Riley Bailey and Fredrick W. Kaganwith Nicole Wolkov and Christina Harward February 21, 2024
Russian forces are conducting a cohesive multi-axis offensive operation in pursuit of an operationally significant objective for nearly the first time in over a year and a half of campaigning in Ukraine. The prospects of this offensive in the Kharkiv-Luhansk sector are far from clear, but its design and initial execution mark notable inflections in the Russian operational level approach. Russian efforts toseizerelatively small cities and villages in eastern Ukraine since Spring 2022 have generally not secured operationally significant objectives, although these Russian operations led to large-scale fighting and significant Ukrainian and Russian losses. Russian forces likely pursued more operationally significant objectives during their Winter-Spring 2023 offensive, but that effort was poorly designed and executed and its failure to make any substantial progress precludes drawing firm conclusions about its intended goals. Russian offensives to this point have generally either concentrated large masses of troops against singular objectives (such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka) or else have consisted of multiple attacks along axes of advance that were too far away to be mutually supporting and/or divergent. The current Russian offensive in the Kharkiv-Luhansk sector, by contrast, involves attacks along four parallel axes that are mutually supporting in pursuit of multiple objectives that, taken together, would likely generate operationally significant gains. The design of this offensive operation is worth careful consideration regardless of its outcome as a possible example of the Russian command’s ability to learn from and improve on its previous failures at the operational level. Russian tactical performance in this sector, however, does not appear to have improved materially on previous Russian tactical shortcomings, a factor that may well lead to the overall failure even of this better-designed undertaking.
I feel like it sucks to be Ukraine, and perhaps our Current Admin shouldn’t have been so kind to Putin, but not our circus. We have our own circus to deal with.
I feel like it sucks to be Ukraine, and perhaps our Current Admin shouldn’t have been so kind to Putin, but not our circus. We have our own circus to deal with.