Ukraine set to strike back. But what would success look like?

Mick Ryan Military leader and strategist May 2, 2023

Since last year, many have speculated about the next Ukrainian offensives. After the successful Kharkiv and Kherson operations, it was natural to look for the next potential Ukrainian campaign to recapture its territory from the invading Russians.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with NATO leadership in April.Credit: Getty Images

For some time, Ukrainian military planners have been preparing for these offensives. In a December interview with The Economist, Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, described how “we have made all the calculations – how many tanks, artillery we need and so on… May the soldiers in the trenches forgive me, it’s more important to focus on the accumulation of resources now for the heavier battles that may begin next year.”

It appears that time is close at hand. Over winter and into the new year, Ukrainian training institutions have been preparing soldiers and leaders. Combat units have been undertaking collective training. Huge quantities of new equipment have been accepted, absorbed into the Ukrainian military and issued to units. New brigades have been formed, and logistics stockpiling has been taking place.

Recent articles have discussed the political importance of the coming Ukrainian offensives. The focus has often been about the consequences of failure. A recent article in The New York Times argued, “Without a decisive victory, Western support for Ukraine could weaken, and Kyiv could come under increasing pressure to enter serious negotiations to end or freeze the conflict.” But what might such a decisive victory look like?

In all the speculation there has been no clear explanations of the measures of success and failure, or how it might be perceived in Ukraine, Russia or in the West. Therefore, setting measures of success for the coming offensives will be an important method by which Ukraine, and others, might assess the impact of the offensives. There are many outcomes by which we could measure success, but four stand out.

A Ukrainian soldier fires the howitzer at the Russian positions on the frontline near Kremenna, Luhansk region last month.Credit: AP

The first is that Ukraine takes back large amounts of its territory. By achieving battlefield successes, after fighting through Russian obstacles, recapturing large parts of its territory and liberating Ukrainian citizens will be a crucial measure of success for the counter-offensives. If large parts of Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are recaptured, this would be an excellent outcome. And it would be a foundation for future operations to recapture Crimea and Donetsk.

A second measure of success will be if Ukraine captures or destroys large parts of the Russian forces in Ukraine. The Russians have to be beaten, and they must be seen to be beaten. A successful Ukrainian offensive will reduce the quantity of Russian forces that the Ukrainians have to fight. Such a success will also ensure sufficient Russian combat power is destroyed to prevent them conducting any follow-on offensives for the remainder of 2023.

A third important measure of success will be that Ukraine preserves sufficient forces to continue defending some areas and conducting subsequent offensives in others. While the Ukrainians will invest a significant part of their air and land combat power in this offensive, they will want to do so in a way that they avoid massive casualties. The degree to which Ukraine can inflict disproportionate destruction on the Russian forces will be an important measure of success.

Finally, not only must Ukraine achieve considerable tactical and operational success in its operations, the Ukrainian people, foreign leaders and populations must believe they have succeeded. Ongoing strategic communication from the Ukrainian government will be a vital part of telling the story about the offensives. The perception of success is essential to Ukrainian morale, and an indispensable element of sustaining physical and moral support from the West. It will also assist Ukraine in rejecting hollow Chinese “peace” overtures that would see an immoral freezing of the conflict to Russia’s (and China’s) immense benefit.

Much has been sacrificed by the Ukrainians to arrive at this point of the war. Ukrainian civilians have endured endless missile and drone attacks, have seen their cities obliterated, and their fellow citizens tortured, raped and wantonly killed by the Russians.

US says 20,000 Russians killed in Ukraine war since December

The Ukrainian armed forces have fought on the land, in the air, at sea and in the information domain – and suffered tens of thousands of casualties. Through it all, they have not wavered, nor have they backed away from the agonising choices required to defend some areas, cede ground in others, while also building up their forces for this coming offensive.

The success of this Ukrainian campaign may not just determine the level of support from Western nations. Depending on the degree to which they achieve success, it may well provide a foundation for Ukrainian victory. A massive wave of steel and fire will shortly be unleashed on the Russians to give the Ukrainians the best chance of achieving this.

Putin Inherits Stalin’s Terror Apparatus

Foreign Affairs Defence & Security

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952 and was an only child. Leningrad is now known as St Petersburg, as it was in Tzarist times.

Putin is a Chekist, that is, a secret policeman. It is customary to describe his former employment as “intelligence officer”, but this is far too polite. The name Chekist derives from the name for the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka. Today it is known as the FSB, the Security Service of the Russian Federation. Throughout its various permutations, the Cheka has constituted a parallel government.

