The Battle of Bakhmut is over. It was one of the longest battles of the 21st century to date, and certainly the bloodiest.
Russia won. In doing so it destroyed much of the Ukrainian Army's combat power while buying time to generate forces for future offensives.
How much of the Ukrainian Army's combat power?
The Grey Zone Telegram channel compiled a partial list of Ukrainian units reported in Bakhmut at some point during the nine-month battle.
This is something like a third of the AFU's order of battle. Losses were obviously extreme.
Russian casualties were modest in comparison and, critically, largely occurred in an auxiliary formation that is not part of the regular Russian military - the Wagner Private Military Company, which bore the brunt of the fighting.
h/t Mediazona
Ukrainian propagandists have begun predictably claiming that the battle somehow "bought time" for them to launch a strategic counteroffensive, which can be disproven with a pretty simple examination of the state of play:
Firstly, the Ukrainians already launched a multi-brigade counteroffensive in a failed attempt to retake the city, which failed with considerable losses and little ground taken.
Was that "the" counteroffensive? If they plan to attack elsewhere the lives of those men were wasted.
There is a related talking point that the AFU only attacked with the brigades in the immediate area, which is very misleading - Ukrainian "brigades" are basically front-sector commands that constantly churn through combat battalions.
As such the actual question is how many battalions a given brigade had assigned to it at that time.
Also the order of battle for the Ukrainian attack was and remains extremely murky beyond the heavy participation of Azov, one of the AFU's premiere units.
Similarly this makes the "AFU ORBAT" graphic above quite misleading - these units were not all packed into Bakhmut at the same time (as rather ridiculously shown on some maps) and mostly showed up as subordinate battalions to a handful of "resident" AFU brigades.
There is another talking point going around that the "Bakhmut counteroffensive" was only a small effort, which is facially ridiculous given the length of front attacked and reports of extremely heavy fighting.
I remind the reader the Russian MoD routinely sits on footage.
They killed hundreds of Ukrainian commandos during an attempt to storm the Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Plant in October, released nothing, and let Ukraine claim no battle even took place for months until they admitted the loss recently.
Secondly, the massive Ukrainian commitment to Bakhmut had an enormous cost in operations not undertaken elsewhere.
Remember the great Ukrainian winter offensive in Zaporozhe that never happened? I do. Those troops were fed into Bakhmut.
AFU attrition over the fall and winter was so bad that NATO had to build them another army from the ground up - one larger than that of the United Kingdom - and they may have already lost a significant amount of that force.
Many of those losses were suffered in Bakhmut.
Third and related to the above, Ukraine deployed its regular army to the failed attempt to hold Bakhmut. Russia sent in the Wagner PMC.
The AFU was decimated by the battle, while the Russian Army is not only intact but has used this time to generate substantial new forces.
This was even acknowledged by pro-Ukrainian commentators at some points, along the lines of "Ukraine is losing its army and Russia is losing its prison population."
After spending the last ten months largely on the defensive (there was no Russian winter offensive), and with limited prospects for another large Ukrainian offensive, the Russians are likely to attack in the near future.
The size and scope of that operation is the largest single unknown of this war.
Addendum: Why Bakhmut? Because it was the next town in front of the Russian Army after Lisichansk fell last July and the AFU reserves showed up in force to stabilize the front.
Great battles are often fought over obscure places.
Trump seems to have concluded a ceasefire with the Houthis, negotiated in Oman, that will see the Bab al-Mandeb reopened to American ships and leave Israel and Yemen to continue their long-range war.
If this was his intention all along, the bombing campaign suddenly makes sense.
Rather than waging an open-ended air campaign in effective support of Netanyahu's poorly-defined schemes in the region, Trump may have simply wanted to get the strait reopened to American traffic so business as usual could resume... or at least that was an acceptable step down.
Lest we forget, the Houthis had announced an intention to attack any American traffic passing through the straits some time ago.
I wonder if this whole thing was actually a head-fake with the Israel lobby. Negotiations seem to have been conducted very quietly, via Witkoff.
The latest talking point out of the Ukrainian side is that they don't really need NATO's support any more because they have tons of kill drones and they're so incredibly lethal that's enough to hold off the Russians indefinitely.
Let's examine this.⬇️
First of all, let's examine the kill drone as a weapon system. Generally known as FPV drones, or as I prefer to call them, antitank drones, these are small, simple quadcopter drones equipped with a camera, a radio or wire communications system, and an explosive warhead.
