Ukraine

I've got a high opinion of Michael Kofman's commentary on the Russo-Ukrainian War, consider him to be one of the better commentators talking about the matter to follow; for those not familiar, Kofman's a Ukrainian-American analyst specializing in the Russian military. A while back, he started doing a regular podcast with War on the Rocks called The Russia Contingency; they just came out with a new episode, the first I'm aware of where he's talking about the Kursk offensive. They don't do transcripts, but I thought I'd listen to it and type up a summary for anyone interested who may not like the podcast format.

This also has Dara Massicot, a coworker of his who he also sometimes does interviews or panel discussions with. Both are currently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; when I started paying attention to him, Kofman was at the Center for Naval Analyses and Massicot was at Rand.

I personally particularly like Kofman's tendency to focus on highlighting what factors are likely to be or become significant, something that I don't see a lot of well-informed people putting online. I'd call his stuff generally well-informed and objective.

This is was released August 10, so it's about a day or so old, and the situation is obviously rapidly-evolving.

I've done these transcripts before, and have tried to get placenames and such correct, but I do not speak Ukrainian or Russian, so this is my best-effort attempt to try to provide references to placenames and people using maps and what resources I can find online (Google Maps, Deep State Maps, ISW's maps, etc). I may get things incorrect; that's on me and my own limitations. Kofman's stuff tends to be pretty information-dense, so usually my summaries of his stuff head closer to being transcripts.

Summary:

Kofman

• Major caveat: Operation started August 6, so about 4 days of activity so far. Most material in this environment tends to show up about a day or two days after happening, so anything publicly-known is going to be dated by about a day or so.

• Ukrainian regular forces have pushed in from Sumy into Russia's Kursk Oblast. They seem to have seized the town of Sudzha. They pushed northwest towards the town of Snagost and are outside Kremyanoye further northwest. They've advanced north; it's unclear how far, but maybe several settlements down the road towards Liubimovka and Kursk itself. Also made several salients advancing branching down roads coming from it. At this point, from open source material, statements that Ukraine has captured maybe 350 square km, probably more by now, but Kofman does not expect that all of this territory is yet controlled, or that it's early to make that determination. [I expect that this is due to it including areas between roads where Ukrainian forces have no physical presence.] It is also not clear yet what they intend to hold. There is definitely a salient that they have made; they overran the border guards and the initial conscript units that were there. They took quite a few POWs; we do not know how many, but most likely in the hundreds. Ukrainian forces advanced quickly, but also important to remember that advance forces entering territory is not the same as controlling territory. A lot of speculative maps floating around out there from various people trying to put together a picture of what's happening.

Massicot

• Agreed. Not yet clear whether municipal buildings are controlled, what is the status of the local police force, is it only roads that are being moved up, how are they holding behind those. Believe that who are prisoners may have political significance for the Kremlin; this has been a sensitive political topic for Putin for some time, that conscripts not be involved. I'm also watching who Russia is looking to blame for this, and has been shifting around but looks to be the Chechen Akhmat group [Kadyrovites], that they were supposed to defend but ran away or couldn't close. In general, a lot of movement right now. When I see advancing maneuvers like this, have to ask what is the logistical plan; how are the forces going to be resupplied and refueled. That information is not visible to us right now. Lots of footage online of things exploding, but important things, things that Kofman and I follow, like where are the reinforcements, what are the logistics plan...that's the key part to watch for right now.

Kofman

• Very clearly not like the previous raids organized by HUR [Ukrainian military intelligence]. This is an operation clearly planned by the Ukrainian general staff. Operation composed of regular forces, probably supporting elements from Ukrainian national guard, maybe territorial defense, and Ukrainian border service. From what people have been able to identify, there are elements of at least five different brigades. I want to be clear about this: elements. Sometimes when people see brigade numbers, they assume that all of the brigade is present. That's not always the case. As best as Kofman can tell, this operation maybe involves something like a divisional-sized element, maybe best guess ten to fifteen thousand men. It doesn't look that large. Kofman doubts that what we're seeing is just the tip of a spear, for a couple of reasons. First, a number of these brigades were moved off the line in Donetsk and other areas. A couple of them are brigades that had been recently-created and were going to serve as a reserve. Based on what Kofman's seen while doing fieldwork in Ukraine, there isn't a great deal of excess manpower or additional brigades available for this sort of operation, so not likely that Ukraine has a lot of free forces to throw into this without having to pull them off the line. A number of these units were pulled off the line; elements of 80th Air Assault Brigade, 82nd Air Assault Brigade, 22nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, probably have some elements of 95th Air Assault Brigade, maybe 5th Separate Assault Brigade as well, along with all sorts of supporting elements, maybe one of the newer 150-series brigades like 150th. Bottom line, in terms of operation size, it's probably closest to the Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv in 2022. It looks like it's following a similar template. That's not surprising, given that Syrskyi's in charge. I believe that initially they were quite successful and had a significant breakout. My first reaction is that this looks deeply-embarrassing for Russia. I don't know what you have to do to get fired if you're Gerasimov, your favorite general, not sure what it takes, but...laughs

Massicot

• I'll say this. If Surovikin was still involved in this, he would have built defenses and minefields on the other side of the border.

