UKRAINE PART FIVE
The Ukraine front has been more or less static for the last few months. The Russians did eventually capture Bakhmut, of no strategic importance in itself but placed on a north-south road which enabled the Ukrainians to move troops rapidly up or down the front. A Ukrainian counter attack to retake it is in progress now. There was much talk about a spring offensive. Spring is long gone and we are well into summer, but no country and no army is going to broadcast its intentions to the world, so there will continue to be much disinformation, dissemblement, obfuscation and bluff. A Ukrainian offensive will come, as they must recover that portion of their country which has been captured and is occupied by Russia, but it will not come until they are ready, and that means having the armour, the artillery, the engineers, the infantry and the air all integrated, equipped, trained and with logistic support in place.
Ukraine is now receiving tanks. The UK was the first to offer tanks, and while one squadron of Challenger 2 (fourteen tanks) and another promised will not win a war, it was a catalyst – once one country had promised, the rest of NATO came into line. The 64 ton Challenger 2 is the most modern of the allied tanks. Specifically designed to better the Russian T90 it came into service in 1998. It has Dorchester level 2 spaced armour and a 120mm gun. In the second Gulf War one Challenger 2 knocked out fourteen T74s in one action. Admittedly the latter were not the most modern mark and were manned by Iraqis, but the result does give an indication of how good that tank is. The Americans have promised the 60 ton Abrams, with British supplied Chobham spaced armour, which came into service in 1980. It may not be suitable for Ukraine as it requires two gallons of fuel per mile – no problem with US army logistic support but possibly beyond that of Ukraine. The tank the Ukrainians really wanted was the 62 ton German Leopard 2, which came into service in 1979 but has been upgraded since. Despite not necessarily being the most effective of the tanks offered, there are around 2,000 of them in service with NATO armies in Europe and therefore can be transferred to Ukraine with minimal effect on the suppliers’ own armies. Conversion from the T74 currently in Ukrainian service will take time, as will the establishment of maintenance routines, but this is well in hand both in the UK and elsewhere.
When in defence air cover is perfectly well provided by anti-aircraft missile systems, and for most of the war, except for localised attacks, Ukraine has been on the defensive. They have the British tracked Rapier, the German Marder and the American Patriot systems. Once on the offensive, however, manned aircraft are needed and currently Ukraine fields Soviet era MIG and Soyuz, which are no match for the Russian air force. Ukraine would like the American F16 and the Biden regime has expressed irritation that the UK is training Ukrainian pilots on the F16 and has promised to supply some, without asking the US. No doubt that will all blow over as the US is now considering supplying a number. Pilots are also being trained in Denmark. This is all to the good, but the difference between the current Ukrainian MIG and the F16 is comparable to the difference between a Sopwith Camel of World War One vintage and a Gloster Meteor jet fighter of the latter stages of the Second World War. The RAF takes four years to train a fast jet pilot. It might be possible to convert to the F16 a MIG pilot who has experience of air to air combat in, perhaps, eighteen months but it is difficult to see how it could be done in less. We shall see. Training the pilots is one thing, establishing the highly technical maintenance infrastructure is quite another. It takes one man to fly the F16, but in a squadron of up to 24 aircraft more than 100 maintenance and support crew are needed. In peace time for every hour of flying the F16 needs seventeen hours of maintenance, although this could probably be halved in time of war. It will therefore be some time before Ukraine has the air capacity to mount an effective major offensive, although local attacks are quite likely in the meantime. Once ready, with all equipment, vehicles and aircraft integrated into its armed forces, Ukraine will have to tackle the deep minefields, anti-tank obstacles, artillery killing grounds and other defences that the Russians have had all winter to prepare. It will not be easy and it will not be achieved quickly.
The most dramatic activity of the past few weeks has been the extraordinary behaviour of the Wagner group and its proprietor, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Wagner group describes itself as a private military company, that is to say a mercenary organisation which will fight for whoever pays them. They are present in Venezuela and in Africa, particularly in Syria, in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic. They prop up some pretty unpleasant regimes and make a great deal of money doing that and also by gaining control of raw materials and gold mines. The Russian government has always disavowed any connection with Wagner’s activities out of Russia. In the present war they have been fighting alongside the Russian army in the Donbas region, and have shown themselves to be amongst the most effective units, and the most ruthless. There has always been resentment towards Wagner on the part of the regular army, this group of fighters not under their direct control, not subject to Russian military law and where the equivalent of the private soldier is paid £2,400 a month, around seven times the salary of a conscript private in the army. Prigozhin himself was a petty criminal who served time in prison during the Soviet era. On the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 he, like many others, made himself immensely rich by buying up vouchers. In Soviet times all industries, factories, mines, and the means of distribution belonged to the state. When the inefficiency of the command economy and the huge percentage of GDP being spent on defence made the whole system unviable leading to its inevitable collapse, all citizens were issued with vouchers entitling them to a proportion of state property. If you were peasant in the middle of Siberia, ploughing your field with oxen and with a lavatory at the bottom of your garden, clutching a bit of paper entitling you to one ten thousandth of a coal mine somewhere, and someone offered you a few thousand roubles for it, you sold. This was the foundation of the fortunes of many of the oligarchs, including Prigozhin. He went into the catering business, grew ever larger, acquired contacts from the Russian government to supply catering facilities to schools, the armed forces and the government itself. He founded the Wagner group in 2014 although he did not actually command it until shortly before the Ukraine war in 2022.
