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Monday, an explosion ripped up a section of road across the Kerch
Strait bridge, Putin’s pet project linking the Russian mainland with
illegally annexed Crimea. It was the second time the bridge was hit in
less than a year. The last time, in October, a truck bomb ruined part of
the rail lines. This time, the damage was the work of naval drones. Vladimir Putin
promised retribution and he quickly delivered: He pulled Russia out of
the expiring grain deal that allowed Ukrainian agricultural products to
leave the ports Russia has blockaded, and then attacked those
ports—Odesa and Mykolaiv—destroying a massive fuel depot. The attack,
his spokesman confirmed, was revenge. Though Ukraine hasn’t officially taken responsibility, the attack on the Kerch bridge is part of the deep war that the country has been waging on Russian supply lines. About a month ago, Ukraine punctured another Russian-controlled bridge, across the straits of Chonhar, this time with a British Storm Shadow missile. Unlike the Kerch bridge, which was designed to square a geographic circle—Crimea isn’t actually attached to Russia by land—the Chonhar bridge was the shortest possible route from Crimea to the fronts in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. It was also similar to Ukrainian missile strikes deep into Russian-occupied territory targeting major ammunition depots. A strike last week, on the occupied seaside town of Berdyansk, killed a Russian lieutenant general, the deputy commander of Russia’s southern military district. These attacks make for spectacular theater, and Ukraine, which has become incredibly good at social media, has turned them into viral, triumphalist content: videos of exploding bridge spans, of missing roads, of miles-long traffic jams of Russians trying to get across for their Crimean vacations. But even when the bridges are damaged, the authorities manage to patch them up and get some train and automobile traffic through. They build pontoon bridges. They rely on ferries. It’s slow, it’s clogged, but it’s still movement. Less than 24 hours after Monday’s attack, cars were already slowly moving across the Kerch bridge again. Meanwhile, Putin’s government, rather than telling Russians to pause their holidays in occupied territory, was advising them to simply drive around it—over the land bridge that Russia hacked through Ukrainian territory in the spring of 2022 and which remains close to the front, under Russian martial law. |
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the background of these missile exchanges is the long-awaited Ukrainian
“spring” offensive, is now in its fifth week. For months, all talk of
the war in Washington and Brussels was dependent on its outcome. So far,
it’s not looking very good. After all, while the West talked about the Ukrainian offensive, Russia prepared for it. They dug miles of trenches, prepared miles of minefields, peppered it all with bunkers, cement “dragon’s teeth,” and booby traps. The defenses are so formidable that they can be seen from space. When the Ukrainian army attacked in June, they began exactly where everyone thought they would, striking toward Melitopol and Berdyansk in the southeast, and toward the Azov Sea. Not coincidentally, this is where Russia’s main fortifications had already been set up. “There are miles and miles of minefields, of all kinds of nasty little traps,” said Dara Massicot, a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation. “The Russians have had nine months to prepare for this.” The preparations have proven extraordinarily effective. Equipment provided by the West—Abrams and Leopard tanks and mine-clearing vehicles—has been destroyed in shocking quantities. As the Ukrainians advanced through wide, open plains, they’ve been picked off by Russian artillery and drones, which have also resown the land with mines as soon as Ukrainians clear them. Unwilling to continue sacrificing the hardware it took so much political capital to obtain from the West, the Ukrainian military has now changed course, sending small groups of uncovered soldiers, who have had to inch forward, often on their stomachs, to defuse the mines by hand. Any wounded soldiers have to be rescued in the same way, out in the open, under the punishing eye of Russian drones and barrages of their artillery. Unsurprisingly, casualties have been extremely high. But the cost of precious Western hardware seems to be even higher. Dmitri Alperovitch, who runs the Silverado Policy Accelerator and just returned from the front, summed up Kyiv’s pivot to small infantry teams this way: “Your life matters less to us than an armored vehicle.” The Ukrainian military’s casualty count, it seems, is inversely proportional to its territorial gains. The army is fighting hedgerow to hedgerow, tree line to tree line, and, when measured against Western expectations, progress has been painfully slow. In five weeks, Ukraine’s military hasn’t advanced very far, capturing a handful of villages and still finding themselves miles from the main Russian lines. Ironically, this is all the work of Sergey Surovikin, Bashar al-Assad’s favorite general, who was briefly in charge of the Russian war effort last fall, when he began the project of what is now known as the Surovikin Line. He has not been seen or heard from since June 24, when he appeared in what looked like a hostage video, telling Yevgeny Prigozhin to stop his mutiny. |
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| Much
has been said of morale in this war: Ukraine’s is high, Russia’s is
low. For the armchair generals on social media, this will somehow prove
to be the deciding factor in this bloody slog, a military version of the
American conviction that good inevitably conquers evil. But the
assumptions about morale aren’t true across the board, analysts tell me.
