Ukrainian general: the Russians are advancing along the entire line of confrontation
Yesterday’s news ticker on the Russian website dzen.ru briefly carried the headline cited above. Like so many news ticker items, that teaser announcement disappeared soon afterwards and cannot be retrieved. * But it was very important, because it confirms what the Russians were saying sotto voce on their daily news programs all day yesterday via reports from war correspondents located in various hot spots of the Donbas.
A guest panelist on the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov show last night reminded us that, unlike the Ukrainians and their American controllers, the Russians do not publicize the offensive, first called ‘active defense’ by Vladimir Putin, that they recently launched after the Ukrainian ‘counter-offensive’ wound down for lack of human and materiel resources. They do not want to arouse a backlash in Western media and thereby pressure Biden to do something stupid.
And so the Russians are not saying publicly where they intend to concentrate their efforts or what their immediate objectives are. They just hit hard and harder each day along nearly 1200 kilometers of the front, taking opportunistic gains everywhere possible. They are using multiple rocket launchers reaching 30 or more km back from the front, artillery and tank cannon reaching 15 km from the line of confrontation and storm trooper units to overrun Ukrainian defensive positions three or four kilometers away that have been pounded 24/24 by artillery being guided by reconnaissance drones.
Of course, there are some hints on what comes next. We were told last night that Ukrainians troops are stealing anything and everything they can from the Kherson oblast under their control on the right bank of the Dniepr and taking the loot back into western Ukraine. This is an indication that the Ukrainians expect the territory to be retaken by the Russians in the near future. We may expect Kharkov oblast to follow suit. These are the two regions which the Russians lost in September 2022 when they were overextended and undermanned.
As I have said repeatedly, the Russians were never very good at Public Relations, and now finally this is serving their military and political objectives well. Their actions are speaking louder than their words for those who are paying attention. The idea that this war has reached an impasse is utter nonsense that only those living in the bubbles of Washington, D.C. or the European Institutions quarter of Brussels believe and that our journalists are paid to disseminate.
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The Russians are feeling good about themselves and have to make a conscious effort not to be cocky. Solovyov opened his show with a video from his latest trip to the battlefront where he inspected a trophy Bradley troop carrier that was largely intact and had just been heroically towed from the battlefield by Russian soldiers who were then rewarded with cash awards for their efforts. The soldiers remarked that the U.S. built Bradley is poorly suited to its present use in Ukraine. It might be fine perhaps for the desert, where it saw action in Iraq, but it does not allow for the clearances of a crew wearing bulky winter dress. They have little room inside and they have difficulty getting in and out of the hatches. Moreover, the hatches are hydraulically operated, meaning that if you strike the electronics the crew is trapped in what quickly becomes an incinerator. The updates to modernize the Bradley, the active defense elements that were installed after the initial production runs, were deemed to be unimpressive and inadequate to the challenges of today’s kamikaze drones.
These critical remarks on what the United States and its NATO allies have considered to be technological wonder weapons have to be put in the context of what the Russians themselves are now deploying on the battlefield. The Russian soldiers appear to be delighted with the hardware they are receiving from their military industrial complex, both state factories and entrepreneurial firms such as the producers of the now celebrated tank-killing Lancets. Most important, the Russian factories are in daily contact with the soldiers in the field to discuss what improvements should be made and are sending new upgrades straight to the field where their own repair and reconditioning teams make the changeovers under field conditions. In particular, they are making constant changes to improve the secure field communications.
Solovyov’s videos presented the newest shoulder held anti-drone weapons which fire small guided missiles. These launchers look like shortened bazookas and do the job of air defense against both surveillance and kamikaze drones at what must be minimal cost. The celebrated “Alligator’ attack helicopters are also now being equipped with cameras and sensors that monitor all incoming projectiles in 360 degree radius and automatically destroy them before impact. The defense factories have brought in engineering students to their factory design and production teams where they are effectively making daily innovations while continuing their studies.
This is a Russia that contradicts everything I learned when I visited Soviet ministries, factories and institutes in the 1970s and 1980s. The firewalls between design teams and production centers were then hermetic. Clearly not any more.
By the way, Russia is also doing well in civil aviation. Its latest wide body and medium range jets had incorporated initially many imported components, but now nearly every bit of these latest generation civil aircraft is home produced. Video images were aired yesterday of the latest jet engines for wide body aircraft and newly fabricated wings from composite materials. As a panelist commented, there are fewer countries in the world capable of manufacturing these engines than there are nuclear armed states.
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The Solovyov talk show has a mostly fixed set of topics for discussion and very often the same panelists are repeating themselves on installments aired week after week. But occasionally some new and interesting information is presented by the regulars.
In the past I have mentioned the very colorful panelist Lt. General (in the reserves), State Duma member from United Russia Andrei Gurulyov. His gravelly voice projects gravitas. His paunch and large frame give him a strong physical presence, as one would expect from a Siberian. Last night Gurulyov brought his customary ‘law and order,’ ‘string ‘em up’ rhetoric to bear on the issue of sabotage by agents in the pay of Ukrainian intelligence. Now that there was a recent explosion carried out by saboteurs in a tunnel of the Baikal-Amur Railway, his call for blood had a clearly defined target. Moreover, he reported that railway switching gear has been systematically destroyed in the Eastern Siberian region where he is from. This may sound far removed from the war in Ukraine, but Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East are home to many of the country’s most important defense factories.
Gurulyov called for the reintroduction of capital punishment for cases of sabotage and terrorism, such as the assassination by bombings of various highly visible Russian journalists and public figures this past year. His call was taken up by fellow Duma member from the Communist party, Leonid Kalashnikov. What Russia should do, he urged, is follow what Alexander Lukashenko did to solve this kind of problem. Reportedly Belarus also had a spate of attacks on its railways. Then the forces of order caught several saboteurs in the act. Two were summarily killed on the spot and one was taken and later executed. The news was not posted in media but spread by word of mouth and the attacks on infrastructure stopped at once. As Gurulyov remarked with sly sarcasm, Russia should take ‘best practices’ from abroad.
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Occasionally I get a request from readers to provide a reference substantiating what I write here. With rare exceptions that is difficult if not impossible to do since most of what I base myself on is coming from live Russian state television. Some programs, like the Solovyov show or the big Vesti news wrap-ups on the weekend, are posted on the internet a day later and can be consulted there. But much of what I report on is not recorded and does not come around a second time.
You will note that my sources are primarily television, not print media and there is a good reason for this. Russian newspapers, even the semi-official Rossiyskaya Gazeta, provide very little coverage of the war and other major issues. Television airs vastly more information.
In the distant past, the opposite was true. For several years I was in nearly daily email contact with Professor Stephen Cohen, and I know that he relied almost entirely on Izvestiya or on the liberal newspaper that was popular with the Russian intelligentsia, the basically anti-government or, to the thinking of some, anti-Russian opposition periodical Novaya Gazeta. That paper shut down in Russia after the start of the Special Military Operation. So the game is now entirely in the electronic media, which I find to be rich pickings. But you have to be able to catch the news on the fly, and, for better or worse, there are not too many Russia specialists who invested the time in that skill.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
*Just posted on Meduza: https://meduza.io/en/news/2023/12/11/ukrainian-commander-says-russian-army-attempting-to-advance-along-entire-front
The officer is Oleksandr Syrskyi.