While resentment by the regular army has always been there, recently there has been increasing criticism of the conduct of the war, the army and its leaders by Prigozhin, and of late this has descended into increasingly vitriolic and personal invective directed against the minister of defence Shoigu, and the chief of the general staff and overall commander on the Donbas front, General Gerasimov. He has accused them publicly of treachery, incompetence and of deliberately targeting one of Wagner’s bases and killing a number of his fighters. He has also questioned the whole rationale for the war itself. I had considered that it would be only a matter of time before the generals took him out. The spark that initiated his performance two weeks ago seems to have been an edict from the Russian ministry of defence requiring Wagner to sign a contract with the ministry, thus putting Wagner under direct command of the army. On Friday 23 June Wagner withdrew from its bases in the Donbas and by Saturday morning had occupied Rostov-on-Don without a shot being fired. Rostov is the headquarters of the Southern Military District and it is from there that the Ukraine war is being run. That there was no resistance to Wagner’s occupation would indicate that there was some support within the army, or at least in the army stationed in Rostov. Current reports suggest that General of the Army (full general) Sergey Surovikin, briefly overall commander of Russian forces in the war until superseded by Gerasimov and then one of the latter’s deputies, has been arrested, although this has not been verified.
On Saturday 24 June Prigozhin announced that he would march on Moscow with twenty-five thousand men (probably actually a lot less) not, he emphasised, to overthrow the government, but to force the removal of Minister Shoigu and General Gerasimov. Passing through Voronezh, 350 miles from his start point his vehicle column was attacked by Russian helicopters which Wagner shot down killing a number of Russian air crew. Meanwhile in Moscow the authorities were fortifying the city and digging up the roads from the south. President Putin appeared on public television and denounced this as a mutiny, saying that Prigozhin and Wagner were traitors who would be severely punished. Prigozhin got to within 130 miles from Moscow. And then he stopped! Quite what happened we do not know. Perhaps Prigozhin found that he did not have the support among the populace and the army that he thought he had, or perhaps he really did strike a bargain with Putin. In any event, the official version was that to avoid the shedding of Russian blood Wagner would withdraw but its members would not be punished, and neither would Prigozhin, although he would be banished to Belarus. Wagner fighters were given the options of going home, joining the Russian army or going to Belarus. At present it seems most are going to Belarus, a Russian client state. If that is so then Ukraine will have to bolster her northern frontier, currently held by territorial (part-time) units, and that means taking troops from somewhere else. On the plus side the removal of Wagner from the Donbas front can only help Ukrainian efforts there. The whereabouts of Prigozhin are the subject of much speculation. He may be in Belarus, he may be in Russia, he may be dead, we simply do not know.
The most immediate matter of concern is the agreement allowing the export of Ukrainian wheat and vegetable oil. At the beginning of the war Russia blockaded Ukrainian ports, particularly Odessa, and if continued this would have destroyed Ukraine’s economy, wheat and vegetable oil being her major exports. In the summer of 2022 Ukrainian farmers were suggesting that they could not plant the next year’s crop as silos were already full. Then in July 2022 the United Nations brokered an agreement allowing exports to recommence. Russia agreed to this because the bulk of Ukrainian wheat and vegetable oil goes to the Middle East and Africa, where Russia is trying to cultivate allies. Holding out the hand of friendship while threatening starvation is counterproductive. The ships laden with their cargos leaving the port of Odessa are guided through the Ukrainian and Russian minefields by a Ukrainian patrol boat, are inspected in Istanbul to ensure that no contraband is carried and then go on into the Mediterranean to their ports of delivery. On the way back the ships are inspected again to ensure than no warlike material is carried and return to their port of origin. The agreement is due to be renewed on 17 July, a mere eight days away. The Russians say they will not renew the agreement unless they are reinstated in the global financial market. Exclusion from this was one of the first sanctions imposed and means that Russia cannot negotiate loans on the world money markets, has difficulty in paying for imported goods and services, and for the ordinary Russian it prevents the use of credit cards, Visa, Mastercard et al being international. There is a suggestion that the US may allow Russia a link to one American bank, but Russia rejects this. My own view is that this is posturing and that Russia will accept renewal for the very same reasons that she signed in the first place – to avoid alienating her potential clients in the Middle East and Africa. We await the result.
The Ukraine army is still very much in the expansion stage (the UK is training 2400 Ukrainian army recruits every five weeks) and any offensive will inevitably be a slow process. In regard to the extraordinary behaviour of Prigozhin and Wagner we wait and see - I suspect Wagner will not go quietly, and in any case most of their efforts are in Africa, but if I was Prigozhin I would make sure to lock my bedroom door at night!
Very good update! I have read that there are several divisions that have not yet been activated during this probing phase of the counteroffensive; do you see those units as having an impact? And, Prigozhin... hoo boy, going to need to wait a week or so more to see where that thing is headed!