The Russian air force recently dropped 250 glide bombs on a single treeline near Andriivka in Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast, potentially making that roughly 3-km-long copse the most bombed place on Earth at the time.

It didn’t help. The Russian regiments and brigades the air force was supporting with its intensive—some might say “insane”—aerial bombardment have been defeated and forced to withdraw from the area.

The Russian KAB glide bombs, which range 25 miles or farther under pop-out wings and satellite guidance, rained down as a trio of Russian units—the 22nd and 30th Motor Rifle Regiments and 40th Marine Brigade—were “really struggling near Kindrativka,” just outside Andriivka three miles south of the border with Russia, according to analyst Moklasen.

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Shortly after drone-harried Ukrainian forces retreated from western Russia’s Kursk Oblast in mid-March, bringing to an abrupt end a controversial seven-month Ukrainian incursion, Russian units including the 22nd and 30th Motor Rifle Regiments and 40th Marine Brigade counterattacked—and crossed into Sumy.

But they counterattacked on foot, bringing with them virtually zero combat vehicles. While far from unusual as the Russians hold back their surviving armor, the Sumy operation underscored the risks that accompany infantry-first tactics.

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Shrugging off the bombardment, mechanized Ukrainian troops flanked the de-mechanized Russians near Kindrativka last week. The Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted Ukrainian counterattacks in Sumy that could “complicate the enemy’s advance and threaten the encirclement of Russian troops operating in Andriivka.”

This in a nutshell is why Russia has such a big problem having exhausted all of its armor and even unarmored vehicles at a logistical scale. The media always wants to understand warfare as two action figures fighting from two different teams in a battle where they get mashed together and the stronger one wins. It is the marvel/superhero narrative, it is the narrative military arms companies want to sell about weapon systems like the F35 that are incomprehensibly expensive in TV commercials to the public.

Warfare is spatial however, it includes context, in general the media can only see warfare as "Tank vs AI Drone = Tank Lose" and that is where the analysis stops, but understand that no matter how the calculus of that equation changes the actual process of war is about maneuver, about placing your forces in places that existentially threaten the enemy forces and then going to battle when the enemy tries to deny your maneuver.

Without armor, you cannot maneuver. This doesn't just place your forces at existential risk when they are on the offensive, it places your forces at risk no matter WHAT they are doing because they can easily be flanked and encircled by mechanized forces of a much smaller number as this quoted example illustrates.

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[–] Jumi@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

They fight over places with literally zero military value and probably smaller than my closest neighbourhood. What a waste of life...

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Yeah honestly, these are truly horrific numbers. While from the perspective of Ukrainian defenders of strategic objectives Russia certainly still has armor, from the Russian warplanning perspective of overall troop and logistics movements and armored assaults they essentially have none.

I don't want to underplay how lethal and dominating of a presence fpv drones are fiber optic or not, but there is a basic calculus that Russian generals must be able to see here that when you try to conduct an offensive without proper artillery support (Russia has artillery but it doesn't seem to be able to protect it enough to use it oppressively) and no armored vehicles or even unarmored trucks things start to look grim very quick. These are basic realities of war, drones radically tranform them but they don't make the rules of war defy gravity, they just force them to respond.

longer response

Even if North Korea and other allies send more troops, a basic reality of large scale sustained land war like this is that you can only concentrate infantry so much before your returns start to diminish and the risks start to skyrocket that a single ambush could knock out a critical amount of your forces. The only counter Russia has here is to exploit numerical superiority then is to keep spreading out a raw numerical superiority broadly along all possible fronts... and maybe that would work but the plan would require a serious strategic defeat in this offensive for Ukraine this summer because otherwise Russia will begin to encounter massive issues with not being able to maneuver all of its forces that have been laboriously deployed to the front and activated with synchronized orders into an almost purely capillary action.

...and as I have made the point already on the Ukraine community, in order to make a significant breakthrough you need armored vehicles and logistics vehicles to keep the supply lines up with the armor charging forward.. and to sustain broad offensives across an enemies frontlines don't you also need a lot of vehicles to project deep out along flanking routes?

Any large deployed infantry distributed along a front to maximize pressure at all points of contact with the enemy is by definition a thinly strewn line of troops in the middle of nowhere, closeby to the enemy, without any transportation to respond to regional shifts in the war and maneuver to new positions. I am not trying to underplay how scary Russia is and how intense this offensive and civilian bombing is, but this looks like Putin is setting up the conditions for a bloodbath of his own troops. Ukraine is only increasing its artillery capacity, and Russia's strategy right now REALLY doesn't work that well against a foe that has thorough artillery reserves.

What I am trying to say is that this feels like an incredibly futile waste of life. Russia simply does not posess the tools to decisively sustain a breakthrough in this offensive this summer, and I see that becoming even more true as time goes on, not less true. Even if Russia makes a scary, tactical breakthrough and takes some territory quicker than has up until this point in the summer offensive, can the Russian forces even risk exploiting the gap in Ukrainian defenses? None of the friendly forces around them have enough armored vehicles and the same CANNOT necessarily be said for the Ukrainian forces in the region.