In the night between Monday and Tuesday, President Zelensky announced the start of the Russian offensive in Donbass, the announced “phase two” of the invasion. An operation that will be fundamentally different from the days following February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin’s army launched the “special military operation” to overthrow and “denazify” the government in Kiev.
The euphemism with which the official media and the Kremlin have dubbed the operations is actually quite helpful in understanding the invading forces’ change of gear. This war, at least initially, was not planned with an eminently military logic.
The spectacular failure of the first assault is quite revealing of the premises with which the Russians unleashed the conflict, which in Moscow’s plans was probably first and foremost a political action. The lack of a convincing military strategy suggests that the role of the armed forces must have been negligible and reduced, at least in Russian plans, to a well-placed kick to the already rotten foundations of the Ukrainian state. At best, the deployment of hundreds of thousands of soldiers at the border could have served as a coercive tool in negotiations with the United States and Ukraine.
Regardless of which of the two interpretations guided the Russian strategy, it is important to emphasize that the Russian command does not appear to have arrived with a militarily sensible plan for the conquest of Ukraine.
From this point of view, the “second phase” represents a change of pace. Assuming that the military instrument is always political, the Russian army would seem to have taken over the management of the invasion by now, postponing the civil dimension and planning operations calibrated on military objectives rather than political ones.
The aim of the first fifty days was to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership and take control of the focal points of a country believed to be on the verge of collapse. Today the aim is to dislodge the Ukrainian military forces from the Donbass and alter the military balance in their favor, strengthening (perhaps) Moscow’s negotiating position.
We can deduce this strategic downsizing from a series of indicators: the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kiev axis, the thinning out of “denazification” as the declared objective of the campaign, the centralization of command of operations in the Southern Military District (which for eight years holds the role of manager de facto of the pro-Russian forces in Donbass).
In light of all this we can also expect a change at the doctrinal level. The civilian and governmental objectives of the first phase of the conflict favored a limited approach on the Russian side, with targeted attacks and raids against key points (just think of the daring raid by airborne troops against Hostomel and the attempts to infiltrate the government district of Kiev).
A separate discussion are the operations in the south, in the strip of land between the Crimea and the Donbass, which immediately had territorial control as the main criterion for success. Here, and likely also in this new thrust into the Donbass, the Russians conducted more artillery and air raids, with the primary goal of deteriorating Ukrainian forces and consuming their operational capabilities. This is a very different approach, which rather than the idea of a resolutive action responds to a perspective of conflict in which the winner is the one who manages to resist the wear and tear of his own military forces for the longest time.
This is also why it is difficult to predict the next phases of the war. The main objective for Kiev will no longer be the mere survival of the Ukrainian state, but to minimize its losses and be able to hinder the Russian advance. Despite Western aid, Ukrainians are unlikely to be sufficiently equipped to conduct a satisfactory number of counterattacks, although around Kharkiv we have seen an attempt to threaten Russian logistics networks in northern Donbass. Compared to March, the Ukrainians will be able to concentrate their assets on one front. And if the defenders have a sufficient number of transport tanks they will even be able to mount the mobile defense they wanted to set up in the first phase of the war.
To the advantage of the Kremlin forces remains an overwhelming superiority of means and weapons, the possibility of continuing to hit the Ukrainian critical infrastructure behind the lines and to exert constant pressure from Belarus, as well as the ability to supply their own units without disturbance from the side. of the Ukrainian missile forces.
But a change of priority is not enough to forget the price of past mistakes. Units moved hastily from other fronts in Donbass have low morale, have largely degraded combat capability and are still susceptible to the objective rules of warfare (with equal strengths, defenders have the advantage) as well as already diagnosed weaknesses : inadequate logistics, still disputed skies, a sometimes dysfunctional Command & Control structure.
All attributes that leave the game open and guarantee a catastrophic use of artillery even against civilians, as well as the pressure to conclude this phase of the operation before the arrival of further Western equipment.
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