Ukraine's Strategy Now That NATO Tanks Are Arriving

The good news is that promised NATO tanks of considerably higher quality - and lethality - than anything Russia has to offer are starting to arrive in Ukraine. 

But Russia still has @2,000 tanks in Ukraine and to some degree, numbers matter. Ukraine's strategy will be to husband its resources in order to generate maximum impact, which means waiting to find weaknesses in the Russian defenses and then striking hard. Eg, "hit 'em where they ain't." JL 

Mark Sumner reports in Daily Kos:

Challengers, Leopards, AMXs and Bradleys are starting to arrive. The Challenger 2 is an amazing tank. It may have the record for the longest-distance tank kill in history. It also notched a 200+ to 0 record against Iraq tanks in the Gulf War. Ukraine has also received an infusion of updated Soviet-era tanks from nations across Europe. Russia had lost  40% of its entire pre-war tank fleet and 50% of its mainstay, the T-72. (But) it still has around 2,000 functional tanks. Almost all of them are in Ukraine. (And) Ukraine can only make a company of Challenger 2s (or) a company or two of Leopard 2s. What Ukraine wants to do is to shepherd these resources to generate maximum impact.

All the players—Challenger 2, Leopard 1 and 2, AMX-10rc, Bradley fighting vehicles—are starting to arrive. The first M1 Abrams won’t be coming until late summer, early fall at the earliest, but the rest of the Western gear that had been promised to Ukraine following a meeting of NATO leaders last fall is moving into position. The numbers of such equipment remain relatively low, but at this point Ukraine could certainly outfit a handful of armor companies with a very interesting and potentially powerful set of tanks and supporting vehicles. 

At the same time, hundreds or thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who have been training on this equipment are returning to the country. So are thousands more that have been in locations across Europe training with NATO forces on Western tactics.

But does this mean Ukraine is ready to go with a spring counteroffensive?

Presumably, Ukraine has been working over the last four months to design the structure of the units that will incorporate these tanks and armored vehicles. They have surely also been putting in place the logistical chains necessary to keep these weapons in the field. Both of those efforts will have mean that thousands more Ukrainian soldiers and officers have been away from the fight over the winter, preparing for the moment when these forces rolled out.

In addition to Western tanks, Ukraine has also received an infusion of updated Soviet-era tanks from nations across Europe. Keeping up those levels is critical—even though the modern tanks may be regarded as much more capable, they’re also critically rare. 

Back in February, the International Institute for Strategic Studies took a look at Russia’s tank losses in Ukraine. Their estimate was that Russia had lost around 40% of its entire pre-war tank fleet and around 50% of its mainstay, the T-72. In a sense, despite the delivery of aging T-62 and T-54 tanks to the battlefield, Russia’s tank fleet is actually getting newer … because so many of the old tanks are being picked off that it makes the new tanks a higher percentage of what remains. That certainly doesn’t mean the new tanks are invulnerable, or even significantly less vulnerable, to anti-tank weapons.

At this point, Oryx reports that Russia has lost at least 460 T-80 class tanks and at least 58 T-90 tanks. There were never that many of these tanks to begin with. The total number of T-90 before the invasion began was estimated to be around 400. Russia is dipping into tanks it had built for sale to someone else to support its own military. 

Even so, after everything that’s happened, Russia still has around 2,000 functional tanks. Almost all of them—so many that it’s not clear Russia could mount a tank company anywhere else in the world—are in Ukraine.

The Challenger 2 is an amazing tank. It may have the record for the longest-distance tank kill in history. It also notched a 200+ to 0 record against Iraq tanks in the Gulf War. Those Iraqi tanks were a mixture of T-54, T-62, and T-72 (including a version made locally in Iraq), with a scattering of other vehicles, including U.S. tanks from the 1950s. Iraq also had a weirdly high number of old Soviet PT-76 amphibious light tanks, a relic of a period in which Saddam Hussein waged war on the “marsh Arabs” within his own country and drained the vast Mesopotamian Marshes that had supported civilization in the region for better than 6,000 years. 

Anyway … the Challenger 2 plowed through these Iraqi tanks without taking a single loss, and that is impressive. But it did so on the basis of three things: First, the Iraqi tank operators were almost all poorly trained and undersupplied; second, their tanks were poorly maintained and often poorly positioned to meet the British assault; third, the number of British tanks involved in the attack often meant they outnumbered the Iraqi force in the area.

