Ukraine’s Counteroffensives Appear To Be Part Of A Much Bigger Plan—To Divide The Russian Army

A month into Ukraine’s twin counteroffensives in southern and eastern Ukraine, Kyiv’s overall strategy is becoming clearer. Experts assess that the Ukrainian government’s plan is separately to surround, cut off and destroy elements of the Russian forces in the south and east while also severing the immediate supply lines between the two forces.

That would leave the Russian army in Ukraine fragile and divided—and should limit the Kremlin’s options as the Ukrainian army aims for total victory on Ukrainian soil.

Mike Martin, a fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College in London, explained this possible Ukrainian strategy in tweets on Monday. “Here is how the war ends, I think,” Martin stated.

Martin detailed the Ukrainians’ two main efforts. In the east outside the free city of Kharkiv as well as farther south in the Donbas region, Ukrainian brigades are continuing a series of envelopments that began in early September when they first exploited gaps in Russian lines—gaps that resulted from the Kremlin’s hasty shifting of forces to the south to block Ukrainian attacks north of Kherson, a strategic port on the Black Sea that Russia has occupied since the spring.

The Ukrainians’ eastern envelopments—first in eastern Kharkiv Oblast, then farther south around Lyman and in eastern Luhansk Oblast—badly damaged or destroyed major Russian formations, captured hundreds of functional tanks and fighting vehicles, unraveled Russian supply lines in the east and disrupted the Kremlin’s frantic and faltering effort to raise and deploy hundreds of thousands of fresh troops.

“The Ukrainians did a pretty amazing number on the Russian forces outside of Kharkiv,” an unnamed U.S. defense official told reporters Wednesday.

The southern counteroffensive has been slower—and for obvious reasons. Russian President Vladimir Putin “is deprioritizing defending Luhansk Oblast in favor of holding occupied territories in southern Ukraine,” explained the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C.

But signs of Ukrainian advances in the south in recent days finally became evident. Ukrainian brigades rolled south along the wide Dnipro River, liberating a chain of settlements, forcing the Russians back to Dudchany and beginning an envelopment of potentially thousands of Russian troops northeast of Kherson.

The pocket that’s forming on the right bank of the Dnipro “will be used to suck in [Russian] troops and assets to hold it,” Martin noted. If the Kremlin continues to prioritize the southern front over the eastern front, Russian units in the east—lacking the reinforcements they’ve been screaming for since early September—could continue to collapse, potentially accelerating the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv and Luhansk Oblasts.

To be clear, however, Putin prioritizing the south doesn’t mean the Russians will win in the south. Ukrainian artillery, rockets and saboteurs have spent months severing the main supply lines in and around Kherson Oblast. Pouring reinforcements into the region without securing their resupply might just mean more starving Russians for the Ukrainians to kill, capture or rout.

As exciting as the Ukrainian army’s advances in the east and south are for Ukraine’s leaders—and for everyday Ukrainians—what really matters, for the war’s final outcome, is whether and how the two operations link up.

Martin anticipates an eventual third Ukrainian counteroffensive, one that launches from Zaporizhia—midway between Kherson and Donbas—toward Mariupol, an historic port city that the Russians destroyed and occupied this spring. The idea, Martin explained, is Ukraine “using its strategic reserve to sever the Russian armed forces in Ukraine into two pieces that cannot mutually reinforce.”

A Ukrainian drive on Mariupol divides the Russian army in the south from the Russian army in the east. Each half still would have supply lines to strategic rear areas. The garrison in Kherson should enjoy a trickle of supplies from occupied Crimea that in turn arrive via ship or across the one bridge connecting the peninsula to the Russian mainland. Forces in the east would still link to Russia by rail.

But with the loss of Mariupol, Russia’s southern and eastern forces wouldn’t have direct, overland lines of communication. And that could mean the end of the Kremlin’s (admittedly clumsy) practice of shifting forces between the fronts in response to Ukrainian attacks. Russian leadership isn’t known for its flexibility. But overseeing two isolated forces in Ukraine, it wouldn’t even have the option of flexibility.

It’s all part of an apparent Ukrainian plan to carve up the Russian army in Ukraine. “What we are seeing is an excellent Ukrainian operational design playing out across the south and east of the country,” noted Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army general.

But right now, the apparent plan remains just that—a plan. The third Ukrainian counteroffensive hasn’t yet materialized. Likely because a third operation requires forces that either aren’t ready, or which Kyiv isn’t ready to risk given the fluidity of the situations in the east and south.

If Kyiv indeed is planning a march on Mariupol in order to unify its earlier counteroffensives, that march might not come this year. Early winter in Ukraine is wet but not yet cold enough to freeze mud into ice. It’s not for no reason that, historically, armies in Ukraine pause in November and December before resuming operations after the New Year, when a deep freeze—and solid ground—is likelier.

So if a third counteroffensive is coming, it will come very soon—or probably not at all until 2023. That begs a second question: what might Russia do with a two-month pause? Can it generate enough combat-ready forces to stabilize the front and complicate Ukraine’s apparent strategy?