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28 September 2023

Russia's Army Learns From Its Mistakes in Ukraine

Matthew Luxmoore, Michael R. Gordon

More than a year after Moscow failed in its goal of a lightning victory in Ukraine, the Russian military has steadily adapted on the battlefield as it shifts to a strategy of wearing down Ukraine and the West.

The poor performance of the Russian military in the early days of the war shocked many in the West and ultimately allowed Ukraine to resist, and then roll back, a large part of the Russian advance.

But Russia has since learned from its mistakes, adapting in ways that could make it difficult for Ukraine to expel Russian forces from its territory.

After Ukraine easily swept through Russia’s lines in the Kharkiv region last autumn, Moscow spent months preparing formidable defenses ahead of the current Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south. Moscow is also deploying drones to scope out and attack Ukrainian positions in a way that Kyiv has struggled to respond to.

As a result, Ukrainian forces have advanced slowly in the past few months, facing dense minefields while Russian helicopters, antitank missiles and artillery pick them off.

“We have seen quite a few areas where they’re adapting, and of course we’re paying close attention to that,” Gen. James Hecker, the top U.S. Air Force commander in Europe, said in an interview.

To be sure, Russia’s military—which has suffered more than 270,000 killed and wounded as its army has lost more than 50% of its “combat effectiveness,” according to some Western estimates—may need to make deeper changes to sustain a yearslong war.

It still suffers from a Soviet-style top-down structure that allows little initiative for front-line commanders and gives priority to political goals from Moscow over battlefield decision-making. It expended months and thousands of lives to take Bakhmut, an eastern Ukrainian city with little strategic value, after the Kremlin identified it as a key target. Russia has continued to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers to defend the city, where it claimed its only major victory since the early months of the war.

Moreover, Russia is now largely on the defensive as it tries to hold back the Ukrainian push, and it is far easier for armies to defend than to go on the offensive. Analysts and Western officials say Russia has exhausted its offensive capacity for now and is failing to gain new ground in parts of eastern Ukraine where it is still trying to push forward.

However, the Russian military is showing some capacity to learn from early mistakes.

For instance, early in the war, Russian warplanes flew into the teeth of the Ukrainian air defenses and suffered serious losses because Moscow had failed to gain air superiority. More than 75 planes were shot down, with many flying “right into the surface-to-air missile engagement zones of the Ukrainians,” said Hecker.

He added, however, that much of the Russian air force now remains intact. “So they now don’t fly in those rings or if they do, it is for low altitude for very quick moments and then they go back out,” he said, although that tactic has seriously hampered the accuracy of the Russian bombing missions and that air superiority remains well beyond the Russians’ reach.

The Russians have added guidance capabilities to older bombs that they release from planes flying beyond the range of Ukraine’s air defense, including from aircraft flying over Russian territory. Ukraine struggles to detect and shoot them down with their Soviet-era aircraft.

Russia has also moved command posts and many ammunition depots farther from the front lines after Ukraine struck them using Western-provided Himars launchers, which fire guided rockets with a range of almost 50 miles.

After the Ukrainians began to use extended-range JDAM satellite-guided bombs, the Russians moved their command posts farther back still. Those strikes have forced the Russians to conserve the use of artillery, extend their already strained supply lines and become more precise in their targeting.

The U.S. now says it will provide a small number of ATACMS missiles to Ukraine in coming weeks and that more might be provided later. Those surface-to-surface missiles have a range between 100 and 190 miles depending on the model that is provided, and could similarly target Russian logistical lines.

Early in the war, Moscow deployed unprotected columns of Russian armor into Ukraine, expecting minimal resistance from Kyiv, and sent undermanned and underequipped units into combat, resulting in tens of thousands of Russian deaths.

The Russians are now better at protecting their soldiers by building deep, highly fortified trenches. They hide their tanks and armored personnel carriers in tree lines and under camouflage netting, conducting sorties to fire on Ukrainian positions before swiftly retreating.

“If we compare this with the start of the invasion, the difference is colossal,” says Oleksandr Solonko, a private in a Ukrainian air-reconnaissance battalion near Robotyne, close to Russia’s main defensive lines in the south. “They’ve sprayed the fields with mines and put up all sorts of traps. They’ve done it well.”

In the south, the Russians have increased the use of drones and guided bombs to hold back the Ukrainian offensive. Lancet explosive drones and racing drones rigged with explosives smash into Ukrainian armored vehicles, medical-evacuation vans and infantry, disabling vehicles and killing and maiming troops.

Yuriy Bereza, commander of the Dnipro-1 Regiment that has been fighting around Kreminna in the east, said he has seen a marked increase in the Russians’ use of drones, a bid to catch up with Ukraine’s own. Previously he spotted the occasional Russian Orlan drone fly over one of his regiment’s positions to send back coordinates for Russian artillery units. Now whole swarms are active overhead.

”When we started fighting them a year and a half ago, they were throwing people at everything, and losing thousands,” said Bereza. “Now they’re trying to catch up to us technologically. And they’re learning fast.”

Ukrainian troops on the front lines around Bakhmut say they lose dozens of drones daily because Russian jamming equipment is successfully bringing them down on enemy territory.

Ukrainian officials say the Russians have procured thousands of cheap drones produced on the Chinese market by the manufacturer DJI. Russia has also expedited the production of Geran-3 drones in cooperation with Iran, menacing Ukrainian cities in a bid to undermine morale as it pounds Ukrainian forces on the front lines.

Ukraine’s drone industry has expanded dramatically in recent months, but the losses are nonetheless substantial. In a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute, the London-based think tank estimated that Ukraine is losing around 10,000 drones a month, largely because of Russian electronic warfare.

The Russian military has in turn been adapting to Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory. After the Ukrainians began using drones to strike Russian combat aircraft deep inside Russia, the Russians started dispersing their planes to more airfields. They also began putting tires on the wings and fuselage of bombers at some of their bases.

The practice, the utility of which isn’t entirely clear to some Western experts, had been documented in commercial satellite photos by Maxar Technologies that show tires piled on Tu-95 bombers at the Engels air base near Saratov, southwestern Russia.

“Placing tires, crates and other material on top of the wings and fuselage could be an attempt to confuse or alter the visual patterns used by drones targeting the aircraft,” said Stephen Wood, senior director at Maxar.

Hecker, the U.S. Air Force commander, said the move might be a Russian effort to protect the planes from a drone blast. “That’s their sandbags,” he noted at a conference hosted by the Air & Space Forces Association. “Something hits the aircraft. Instead of putting a dent in the aircraft, which might make it unflyable for a short amount of time, it hits a tire.”

Russia’s war machine is adapting at home as well, managing to sustain and even increase defense production of some items despite sanctions.

Western officials thought Russia could produce about 100 tanks a year, but the actual tank production is closer to 200 a year now, according to a Western defense official. However, the official said Russia had lost more than 2,000 tanks, which he said would take it a decade to make up.

The West thought Russia might be able to produce about one million artillery shells a year, the Western defense official said. But now it believes Russia is on a path over the next couple of years to produce two million artillery shells annually. To put that in perspective, he said, Russia fired 10 to 11 million shells last year and was sometimes using shells that were out of date and prone to malfunction.

To sustain the war, he said, Russia has boosted military spending, though this has had a distorting effect on its economy by forcing economic cutbacks elsewhere, prompting an increase in interest rates.

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