Warzone Ukraine: Week 4 Recap
Battlefield Map Updates, Drones, and Off-Ramps
As we pass the one month milestone of the war in Ukraine, this headline from the New York Times accurately describes the current situation.
How One Month of War in Ukraine Ground to a Bloody Stalemate
Battlefield Map Update
Despite the stalemate, the makers of our battlefield maps produced three updates to their products.
First, the UK Ministry of Defense (MOD) consolidated categories on their battlefield map. Previous maps included a category for areas Russian troops operated in and a category for unverified areas Russia claimed to control. The UK MOD consolidated those two categories into a new category called Contested Areas. This new category showcases the fragility of Russia’s territorial gains.
Second, the Institute for The Study of War (ISW) made updates to their competing map. Blue coloring highlights areas experiencing Ukrainian counterattacks and black/green circles indicates intense fighting during the previous 24 hours. We still see significant fighting throughout Ukraine as well as Ukrainian counterattacks near Kyiv.
Third, ISW produced a detailed map of the fighting in Kyiv. I want to point out the black dash circle representing a 25 kilometer radius around Kyiv. Last week I discussed Russia’s attempt to advance towards Kyiv within firing range (25 kilometers) of their howitzer. I expect Ukraine to focus its defense on keeping Russia outside of the howitzer’s firing range.
While we wait to witness Russia’s next plans, I expect them to include far more drones.
Drones
During the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war I watched hundreds of videos from the Azerbaijani MOD Youtube page featuring drones either completing their strike or filming the strike, which the drone coordinated. For most of the war in Ukraine I watched plenty of Ukrainian drone footage, but very few from Russia.
That began to change this week. On March 20, Rob Lee tweeted a video showing three strikes coordinated by a Russian owned Israeli-made drone called the Forpost-R. The coordination services offered by the drone allows for precise targeting of the enemy.
The next day, March 21, we see footage of a Russian drone tracking a Ukrainian Multiple Rocket Launch System (MRLS) to a mall parking garage. We then see a missile strike on the MRLS (I think the Russians used a ballistic missile because of the missile’s near vertical angle). This strike shows the potency of surveillance drones, the eye in the sky can track and follow nearly any ground asset.
On March 23 Ukraine Weapons Tracker found footage of a drone coordinated artillery strike on a Ukrainian S-300 anti air system. As I explained last week, the effectiveness of the S-300 obviates Russian aircraft from entering Ukrainian airspace.
The next day, March 24, Rob Lee showed us a video from the Russian MOD of another drone coordinated artillery strike on Ukrainian air defenses.
As Russian forces learn from their mistakes, they still carry major structural deficiencies. Last week I differentiated the philosophy of air superiority between the Russian Air Force and the US Air Force. Russia’s air power philosophy precludes them from engaging in air war operations like the Americans performed in Desert Storm.
While Russia updates their war plans, we finally encounter some signs of off-ramps that can lead to this war’s conclusion.
Off-Ramps
Many Western media figures assume that we need to offer Putin an off-ramp, I found that assumption strange. The Russian government and friendly media appendages spend much time and energy crafting and disseminating pro-Russia media narratives to its citizens. If Putin wants an off-ramp, he will create one himself, and he may have just created his off-ramps.
Russia demanded that the Ukrainian government needed to “denazify“ its administration, while never specifying the parameters of denazification. ISW reported that we finally have a definition.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov defined the “denazification” of Ukraine as the abolition of any laws that discriminate against Russian-speaking populations on March 18—the first time a senior Kremlin official has publicly stated the Kremlin’s definition of Ukrainian “denazification
It’s perplexing to see legislative protection for Russian speakers classified as denazification, but this is a clear example of Russia creating an off-ramp for itself. Another off-ramp appeared on March 25, TASS reported that Russia attacked Ukrainian cities to tie up Ukrainian soldiers from reinforcing their brethren fighting in The Donbas.
In my Week 1 Recap I discussed the possibility that the Russians could strand the Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. If Russia focused on The Donbas instead of wasting them in Kyiv, Russia could have achieved that objective.
This concludes our fourth weekly recap