The appearance of a complicated Russian army rocket launcher in southern Ukraine underscores the turmoil the Ukrainian military may face if it launches a new counteroffensive, one that aims to liberate southern Kherson Oblast south of Dnipro and position Ukrainian forces for an imaginable attack on Russia. -Occupied Crimea.
And mines are only an immediate risk to Ukrainian operations. They are also a long-term problem, even if Ukraine wins the war.
The logo of the new Zemledeliye multiple-launch rocket formula appears to be in action, launching large-diameter rockets filled with mines, in a video believed to have originated somewhere in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, just east of Kherson.
It is not transparent that the video is recent. Green foliage can only imply that it was recorded this fall or spring. In any case, the Russians have been under a strong incentive to exploit Zaporizhzhia for many months.
This is because the oblast, anchored through the port of Melitopol on the Black Sea coast, is the gateway to Kherson and the strip of land occupied by the Russians between the wide Dnipro River and the narrow strip of land connecting mainland Ukraine with Crimea. peninsula. , which the Russians took in 2014.
Ukrainian armed forces liberated northern Kherson Oblast, adding the town of Kherson, in early November. The release came weeks after Ukraine’s Southern Command introduced a first counteroffensive, the country’s third since this spring, that forced Russian troops across the Dnipro.
Since then, fighting in Kherson has slowed as armies brave Ukraine’s muddy winter and readjust their forces for the upcoming campaign. Heavy fighting is likely to resume as soon as the ground freezes around the new year.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians landed special operations forces on the sandy Kinburn Peninsula, just south of the mouth of the Dnipro, forcing the Russians to position blocking forces east of the peninsula.
Russian brigades in southern Kherson are constant there, which is probably precisely what Ukrainian commanders want. If the Ukrainians attack, they can begin their attack on Zaporizhzhia, where Russian defenses are thinner and there are fewer primary geographic bottlenecks.
The plan may simply be for Ukrainian brigades to target Melitopol, 65 miles south of the existing front line, before turning right and crossing the left bank of the Dnipro into the Black Sea. There are signs that Ukraine’s Southern Command is already preparing. by this “left hook of Zaporizhzhia”. Russian resources claimed last week that Russian artillery shelled Ukrainian forces gathered in Hulyaipole, just north of the band line in Zaporizhzhia.
Unless they can muster the forces for a futile attack, the Russians will be on the defensive. Hence the mines. Russian forces are scarce in the vast expanse of Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine’s fixed operations in Kherson, as well as the intense fighting underway in the east, prevent the Kremlin from moving gigantic numbers of troops to Zaporizhzhia to deal with a Ukrainian attack. Mines compensate for the lack of manpower.
Like many modern mechanized armies, the Russian military deploys mines to “protect the front edge of the defense and channel the enemy into pockets of fire within the defense,” Lester Grau and Charles Bartles noted in The Russian Way of War.
The concept is that Russian brigades dig and aim their anti-tank missiles, tank guns and artillery at the most productive destruction spaces, where the terrain welcomes incoming enemy forces and also complicates their exit. Narrow valleys, for example. The trick is to direct the enemy into the death zone by making all other paths through the domain even less hospitable than the imaginable death zone is.
Mines can do the trick. While a fashionable army has many tactics for locating and neutralizing mines (infantrymen gently probing the ground with bayonets with explosive charges in a line that can raze entire apples and any explosives underneath), demining takes time. Time that attacking commanders lose if they control to build momentum as a component of a coordinated offensive.
Thus, the Russians exploited Zaporizhzhia to give their few brigades in the oblast the possibility of directing any Ukrainian attack towards spaces of destruction where Russian defenders can at least inflict enough casualties to mitigate the attack and buy time for Russian reinforcements. arrival.
If Ukrainian commanders are wise and their intelligence is good, they will know where the minefields and destruction spaces are and will do everything possible to prevent them. Even then, Russian mines will pose a long-term challenge to Ukraine. Both sides deploy mines, yet the Ukrainian government knows where its own minefields are. Russian minefields, on the other hand, might not be apparent to Ukrainians until someone triggers a potentially fatal explosion.
The Russians have potentially scattered millions of mines across at least 67,000 square miles of Ukraine. Ukraine’s state emergency service discovers and secures up to 2,000 mines per day, but every day the Russians deploy more.
“There is no genuine peace for a child who can die from a hidden Russian antipersonnel mine,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday. Decades.