OPINION: Bridges Too Close, Mendacious Big Shots, Counting Drops in a Bucket

The Russians this week turned down the tap on missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine. From the perspective of us being hit (or missed), it looks like the smart guys in the Kremlin shifted from massed attacks trying to break through to the highest-value targets, to selected strikes – ahem – accepting the risk of collateral damage.

In Poltava on Tuesday a pair of Iskander ballistic missiles caught at least a couple of hundred students and instructors at a military institute out in the open, and more in one of the main buildings. There were 55-plus dead and 330-plus injured. Some of them were relatives on hand for an opening-day ceremony. It seems very clear the missiles were fired from nearby, across the border.

A reader tells me the Iskanders blew up over the crowd and hit the building, about two minutes after air raid sirens went off. I’m pretty sure it was the bloodiest single Russian missile strike of the war. Certainly one of.

I know people who were there. They say it was a butcher’s shop. In Lviv, on Wednesday, a missile hit a residential district and killed seven, among them a mother and three daughters. The father survived, and now, along with the horror of living with the murder of his family by an enemy state, he’s now a prime target for foreign media interviews.

Since then, through today, the Russians have launched Shahed drones at about one to three dozen a night, flying all around the country, probably trying to gather intelligence on where the Ukrainian air defenses are at. But no missiles. So the consensus is it’s pretty likely the Russians blew their cash wad in saved-up missiles shooting at things and people over about the past 10 days, and now they’re out of ammo for a while.

Other Topics of Interest

Zelensky Meets CIA Director William Burns in Ukraine

Zelensky said he had met Burns on multiple occasions throughout the war, but their meetings had been undisclosed.

They’ll obviously manufacture more (this is foreshadowing for the third section of this review) but short term, the Ukrainians are still there, and they haven’t decided to surrender, so Putin’s theory that Russia is a superpower other nations must back down to and will back down to just as soon as Putin orders some stuff and people in that country are blown up, still isn’t working as planned.

Bridges too close

There is a lot of fighting along much of the front. If I were focusing on the highest volumes of combat, ammunition expended, people killed and stuff destroyed, I would absolutely be trying to draw your attention to Donbas, Kurakhove and especially Pokrovsk.

But for me, probably the most curious data bit to cross my screen this week came from Ukraine’s Sumy region, where, on Wednesday, Sept. 4, authorities announced the full evacuation of civilians from the “border territories” of the Hlukhiv region, which abuts the Russian border and Kursk Oblast.

As most of you know, the Ukrainian army invaded the Russian Federation over the past month and occupied a chunk of land about the size of Luxembourg. This also was not part of the Kremlin plan, but I digress.

The order about the Hlukhiv border regions caught my attention because the Sumy region/Russian Federation frontier is pretty quiet. There is very little shooting, no major ground operations (that I know of) on either side, and from what I get told by locals, the most visible pieces of the war there are Russian Shahed drones heading south overhead most nights, and a higher quotient of Ukrainian troops in the general vicinity. Civilians see soldiers when they visit shops and trucks and cars moving food and supplies.

The general thinking is that there are Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) combat units quartered in the vicinity, but how many and with what weaponry, it seems people do not know or aren’t saying. A quick check of the map – and I marked one up hopefully to make this easier to see  – points out some pretty interesting facts:

1.Where the Ukrainians are emptying out the civilians, there is an excellent hardball road (the E38) heading straight to Kursk. I’ve marked the area being cleared out with a dark blue circle.

2. South of the E38 and paralleling it, the major terrain feature of the region, is the Seym River. It’s about 20-25 km south of the highway as legacy missiles fly. The Seym flows east-west in this area and then turns south towards Ukraine. Hopefully you can see the river on the map.

Bear in mind it’s too wide and deep to drive vehicles across along its entire length in the area.

3. Ukrainian forces invading Russia are already well north of this elbow-like stretch of the Seym. South of the east-west section of the river, there is a 15 km x 35 km pocket of Russian territory surrounded on two sides by Ukraine and on the other two sides by the Seym.

The upshot of where the Ukrainian forces are, and where the Seym River’s flood plain is, is that if you were a Russian military unit in the south of the river and west of the Ukrainian incursion, you now have no way to drive into mainland Russia except over a bridge crossing the Seym where it runs east-west.

