Ukraine SitRep: High Losses, Mobilization Problems, Too Few Air Defenses
January 10, 2024
The Wall Street Journal provides another dark frontline story (archived) from Ukraine. It describes the attempts by a airborne company to take Russian positions near Verbove, a town next to the famous 'Bradley square' where the Ukrainian counteroffensive had failed:
Just after dawn on Aug. 12, drones swept overhead as they approached the target along a line of trees between farm fields. Kharchenko’s men had been told Russian drones would be downed by Ukrainian jamming equipment and assumed they were their own. Then the drones began dropping explosives. The trees exploded with machine-gun fire. Grenades lobbed from automatic launchers burst around them.The platoon was incapacitated. More than half of its 20 or so men were dead or wounded within minutes, including the medic.
“What shall we do with the injured? F—!” Senior Sgt. Maksym Serheyev, commander of the first platoon, yelled over the radio to his commander. “There are more of them than us.”
The company commander requested smoke grenades to be fired before a rescue mission was sent to recover the wounded without being seen by Russian drones or soldiers.
Why no smoke was used during the first attempt to attack is not explained. Smoke would also have helped during the first phase of the counter attack when dozens of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks ran into minefields and were then destroyed by Russian anti-tank missiles.
When I learned to become a tank platoon leader we regularly requested smoke screens from the artillery or used the smoke grenades mounted on our tanks to hide our movement. The Ukrainian soldiers have done so only rarely:
“This isn’t World War II and Guderian,” said a senior Ukrainian security official, referring to German Gen. Heinz Guderian, a pioneer of Blitzkrieg. “This is World War I and trenches.”
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By the end of the day, only three of 22 men in the first platoon remained fully fit.
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Verbove remains in Russian hands. Further infantry assaults by Khorol’s men led to further small gains, but more losses and no significant breakthrough.
The WSJ report includes a picture of an old Ural sidecar motorcycle describe as the only means to evacuate the wounded:
Such sidecars were widely used during World War II.
The Ukrainian army is said to lose about 30,000 men per month:
The Ukrainian government has not released official figures for the total number of soldiers who have been killed or wounded since Russia launched its full-scale invasion nearly two years ago.However, anecdotal evidence of mounting Ukrainian casualties in the war was reinforced by claims made on Ukrainian television this weekend by the country's former prosecutor general.
Yuriy Lutsenko claimed that around 30,000 Ukrainian troops are now being killed or badly wounded per month and that the total casualty toll for wounded and killed in the war is around 500,000.
Those are 1,000 per day. That is more than the Russian Ministry of Defense claims in its daily reports. The average therein is about 600 to 700 per day listed as Ukrainian dead or heavily wounded. Left out of the reports are those killed or wounded unobserved due to far range missile strikes.
The high losses are the reason why the Ukrainian government wants to, over the next year, mobilizes another 500,000 men and women. That are about 41,000 per months. But the new mobilization law the government presented to the parliament was full of unconstitutional clauses (in Russian) and will have to be heavily modified. The mobilization efforts are unlikely to be successful.
December and January have seen three large scale Russian missile attacks aimed at Ukrainian weapon production sides. The attacks have exhausted the Ukrainian air defenses (machine translation):
The Ukrainian Air Force confirmed that the Ukrainian Armed Forces do have a shortage of anti-aircraft guided missiles.This was stated by Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat, commenting on The New York Times article that the United States will soon not be able to supply Ukraine with Patriot missiles.
"It is clear that there is a shortage of anti-aircraft guided missiles, and no one is hiding it. That is why there are such concerns in the Western press. I think that our Western partners are well informed about the state of affairs with our air defense systems," Yuri Ignat said on the telethon.
He said that the Ukrainian Armed Forces spent a lot of missiles to repel the last three massive Russian attacks on December 29, January 2 and January 8.
There will be more large scale missile attacks and there will only be few new anti-air missiles to replace the fired ones.
On the front line the Russian practice what they deem an 'active defense'. Local attacks, while small, are used to take up better positions.
The toll on the Ukrainians is high:
“Morale is all right,” said the deputy battalion commander, who uses the call sign Shira, standing nearby to see the men off. “But physically we are exhausted.”
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The men of the 117th Brigade, who were deploying to the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region on a recent night, faced a four-mile hike through rain and mud, the intelligence commander said. If they were wounded and captured, Russian troops would execute them, he warned them.The long, arduous slog to carry in ammunition and food to supply troops and to carry out the wounded was one reason Ukraine could not sustain its counteroffensive, a company commander, Adolf, 23, said.
Ambulances and supply vehicles came under fire from kamikaze drones so often that his unit stopped using them, resorting instead to a four-wheeled buggy that volunteer engineers rigged up to carry a stretcher.
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The toll is heavy for all units along the front. Almost everyone has been wounded or survived a narrow escape in recent months, soldiers said.“We are short of people,” said an intelligence commander of the 117th Brigade who uses the call sign Banderas, after the actor. “We have weapons but not enough men.”
A some point such units will break down, likely at the end of the currently harsh winter.
That might become the moment the Russians will change from active defenses to bigger attacks. But big red arrow movements are difficult to prepare for as NATO surveillance via spy planes and satellites is able to detect any concentration of forces.
Expanding multiple local attacks to find a weak position to then lead up rear forces where a breakthrough seems likely is probably the better strategy.
Posted by b on January 10, 2024 at 15:02 UTC | Permalink