There are pretty good arguments to be made that the first two of those factors also apply in Ukraine. Right now, some of the Russians sitting in those just arrived T-54 tanks are going to be sitting there staring at unfamiliar controls, or watching a half-assed instructional video on YouTube. But that third fact, the sheer numbers factor, is still not with Ukraine, in spite of all the Russian losses.

Imagine an army that consists of two hundred … let’s say, Jackie Chan clones. That army faces off with two hundred average guys, marches straight ahead, and high kicks, throat punches, comically destroys the entire opposing force without a loss. “Wow,” you say, “these Jackie Chans, they’re so much better than a regular guy.” And they are, but they are not invulnerable. Put a couple of Jackie Chans on the ground against the same two hundred regular guys, and they’re going to be downed soon (assuming Team Regular Guy doesn’t have to follow the martial arts movie rules of lining up to attack one at a time). 

That’s kind of where Ukraine is with all their Western tanks. Right now, they can make a company of Challenger 2, they can make a company or two of Leopard 2s. Only Russia still has 2,000 tanks in Ukraine. Many of them may be legitimately bad tanks. All of them may be worse tanks. But what Ukraine doesn’t want to do is send out 14 Jackie Chans only to see them run into 200 regular guys. Even a win in such circumstances would likely come at too high a cost.

What Ukraine certainly wants to do—other than convincing the U.S. and others to send a lot more gear—is to shepherd these resources to generate maximum impact. This is why many people doubt the “drive everything into Bakhmut" scenario. But hey, if you can get Russia to move even more people and equipment to Bakhmut to brace for that big counteroffensive … it just makes every other point of the line weaker.

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Here’s something we haven’t run in a while—a FIRMS map. In this case, a map of the area around Bakhmut.

NASA FIRMS map for last week in area around Bakhmut

In this case, the map seems to show the heavy fighting and frequent shelling within the city of Bakhmut, as well as artillery being used against Ukrainian positions to the west. Russian sources have taken to using maps of FIRMS in the area because they like how all of these red dots are in areas held by Ukrainian forces. They see it as a signal of how Russia is firing into Ukrainian positions, but Ukraine is unable to fire back.

Undoubtedly, some of the hot spots being picked up by FIRMS are attributable to the battle that’s going on around the city, but there’s a reason that we stopped leaning so heavily on FIRMS maps, and it’s more visible when the map includes a larger area.

FIRMS data across eastern Ukraine

Bakhmut is still right at the center of this map, and you can see those same hotspots. Only now, the points picked up by FIRMS are scattered everywhere—a pox upon both their houses. Some of these points surely reflect actual areas of artillery strikes or hits by missiles or drones. Other areas… who knows? Smokestacks. Trash fires. Fields being burned off before planting. The only clear thing is that the noise level is very high. Other areas where the known level of current fighting is very high, like the area around Avdiivka northwest of Donetsk, are almost free of hotspots.

There have been points where FIRMS has seemed to do an eerily good job in mapping current military activity. It seemed to do this well on several occasions during the summer of 2022, even reaching the point where it was possible to track the movement of forces over a series of days. But it’s clear that for there to be more information than noise on these maps, it requires specific conditions on the ground. We’ll keep checking in with them. For now, when someone holds up FIRMS of any area as “proof” of some event in the war, tell them to zoom out and look around.

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Fighting within Bakhmut is on this street-to-street, building-to-building basis. But, as we’ve discussed before, even in this kind of fighting Russia has one basic advantage: destruction. The first thing they do when moving into a new location is set up sniper positions to try and take out Ukrainian forces in surrounding blocks; it’s to advance mortars and provide positions for artillery to hit buildings in the next block. They work to make each block unsustainable as a defensive position through hitting buildings again and again until Ukrainian forces pull back. Then they move forward.

Detail of area in southern part of Bakhmut. Open image in another tab for a larger view.

That’s how Wagner has fought all along. It’s how they are still fighting. The only way to end this tactic is by counterbattery fire. The rate of Russian artillery being knocked off has doubled over the last month, but clearly, Wagner is still getting the strikes they need to move up. Slowly.