[From my past listening to Kofman's material, he has generally been critical of Gerasimov's performance relative to Surovikin's; he considered Surovikin's more-defensive-minded approach to be more dangerous for Ukraine, as it would force Ukranian forces to deal with Russian defenses in an attritional conflict, that Gerasimov's attempts to conduct offensives into strong Ukrainian defenses unwise and likely done for political reasons, at Putin's behest, due to Putin wanting to gain ground.]

• Would guess that there are also units subordinate to HUR and SBU [Ukrainian intelligence agencies] involved in scouting things out in advance parties at start of offensive last week.

• Share concerns with Kofman about Ukraine's ability to reinforce, and Ukraine pulling people off the line may make situation elsewhere more-difficult.

• In terms of logistics, access is probably okay, but not sure what happens to logistics tail after it crosses the border to try to catch up with the guys who are all the way forward.

[Note that the border crossing being used is apparently the R200 -- Google Street View. This is a single two-lane road, and there does not appear to be a rail route through.]

• Is embarrassing for Russia. Still in initial stages; don't know how this is going to end, but for the first week, this reveals a lot of problems that shouldn't be present on the Russian side two years into a war. Right when the war started, Russia declared a state of emergency, modified martial law in all of the regions that bordered on Ukraine; this was one of them. What that does is gives local law enforcement and military enhanced power to set up curfews, set up roadblocks, to put in minefields, to do territorial defense things specifically to make it easier to defend when you're at war with your neighbor. The fact that we're two-and-a-half years into this and either Russian intelligence did not pick this up, which is a failing, or it went up to General Lapin, who commands this area, and then went sideways, or it went above him up the chain to Gerasimov. [Note: I have seen later news coverage that they did detect Ukrainian concentrations, that it reached Gerasimov, but that Gerasimov did not consider it significant and did not inform Putin about it.] Not clear to me yet who will bear ultimate responsibility. I think it falls on Lapin, who is in charge of border defense in this region, and seems to be some effort to blame Akhmat Group. You start to see appeals from Russian citizens, and expect them to become politically-damaging to the Kremlin. You start to see them...if you haven't seen them, they look like "we have supported the war for two-and-a-half years, we are a border town, our men are off fighting, and you haven't evacuated us, you're not providing for us, there's no help, this is dangerous and unfair". This is a dangerous message for the Kremlin to let bounce around in the information space.

Kofman

• We need to look at how this began. It is clear that Ukraine managed to achieve operational surprise. To be clear, folks like me didn't know that this offensive was coming. I don't think anybody did. I don't think that they told the United States or others. I have my own clear-cut theory as to why: my view is that tactically, Russia has actually had ISR coverage. There are videos posted of Russian drone feeds of them watching Ukranian forces before they crossed the border and as they were crossing the border. But as these types of operations continually show, war is a human endeavor, and technology may make the battlefield a lot more transparent at the tactical level, but people make mistakes, they don't prepare for things like this, they don't react in time. In some ways, it's not unlike what happened during the Kharkiv offensive, which people tried to portray as a surprise. In actuality, Russians were talking about it for two weeks during the buildup before Ukraine conducted it, and the Russian general staff just didn't respond or appropriately prepare or whatnot. I'm glad that you mentioned this; we continue to see Russian forces continue to make some of the same types of mistakes. And there are reasons for that. First, Russia seems to do quite poorly when it has to respond dynamically in a situation like this. So to some extent, you see Ukrainian units having the run of the place in these initial four days. Russian forces do far better when they're operating with a prepared defense, fixed lines, more in positional warfare. Much harder, as best I can tell, for them to coordinate action between different types of units. That still remains fairly weak, and it's interesting to observe. The other big issue is "what do you have to respond with"? Russia clearly has reserves, it has second-echelon units, it can pull units off from, say, the Kharkiv axis if it needs to. The issue you get, typically, is that newly-generated units are inexperienced. They also often aren't led by people who are that experienced. They will typically perform poorly against experienced units. This has been the case on both sides. Ukraine has had the same experience. Whenever it's thrown a battalion from a brand-new brigade to try to hold a part of the line...it's been fairly-consistent in this war. So when you have to send a reinforcement, and all your experienced units are on the front, your options are going to be newly-contracted personnel, or, worse, a battalion that's primarily conscript-staffed. And they're going to be very unprepared, and you're going to see things like we saw yesterday, which is an entire Russian column of trucks filled with infantry parked somewhere on a road essentially getting wiped out by a HIMARS strike. They probably lost a company's worth of men. That's the kind of mistake that the Russian forces along the line of control typically don't make. But it's definitely the kind of mistake that new units do make and will consistently be making when they're sent to reinforce and try to respond to this type of situation.

