Is Ukraine's army playing rope-a-dope with Russian invaders?

Russian BM-21 GRAD multiple rocket launcher

I’ve spent this morning going over Google Maps of Ukraine using clues from the satellite photos and what coverage there has been to determine what road the convoy is traveling along and where it might be located today.  A late image this morning showed elements of the convoy deploying in a field on the edge of a small town called Zdvyzhivka, about a mile or so from the Antonov International, the main airport serving Kyiv.  The airport itself is 25 miles north of the city, so that gives us an idea of where at least one part of the Russian army is setting up outside the city.

Zdvyzhivka is right on the road the convoy has been travelling from the Russian border to the region near Kyiv.  The road passes through a slightly larger town called Ivankiv, about 20 miles north of the airport.  Satellite photos from yesterday show the convoy negotiating an oblong shaped roundabout on the edge of Ivankiv, so with those two satellite photos, we can establish that the convoy, or a part of it, has traveled at least 20 miles overnight.

The convoy has been described as 17 miles long, or even 40 miles long.  I took a look at a satellite photo from yesterday showing the convoy along the highway just north of Ivankiv, and I counted 70 vehicles, most of them military trucks with short cabs and canvas-covered cargo beds in the back.  This morning in a local parking lot, I paced off the length of a dump truck about the size of those shown in the satellite photos.  It was 30 feet long.  Let’s say the Russian military trucks are 30 to 40 feet long, so taking the longer length and adding 20 feet for the distance between vehicles (generous, as the photos show them to be nearly nose to tail), that means there could be as many as 88 vehicles per mile in the convoy.  Let’s estimate 70 vehicles per mile, allowing for some accordion effect in the convoy.  That means there are about 1200 military vehicles in the convoy if it is 17 miles long. 

The question is, what do the Russians intend to do with this long convoy of military vehicles, most of which appear to be supply trucks, along with some towed artillery pieces and tanks and rocket launchers?  And what do the Ukrainians intend to do about the convoy?

I looked at the convoy route on Google Maps, following it from north of Ivankiv all the way to Kyiv.  The road is two lanes and passes through flat farmland and a few small towns and villages until it reaches the suburbs of Kyiv.  There is virtually no “cover” for infantry or mounted Ukrainian soldiers to use to attack the convoy, and to their credit, they haven’t tried, because if they did, they would get cut down by the armed Russian vehicles in the convoy.  The terrain to the west and south of the city looks very similar – suburbs leading into flat farmland.  About 20 miles south of the city is the Vasylkiv Airbase, a military airfield for the Ukrainian air force.  It sits in the middle of farmland and a few small villages just west of the Dnieper River.

There are three highways that are four lanes wide out of Kyiv: the E373 going North, the E40 going West, and the E95 going South.  The E373 passes right by the Antonov International Airport, and the E95 passes near the Vasylkiv Airbase.  Closer to the city, there is a four-lane beltway around the north, west, and south of the city.  There are good two-lane roads all around the city through the farmland and small towns and villages.

Here's what I think the Ukrainians are doing:  they’re playing a “rope-a-dope” strategy waiting for the Russians to get close enough to the city of Kyiv that they can set up ambushes in the residential and industrial suburbs and either slow down the convoy or stop it and then attack it, as they have done during smaller skirmishes in the suburbs of Kharkiv over the last few days.  It’s a good plan if the Russians keep going.  But from the satellite photos taken this morning showing the Russians taking over part of the town of Zdvyzhivka and establishing what amounts to a firing base there, I don’t think rope-a-dope is going to work unless and until the Russians push in further.

Here's what I think the Russians are doing:  They’re going to continue to push the convoy along the far west edge of Kyiv to the south until they have established a ring around the city about 15 to 20 miles out, and then they’re going to lay back and shell the hell out of Kyiv using 155 mm cannons, BM-21 GRAD multiple rocket launchers, and a fearsome rocket launcher called the TOS-1, which fires thermobaric and incendiary warheads.  The TOS-1 is mounted on a T-72 tank chassis and can fire 24 rockets at once or sequentially.  The GRAD is mounted on a truck chassis and is fitted with a bank of 40 launch tubes firing 122 mm rockets.

The GRAD rocket launcher has a range of 12 to 19 miles, so they could hit the outskirts of Kyiv from the position they have established in Zdvyzhivka.  They could also use 155 mm cannons from there, which have a range of 15 to 25 miles depending on which warhead they are firing.  The Vasylkiv Airbase is 20 miles from the center of the city.  They could use it to shell the city and resupply the rocket launchers and cannons from the air.  They will have to move in closer to use the TOS-1, but it’s obvious they have plans to employ it because the Ukrainians have already captured one near Kharkiv.

I think in the coming days, Kyiv is going to be subjected to what the U.S. artillery calls a “rain of steel.”  Heavy bombardment by Russian weapons from all sides.  We saw the beginnings of such an assault this morning when a cruise missile struck the parking lot in front of a government building in Kharkiv.  I predict you’re going to see a lot of parking lots in front of government buildings hit by cruise missiles in the coming days, because I think the Russians are using Google Earth type maps to set up their guidance systems, and when you put in the grid coordinates for a building from that system, you get the location where a Google map device would take you:  to the parking lot of the building, not the center of the building itself. 

There is going to be an ugly, bloody, drawn-out siege of Kyiv and Kharkiv.  This war is not a “battle of civilizations,” because only one side is civilized.  The Russians don’t care if they cause civilian casualties.  They have been given the order to “take” Kyiv and Kharkiv.  They aren’t going to drive their tanks and armored personnel carriers into those cities until they have destroyed government buildings and military installations and killed as many Ukrainian soldiers and civilians as they can.  Killing civilians is part of the strategy.  They want to demoralize and “soften-up” (as an old military saying goes) the population to be taken over and occupied. The more civilians they kill, the fewer people they’ll have to worry about when they take over the cities.

That’s the Russian strategy.  Unsurprisingly, it is a criminal plan to launch a criminal war for criminal purposes because it was ordered by Vladimir Putin, the Russian criminal in chief.