This makes for a new type of weapon system that, rather than being extremely powerful at face value, gains its effectiveness through a combination of smart guidance and ubiquity. They do three things that prewar "legacy" antitank systems do not:
1. They have extremely precise guidance and can be maneuvered to attack weak points on an armored target or pursue dismounted troops into cover;
2. They have onboard sensors and sustained flight capability, and are capable of not just attacking targets outside of the operator's line of sight but actively conducting reconnaissance; and
3. They are relatively light and cheap, with two or three kill drones fitting into the size and weight factor of a single old-style antitank missile, and thousands of drones stamped out in Chinese factories daily on no-questions-asked contracts to be jury-rigged to ubiquitous Soviet-era antitank warheads.
These weapons do, however, have drawbacks compared to conventional antitank systems.
1. Radio-controlled models are vulnerable to electronic countermeasures;
2. They have limited lift capability and as such their warheads are generally relatively weak, often simply repurposed single-stage RPG-7 shells or purpose-built charges that are little better;
3. They fly relatively slowly and can be, and frequently are, defeated successfully by defensive fire from determined dismounted troops; and
4. They "fire" extremely slowly, as each drone must be manually prepped, linked to a command system, checked out, flown out to a target that could be several kilometers away, and then carefully maneuvered into the target for maximum effect. The rate of fire for a single drone team is thus measured in minutes per round rather than rounds per minute. Engagements where you see multiple drones hit in quick succession are the result of multiple teams attacking a single target or group of targets.
The Russians and to a lesser extent the Ukrainians have implemented countermeasures to lessen their forces' vulnerability to these weapons, generally consisting of ECM systems, defensive fire (skeet shooting has become a matter of great tactical relevance lately), and elaborate "cope caging" that would have drawn extreme mockery a few years ago and which still does in the circles of people who aren't going to survive the first battle of the next war. As such, the probability of kill (PK) of a given antitank drone launch at the moment is, optimistically, about 10% against an appropriately prepared armored vehicle.
And now, my readers, we see the inherent weakness of a military doctrine centered around these weapons. Recall what I previously said about the slow rate of fire of drone teams and compare it to the low PK to be expected of any system which an adaptive enemy has had a chance to respond to. Assuming a PK of about 8% and a five-minute engagement cycle, any given Russian armored vehicle can expect to have about one "drone-hour" of combat lifetime under attack by these systems. Thus a single vehicle being engaged by six teams, for instance, can expect to last ten minutes before being knocked out.
This combat model is borne out by numerous engagements in which Russian units have pushed through drone attack with few to modest losses despite clearly being under attack by multiple teams for extended periods of time. The "drone wall" tactic does, however, create a sufficiently dense swarm of drones at the point of contact to render advances at the platoon level largely a matter of luck and deliberate company-scale attacks a bloody proposition for the chance of little ground gained.
What about larger-scale attacks, though?
Let's run a little wargame. In this scenario, a Ukrainian division (let's say one of their new "tactical corps" that's effectively a divisional unit) is defending against a Russian divisional attack. The Ukrainian unit has deployed into a formation designed to maximize the intensity of antitank drone fire to be directed against an attack at any point on the front - very similar to AFU deployments on the ground right now - with two defensive lines of dismounted infantry in closely-spaced strongpoints and a final "line" of mechanized reserves to bottle up any breakthroughs. A mechanized Russian division has been tasked to smash its way through.
The exact geometry is also noted on the graphic below, but I'll state it here for completeness' sake - the AFU division is occupying a 27km front with three brigades each occupying nine kilometers. The two infantry defensive lines are each composed of platoon strongpoints located one kilometer apart, with the second line positioned three kilometers to the rear of the first line and able to support it with drone fire under intense combat conditions.
A few notes on the rules here.
1. Every Ukrainian strongpoint is assumed to contain one drone team with an engagement range under "assault" conditions of five kilometers. Each team will fire once every five minutes. Firing strongpoints will be marked with a red box in the graphics.
2. As I pointed out above, Russian vehicles have a combat lifespan of one "drone-hour." As such it will take twelve "shots" from a single drone team to kill a vehicle, or one shot from twelve drone teams.
3. I am assuming that a Russian unit will take 30 minutes to move 3-5 kilometers tactically, accounting for en-route mine clearance, etc. Moving through cleared areas will of course be quite fast.
