The night of the fall of Bakhmut. How did the Russians manage to organize themselves and regain control in Ukraine?

From the moment the Russians entered Ukraine, the Kremlin thought that it was a lightning operation that would take about two to several weeks and end with the fall of Kiev into their hands, but there are two factors that caused that conviction to turn into a myth, the first is the great Ukrainian resistance that Moscow did not expect, and the second is the unprecedented Western support with training and weapons for Ukrainian forces.

These variables, and the length of the war and its high material and human cost consequently, led to a shake in the position of the Russian army on Ukrainian territory during the first year and most of the second year of the invasion, especially with a noticeable advance of Ukrainian forces in a number of crucial areas, during which the Russians were spending approximately $ 900 million per day, according to some reports, in addition to a radical loss in the supply of raw materials used in the manufacture of weapons due to Western pressures, and with the Russian economy affected, this caused Some politicians on the other side (the Ukraines and NATO behind them) believe that Russia may try to end the war quickly in any appropriate political way.

(Al Jazeera)

(Al Jazeera)

According to a recent research report from the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based security and defence institution, the Russians cleverly adapted to that shock and began settling themselves into a long war, then reshaping their tactics to adapt to the new reality, enabling them to advance again in some areas or at least preserve their previous gains.

At the gates of Zaporizhia

Essentially, this tactical adjustment is evident in Russian infantry formations, which used to be formed as "tactical battalion groups" (BTG), a joint arms maneuver unit that is the Russian military's main tool on the ground, usually consisting of a typical mechanized infantry battalion of 2 to 4 companies reinforced by units of air defense, artillery, engineering, and logistical support with a tank company.

In August 2021, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated that the country has about 170 battalions of this type, each comprising approximately 600-800 officers and soldiers, including nearly 200 infantry, and they are equipped with about 10 tanks and 40 armored vehicles, these units have already deployed during the first year of the war, but with the apparent exhaustion of the army's budget and the emergence of fatal weaknesses in this type of battalion related to coordination between its units, the Russian army returned to a non-order. Formal involves the creation of four different categories of infantrymen: specialist, offensive, linear, and disposable.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. (Reuters)

The specialist squad receives training at the highest level for their missions, usually sniper teams or heavy weapons, while offensive infantry includes elite units such as paratroopers and marines as well as some Wagner Group mercenaries, who receive additional training and are considered by the Russian military as "valuable skilled assets."

Linear infantry usually receive weaker training, and are used for tasks that do not require such training as digging, staying in defensive zones and supporting more valuable infantry formations (specialized and offensive), and at the bottom of the Russian infantry hierarchy are "disposable infantry", among these recruits from the Lugansk and Donetsk regions of eastern Ukraine declared independent republics by Russia, others coming from Wagner Group prisons, as well as civilians with little training, equipped only with small arms, and sending small teams. to battle.

Currently, the Russians are working to integrate these infantry classes into battles according to tactical needs, and instead of supporting everyone with weapons and heavy training, it has been limited to specific categories, saving significant material costs and increasing the capabilities of certain teams that specialized in performing more difficult tasks. This helped solve the problem of the tactical battalion group, but caused a new one, namely that the less trained groups are significantly more at risk, and therefore their representation has risen dramatically in the death count.

God of War

The same tactical change can be clearly seen in the pattern of action of Russian artillery, which is the heart of the Russian army or, as Joseph Stalin once called it, "the god of war." During the first year of the Russian invasion, one to two batteries (6-16 pieces) of howitzers were allocated to each tactical battalion group, along with one battery (6-8 pieces) of rocket launchers or multi-rocket launchers.

Russian 152mm howitzers type 2A65 Msta-B now used in the war in Ukraine. (Wikipedia)

During the first quarter of 2023, we can see that the rate of fire from Russian artillery has clearly decreased to between 12000,38000-20,60 rocket rounds per day, compared to firing rates that started from 2022,152 and reached 120,<> rocket rounds per day in <>. In addition, a clear shift has been observed in the calibers of the shells most commonly used by Russian artillery, with the use of <>mm caliber declining, with a significant increase in the volume of fire from <>mm mortars (weaker than the previous one).

The reason for this impact was not only the poor production of Russian artillery rounds compared to what was required on the battlefield, or the insufficient number of rocket rounds to meet the required supply, but also because of the strikes of the American "HIMARS" batteries used by Ukrainian forces, which disrupted supply lines and destroyed stores and artillery forces themselves, as well as the significant impact of the Western's long-range and precision-targeted howitzers.

AMERICAN ROCKET LAUNCHER M142 HIMARS. (Wikipedia)

But Russian forces have adapted the time to these variables well as well, by rethinking artillery launch plans by introducing new tactics based on transforming the decision to strike artillery into a larger and more diverse set of smaller decision points concerned with determining the best possible timing of the strike in the context of the unit's broader actions.

This has given rise to four categories of artillery forces, the first firing from mobile points, often to destroy enemy artillery batteries, the second aimed at protecting troops on the ground by keeping the barrage of fire continuous, and the third conducting mobile maneuvers on the ground to ensure that heavier shots reach targets more accurately (in which case artillery is accompanied by an infantry division of the "specialists" class we have just talked about).

