On grabbing the belt in Severodonetsk
There is one hell of a story on the ground in Severodonetsk, I suspect.
What I think we’re seeing here is that Russian tactical reliance on indiscriminate bombardment has made it possible for Ukrainians fight back by getting very, very close - inside artillery range, so close that Russians can’t bombard them without endangering their own troops.
It seems safe to speculate that Russian weapons, at this point, are provably not very precise, and the average circular probability error of Russian artillery is probably quite large. That still means, in real terms where commanders cut safety margins, the distance that Ukrainians have to close in order to be indistinguishable from Russians, from the indirect fire viewpoint, is probably on the order of hundreds of meters; less, even.
There are earlier parallels in the era of total war, as well as in pre-modern warfare, but in the "modern" counter-insurgency/asymmetric-conflict age, the NVA under Vo Nguyen Giap, during the Vietnam War, should probably be credited as the first tacticians to really embrace the tactic. They realized that if you got inside artillery range, close enough that indirect fire assets couldn't operate safely without bombarding their own troops, you could effectively equalize the advantage in artillery and indirect fire generally.
It is an approach superficially somewhat akin to the "human wave" attacks of the Korean War, but more focused on removing an offsetting strategic advantage in an asymmetric fight. In this case, as against Americans, the offsetting strategic advantage being removed is indirect fire superiority, air strikes and artillery, essentially.
Once you don't have to worry about air strikes and artillery, it turns into a small-unit tactics ground fight, writ large, all up and down the line; and sixty years ago, Vietnamese units with superior knowledge of the terrain, generally more reliable AK-47s, as against still-new M-16s (see, for instance, O’Connell ‘20 for a recent view onto this comparison) and a higher level of motivation than their French, then American adversaries were very, very effective at this.
The NVA called it "grabbing by the belt". You need to sneak up, or, if you’re unlucky, advance under enemy artillery taking shelling all the way, then get close enough to the enemy to shoot them with small arms fire.
Both Afghan and Iraqi insurgents have tried this a few times during the past twenty years; the rise of very high precision munitions has rendered this much less effective as a practice, I think. Thus, within the past twenty years, there are an increasing number of records of American units who have ended battles by calling for fire "inside the wire" - a nearly suicidal practice before the advent of bombs that could be dropped within meters of a position.
Only American, Israeli, and maybe Chinese systems for investigating people, finding targets, fixing locations, imaging targets, assigning strike assets, coding strike parameters and delivering payloads - "targeteering" - are good enough to do this; China maybe only on a good day. American targeteering is a quantum leap beyond anyone else in the world, to the point that we aren't even putting explosives in some of our bombs anymore (like the R9X "Ninja Bomb") because they're so precise.
The people involved absolutely hate it when civilians say things like this, but there's a somewhat ghastly expression for what they do: "warheads on foreheads". We do that literally, not figuratively. It is a somewhat surreal and horrible thing to take national pride in (“we’re #1 at bombing things!”) but that's America for you; and it's also what we are teaching Ukrainians to do. That's where America is.
Russia isn't anywhere close. Their precision strike capability is somewhat contemptible, actually, in my estimation; their entire broken-ass war machine is like that. Corruption, sanctions on high tech, and brain drain have deprived Russia of the ability to even build high-precision munitions. This is one of the many, many reasons why the U.S. has a sanctions regime like that, focused on tech goods; as of early May, Russia is reportedly at the point of using appliance parts in military hardware (per sources cited by Jeanne Whalen in the Washington Post on May 11, 2022).
So "grabbing by the belt" has got to be fairly effective against Russia, as short of precision-guided munitions as they are.
It is, however, a terrifying way to fight. Try to put yourself in Ukrainian shoes for a moment: if a bunch of Russian teenagers hopped up on pilfered booze and nationalism are shooting at me with guns, my first instinct and a lot of people's first instinct is not to move towards them, it's running away.
Artillery barrages are sometimes rolled "outwards", in anticipation of this, so as to catch people fleeing, because artillerists know the fear that their weapons cause. Thus, John Keegan's 'The Face of Battle' records record civilians and soldiers alike who have died scratching at the walls of bunkers, or who fled out into bombardments and died, because the sound of gradually approaching explosions drove them mad with fear.
This is just the kind of routine horror that is embedded into war. That’s what you have to constantly put up with, this kind of constant, background risk of randomly ending up being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so it goes, as Vonnegut would say.
The remarkable thing about Severodonetsk appears to be that Ukrainians are moving towards that. They aren't standing off at 30km and bombarding Russians with the M777s we gave them; instead, it looks like they're advancing right into vicious house-to-house street fights. These kinds of advances, as well as controlled retreats into encirclement and annihilation traps, as Chinese rebels under Mao did, require highly disciplined, motivated armies (this is why folk Chinese military wisdom advises not to pursue an enemy retreating in good order).
A lot of courage is required for this kind of tactic to succeed. You need to ask for a lot from people.
But it appears to be working for Ukraine.