4. What’s more, if you have tanks or loaded trucks it would have to be a pretty strong bridge. I’ve marked that pocket of Russian-controlled territory using a pinkish with a red border.

5. It’s obvious the Ukrainians know all this. For the past three weeks the Ukrainians have knocked out all three of the bridges connecting the pocket to Russia.

After that, they blew up pontoon bridges that the Russians had built nearby. I’ve marked the road bridges with a black “X” and the known pontoon sites with an orange “X.”

There may be one or more pontoon bridges operating as I write this, but even if that is the case, we can be confident, based on past strikes, the Ukrainians will find them and blow them up. The preferred weapon is an M30 precision-guided rocket fired from a HIMARS or M270 launcher.

Reports are all over as to how many Russian troops are, as a result of all this, south of the Seym more or less trapped in the pocket.

One number getting kicked around is 3,000, but there’s basically no hard evidence.

What is clear is that whatever force the Russian army does have down there, they are willing to build pontoon bridges and see them get blown up and then build more, to maintain communications with this territory. If one were a Russian joint forces north operations officer, all this adds up to an already-bad situation that has just got worse.

What are those damn Ukrainians (this is General Syrsky and his staff) up to in Hlukhiv region? Even open sources are reporting that the Ukrainians have only sent about half of their available reserves into Kursk Oblast. So where is the other half? Maybe in Hlukhiv region hiding? There are a lot of woods there.

Russia doesn’t have the NSA or NATO reconnaissance. To compensate for that, at least sometimes Russian spetsnaz patrols are sent south of the border.

The problem here is that they can and have been ambushed. There’s a lot of Territorial Defense infantry in that area. Actually, I’ve met with a few of those guys – and unsurprisingly, since they’re local hunters, farmers, mushroom collectors, and so forth, they know the terrain pretty well.

Bottom line, if you are a Russian army operations officer with responsibility for the northern sector, what the Ukrainians are up to in the Hlukhiv district isn’t a cocktail party discussion item or fodder for some internet blog (ha!); it’s critical intelligence with operational-level importance. Sure, it might be nothing. But then again, the Ukrainians might have stuffed five or six combat brigades with one or two artillery brigades to back them up into the woods around Hlukhiv.

Or maybe they plan to. Professional obligations of a career staff officer aside, there is also the unpleasant reality that the Kremlin is already hunting for members of the Russian military to blame and punish for the Ukrainians already inside Russia. Work in headquarters isn’t supposed to be dangerous, but, in the Russian army a man might guess wrong about developments around Hlukhiv, or even just sign off on a bad prediction because that’s what the boss wants, and then wind up the scapegoat.

In this scenario, getting exiled to the Arctic Circle is a good outcome because the worst ones are a kangaroo court and jail or command of an infantry unit with attack orders.

My point is, even if there are zero Ukrainian conventional troops in the Hlukhiv region, evacuating civilians at minimum makes the task for Russia of controlling Ukraine’s invasion and, somewhere down the line, assembling force to push them out a lot more complicated.

My guess is that the Ukrainians will decide what to do next, depending on how operations inside Russia play out over the next couple of weeks. The AFU has plenty it can work on; you should hear the soldiers complain, but this little event is a textbook example of how the AFU operates when they’re on their game.

They are getting a big effect with minimal resources, they’re leaving themselves lots of future options, and what they’re doing is driven by an understanding of Russia and the Russian army that’s at least as good as among Russian soldiers themselves.

Mendacious big shots

OK, many of you will have seen an interview General Oleksandr Syrsky did with CNN, and no matter what some of you might think of or say about CNN, still, it was some rare public comment by Ukraine’s top military officer.

Among other things, Syrsky held forth on Pokrovsk and delivered the general message that the situation there is under control but difficult. No surprise there. As to attacks in that sector, Syrsky said Russian forces “hadn’t advanced a meter” in the past six days. This was a little eyebrow-raising considering Russian attacks in that sector have been accelerating a bit there for about the last month.

Mind you; it’s not been Blitzkrieg-entire-regions-in-a-day-or-two. Rather, the standard Russian attack pace for about the last year had been 1-200 meters a day, and recently they had upped it to 500-800, and 2-3 km on a very good day. In the Pokrovsk sector. So Syrsky’s declaration that all had stopped deserved more attention.