Massicot

• Agreed. When we think about that region, who might that be? Russia has several regeneration and training sites that are north of that area. They've probably pulled whoever was closest and was reasonably-available to do this, which is why you see that clumping. When I saw the drone feed of the POWs surrendering, that is really inconsistent with a lot of what we've seen inside occupied Ukraine from units who have been fighting for years. They typically don't surrender. Ukrainians will say this, we've seen it on drone feed, they'll shoot themselves in the chest or head with a rifle...they don't really surrender like that in an organized way. My first thought when I saw this was "are these conscripts?" But then I think, no, they were too big...I mean, men with muscles, 18-year-old Russian conscripts just have a different bearing and size. To me, this didn't seem like these were 18-year-old boys from a base. They were probably pulled from whatever training range was available, not experienced guys, and that's why you saw that. If these were hardened guys rotating out of the zone, what we've seen might have looked very different. The Russians are...presumably...it's not clear on how they're planning on responding to this, but they will, so I'd caution everyone that Week Two is going to look different from what we're sitting and looking at today.

Kofman

• Yeah, it could go a number of directions. The Russian offensive on Kharkiv looked quite good in the first couple of days, but actually culminated by around Day 5 or 6. This is a very different operation and situation, but these things tend to be quite dynamic early-on, but the offensive action can very quickly reach a culminating point. Depends on what you have to exploit it with, have you thought through the logistics, do you have additional reserves to throw in to sustain momentum. Ukraine has air defense there for example, but this is clearly a fairly-narrow incursion; we've already seen them lose some of their air-defense systems, FrankenSAMs and what-have-you, we've seen Russian Lancet attacks and attack helicopter missions. So it's clear that Russian forces are suffering losses and getting personnel captured. My best guess that the forces that you saw were probably territorial troops of some kind, reservists...conscripts tend to be very young, I think you're right there, but we don't know who that was. It might have been border guards. It might have been the formations they created -- and they created a whole bunch of them -- to help guard the borders against raids, but these are...I'm not sure that it'd even be fair to describe them as second-echelon troops in terms of who they likely staff that with. They clearly were unprepared to deal with an actual mechanized assault and a planned operation by regular forces.

• Let's talk about objectives. Here, we are sadly in the realm of speculation, but we should try to at least make some educated guesses. My first impression is that Ukraine likely would wish to trade any territory that they end up holding for Russian withdrawal from Kharkiv if they could. Alternatively, I think that the minimum objective here is to create a Krynky-type situation. For those who recall, Krynky was the lodgement that Ukrainian marines held for a very long time on the left side of the Dneiper River bank. Russian forces, particularly the Russian airborne, spent a long time trying to attack it. It cost them quite a bit in terms of losses. Ultimately, Ukrainian forces withdrew from it and abandoned that position. The purpose of a Krynky-type salient is that, of course, Russia would then have to throw a lot of forces at it since this is on Russian territory. The challenge is that for that to be successful...invariably Russia will be throwing in reserves. That's not even a guess; we've already seen that they've been moving reserves into the area to counter. The issue is that Ukraine pulled units off the line to do this and deployed units that were also what Ukraine had available in its reserve. The question now is whether Russia will deploy a substantially-larger force to counter this; will it be worth it? What the balance of attrition will be. And most-importantly, is it going to force Russia to pull forces from active operations that will materially-affect its current advances in Donetsk around Pokrovsk or the current positions that they are holding in that narrow buffer north of Kharkiv? So far, the Russian advance towards Pokrovsk has not stalled; if anything, it has accelerated over the last couple of days. I don't know if that's going to hold; I'm just saying that that is one of the litmus tests in terms of what the operation can achieve. If it does, it'll be very successful. I've heard -- I've read in papers -- folks advancing the idea that it could be leverage for some future negotiations. I am very skeptical of that; I think that the operation probably has some kind of concrete, Day 1, 2, 3 objectives. Maybe there is a clear objective that they are trying to get to there. I don't think that it can be especially grand given the forces arrayed there and how difficult it's probably going to be to hold that terrain. I do think that any operation probably has minimal and maximal objectives, and that they can change depending on how it unfolds and that's why you can be both right and wrong in trying to guess what they are. Something can have been a planning objective for the operation, and then the operation becomes much more successful than anyone expected, like Kharkiv did in 2022, and then you get much-more ambitious and then you try to advance much more than you initially-intended, or alternatively, the operation is less-successful, and you pare down your objectives. Political leaders will invariably say that their initial objective is whatever the thing looks to have achieved.