4. Ukrainian strongpoints attacked from the front must be deliberately assaulted, which will take 30 minutes at 3:1 odds. Strongpoints that have been flanked can be hastily assaulted in the same turn as movement.
5. Ukrainian strongpoints in close combat with superior Russian units are suppressed and cannot fly off drones. This will be marked with a black box in the graphics.
6. Ukrainian artillery has largely been silenced and the Russians have stiff fire superiority and their own drones searching the battlefield. Once a Ukrainian drone team opens fire it will be spotted and destroyed by Russian indirect fire within two hours. Strongpoints with dead drone teams will be crossed out and will not fire, but must still be assaulted and cleared of their infantry for the Russians to progress.
7. The Ukrainian reserves cannot simply blitz to the breakthrough sector - they must be alerted and then move out, under attack by Russian interdiction fires and clearing scatter-mine obstacles on the way. Thus they are going to move relatively slowly.
8. The Russians have achieved operational surprise and there is no large AFU reserve force waiting for the assault. This isn't particularly unusual, a similar situation occurred at the start of the Battle of Avdeevka and the Kharkov incursion last year. The Russians seem to be able to pretty reliably mass large forces for operations if need be, without Ukraine or NATO intelligence noticing.
Simple enough? Maybe I should put in an application at Milton-Bradley!
Let's begin - I'll now transition to thread format.⬇️
Here we see the initial battlefield set. Of note, I'm depicting the Russians tactically by company but will be keeping a more precise tally of assault vehicles destroyed. Russian company icons will be removed as appropriate.
The little ovals are Ukrainian battle positions.
Dust rises on the war-torn steppe as a huge assault force rolls into view - an entire Russian battalion coming on out of the Russian line some way to the south.
The five closest strongpoints launch drones as artillery begins hammering down across the defensive line.
The closest historical analogy to the Ukrainian War I can think of is the American Civil War - ironically a conflict that Europeans have always shied away from carefully studying.
A thread.⬇️
The underlying causes of the American Civil War festered for decades, finally erupting into open conflict after a series of political calculations and miscalculations brought down a national compromise that increasingly resembled a house of cards.
Ditto Ukraine. I've said elsewhere the number of political offramps available to Western leaders to avoid this war were so numerous that the fact war broke out can only be explained as the result of anti-Russian policy - clearly miscalculated policy given the results thus far.
Top 10 pro-Ukrainian talking points - and why they're nonsense.⬇️
10. Ukraine is a democracy!
False. The last free and fair election in Ukraine - not held under an ultranationalist jackboot after the 2014 coup - was in 2010.
All elections in Ukraine have been suspended since 2022, and Zelensky's five-year term from 2019 expired months ago.
9. Russia is an autocracy!
False. Vladimir Putin and United Russia enjoy approval ratings among the Russian public that are extremely high, even in polling conducted by Western-backed, anti-Putin organizations.
Putin is popular enough to win any election held in Russia handily.
How many plans has NATO gone through to try to beat Russia in Ukraine?
Let's count 'em!
Plan A: The FGM-148 Javelin
It seems absurd now, but in late 2021 NATO's leadership thought Javelin was a tank-deleting magic wand that would deter Putin from challenging Zelensky's scheme to conquer the LDPR.
Javelin failed in service and is a rare sight on the battlefield.
Plan B: The Kazakh Gambit
The West quite obviously fomented an uprising in Kazakhstan in January 2022 in hopes of distracting Russia from the then-boiling Ukrainian crisis.
Didn't work. CSTO troops arrived and helped the Kazakh government crush the would-be color revolution.
Late last week the Ukrainian command, seeing their offensive in Sudzha-Koronevo bog down, tried to expand the flanks of their salient into Russian territory in Kursk. Part of this was an attack on the Glushkovo district to the west.
The Glushkovo District is somewhat isolated from the Russian interior by the Seim River.
Having learned the wrong lessons from their 2022 counteroffensive in Kherson, the AFU command decided to try to induce a wholesale Russian withdrawal by attacking the bridges over the Seim.
The large road bridge at Glushkovo, the district center, would be their first target. As in Kherson two years ago, HIMARS fired on the bridge with GMLRS. As in Kherson two years ago, it was ineffective.
Unlike in Kherson two years ago, the Russians killed the HIMARS launcher.