My newspaper fact-checked, and we decided that as long as one defines the “Pokrovsk sector” as a single axis of advance along basically a single road and single rail line paralleling it, and one cuts the Ukrainians a bit of slack, what Syrsky said was the truth.

If, however, one were to define Pokrovsk sector as, for instance, “that part of Ukraine where operational movement by military force might or might not allow those forces to control Pokrovsk city and the key industry and road networks around it,” (which is pretty much exactly how our notional operations officer from the previous section would view it) then unfortunately for AFU credibility, General Syrsky’s words didn’t match that template.

Here’s the article.

I don’t want to belabor the point or play “gotcha,” but Syrsky’s overall message was that the Russians are slowing down and mostly being stopped across the front, that they visibly can’t manage more than scattered company-sized attacks, and that they are paying a big price in dead and wounded to advance the moderate distances that they do. Still, if an official is misleading in a public statement and you have a democracy then he risks getting called on it, that’s just the way the system works.

Which leads me – and if I do say so, it’s a transition nearly as smooth as a lounge lizard with his shirt unbuttoned to his belt, and wearing reflective shades – to recent declarations of “fact” by leadership in the world’s only true superpower, the United States. Syrsky’s misleading comments were peanuts, chicken feed, a pittance, by comparison.

If you want to find a duly-appointed senior official in the government of a functioning democracy, delivering some truly epic whoppers, distortions on an industrial scale, fiction dressed up as facts, checked and confirmed by responsible government employees, there really is no better place to look than the White House.

Particularly when an administration bigwig gets in front of reporters and decides to grace voters with official comment on Ukraine.

The subject was US long-range weapon deliveries to Ukraine, specifically ATACMS missiles, and their use. Speaking at a Sept. 4 White House briefing to an assembled press pack, US National Security Council Advisor John Kirby fielded a question about why the administration won’t deliver proper long-range (500 km+) weapons to Ukraine for use against Russia, and why the administration won’t allow Ukraine to use even the medium-range weapons it does have (ATACMS reaching about 250-300 km) against targets that far inside Russia?

A VOA reporter asked, and here’s what Kirby had to say: “Nothing’s changed about our policy with respect long-range strikes inside Russia and on Russian territory. I also think it’s important to note if I might that 90 percent of the aircraft that that Russia uses for glide bombs and long-range strikes… lie outside 300 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, deep inside Russia. So the argument that somehow if you just give them [Ukrainians] an ATACM and tell them it’s okay that they’re going to be able to go in and hit the majority of the Russian aircraft and airbases that are in fact used to strike them is not true, it’s a misconception.”

Kirby went on to explain that the US is taking the smart option and conducting well-reasoned policy by handing over air defense weapons to Ukraine to help intercept Russian bombers, missiles and kamikaze drones.

For one thing, I can look out my window most nights and the air raid sirens, and less often, distant explosions, offer pretty convincing evidence that this particular aspect of US national security strategy is a long, long way from functioning perfectly.

Get ready. For such a short sound bite Kirby’s comment has some pretty impressive falsehoods baked into it.

I’ll start with the “the Russian airfields are out of range” part. In fact, there are three Russian combined arms armies attacking Ukraine. Each of those armies has several air force wings assigned to it.

These air wings contain strike jet squadrons, usually Su-34s. The job of the pilots and ground crew operating these jets is to launch the airplane, fly it in the direction of Ukraine, and drop a glider bomb from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses. I’m sure the strike planners say they are aiming only at military targets and I’m even more sure there are maps in the headquarters with red circles only around military targets.

However, in the real world, the Russian bombs seem to hit just civilian homes and businesses, and the people in them, at least half the time. Maybe more. The air bases from which these glider-bomb toting combat planes take off are well known, they’ve been in operation for years, and by distance they’re 200-300 km from Ukraine-controlled territory. This is, roughly speaking, around Voronezh, Volgograd and Rostov, respectively. ATAMCS have that range.

So that’s lie number one. The bases from which the planes carrying glider bombs fly from, are within the range of even the hand-me-down ATACMS Ukraine has received so far.

