Ukraine Update: It’s a war of the tree lines

New maps of the Ukrainian front lines demonstrate just how difficult the task of liberating territory has become.

The video below shows Ukrainian artillery getting shelled while operating through what is by now a decimated tree line.

Ukraine has clearly taken that tree line as part of its march to liberating all the space between Novoprokopivka, Robotyne, and Verbove. Look at what that looks like on the map:

Let’s zoom in a little:

With these satellite images, we don’t see just the individual fields but also the tree lines between them that act as windbreaks, designed to protect fields from soil erosion.

We all know about Russia’s main defensive lines; you can see them in yellow in the image above. But the big surprise of the counteroffensives is that Russia has dug-in defenses in all of those tree lines. As a result, Ukraine’s advances have literally been tree line to tree line. That has both slowed the advance and created exhausting conditions for Ukrainian forces.

In the olden days, armor would simply storm these locations, using their superior firepower to eliminate infantry defenses. Today, armor operating in that open space is in mortal danger of drones, anti-tank guided missiles, or artillery fire. Hence, Ukraine is relegated to those tedious advances.

Watch this remarkable video of a Ukrainian assault on a tree line near Bakhmut.

So many interesting points here:

• Ukraine still can’t do combined arms, but at least it has armor supporting infantry.

• Russia lays down an artillery barrage against the three charging Ukrainian vehicles (one tank and two infantry personnel carriers). A couple of rounds almost hit their targets. It’s amazing how in war, life and death is often a matter of chance. A little flutter of wind, or lack thereof, saved the lives of a crew.

• Frankly, I would’ve expected more artillery. We’ve seen heavier Russian barrages. It really does seem like Russia is less capable of laying down those walls of steel that were the norm earlier in the war.

• Ukrainian vehicles operated freely, seemingly unafraid of mines. Part of it is that chance of war—you can’t worry about what you can’t see. But also, the drone operator narrating the battle says Ukraine had de-mined the approach prior to the attack.

• The tank sets up its firing position right in the middle of an open field. It receives no anti-tank missiles from the defending Russian infantry. In fact, those seem increasingly rare as Russia focuses most of its efforts on suicide drones.

• Speaking of which, Russia missed a juicy suicide-drone target. Maybe their availability is as much a game of chance, as whether one of those scattershot artillery shells hits its target.

• Would’ve been nice to have more tanks and infantry on the assault, but maybe it’s related to the above. If Ukraine presents a much larger, juicier target, perhaps it’s more likely that Russia decides to commit more drones and more artillery in defense. Assuming there are a bunch of these attacks happening at the same time as Ukraine advances, it might force Russia to parcel out its precious resources.

• As the tank lays down a barrage of fire against the Russian-occupied tree line, the infantry dismount at the edge of the tree line. The drone-operating narrator says that the Russians are being “surrounded,” but they’re not. It’s more like rolling up the edges.

• We actually don’t see the infantry occupy Russian lines. The armor retreats, unharmed, and the narrator declares that the mission to take that tree line was successful. Beats me if true.

In all, this is the first glimpse we’ve seen of this tactic. There are plenty of videos from the perspective of Ukrainian infantry. Like this one:

Or this one:

That kind of combat is exhausting to the attacking side, and it simply can’t be maintained indefinitely.  

In this video—which is more explicit, so I won’t embed—you can see how the dropping fall foliage better exposes Russia’s tree line trenches. This one, too:

Conventional wisdom is that winter will slow down the Ukrainian attack. I don’t believe it will. Mud won’t affect attacking infantry the same way it hampers heavy armor. And the lack of foliage will provide Ukrainian drone operators with even greater opportunities to both snipe Russians directly, or call artillery on formerly hidden positions.

But that’s all good for eroding Russian defenses. The problem is that there is only so much Ukrainian infantry available to work on these advances, and every single one of those tree line combat missions both attrits them (with killed and wounded in battle) and exhausts those who survive unharmed. “The problem for Ukraine is that it is fighting the battle that Russia wants. If Russia can’t beat Ukraine in mobile combat, then the next best thing is to wear the Ukrainians down through attrition and trench warfare,” notes the Center for European Policy Analysis,  

Ukraine will continue making its slow advances, and all the while, its now-superior artillery and drone edge will continue destroying Russian equipment from afar.

In fact, Ukraine’s kill claims in recent days are downright gaudy.

But the big breakthrough? That might be further away than we hope.

If you wonder where Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene gets her Putin-approved talking points:

CBS News reports that Russia has started receiving artillery from North Korea. For the “America First” nihilists who claim supporting Ukraine is somehow a problem—at less than 5% of our military budget—Ukraine hasn’t just neutralized Russia’s military, but now North Korea will be sending its own artillery guns to Ukraine, reducing their supply on the Korean peninsula.

That’s called “two birds with one stone,” and that stone is pretty darn small. It should be lots bigger.

Russia is a terrorist state.

I am still of the mind that killing a dozen or more Russian soldiers is not a great use of GMLRS rocket artillery—unless they are in far more plentiful supply than previously assumed.

That’s about $250,000 worth of rare rockets to take out two trucks and maybe one to two dozen Russians? Still, take a look at the spread of those rockets’ tungsten steel balls. You can see them splash into the water on the reservoir next to the strike area. Nothing survives within that radius.

Also, this is likely forgotten, but those tungsten balls were a direct replacement of the original GMLRS rounds with cluster munitions. The idea was to have the same kind of wide-area destruction as cluster bombs, without the unexploded ordnance those left behind.

For now, I’m happy Ukraine has both.