The founder of the Bolshevik secret police was “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky was a Polish aristocrat who was an early convert to Bolshevism. His giant statue stood in front of the Lubyanka, the infamous prison and execution ground in central Moscow from 1958 until 1991. The statue was toppled when the Soviet Union fell but calls to reinstate it persist. Indeed, Iron Felix’s images can still be seen here and there.

Power Politics

Up until his death in 1926, Dzerzhinsky was responsible for thousands of summary executions during the Russian Civil War and politically motivated purges. The purges of followers of Leon Trotsky and the Old Bolsheviks had a lasting effect on Russia. The Red Terror’s mass killings, directed by Iron Felix, were instrumental in consolidating the Bolsheviks’ grip on power. Iron Felix used terror as an instrument of social control.

Vladimir Putin, the consummate Chekist, has used the FSB as an instrument of social and political policy since becoming President of Russia in 2000. Believing otherwise would be foolish. The security agency may not be as menacing as it was during Stalin’s purges, but it is still threatening.

Moreover, penal colonies persist. They are the descendants of the notorious Gulags. The prison camps are mainly in remote areas, where there are industries such as mining, construction and forestry. Manufacturing, in sweatshop conditions, is also common. Inmates of the camps are mainly petty criminals, often with convictions for fraud and corruption.

It is not uncommon for persons charged with political offences to be interned in today’s Russia. Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, is interned in a labour camp. This is the fate of those who displease the regime, even for apparently trivial offences.

Things have become worse since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Dissent, even when it is trivial and has largely non-political implications, is dealt with harshly.

Heir of Stalin?

To give an account of the joy Putin’s accession to power engendered among FSB operatives, Mara Moustafine in Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files (Vintage, 2002), quotes her contact, Sasha. He is optimistic following the recent election, when Putin came to power. He is optimistic about the country’s future now that Putin has become president. This outcome undoubtedly pleased many FSB operatives.

“Things will get better. You will see. After all, he is one of us – a Chekist,” Sasha laughs. He proudly allows himself to use the term “Chekist”, for the original secret policemen, even though he must be aware of the terrible toll that the Cheka, in every one of its manifestations, has taken on the Russian people.

The Russian capacity to endure terrible suffering is a common theme in histories about Russia. Catherine Merridale, in Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939-1945 (Faber and Faber, 2005), describes how the ordinary Russian soldier, known universally as “Ivan”, survived the German onslaught and then conquered the seemingly impregnable Third Reich.

Initially, the Red Army had to recover from Stalin’s maniacal purges, which had destroyed the Red Army’s officer corps, including the High Command. As Merridale recounts, in the first two years of the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call it, the Red Army suffered catastrophic casualties – in the millions. Millions of Russian prisoners of war died of exposure and starvation.

But from this chaos and tragedy, the Red Army emerged to defeat the German war machine (Wehrmacht). Without the Red Army’s determination to take shocking losses, Europe would be a very different place today.

Russia does not change much. The “punishment battalions” sent to fight in Ukraine today are mainly composed of petty thieves and fraudsters. They are cannon fodder. They have been given a choice of advancing against the Ukrainians or being shot on the spot. It is not uncommon for eight out of ten men in “punishment battalions” to die, uselessly.

Vladimir Putin is not Joseph Stalin, but he is a worthy heir.

Jeffry Babb studied Russian history and politics at the University of Western Australia.

This Sums it all up

VETTERANWEB NETWORK

April 7, 2022 by Ray Payne

I DIDN’T KNOW THIS

I didn’t know his background, if you didn’t know either, you might be interested. In June of 1941, Hitler’s Army began a rampage through Ukraine, razing towns, unleashing death squads, and massacring Jews by the hundreds of thousands. In one village in the Pale of Settlement, virtually the only region of the Soviet Empire in which Jews were permitted to reside, four Jewish brothers enlisted in the military, said goodbye to their parents and walked off to fight the Nazis. By the war’s end in 1945, only one of the brothers, named Semyon, was still alive. He returned to find that the Nazis had torched his entire village, burning his parents to death. Semyon’s family was dead, and his beloved Ukraine was in ruins. The Nazis had murdered between 1.2 and 1.6 million Ukrainian Jews. Semyon married a fellow Ukrainian Jew who had survived the war by fleeing her city, in which the Nazis had killed 5,000 Jews. Two years later, in that same city, they had a son, Oleksandr, keeping alive the family line that the Nazis had brought a razor’s width from extinction. Thirty-one years after that, Oleksandr had his own little boy. That boy was Volodymyr Zelensky, who grew up to become the President of independent, democratic Ukraine. Today, he leads his outmanned, outgunned, ferociously defiant nation against the onslaught of Russia. As Russia dashes itself against the will of his people, Zelensky, the survivor of survivors, summons the resilience of his ancestors. He does not bend.