk of miring—or at least are recoverable—it seems unlikely Ukraine will launch a major armored assault.

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