Truck Shortages, Point

Sep 19, 2023

Russian army trucks near Ukraine in April 2021.

The Kremlin has used trains—hundreds of them with many thousands of cars, in total—to stage along the Russia-Ukraine border weapons, vehicles and supplies for an army of around 100,000 troops.

If Russian president Vladimir Putin pulls the proverbial trigger and orders that army to roll west into Ukraine's restive Donbas region, those same trains will haul supplies to forward depots and haul away from the war zone any damaged vehicles in need of deep repair.

That dependency comes with risk that, more than any tank-on-tank or artillery-on-artillery match-up, could define a wider war in eastern Ukraine. Trains can't roll all the way to the front line. For that, Russia needs trucks. But it's woefully short.

The cruiser 'Moskva.'

The Russian navy cruiser Moskva by far is the most powerful warship in the Black Sea. If Russian president Vladimir Putin orders his troops to widen their war in Ukraine, Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, undoubtedly would lead the naval assault.

Think of Moskva as a 12,500-ton, 612-foot mobile missile battery with nearly 500 people aboard. She packs enough anti-ship missiles to wipe out the entire Ukrainian navy and enough air-defense missiles to swat away any conceivable aerial attack on the Black Sea Fleet's amphibious flotilla.

Moskva's value to a Ukraine operation could make her a top target of Ukraine's missileers. Assuming the Ukrainians can preserve their anti-ship missiles through Russian bombardment and pinpoint Moskva's location using radars or drones, they might get to take a few shots at the cruiser.

2S19 howitzers from the Western Military District's 138th Motorized Rifle Brigade.

Most people have it all wrong. Visions of Russian tanks rolling across snowy Ukrainian fields, heralding a wider and surely much bloodier phase of the eight-year-old war in Ukraine, are fantasy.

It's the artillery that will signal the escalation. Hundreds of big guns and rocket launchers spread across scores of semi-independent Russian army battalion tactical groups, each a thousand men strong.

In Russian doctrine, artillery—not tanks or infantry—is the decisive force. The other combat arms exist to position the artillery for the most devastating barrages, and to exploit the holes the guns smash in enemy defenses.

Civilian trucks on a Russian train heading for Ukraine.

The Russian army never had enough trucks to sustain a fast-moving invasion force in Ukraine.

The problem has gotten a whole worse. As the wider war in Ukraine enters its fourth week, the Ukrainian army and sister services have destroyed no fewer than 485 Russian trucks.

That's more than a tenth of the trucks that belong to the Russian army's 10 "material-technical support" brigades, which haul supplies, ammo and fresh troops from rail-heads to front-line formations.

A shortage of trucks, growing ever more severe as the Ukrainians knock out more and more of the vehicles, was evident in the first 10 days of the invasion as Russia began transporting civilian vehicles into the war zone, probably in an effort to make up for losses of military trucks.

Su-27s strike Snake Island.

The Ukrainian air force's best fighter jets just staged a daring raid on the Russian force occupying Ukraine's Snake Island.

The raid marks a significant escalation of Ukraine's air campaign targeting the Russian garrison on the island in the western Black Sea, 80 miles south of Ukraine's strategic port Odesa.

For at least a week now, Kyiv's propeller-driven TB-2 armed drones have been waging a relentless defense-suppression campaign over and around Snake Island. The satellite-controlled drones with their 14-pound missiles have knocked out at least three air-defense systems on the 110-acre island as well as two Russian patrol boats and a landing craft along the shore.

Destroying the air-defenses, along with any naval vessels attempting to reinforce the tiny island—with its single pier, helicopter landing pad and dozen or so structures—cleared a path for the twin-engine, supersonic Su-27s to strike on or before Saturday.

A low-flying Ukrainian air force Su-25.

Desperate to avoid surface-to-air missiles in the lethal air space over Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian pilots have revived a classic tactic—flying really, really low.

But the same low flying that helps pilots to dodge enemy air-defenses also exposes them to a separate risk: collisions with the terrain. In just the past week or so, the Russian air force has lost two Su-25 attack planes, and at least one pilot, in crashes during low-level flights to or from the war zone.

The sky over Ukraine—in particular, eastern Ukraine where the fighting is the most intensive—is some of the most dangerous in the world for crews on both sides of the conflict. In four months of warfare, the Ukrainian and Russian air forces have written off around a fifth of their deployed fixed-wing aircraft, as well as many helicopters.

Su-34s deployed for the war in Ukraine.

Russian air-defense troops just shot down one of the most sophisticated warplanes involved in Russia's wider war in Ukraine.

One problem. It was a Russian warplane. A brand-new Sukhoi Su-34M fighter-bomber.

Russian propagandist Yevgeny Poddubny apparently captured on video the shoot-down over the city of Alchevsk in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. "Last night, the air-defense crew of the allied forces destroyed a target in the sky over Alchevsk," Poddubny wrote. "The nature of the target is not clear. The burning ball fell to the ground for more than a minute."

A video of the wreckage confirmed the plane's identity: it's an Su-34M with the registry RF-95890, one of just 10 or so Su-34Ms that Sukhoi so far has delivered to the Russian air force.

A Russian T-80 burns following a Ukrainian drone strike.