Not out of range, like Kirby said.

Next, Kirby’s 90 percent figure. If we are talking about Russian planes that attack Ukraine, there is a small percentage, certainly no more than 20 functional heavy bombers out of the 120-150 or so strike aircraft of various types the Russians put into the air every day for Ukraine-related operations, that do indeed fly from bases well outside of the range of ATACMS missiles. In simple terms there are two bases, one near Saratov and the other near Murmansk, that operate these heavy bombers.

However, Russia doesn’t fly heavy bombers to launch missile strikes against Ukraine daily. Not even weekly. They’re old aircraft, they break a lot, and Russia doesn’t have nearly as many missiles as it wants. So, by and large, on average, somewhere between five and 15 Russian heavy bombers take off and launch missiles at Ukraine about twice a month.

All the other time, the bombers are being maintained or not, the aircrew are being briefed, or trained, the pilots are sitting around in ready rooms telling each other how great they are, or people are just goofing off.

Meanwhile the shorter-ranged strike jets are flying daily. Therein is lie number two.

If you look at where the Russian aircraft are flying from, how often, and what they’re launching, it is reasonable to say about 90 percent of incoming aircraft-launched weapons are sent towards Ukraine from an airplane, and by a Russian pilot, based somewhere well within the range of an ATACMS. Kirby told the White House press pack the suggestion that using ATACMS to attack these airfields could degrade Russian missile and bomb strikes against Ukraine “a false argument.” Sure doesn't look “false” to me.

Next, and literally anyone physically in Ukraine is aware of this, bombs and missiles are only a minority portion of the explosive flying objects the Russians are directing into Ukrainian homes, businesses and infrastructure. By aircraft count, probably 2/3 of that is drones, not strike jets or heavy bombers.

Almost all are Shahed “putt-putt” drones imported from Iran. As with glide-bombs, Russia does not launch Shahed drones from the Urals or Siberia or the Caspian Sea, the weapon gets sent in the direction of Ukraine from someplace closer. Since Russia uses the drones to probe Ukrainian air defenses, the closer to Ukraine they launch, the more drone loiter time over Ukraine.

The Shahed launch sites are well-known because it’s fairly easy to track the drones since they fly slowly.

One launch site is from a place called Point Chauda on the Crimea peninsula. Others are in the interior of Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod Oblasts. Like the strike aircraft/glider-bomb airfields, launch sites for the Shahed drones are easily within the range of ATACMS.

Further, since ATACMS is a ballistic missile designed to smash airfields, it is also a near-perfect weapon to attack a Shahed strike at the source.

To launch a wave of Shaheds, Russian ground crew and Iranian advisors have to drive to a launch site, unpack their equipment, construct launch rails, load the aircraft onto the launchers, launch drones, and then pack up and drive away. It takes time and it’s visible to Ukrainian observation drones and, should they wish it, NATO/US strategic reconnaissance. Ballistic missiles fly so fast, they usually hit before the target and his early-warning system can get the word out they’re incoming (see Poltava).

So Kirby’s and therefore the White House’s lie here is by omission. He’s talking as if the only thing hammering Ukraine is missiles dropped by long-range bombers outside of ATACMS range, when in fact the majority of the Russian strikes is made by robot aircraft, and Russian operators and Iranian advisors, launched from known sites firmly inside of ATACMS range. One would think that, given that US rhetoric vs Tehran since 1979, any White House administration would jump at the chance of attacking Iranian advisors launching terrorist attacks against civilian targets in a democratic, European state.

However, the exact opposite seems to be the present US policy. It sure doesn’t look like intelligent policy to me.

Another problem with Kirby’s arguments that long-range weapons can’t really help Ukraine deal with the Russian air strike threat, is the well-known fact that even if a combat aircraft can skedaddle an airfield to avoid an incoming air raid, aviation fuel reservoirs, ground radars, most air defense systems, and all ammunition dumps at the air base can’t run away.

What is worse for the proposition that long-range weapons can’t help the Ukrainians is the additional fact that the Ukrainians are busily making their own long-range weapons, by and large, kamikaze drones. A robot plane is not nearly as dangerous as a ballistic missile, it flies slower, it’s easier to intercept, it carries an order-of-magnitude smaller warhead.

