Will Ukraine’s muddy ground halt Russian tanks?
The spring thaw may complicate an attack. It won’t stop it
RUSSIA’S MILITARY build-up on the Ukrainian border has sparked a new field of inquiry: invasionology. If Russia invades, as America and Britain believe is likely, when will it do so? Many factors are in play, from the timing of Russia-Belarus exercises, which begin formally on February 10th, to the Winter Olympics in China (Xi Jinping is said to have asked Vladimir Putin not to spoil his big event), which conclude ten days later. But one widely discussed constraint is weather. In January the Biden administration reportedly asked meteorologists to study weather conditions in the region. Does Mr Putin need to attack before Ukraine’s ground thaws in March or April, rendering it impassable to his tanks?
Weather, terrain and war in eastern Europe are so tightly interwoven that the concept has a dedicated Russian word. Rasputitsa, literally “time without roads”, refers to the heavy rain in autumn and the melting snow and ice in spring, both of which turn streets into muddy bogs. Such conditions famously hindered Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. They also played havoc with Nazi Germany’s offensive towards Moscow in 1941. “The roads rapidly became nothing more than canals of bottomless mud, along which our vehicles could only advance at a snail’s pace and with great wear to the engines,” lamented Heinz Guderian, a German general, that October. “The Ukrainian mud in spring has to be seen to be believed,” noted a British journalist during a Soviet offensive in 1944. “The whole country is swamped, and the roads are like rivers of mud, often two-feet deep.”
Weather still matters even to modern armed forces. Winter is hard on soldiers, but it can be good for tanks. “Armoured forces are capable all year round but they are best suited to hard, frozen ground,” says Phil Breedlove, a retired American general who was NATO’s top commander in 2013-16. “We’re entering into a period where the climate, though harsh on the soldiers, enables more rapid offensives and more options.” American officials have said Ukraine’s ground will reach “peak freeze” around February 15th (though it is frozen enough now).
Conversely, mud is a problem. An American M1 tank weighs 54 tonnes and exerts enormous pressure on the ground, notes John Kurak, a retired command sergeant-major who served for over 30 years in armoured units. When Mr Kurak took part in NATO’s huge annual “Reforger” exercises in Germany during the cold war, held from January to March, tanks would often get stuck, with their treads dislodged by mud building up in the sprockets.
As hundreds of tanks pass over the same ground, they churn it up further. One German Panzer division on the eastern front in 1941 covered 76km in 15 hours; the next group barely made it 10km, notes C.E. Wood in “Mud: A Military History”. Modern tanks, though more advanced in many ways, are not immune to that problem. The spring thaw is therefore likely to affect what Mr Kurak calls “manoeuvre avenues”, or the routes that Russian armoured units can take. But it will not necessarily stop them.
“Eastern Europe is a mound of silt and mud to get through,” says Jon Hawkes, a specialist on land warfare for Janes, a defence-intelligence firm. “It is horrible for heavy vehicles.” But that is precisely why Russian armour is designed to be lighter, faster and simpler than its Western equivalents, he says. A Russian T-90 tank, for instance, weighs 46 tonnes; compared with 62 tonnes for a German Leopard 2A6. Russian forces are also designed with an emphasis on amphibious and air-droppable capabilities. Russia’s naval infantry and airborne units are already gathering at the border with Ukraine, though such lighter forces lack the “punching power” of heavy armour, notes Mr Breedlove.
Infrastructure also eases the impact of rasputitsa. Paved roads, rare in the 1940s, provide better avenues of advance, but they are not a panacea. Heavy tank traffic could damage their surfaces, slowing down follow-on forces. Tank commanders also dislike having to stick to predictable routes, which can be more easily mined, ambushed or targeted by artillery and missile strikes. Yet Ukrainian forces would face much the same constraint—with the potential added problem of highways being clogged up with civilians fleeing west.
Overall, the impact of mud has probably been overstated. “I’ve twice commanded armoured and mechanised forces in Bosnia,” says Ben Barry, a former army officer now with the IISS think-tank, “and the thaw didn’t bring fighting to a halt…I don’t recall mud ever being a constraint.” Should Mr Putin order an offensive, “General Mud”, as European armies once dubbed their soft and sticky adversary, is unlikely to prove impassable.