Ukraine war diary

The war to last as long as Putin does?

Chris Johns

I write a (short) daily post for Powerscourt, a Strategic Communications company, based in London and Dublin. The idea is to summarise the news flow around the war in Ukraine - not so much the news that makes the front pages but more the stuff that we find interesting/relevant. News that may have not attracted the attention it deserves. Anyone interested in receiving the short email on a daily basis is welcome to contact Powerscourt here: insights@powerscourt-group.com.

Monday July 31st

Ukraine remains heavily reliant on a network of satellites for its battlefield communications. Starlink is the name of that network and it is controlled by Elon Musk. The 4,500 sofa-sized satellites (the number grows every week) operate in low earth orbit at an altitude of roughly 300 miles. The New York Times reports that Ukrainian officials have complained to the Pentagon about previous decisions by Musk about his satellites. Battlefield plans have had to be altered. Musk has hinted that he has a deal with the Chinese (possibly linked to the importance of China for Tesla) about the use (or, more likely, non-use) of Starlink over China. The satellites enable internet usage away from state control and eavesdroppers.

Taiwan is reluctant to use Starlink because of Musk’s mainland connections. The EU wants to spend billions on its own version Starlink, partly because of concerns about Musk. 

Starlink also assists Ukrainian ground controllers direct drones to their targets. This weekend’s attacks on Moscow illustrate how drone technology has progressed leaps and bounds over the course of the war. Military bloggers are today circulating pictures of a new Ukrainian kamikaze drone with a claimed range of 500km. One blogger has just announced a successful crowdfunded $10,000 purchase of a drone at the request of one Ukrainian battlefield unit. Pictures are circulating of Russian workers fencing off the Kerch bridge with anti naval drone barriers. 

If drones are the new face of war, old tech is still important. The BBC today reports, very unusually, from the front line near Bakhmut, where a journalist travels with a ‘ghost’ unit of snipers. The marksmen claim multiple hundreds of kills. Ukraine rarely allows reporters to get anywhere near the front line in order to maintain a security blackout - which has largely been very successful. 

Tuesday August 1st

Neighbouring countries of Belarus are growing increasingly nervous about the activities of Wagner  mercenaries. Following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny, at least two Wagner bases have been built in Belarus. The President of Lithuania yesterday added to voices expressing alarm about what might happen next. Few serious observers think that Wagner has the capacity to mount a serious incursion into Poland, Latvia or Lithuania but there is always the possibility of mischief - or provocation as President Gitanas Nauseda tweeted, adding that Lithuania is stepping up intelligence based monitoring activities. Wagner may have stationed fighters in Belarus but there are few signs, as yet, of the heavy armour necessary for a serious border incursion. 

Saudi Arabia is to host talks in Jeddah next weekend in an apparent attempt to garner support from the global south for a Ukrainian peace plan. It’s a curious initiative as the plan has been around for some time, has attracted zero Russian support and has not interested the dozens of countries that resolutely refuse to take sides in the war. Nearly 30 countries have nevertheless been invited to participate in the talks, including the UK and the US. Russia is a notable absentee, even though it is closely allied with Saudi Arabia, with both countries keen to get oil prices a lot higher. Saudi is thought to be trying to enhance its image as a global intermediary, if not peacemaker. It has managed to broker prisoner swaps between Russia and Ukraine earlier this year.

Despite further attacks on Ukraine’s wheat storage and export facilities, prices have fallen back to where they were just before the collapse of the Black Sea grain deal. There are unconfirmed stories about grain ships successfully running the Russian blockade of the Black Sea shipping lanes. Whether or not these stories are true, number harvests elsewhere in the world have, for now, calmed commodity market nerves. 

Wednesday August 2nd

Two popular narratives about the Russian army stand in apparent contradiction to each other. First, there is the idea that Putin is emulating Stalin and ordering soldiers to stand and fight, rather than retreat. Stalin’s ‘order 227’ decreed that any soldiers displaying ‘cowardice’ would be liquidated on the spot. Estimates vary but it is reckoned that as many as 150,000 red army soldiers were shot by their comrades during World War Two.There is no doubt that Russia has suffered horrendous casualty rates in Ukraine. There are plenty of stories about Chechen forces performing the same grisly role as did Stalin’s ‘barrier troops’. 

