Ukraine War: With Surprise Cross-Border Attack, Russia Ruthlessly Exposes Ukraine’s Weaknesses

CNN
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For Ukraine, May turns out to be the cruelest month.

The town of Vovchansk, in the northern Kharkiv region, liberated from Russian occupation more than 18 months ago, woke up to intense shelling and aerial bombardment on Friday. Russia has found another way to stretch Ukraine’s already thin blue line.

President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials said Russian efforts to advance toward the city had been thwarted, but the Russians have since tried to cut road connections to Vovchansk.

The Russians launched battalion-strength attacks along a 60-kilometer stretch of the border on Friday, claiming to occupy several villages in the so-called “gray zone” along the border, after having focused much of their offensive capabilities this year on a grinding campaign. advance in Donetsk, in the east, which has seen gradual but significant progress.

On Saturday, it appeared the Russians still held a handful of Ukrainian border villages, while intense aerial bombardment continued in the Vovchansk region.

The cross–The border attack is another example of what is going wrong for Ukrainians this year. Their forces are small, with much less artillery than those of the Russians, largely insufficient air defenses and above all a lack of soldiers. Their situation was made worse by dry weather, which made it easier for Russian mechanized units to move.

Ukraine’s deputy head of defense intelligence, Major General Vadym Skibitsky, told the Economist last week: “Our problem is very simple: we have no weapons. They always knew that April and May would be a difficult time for us.

Ukrainian intelligence estimates that despite immense losses since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia now has more than half a million troops in Ukraine or on its borders. This also “generates a division of reserves” in central Russia, according to Skibitsky.

The assault on the northern border follows the creation of a new Russian military group called Sever (North). George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War in Washington told CNN that Sever was a “group of operational significance.”

“Russia has sought to generate between 60,000 and 100,000 troops for its group to attack Kharkiv and we estimate that figure is closer to 50,000,” Barros says, but “it still has a lot of combat power.” .

It was from this new force that armored infantry units attempted to cross the border. The available evidence suggests that they were expected and suffered significant losses. But if more elite units joined them (reports indicate that elements from other divisions might do so), Russia’s ambitions could grow.

As a Ukrainian special forces unit told CNN this weekend: “This is just the beginning, the Russians have a beachhead for further offensives. »

A former Ukrainian officer who writes about the conflict on the Frontelligence blog says that “lack of manpower forces Ukraine to avoid continually deploying large units along the border, with artillery fully stocked and ready to fire.” be used immediately.

He expects the situation to evolve, “with Russian forces deploying more units to penetrate new border areas or to build on their initial successes.”

Several analysts expect the Russians to extend their border attacks westward to the Sumy region, which has been the scene of several months of raids by Russian special forces.

The Sever group could not attack and occupy a city the size of Kharkiv, but that is probably not its goal. Barros says it is more about forcing Ukrainian forces to pivot from Donetsk to the Kharkiv region. The Russians seek to “reduce Ukrainian forces along the 600-mile front line and create opportunities, particularly in Donetsk Oblast, which is Russia’s main operational objective for 2024,” says Barros.

The latest cross-border attacks could also distract Ukrainian units from defending Kupiansk, also in the Kharkiv region, where the Russian assault has stalled for months, as well as create a buffer zone inside Ukraine on which the Kremlin says it wants to reduce attacks. Russian cities like Belgorod.

What is happening in Kharkiv is not isolated. The Ukrainian military this week acknowledged an increase in combat engagements (more than 150 on Thursday alone), adding to a marked increase between March and April.

Indeed, the Russians have the manpower to expand Ukraine’s defenses across multiple attack points hundreds of kilometers apart, forcing kyiv to guess where and when an offensive planned for early summer will be focused.

The accelerated pace of attacks is exacerbating Ukraine’s two critical vulnerabilities: insufficient troops and sparse air defenses. Russia is exploiting both elements in a hurry, eager to establish the facts on the ground before a new wave of Western aid can help. This is at least a few weeks away in significant quantities.

“Manpower remains a major challenge, and Ukraine is working to restore its existing degraded brigades as well as a dozen new maneuver brigades,” Barros said.

Only last month was a law passed to expand the mobilization, almost two years after Russia mobilized some 300,000 additional troops. The process bogged down in Ukraine’s parliament for months, and President Zelensky was wary of both the cost and political fallout of broader mobilization. Numerical inferiority has sharply worsened on the front lines, providing Russian commanders with an increasing number of opportunities to look for weaknesses.

Western analysts estimate that at Chasiv Yar, Donetsk, for example, the Ukrainians could be outnumbered 10 to 1, suffering from a chronic shell imbalance and a complete lack of air cover. A Ukrainian military blogger estimated this week that elements of 15 Russian motorized rifle brigades (each numbering up to 1,000 men) were operating in the direction of Chasiv Yar alone.

The loss of heights around Chasiv Yar and an important belt of industrial cities: Slaviansk, Kramatorsk and Kostyantinyvka becomes much more vulnerable.

Skibitsky told The Economist that losing Chasiv Yar was a real possibility – “not today or tomorrow, of course, but it all depends on our reserves and supplies.”

Northeast of Chasiv Yar, a soldier named Stanislav told Ukrainian television this week that after a month of “very active hostilities,” the Russians “are advancing in the direction of Kreminna, where they are accumulating large reserves “.

“A large number of Russian infantry are attacking day and night, in small and large groups,” the soldier said.

In addition to the lack of trained soldiers, “Russia is exploiting Russian airspace as a sanctuary to strike Kharkiv Oblast, underscoring the urgent need for the United States to provide more long-range air defense assets and enable Ukrainians to use them to intercept Russian planes in the country.” Russian airspace,” says Barros.

The United States announced a $400 million program for air defense munitions and other weapons on Friday, but much more is needed.

Ukraine’s losses are compounded by the lack of prepared defensive positions behind the front lines. where they could retreat. In Krasnohorivka, for example, Ukrainian units were able to use apartment buildings and a brick factory as defensive positions for months. Little by little, they were wiped out – with one Russian military blogger claiming that artillery fire had buried them “under the rubble of their own shelters”.

President Zelensky and others have talked more about “active defense” – having better defensive fortifications as a building block for reversing the trend of Russian advances. Zelensky himself visited these fortifications. But they are too few and too late in critical areas, notably in Donetsk.

Zelensky said this week that “we will be able to stop the (Russians) in the east” when aid arrives. But he acknowledged that “the situation there is really difficult” and maintained that the aid that has arrived so far “does not match the volumes voted for.”

“We need everything to go faster,” he added.

Every day that it doesn’t, the Russians advance – and the Ukrainians lose soldiers they can’t afford to lose.

Barros says the Russians were prepared for a cutoff in military aid. “The recent Russian progress we see today is not simply opportunistic; the Russians prepared for it and are now exploiting it. Ukraine may have to make difficult decisions due to the slow pace of US action and the resulting dilemma.”

This can amount to an exchange of time. And ultimately accept that much of the territory now lost cannot be recovered.