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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   1435 thread views

Transnational Thursday for May 9, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Russia is currently trying to open another front by crossing the border between Belgorod and Harjkov. It's something I've been expecting for a while: why expend your material advantage on pushing through entrenched Ukrainian defenses in the Donbass when you can use it elsewhere? But the direction of the attack left me puzzled. You can't take over a major city with 50k men, especially one that is an important military hub for the existing frontline: that's not enough neither for a frontal assault nor for an encirclement. Getting closer so that you can reach it with your tube artillery isn't a valid military reason either, unless you want to just punish the locals for self-identifying as Ukrainians. I would've tried to threaten Sumy or even the Konotop-Bahmach-Baturin triangle.

Didn’t the Russians just capture it? Possible they knew something we didn’t.

Nope. They have captured a strip of land across the border, but the city itself is still very far away in this war's terms, 20-30 kms or so.

The standard commentary says that it's mostly just meant to focus a chaotic redeployment from other sectors of the front on the UA side, since even losing some irrelevant frontline villages would have an adverse impact on UA morale that is already cracking. The Ocheretino breakthrough seems to indicate that rotations and redeployments are currently Ukraine's weak spot - single brigades hold stretches of the front successfully even if they grumble as they have been forced to do so continuously for over a year, but the moment they are rotated out it's a gamble whether their green replacements will even take their positions or flee upon their first encounter with a FAB shockwave. Entrenching a new defensive belt presumably requires at least some experienced troops to be pulled from elsewhere (rather than throwing new conscripts into a new frontline to figure out things for themselves from scratch), creating a myriad of such opportunities as their former positions have to be replenished with new troops.

RU might also correctly expect that in that particular area, the remnants of the RDK (for whom Ukrainian leadership evidently has little love, but who are also a priority target for Russian spite) will be used as first-echelon cannon fodder.

Finally, do we know the 50k actually represent an upper bound on what could be committed to this offensive if it develops in a promising direction? How hard is it to rapidly redeploy troops to somewhere within 50km of the old Russian state border? Surely attacking with ~200k right away if you can afford to would be better, but in this conflict in particular massing so many troops at once might actually just make them an easier target.

an important military hub for the existing frontline:

Is it really one though?

It is. The northern third is supplied from Harjkov (directly and via Izûm), the central third from Dnepr via Pokrovsk, the southern third via Orehov.

Fair enough. But hasn't pretty much all combat since late 2022 taken place in the central and southern sectors? I imagine Kharkov's logistical role as a railway hub hasn't been that important since then.

Also, maybe the current offensive is limited because it's only meant to capture areas which are due to serve as starting points of a bigger offensive in the summer. Not that I'm certain that they want to capture the city this summer.

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