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.
By popular demand, I'm writing a listicle - my top ten US military acquisition disasters of the 21st century.
It's a little distressing that I have so much material to work with.⬇️
This list is largely informed by two factors - taxpayer money wasted and capabilities not delivered. So despite my catchy F-32 frontispiece above, the F-35 didn't actually make the list because despite being very expensive the program delivered working hardware.
Number 10: the VH-71 Kestrel
You think it'd be easy to design a VIP version of an AW101, but the DoD managed to make an off the shelf design cost $400M each.
Cancelled in 2009 after sinking $4.4B; sane program management got the replacement VH-92 in at a third of the unit cost.
The Russians have lost around a thousand tanks in Ukraine during the war thus far.
Oh, you want an explanation? Okay. Thread. ⬇️
There has been a problem in estimating Russian vehicle losses since the first hours of the war - Ukrainian propagandists have flooded the internet with dodgy pictures of destroyed Soviet-era vehicles, claimed as Russian. I got started debunking them.
It occurred to me recently, though, that there's a way to "back out" Russian vehicle losses from far better-confirmed data for Russian personnel losses. According to Mediazona's ongoing count there have been 724 Russian tankers killed in the war to date.
Palestinian forces - belonging to Hamas and other armed groups in the Gaza enclave - stormed the perimeter defenses yesterday morning local time, catching the IDF entirely off-guard. The front line has yet to stabilize.
Israeli troops have begun to converge on the area and counterattack, so I do not expect the zone of Palestinian control to expand significantly, and absent external intervention they will likely be driven back into Gaza proper soon. However, that isn't the whole story.
The Palestinians took advantage of their initial breakthrough to flush commandos deep into the Israeli interior, where they have been wreaking havoc for the past two days.
Video of a "road of death" in southern Israel, my understanding is the aftermath of a Gazan attack.
"Dozens" of Ukrainian soldiers surrendering north of Klescheevka, apparently around 48.552153, 37.960711. Probably the remnants of a whole company.
Very much calls into question their recent claims of success in the area and the motivation of their troops.
Location on the map. This is quite close to the location of an earlier, unsuccessful Russian attack so it seems the Russians regrouped and gave it another shot.
If Mediazona's count of Russian casualties in Ukraine is accurate - and it probably is - Russian losses tapered off over the month of August to the point they're now hardly worse than American ones at the height of the Iraq War.
This suggests the AFU is beginning to collapse. ⬇️
First of all the bottom line - Mediazona has confirmed a mere 133 Russian military deaths in the first three weeks of August (their data only goes to August 23rd right now). This is on top of a long-term downward trend in Russian casualties since the winter.
Mediazona's total count is slightly over 30,000 for the entire war right now.
How do I know it's accurate? Russian admissions. Recently Gen. Teplinsky, head of the VDV, stated that 8500 Russian paratroopers had been wounded and returned to duty over the course of the war.
Update and a little analysis on the attack on Pskov Airfield. ⬇️
First of all this was not a gimmicky operation with cheap drones. Loitering munitions of some kind were used - I personally suspect Switchblade 600s - fired in a large swarm with sophisticated EW support.
Switchblade 600 has a number of features that make it a good choice for this kind of operation - easy and fast setup, adequate range and speed, relatively small size with limited RCS, thermal, optical and audio signatures, and onboard optics allowing precision targeting and BDA.
Launched from Estonia, they would arrive on target at Pskov in less than 20 minutes. Given reports of 20 or more attacking drones, enough were launched to destroy every aircraft on the ramp at Pskov and inflict a devastating blow on the Russian Air Force.