The problem is that all this runs up against another narrative: Russia is running out of troops. The Economist is carrying a story today to this effect and this morning’s briefing from the UK’s Ministry of Defence also suggests that Putin doesn’t have enough soldiers. 

Internal dissent amongst the officer class has focused on the lack of troop rotation: frontline forces are exhausted and need rest. Such is the length of the line they are defending, there aren’t enough men for normal - militarily healthy - rest and recuperation. The MoD notes that the Kremlin is trying to form a new self-contained Combined Arms army and simply lacks the necessary reserves to do so.

Of course, there are plenty of Russian citizens who could, potentially, be persuaded to sign up.  Or just conscripted. Putin did force an extra 300,000 into the army last year. Many of those are dead or injured, the rest exhausted. More troops are clearly needed, further conscription may yet be required. Putin’s nervousness about a popular backlash against full mobilisation is the only thing preventing it. 

Russia’s army doesn’t have the manpower to make further, sustainable gains of Ukrainian territory. Recruitment - and other - tactics seem to designed to ensure that Putin can hold the current front line. The Economist quotes Kremlin insiders who think that war and Putin will last as long as each other. 

Thursday August 3rd

Russia’s determination to destroy Ukraine’s grain export facilities has mostly focused on Odesa. But there have also been drone and missile attacks on smaller grain storage areas located near the Danube. Overnight, the port city of Izmail has been attacked with Iranian ‘suicide’ drones. Izmail is less than a kilometre from Romania, a member of NATO. Ukraine is reported to be loading grain onto Romanian ships which then are able to evade Russia’s blockade of the usual Black Sea routes. Putin has promised ‘free’ grain to African countries who have suffered from the loss of destroyed wheat. Turkey’s President is trying to persuade Putin to restore the Black Sea deal.

The Washington Post is carrying a major story that argues Western hesitation over arms supplies to Ukraine gave Russia the time it needed to build the hundreds of kilometres of defences that are now preventing Kyiv from making serious advances. The first anniversary of Zelensky’s request for  battle tanks is approaching. As with so many similar requests, it took more than six months for anyone to offer a positive response. 

The Post carries multiple satellite images that show the ‘Surovikin line’ of Russian defences - how they didn’t exist a year ago and what they look like now. Such are those defences, Ukrainian forces have had to abandon the sophisticated combined arms tactics they learned during their brief exposure to NATO methods. Much simpler strategies, dating back to the Soviet era, are now in use - essentially amounting to small squads of soldiers on foot. 

Artillery, drones, mines and booby trapped dead bodies await those foot soldiers. Heavy armour is deployed only sparingly following large losses during the early days of the counteroffensive. It really does seem that those Russian claims were at least partially true. Rapid growth of weeds and other wild plants are also an impediment - for both sides - when crossing fields that were once arable farmland. 

Friday August 4th

Ukrainian medics operating just behind the front line say the number of casualties coming their way has fallen since army commanders altered their counteroffensive tactics. In the early part of June, both men and Western heavy armour suffered high casualty rates until it was realised that Russian defences were much deeper than previously realised and that Kremlin forces, for all sorts of reasons, did not fall back at the first sight of a Leopard 2 tank or Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. 

One of the main problems has been minefields. Russia has laid mines in a way not seen before: often five per square metre, sometimes in layers. Once Ukrainian sappers start to clear a narrow path through a minefield, Russia targets them with artillery fire and drones. If the mines are nonetheless cleared, unmanned mine-laying drones simply reseed the field. 

Sappers have become key to the incremental gains - often measured in metres - still being made by Ukraine. In a Sky News report, one sapper spoke of losing one comrade every day, often to mines. As well as laying tens of thousands of mines, Russia booby traps the bodies of its soldiers with PMs, Soviet-era anti-personnel mines. The advancing sappers have learned to deploy a ‘kitten’, a folding steel hook with retractable claws that spring out to dislodge PMs and other devices. One soldier named Volodymyr said “…the Russians mine everything. Open doors, boxes and crates, even toys. Even their own dead.”

The Kremlin says it has thwarted yet another attack on a Black Sea naval base, this time at Novorossïysk. The claims of no damage to any Russian ships stand in contrast to clips on social media of an unmanned sea-drone attacking a Ropucha class landing ship, a Soviet-era vessel built in Poland’s Gdansk shipyards. There are plenty of images circulating this morning of a badly listing Ropucha.