The latter category of artillery is aimed at suppressing the enemy, and in this context the Russians use various tactics, for example, if they know that the Ukrainians are preparing an attack, they saturate the area with heavy fire from their artillery to prevent its implementation, and if the Russians withdraw from an attack position, they saturate it with artillery fire as soon as Ukrainian forces try to occupy it.

In addition, the locations of the artillery batteries are no longer holes in the ground, but the cannons hide in wooden blocks above the ground, and move to different firing sites with each strike, and at each launch site a quantity of shots sufficient for the target strike was pre-placed. This reduced the waste of artillery shots and created a flexible solution to the problems of hitting stores and supply lines, and overall these new tactics contributed to keeping Russian artillery power sovereign on the battlefield despite the apparent decline in bullet rates.

Fahledar. Tank massacre

The same pattern of flexible tactical change is taking place on tanks, after Russia lost nearly 2000,130 tanks since the start of the war in Ukraine, a huge loss that the Russians paid particular attention to after a battle in the city of Vahleidar in the eastern Donetsk region last October, which Ukrainian officials described as "the largest tank battle of the war," with more than <> tanks destroyed.

T-90M advanced tank of the Russian army, destroyed during the war in Ukraine. (Wikipedia)

For a long time, Russian forces tended to push unsupported tank squadrons directly into Ukrainian ambushes, causing the destruction of large numbers of these tanks, especially with the Ukrainians using relatively cheap but very effective systems against tanks such as the "Javelin missile" (FGM-148) (Javelin), a portable system such as RPGs, developed for the service of the US military, with a range of two thousand meters, and has many advantages such as light weight and ease of operation, but more importantly it follows the technology of "Fire." Wanas, which enables the shooter to hit the target without having to aim at it accurately, thanks to the electronic equipment and thermal and optical sensors inside the missile, which track the heat from the tank's engine or any heat source on board.

Russia started the war using tanks for the purposes of "penetration into operational depth" as part of the tactical battalion groups that we talked about earlier, but with heavy losses, Russia used tanks in cases of breakthrough that seemed appropriate only and with the combination of several diverse decision points, and in the case of the Battle of Bachmut, which ended in Russia's favor recently, the tanks were not used for penetration clearly, but were largely used as artillery machines and fire support.

In addition, the Russians provided their tanks with anti-thermal materials to reduce the accuracy of anti-tank guided missiles, and Russian forces also found tank fighting at dusk and dawn to be appropriate, when the tank's body temperature is closer to the temperature of the surrounding environment, distracting Javelin missiles and other systems heavily used by Ukrainians.

Hell of marches

Drone warfare was a key part of Ukraine's early success in curbing Russian advances, but after a while it was clear that Russia's capabilities had developed in this range, along nearly 10000 kilometers of the frontline, Russia maintained a major electronic warfare system almost every 750 kilometers.

Chebovnik-Aero system. (Wikipedia)

Thanks to sophisticated Russian systems such as the Shipovnik-Aero jamming station, which can be mounted on a cross-suburban truck and is difficult to detect, can suppress drone control signals, penetrate on-board systems, and locate drone control with an accuracy of up to one inch, within a radius of 10 kilometers.

The Chebovnik-Aero system generates strong interference that completely blocks drone control signals, and can even cut off the aircraft from the original signal and replace it with a special signal that can guide the drone and push it to land wherever it specifies. Most importantly, it takes less than a minute for the system to work, from the moment the drone is detected until its control signal is extinguished. Besides, this system is designed not only for anti-drone warfare, but also for suppressing communication control centers and signals for cellular networks, Wi-Fi and other networks.

Overall, during their first year in Ukraine, the Russians seem to have realized that electronic warfare is of paramount importance, so they developed their own electronic warfare structure daily, were able to achieve real interception of Ukrainian electromagnetic signals, were able to penetrate Motorola's 256-bit encrypted tactical communication systems, which are widely used by the Ukrainian armed forces, along with a number of deception actions. Although Ukraine still has the advantage in the range of marches, as the Russian military adapts, it loses its ability to tilt the battle compared to the first months of the war.

Of course, the above were only examples of radical and systematic changes in the tactics of Russian forces to coordinate the various functions in order to regain territorial control in Ukraine, and they have already managed to make some progress over the past few months, neutralizing some problems, some of which related to the Ukrainians' response, others to coordination between forces, and a large part of which related to economic problems and ammunition production lines.

It seems, then, that the Russians, contrary to the thought of many Western warlords, are skillfully adapting to emerging threats, but of course this has only happened after significant losses, nor does it mean that the war has become a picnic for them, as there are still more obvious problems in carrying out offensive operations, but this flexible change indicates that the Russian bear's quiver still has a lot of tricks that could change the course of the war and its expectations.

——————————————————————————————–

Sources:

1. This report is based primarily on a paper issued by the Royal United Services Institute entitled Meatgrinder: Russian Tactics in the Second Year of Its Invasion of Ukraine.