Yet, the Ukrainians are getting excellent results with repeated long-range drone strikes against Russian airfields. I’ve attached an excellent photograph that came out of a dawn elephant walk of Ukrainian drones getting ready to fly off on a Russia strike, no idea where and when, I found them via 25th Airborne Brigade.

The point is, this is what the Ukrainians are doing, while the White House is saying it won’t work. As an aside, another hole in Kirby’s argument that long-range weapons in the hands of Ukraine would damage Russian air strike capacity, is the ironclad military reality that the Russian Air Force throughout its entire existence has struggled with aircraft maintenance, and it’s worse in a war.

Most of the Russian aircraft the Ukrainians have destroyed with their drones, it looks like, are planes that couldn’t fly for the moment, and so got caught on the ground. A final problem with the “it won’t be effective” White House view is that, in the actual war, close to every single time the Ukrainians have got their hot little mitts on something better than drones, like ATACMS or their own very few ballistic missiles, the results have been disastrous for the Russians.

Again, this isn’t Ukrainian propaganda, it’s visible to anyone with internet access in the form of satellite images of tens of aircraft burned and damaged, all manner of ground infrastructure left in shambles, barracks with pilots living in them hit, air defense systems taken out, etc. etc.

You can’t debate it, it’s not theoretical, we have years of experience seeing what Ukraine can do with long-range weapons, specifically against Russian air force capacity. The first two ATACMS strikes, way back in 2023, took out something like three dozen Russian helicopters.

Even Newsweek wrote it up.

Kirby certainly didn’t trot out any evidence to support his claim of the opposite – that long-range weapons like ATACMS in the hands of the Ukrainians won’t be effective against the Russian air force. As a voter, I would be remiss not to point out that if government officials spout baseless claims, taxpayers have a right to ask why they are paying those officials’ salaries.

But Kirby and his associates’ biggest fib, really, is that their policy regarding delivering long-range weaponry to Ukraine is wise, well-considered, effective and in America’s best interest.

The way it looks to me, America is leading the West in a Russia policy best described as: “Contain them somehow, do nothing that might be construed as inflammatory, and above all do everything possible to win the next election.”

In other words, ceding not just influence, but the pretense of trying to influence, security and stability throughout the world to Russia and China. And the likes of Iran, ISIS, Hamas, the Taliban, North Korea and Venezuela.

Kirby may not remember that Western inaction and absence of US leadership allowed Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas to go forward in 2014, and the following eight years of Western inaction and unwillingness to have any other policy on Ukraine than to do the minimum and hope the problem will go away, was a clear message to an aggressive Russia that the US and its allies were OK with an even more massive invasion of Ukraine.

However, I promise you, all of Ukraine does, and also the Poles, the Baltic states, and these days about half of NATO.

What the White House is doing right now, is a continuation of that non-policy. The US national leadership doesn’t even care about the possibility that failure to act decisively is part of a pattern of indecision, a pattern that absolutely will be identified and exploited by adversaries.

From Putin’s point of view, Kirby and his like can huff and puff about how mad the US is at Russia as much as they want. The bottom line is big numbers of ATACMS won’t be sent to Ukraine any time soon, so not only can the Russian Air Force keep on bombing and missiling Ukraine pretty much with impunity, but the Kremlin and Putin are validated in their stance that the West and the US are ineffective and cowed, and Russia’s best policy against them is simply to escalate until the limp-wristed West backs off or is distracted.

This is crappy US foreign policy that undermines US national security and promotes instability and war adjacent to the US’s closest allies. I would – heck, I have for some time – called it incompetent. The present White House’s only defense is that reactive, inert, short-sighted policy on Ukraine is the work of both parties, it’s been going on since the mid 2000s. Military support by the numbers, or, counting drops in a bucket. Over the week there was a fairly high number of announcements of new military assistance to Ukraine.

This is all open source and that’s key, because it’s not just Western taxpayers that are crunching the numbers. They are too in Moscow and Beijing, among others. I’ll just lay out the basic information.

Counting drops in a bucket

The bottom line is that if you scratch “military assistance to Ukraine” just on the surface, the scale of Western support to Ukraine right now is lockstep the same as always, and fits in exactly with the Ukraine policy: “We don’t know what to do, so we’re doing the minimum.”