The Ukrainian army's counteroffensive around the city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine starting on Sept. 6 destroyed half of the best tank division in the best tank army in the Russian armed forces.

A hundred wrecked or captured tanks in a hundred furious hours. That's how much destruction the Ukrainians inflicted on the Russian 4th Guards Tank Division, part of the elite 1st Guards Tank Army, the Russian army's best armor formation.

Now the 1st GTA is retreating north in order to preserve what remains of its front-line divisions. But the damage the tank army has suffered could have lasting implications—and not just for Russia's 200-day-old wider war in Ukraine.

The 1st GTA "had been one of the most prestigious of Russia's armies, allocated for the defense of Moscow, and intended to lead counterattacks in the case of a war with NATO," the U.K. Defense Ministry explained. "It will likely take years for Russia to rebuild this capability."

Ukrainian troops capture a Russian 2S19 howitzer in March 2022.

The Russian army spent decades and billions of dollars building what should be the world's most fearsome artillery fire-control system. Combining drones, radars and thousands of modern howitzers and rocket-launchers, the fire-control system in theory can spot a target, relay coordinates and send shells down-range in just 10 seconds.

In practice, in the chaos of Russia's wider war on Ukraine, the system barely works at all—and the artillerymen themselves mostly are to blame, according to Maksim Fomin, a militia fighter for the separatists Donetsk People's Republic and a pro-Russian blogger. "Most of the gunners, before Feb. 24, had no idea how to fight in modern conditions," Fomin wrote under his pen name "Vladlen Tatarsky."

Fomin was referring to the gunners from the Russian army's Northern Military District, but the same criticism could apply to the army's other districts, too—to the whole force, in fact. A sophisticated artillery fire-control system is useless if the troops don't know how to operate it. Sure, they might fire off a lot of shells. Just don't count on them hitting the right things—and certainly not quickly.

'Moskva' sinking.

In days and weeks after a Ukrainian navy anti-ship missile battery sank the Russian Black Sea Fleet cruiser Moskva on April 13, a lot of rumors circulated.

Many of the rumors attempted to explain how a navy with virtually no big ships or aircraft could defeat a navy with lots of big—and heavily-armed—vessels and planes. Some of the rumors hinged on the assumption that the Ukrainians required foreign help in order to strike Moskva.

Did one of the Ukrainian navy's Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 drones sneak up on Moskva and pinpoint her location, 80 miles south of Odesa, for the Neptune battery? Did a high-flying U.S. Navy Boeing P-8 patrol plane relay the critical coordinates?

Neither, apparently. According to an eyebrow-raising new story in Ukrainska Pravda, the Neptune battery—a quad launcher and its associated radar—found and hit Moskva mostly on its own.

The assistance the battery did receive ... came from nature. An atmospheric phenomenon called "temperature inversion" created a kind of channel for radar waves that allowed them to travel over the curve of the horizon and back.

The 1st Tank Brigade in training in 2021.

The 1st Tank Brigade, arguably Ukraine's best tank formation, didn't just survive the brutal bombardment that preceded Russia's wider invasion of Ukraine starting in late February 2022.

The brigade fought back—hard.

The 1st Tank Brigade's six-week defense of the city of Chernihiv, near the border with Belarus just 60 miles north of Kyiv, already was the stuff of legend when analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds revealed incredible new details in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Russian commanders apparently assumed the 1st Tank Brigade would be an easy target on day one of the wider war. In the early morning hours of Feb. 24, 2022, Russian missiles and artillery struck the permanent garrisons of most of the Ukrainian army's 20 or so active brigades.

But these brigades, including the 1st Tank Brigade, had dispersed. The Russian bombardment mostly destroyed empty buildings.

The 1st Tank Brigade's 2,000 troopers and roughly 100 T-64B and T-64BM tanks—some of the best tanks in the Ukrainian inventory—lay in wait in the fields and forests surrounding Chernihiv.

A TOS-1A the Ukrainians captured last year.

Desperate to break through Ukrainian defenses around Vuhledar, a major strongpoint in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, the Russian army deployed at least one of its precious TOS-1A thermobaric rocket launchers.

The Ukrainians blew it up. Dramatically. A TOS-1A is a 24-pack of 220-millimeter "flamethrowing" rockets mounted on a tank chassis. Hit a TOS-1A, and it's likely to explode in a billowing fireball and scatter flame and rocket-parts in all directions.

That's exactly what happened on or before Valentine's Day, when the Ukrainian army's 72nd Mechanized Brigade struck a TOS-1A outside Vuhledar. As Ukrainian cameras recorded from the sky and the ground, the Russian launcher burst like a giant firework.

The 72nd Mechanized Brigade's destruction of the TOS-1A may have thwarted yet another Russian assault on Vuhledar, a town with a pre-war population of just 14,000 that lies a couple of miles north of Russian-held Pavlivka, 25 miles southwest of Donetsk in the Donbas region.

Along with Bakhmut and the free towns near Russian-held Kreminna, Vuhledar is one of the main targets of Russia's ongoing winter offensive. None of the attacks are making much progress, but the assault on Vuhledar might be the most disastrous for the Russians.