Latest from Russia-Ukraine

From the best I can tell, Russia and Ukraine are engaged in high-intensity combat in the Donbas and apparently around Kherson, with the Russians making slow progress in the former and somewhat less progress in the latter. The Russians are attempting a slow-motion encirclement of the heavily fortified Ukrainian troops in the area, and the Ukrainians are gambling that the Russians will run out of steam before they can actually close the gap. It’s remarkable that we have less clear information about how the war is going at this point than we did in the first week, as Russia spectacularly flamed out on several different fronts, but this is the nature of the grind of attrition warfare on land. It’s best to guess at this point that both Ukraine and Russia are suffering significant losses; my sense is that attrition actually helps Ukraine at this point because of its advantage in mobilized manpower and because of the continuing supply of light and heavy arms from NATO, but it remains possible that the Ukrainian army may be forced to fall back under the strain. Given the speed of the Russian advance, it would be military malpractice if the Ukrainians allow themselves to be encircled in significant numbers. On the other side of the country there are some worrying sounds coming out of Transnistria, which have included Russian missile attacks against Ukrainian infrastructure along the Moldovan border. I’m not sure that the Russian forces currently occupying Transnistria can really do much in terms of maneuver warfare but they can probably tie some Ukrainian units down, at least for a while. For its part Moldova doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor about its territory being used to attack Ukraine.

Some links:

• For all the contributions made by drones and ATGMs, artillery remains the chief way in which Ukrainians are killing Russians and vice versa.
• The Russian defense industrial base (DIB) is all fucked up because autarky does not work even in the most autarkic of sectors.
• The extent of NATO supply of arms to Ukraine does not approach in magnitude the degree to which China and Russia underwrote the North Vietnamese military machine in the 1960s and 1970s.
• We’re not quite to the point that the Russian army is in mutiny but the signs thus far haven’t looked good from a Russian perspective.

Finally, for those of you who enjoy analogic thinking (I like stories!) I offer you the choice between the Winter War and the Kerensky Offensive:

The Russians have purposefully attempted to activate analogic thinking by declaring that their purpose is to “denazify” the Ukrainian government, a claim intended to remind soldiers and civilians of the Second World War. The Ukrainians, for their part, have borrowed and repurposed other analogies from Soviet history, including the historic defense of Stalingrad. Analogies do not truly belong to anyone in a proprietary sense, it would seem.