For Russian reservists, thrown in as cannon fodder, it is obviously
very low. But for more professional units in the south, it is not. These
are the ones that Ukrainians are mostly fighting, and who are pretty
well-rested. Ukrainians, meanwhile, have uneven morale. After almost a year and a half of a brutal, horrific war—one in which most Ukrainians have lost at least one loved one—it is not so much high morale with which Ukrainians fight, but desperation. “The people who talk about morale differences, well, mines don’t have morale and mines don’t run,” Alperovitch told me on his return from Kyiv. The mood, he said, was incredibly dark. The train station was a sea of ambulances as far as the eye could see, all carrying wounded from the front. It was, he was told, a light day. He spoke to a young man who had returned from the fight on leave because he now had a newborn son. “I hope,” he told Alperovitch, “that this war isn’t still going when he grows up.” As for the low morale and grumbling on the Russian side—a high-ranking commander was just fired for telling Valery Gerasimov the truth about his mismanagement of the war—it hasn’t always proved determinative throughout Russian history. “We’re dealing with an army that has always had very low morale, so when we say their morale has fallen, what does that mean?” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist who covers the siloviki. “This background, it’s a constant. It’s there in every single Russian conflict. What would destroy any army in the world, doesn’t destroy the Russian army. There’s an acceptance of a high level of casualties. There’s the criticizing the generals’ incompetence, the feeling of being abandoned, etcetera, but that’s a constant. Very low moral, self-pity—that’s just how the Russian army fights, always. It doesn’t mean they’ll change anything. They’d rather just pity themselves some more, drink some more vodka, and then go fight, fulfilling their orders.” “It’s pressure,” Massicot said of Russian troop exhaustion and Ukrainian attacks on Russian infrastructure, “but when we look at what’s happening at the front line, we still see a lot of artillery coming at the Ukrainians who are trying to advance. Right now, they’re basically keeping the Ukrainians right where they want them: on the other side of the minefields, throwing artillery at them.” |
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| Everyone
I spoke to about the offensive was incredibly pessimistic. They made
sure to add the standard caveats: that it is still early and breaching
operations of this nature can take months to yield success; that not
even NATO countries or the U.S. would perform well in these conditions,
operating with limited vehicles or ammunition and no air cover. But some
pointed to other issues. “Ukraine’s military chose the most expected,
and most difficult, axis of attack,” one military analyst told me from
Kyiv. “The initial execution fell short of expectations for reasons that
had little to do with a lack of capabilities.” There were also hair-raising mistakes made early in the offensive, the analyst said. In one of the first fights, one Ukrainian unit mistakenly attacked another, misidentifying them as Russian. The fresh brigades trained in the West ahead of the offensive turned out to perform more poorly than those already seasoned by the war. And worse still, the fact that the Ukrainian army is now relying on these small, tactical pushes isn’t a surprise. The army seems less than capable of executing the kind of grand military strategy that Twitter warriors expect of them. “Ukraine has defaulted to a strategy of attrition in large part because of an inability to effectively employ combined arms maneuver, or scale offensive operations,” said the analyst. “It is true they have a deficit of capabilities from air defense to mine-clearing equipment, but this is only one part of the explanation for why the offensive has unfolded in this manner.” The Biden administration’s announcement that Washington would provide cluster munitions to Kyiv is welcome news, as artillery seems to be running low—again. And Kyiv is still holding many of its brigades in reserve. The plan for now, it seems, is to grind it out. “I don’t know what Plan B would be,” Alperovitch said. “There is no miracle solution here, you just have to get through the minefields.” |