A turning point in the Ukraine war

Credit: Institute for the Study of War

Sixty-two miles.  That’s how far it is from Donetsk, Ukraine, to the Russian border.  Fifty-seven miles.  That’s the maximum effective range of the HIMARS rockets supplied by the United States, currently being used by the Ukrainian military in its war against Russian invaders.

At least 63 of those invaders were killed on New Years Day in a strike of multiple rockets fired by Ukrainian forces in the Donetsk region of the Donbas, the heavily contested area of Eastern Ukraine, much of which was seized by Russia last February and occupied ever since. 

Ukraine’s military fired up to six of the HIMARS rockets from a position or positions some distance back from the front lines, which according to the Washington thinktank, the Institute for the Study of War, are only about two miles from the western outskirts of the city of Donetsk.  So, Russia is not just trying to hold onto the land it has taken, including the city of Donetsk and its suburb of Makiivka, where the Russian troops were being housed in a former vocational school.  When you take in the range of the HIMARS, Russia is defending its own borders.  If they lose Donetsk, that will put the Russian border, inside of which are reinforcement battalions and stockpiled munitions, within reach of the rockets. 

The truck-mounted HIMARS rocket systems used by Ukraine are valuable not only because they can place accurate fire on targets as much as 50-plus miles from the launcher, but because they are expensive and rare.  Right now, about 30 of the weapons systems have been delivered to Ukraine.  More are expected to be delivered as part of the $772 billion dollar defense appropriation passed in late December, which included $45 billion for defense of Ukraine and to bolster the defenses of NATO allies that have been raiding their own weapons stocks to send weapons to Ukraine.

Because of the range of the HIMARS missiles, Ukraine can fire them from stand-back positions out of the range of Russian artillery.  But they aren’t out of the range of Russian drones or unguided rockets, and it would be a nightmare for Ukraine to lose even one of the rocket launchers.  The U.S. has rocket launchers with greater range than the HIMARS but has been reluctant to supply Ukraine with them for fear of escalating the war if Ukraine were to use them to hit targets deep inside Russia.

Nevertheless, if Ukraine were to take back Donetsk and drive, say, ten miles deeper into the region currently held by Russia, that would give them the kind of cushion behind the front lines they need for the HIMARS systems, and they could fire into Russia and possibly hit areas with troop concentrations of reinforcements and supplies, including ammunition, food, medical facilities, and other rear-area installations.

Ammunition brings up the other major reason yesterday’s strike is a turning point.  Bloggers in Russia have posted on Telegram that one of the reasons so many Russian lives were lost in the missile strike was because ammunition was stored inside the building being used to house the Russian soldiers, many of whom were said to be new recruits. The New York Times reported today that one of the Russian bloggers, a former paramilitary commander known as Igor Girkin, posted on Telegram that the vocational school building had been “almost completely destroyed” because of “ammunition stored in the same building” and that “many hundreds” are dead or wounded.  Girkin blamed the disaster on Russian commanders, who he claimed had been responsible for losses due to similar mistakes earlier in the war.  “Our generals are untrainable in principle,” Girkin posted.

The strike on the makeshift barracks in the suburb of Donetsk comes just three weeks after another HIMARS attack by Ukraine on a hotel in Kadiivka, a city in the Luhansk region, killed many members of the private army called the Wagner Group, led by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a Russian businessman with close ties to Putin.  Prigozhin has been a strong supporter of Putin’s war.  In the south, Ukrainian forces hit a church in Melitopol, a city to the east of Kherson, which Ukraine took back from Russian forces recently.

Housing soldiers in concentrated areas like hotels and former schools, even though it’s clearly being done because of extremely cold winter temperatures in Ukraine, goes against every rule of military strategy anyone has ever written or studied.  So does storing ammunition close to where soldiers are housed, as well as close to the front lines.  From reading maps of the region, the school that was hit yesterday is less than 10 miles from the front lines, meaning that even Ukrainian artillery could have hit both the barracks and the ammunition.

The Times reported that use of cell phones, possibly by new recruits housed in the former vocational school, enabled the Ukrainian military to pin-point the troop concentration.  The Ukrainian military has taken advantage of the sloppy use of cell phones by Russian soldiers before, using the data to target other troop concentrations, and also to kill a senior general who was commanding Russian troops in Ukraine’s northeast.

This war is now 10 months old.  Russia began the war by making the same mistakes that caused the heavy loss of life yesterday in Donetsk.  Russian convoys on the way from Belarus to attack Kyiv were bunched up for miles along two-lane roads, making them easy targets for Ukrainian ambushes that used RPG-7 shoulder-fired rockets and mortar fire to target the closely concentrated vehicles carrying soldiers, ammunition, and other supplies.  Russian forces engaged in the initial attack on February 24 were driven into panicked mass-retreat by late March and early April. 

Ukraine has learned to use Russian weaknesses against them, like the lack of communications discipline shown by soldiers using cell phones.  Meanwhile, Russia seems not to have learned anything at all.  First, Russia lost so many of its first-line regular troops early in the war – there are estimates of 90,000 Russian casualties – that they had to forcibly draft recruits and rush them to the front lines.  Then Russia proceeded to put them in harms way without training, adequate supplies, or leadership that knew enough not to put them all in one place and make a target out of them.

Armies that make the same mistake again and again don’t win wars. That’s why yesterday’s attack by Ukraine marks a turning point in this one.