Reading the New Russian War Strategy
The message I'm getting here is "Russia Sucks At War"
The circumstances, rather than the title, of this Axios article make this slightly lolworthy in a way that might not be readily apparent.
Let me provide a little context:
There is a roughly 25km exclusion zone around Kyiv. Until last week, it hadn't been substantially breached.
Two days ago, in a major counter-attack to the east of the city, Ukrainian forces pushed Russians back outside the exclusion zone, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Military analysts quoted in multiple outlets, including the ISW’s assessments and, yesterday, The New York Times, have assessed that encirclement of Kyiv is basically off the table.
Almost exactly two weeks ago, on March 16th, a theater in Mariupol that clearly said 'CHILDREN' on the outside was hit by - we know now - an aerial bombardment that killed roughly 300 people.
Two days later, seemingly in response, Ukrainian forces counter-attacked across the entire war in a series of devastating strikes calculated to inflict maximum damage rather than take back territory.
The message seems relatively clear to me: kill our children and we will fuck you up. Not "pushing back", not "taking back lost ground" - punishment, plain and simple.
Russia seems to have gotten that.
For the past six days, multiple unconfirmed reports, including from Ukraine's own ministries of defense and intelligence, have indicated that Russian forces are mass-abducting Ukrainian civilians, including - according to Ukraine itself - 2,389 children.
This reflects a relatively common-sensical tactic; as a colleague pointed out to me, human terrain is terrain too, and the abductions represent a method of seizing control of that terrain in a decisive and authoritative manner that also happens to reduce the risk of collateral damage.
And, I'd point out, this tactic also reduces a risk that Russians are all too familiar with now: the risk of theater-wide punishment from Ukrainians avenging their dead children.
The last major precision-guided munition (PGM) launch we've heard about is from the Navy, more than seven days ago, at targets in the south of Ukraine. It is a guess, but I'd say a pretty good guess, that this signals that they are completely out of PGMs. With the PGMs they do have, as American officials assessed five days ago, they’re experiencing a slightly astonishing 60% failure rate (why do you suck at this Russia).
That means that all that Russia has left is indiscriminate bombardment; short of evacuating people from where they're going to hit, they don't really have an effective way of preventing collateral damage.
Doing the evacuations, though, life is very simple for Russian commanders: advance rapidly past towns like Kherson in the south or Rubizhne in the east, send in Chechens, FSB Alpha Group, separatists, Night Wolves and presumably ROSGVARDIIA to "evacuate" (really, deport) people to Russia, clear them out, bomb their houses, then blame Azov.
We - and by we I mean anyone who can read the military writing on the wall in Ukraine - expected Russia to stand off at range from cities and indiscriminately bombard them into submission, given its lack of reliable artillery and armored mobility, as well as its history,
I don't think a lot of people have put together how the abductions are fitting into that strategy though - or, for that matter, how the changes to Belarus' immigration policy fit into that.
I don't think there's a lot of moving parts here as far as a theory. It's really simple if you flip the chessboard around and look at it from an adversary point of view.
In a Russian commander's shoes - disconnected from everyone else in the country, blind outside of their interior circle of trusted subordinates, under hellish pressure from their chain of command as well as their subordinates to produce results without killing more of their own soldiers...
With their infantry, and their TO&E and what it's got to look like right now after campaign attrition, mass evacuation as a method of pacification and territorial consolidation - aimed at an eventual face-saving negotiated settlement - would seem like a really, really attractive option right now. And that assessment is filtering back up to the political leadership as well; this is why, I think, Russia’s claiming it’s scaling back fighting near Kyiv and near Ukrainian cities in general.
Russia is “sour-grapes”-ing the entire Ukraine war and claiming now that their only goal was to ensure the independence of the LPR and DPR, two putative countries that have:
no UN membership or recognition from anyone besides Russia
no embassies in any countries other than Russia
no significant exports, other than militants, nor imports, other than Russian oligarch cash
no real existence, in fact, outside of a few Ukrainian separatist randos play-acting at being a nation-state on Instagram
Compare and contrast that with where they stood on Day 7, even Day 4 of the war. It looked like a maximalist approach to extinguishing the entire country was afoot.
Indeed, going by the “15-day plan” allegedly captured from a Russian commander in the early days of the war, as well as the Lukashenka map (thanks, Big Al!), it looks like Russia intended nothing less than a coup-de-main that would have crushed the entire country between Russia’s army and their Navy.
And now, on Day 35 of this insane war, they’re just going for two dinky little provinces they damn near already had to begin with.
I’ll say it perhaps more directly than people with higher stations than mine:
Russia sucks so bad at war that claiming they were only after a “conservative slice” off Ukraine is the only face-saving option that they have left. They are bad at this.
They have no grounds for negotiating sanctions or stopping the economic destruction of their country - if they were winning the war, maybe those would be concessions we could give. Given that they are losing the war and everyone can see it… we don’t have to give them anything.
Russia will take nothing, and it will have to smile about it.
More directly yet: Go home, Vlad. You’re drunk. And you suck at this.