All these announcements were from this week but if you need exact dates you’ll have to look that up.

$250 million. Mostly ammunition like shells, small arms, anti-aircraft missiles. Some armored infantry vehicles, likely to replace ones destroyed on the battlefield. The problem with this is three-fold. First, the US approved $60 billion in 2024 assistance to Ukraine in April, and in May-August they’ve actually committed about $12 billion, if that.

So the pace of delivery is a lot slower than what Congress (after six months of debates and a near-total halt to Ukraine assistance for that time) than it could be.

Second, that assistance money by law will disappear at the end of Dec. 2024.

Third is a simple calculation.

Were every dime of that money spent on 155mm artillery shells – and we know it will not – that amount of money would buy a bit over 80,000 155mm artillery shells.

As I have said again and again, because that’s what the soldiers tell me, artillery shells are the single most critical piece of military assistance Ukraine needs, bar none.

That amount of money buying that amount of artillery shells would be enough for the Ukrainian army to fire artillery strikes, in serious volumes (like in the US Army, which seeks to obliterate any found target, or the Russian army, which is firing currently) for about 10-15 days.

However, even in the Pentagon and the White House, a month is usually 30 or 31 days long. The actual amount of shells bought by a piece of the $250 million, at a guess, will be sufficient for maybe a week of intense firing, or in reality a month or more of onesie and twosie shells strikes at targets the Ukrainian drone pilots spot, but the Ukrainian gun bunnies don’t have nearly the shells to obliterate.

If you want to understand how it really is, the answer is that the Russians keep advancing. Remember, no infantry in the world advances across ground beaten by artillery. Ever. But of course the artillery need something to shoot.

Spain: A Hawk anti-aircaft battery with six launchers, radars, missiles, etc. On a good day that battery would be able to close off a 50-60 km hemisphere of Ukrainian air space to Russian aircraft, drones and missiles. If you tried to defend Ukraine just with Hawk batteries, you would probably need about 1,000-1,500 batteries. If you want to close off every square kilometer, you would theoretically need about 10,000.

So Madrid’s handover of a single 1960s-era system to Ukraine is generous, but it doesn’t really solve Ukraine’s air defense problem.

The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany announced they will transfer an additional 77 Leopard 1A5 tanks to Ukraine.

I’ve followed this story some time and the latest report doesn’t note, but I know, that this will be over time and most likely in batches of about 12-15 tanks every three or four months.

But, even if all those Leopards arrived in Ukraine tomorrow, they would still be 1970s-era tanks hardly capable of taking on Russia’s best tanks on an even footing, and what’s more (are you noticing a pattern yet?), 77 tanks is about sufficient to equip a single Ukrainian tank brigade.

Ukraine has, conservatively, 40 or so combat brigades fighting right now. So once again, generous but it won’t solve Ukraine’s combat equipment problem. Lithuania announced it will allocate €10 million ($11 million) to Ukraine for the purchase of Palianytsia missile-drones.

One Palianytsia costs a bit less than $1 million. As nearly as I can tell, the drone is effective and the Russians have trouble stopping it. So Vilnius’ generosity will give Ukraine the capacity to hit hard, best case, one single Russian airfield, one time. Russia has how many military airfields?

If you only hit one of them once, even if you just paste it, Russia’s overall air superiority won’t get severely degraded. If there were hundreds of Palianytsia drones and hundreds more coming, then it might be different. But this assistance is enough for a single air raid.

The Netherlands announced it would supply €80 million ($88 million) worth of support materials for F-16s. This will include generators, small vehicles, necessary maintenance materials, and specialized tools.

However, at best, Ukraine is operating maximum four or five F-16s right now, and even best case there won’t be pilots to put more than 10-12 aircraft into the air at one time, until the end of the year. Even if the Dutch equipment and Ukrainian innovation were to generate a phenomenal sortie rate of, just for fun, two sorties per aircraft per day, meanwhile the Russian air forces probably has 15-20 times more aircraft.

So again: good assistance, very generous, but meanwhile, in aggregate, it probably won’t have more than a marginal effect on Russian war-fighting capacity.

