Humanitarian aid is distributed to citizens after the Ukrainian army liberated the town of Balakliya in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on September 11. (Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The past week has seen a stunning transformation of the battlefield in eastern Ukraine, as a rapid armored offensive by Ukrainian forces broke through Russian defense lines and retook more than 3,000 square kilometers of territory.
This is more territory than Russian forces have captured in all of their operations in Ukraine since April.
As brilliantly conceived and executed as the offensive was, it also succeeded because of Russian inadequacies. Throughout areas of the Kharkiv region, Russian units were poorly organized and equipped, and many offered little resistance.
Their failures, and their disorderly retreat eastward, have made the goal of President Vladimir Putin’s special military operation to take all of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions considerably more difficult to achieve.
Over the weekend, the Russian withdrawal continued from border areas that had been occupied since March. The villages located less than five kilometers from the border flew the flag of Ukraine.
The collapse of Russian defenses has prompted recriminations from influential bloggers and Russian military figures in Russian state media.
As the Ukrainian flag was raised in community after community over the past few days, a question arose: How does the Kremlin respond?
A lightning operation
Ukrainian officials had telegraphed that an offensive was imminent, but not where it actually happened. There was much noise about a counterattack in the south, and even US officials spoke of Ukrainian operations to “form the battlefield” in Kherson. Russian reinforcements, perhaps as many as 10,000, arrived in the region over a period of weeks.
There was indeed a Ukrainian assault on Kherson, but it seems that the intention was to fix the Russian forces, while the real effort came hundreds of miles to the north. It was a disinformation operation the Russians could have been proud of.
Kateryna Stepanenko of the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, says the deception worked.
“Ukrainian military officials reported that elements of the (Russian) Eastern Military District that had previously supported offensive operations toward Sloviansk had redeployed to the Southern Axis,” he told CNN.
Their replacements were clearly not up to the job: a mix, Stepanenko said, of “Cossack volunteers, volunteer units, DNR/LNR militia units and the Russian Rosgvardia (National Guard). These forces were not enough to defend a vast and complex first line”.
The Ukrainians chose the weakest point in Russian defenses for their initial push: an area controlled by the Luhansk militia with Russian National Guard units further back. They were no match for a highly mobile armored assault that quickly made artillery irrelevant.
Igor Strelkov, formerly head of the militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic and now a caustic critic of Russian military shortcomings, pointed to the poor training of these units and the “exceptional caution of the actions of the Russian aviation.” In short, the Russian frontline units were hung out to dry without sufficient air support.
Multiple geotagged videos analyzed by CNN, as well as local accounts, show a chaotic withdrawal of Russian units, with large amounts of ammunition and hardware left behind.
The poor quality of Russian defenses along a critical north-south axis holding up the Donetsk offensive is hard to fathom. Once underway, the intent of the Ukrainian offensive was very clear: to destroy this supply artery. Within three days, they had done so, mostly because Russian reinforcements were slow to mobilize.
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