The UK will supply 650 Lightweight Multirole Missile (LMM) systems to Ukraine worth £162 million ($212 million) with deliveries starting this year and pro-rated over five years. So that’s about 120 missiles a year or a ten or so a month.

This is a multipurpose missile that Ukraine would most likely use to deal with Russian helicopter gunships and close-in attack jets, or possibly, as point defense weapons against Shahed drones.

A dozen oldish anti-aircraft missiles is probably the bare minimum needed by a single Ukrainian combat brigade to keep the Russian gunships at distance in its sector.

If they actually had to shoot the missiles because the Russians were trying hard to run air strikes, then that would been enough LMMs for about a week of battle, no more. Again Ukraine probably has more than 40 line combat brigades.

They all need to defend themselves against helicopter gunships. Canada announced it would donate “tens of thousands of rocket motors,” a handful of surplus warheads and the decommissioned chassis of nearly 100 armoured vehicles to Ukraine, and also “help” with F-16 pilot training. As I have noted repeatedly, I have a soft spot for the Canadians but, it wouldn’t be honest to overstate their military capacity.

Canadian F-16 pilots, like most NATO and US-ally F-16 pilots, in simple terms are trained in the US. So as generous as the Canadians are – and give them credit for stepping up to help with a critical Ukrainian shortfall, to wit, trained F-16 pilots – the fact is that Canada can’t fix Ukraine’s F-16 pilot shortage, not now and not any time soon. However, in Canada’s defense, the Americans have a lot more capacity to train F-16 pilots and they are not trying hard to pump out a lot of Ukrainian pilots. So just let that marinate.

As to the rockets, the logical guess would be these are old air-to-ground unguided weapons that were going to be written off. Certainly the Ukrainians can machine warheads and we can depend on it that they will. But an unguided rocket in this war is an area effect weapon meaning you have to fire salvoes to get useful effects, and in a war this size an army can go through 10,000 units of any muntion with frightening speed. Canadian media inform me that the armored vehicles in question are 29 M113 “tracks” dating back to Vietnam and the mid-Cold War era, and 64 Coyote LAVs, which are late Cold War early-1990s, and wheeled armored personnel carriers.

Both are excellent additions to the Ukrainian army, the soldiers know them and are familiar with them, and the brigade that gets them will become one of the UAF’s better-armed. By now you have to know where I’m going with this. Some 90-100 armored vehicles is battlefield transport for a single Ukrainian combat brigade. Ukraine has at least 40 and it needs 60, or more, to go on a proper offensive.

That’s before they start losing vehicles because it’s a war and the Russians shoot back.The second-to-last item in this section will link you to a USG fact sheet on artillery ammunition production now and in the future.

The date points are are that right now the US is producing about 58,000 155mm shells a month, 1,157 “HIMARS rockets” a month, 200 Javelins a month, and 137 AIM-9X missiles a month, 42 Patriot missiles a month, and 18 155mm howitzer barrels a month. The point to bear in mind, in terms of Ukraine, is that total US production of those key expendable items is probably about 1/2 to 1/4 of what the Ukrainian military could use, right now. It’s not like this is planning for a war, the reality is there is a hot war, in progress, and US munitions production is a key piece of Ukrainian fighting capacity.

Obviously only a portion of that production is going to Ukraine, now and in future.

The last item is a cartoon that might make FB mad. I include it here not to express a personal opinion, but rather, to offer a graphic representation of what is the overwhelming view of Russia and Russian citizens in Ukraine.

This point of view will not go away. Anyone interested in getting the Ukrainians into peace talks, in “ending the killing,” in convincing the Ukrainians to turn over territory and population to the Kremlin, will have to overcome this, I would say, universally held point of view. It’s not abstract. Pretty much everyone in Ukraine knows people who’ve died, and pretty much everyone either knows Ukrainians living in the east who’ve had to flee their homes and lost all their property, or are just refugees themselves.

I might think of speculating on the possible views of former slaves in the United States in 1865, viz. reconciliation with former slaveowners, but that would be really inflammatory.

So I’ll leave it at the cartoon, which I think communicates well the Ukrainian public view of Russia, its citizens, and its soldiers.

Reprinted from Kyiv Post's Special Military Correspondent Stefan Korshak's blog. You can find the original here. 

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.