'Russian Armor Burning In Sunflower Fields Strewn With Corpses:' Kremlin Fails Grow

This summer, in Dobropillia, Lyman, Kostiantynivka, Kupiansk and other Ukrainian battlefields, an offensive trend has become a dirge, as the Kremlin's return to large mechanized attacks which sacrifice armor for the ability to infiltrate troops further into the frontline kill zone have proliferated at massive cost of life. 

While it remains premature to write off anything - such as tanks - the way they are being used has to change. Armored attacks versus drones is a literal dead end, but so is the potential for inserting a few or few dozen troops at the cost of armored destruction. The reality is that Russia has not found the answer to Ukraine's initial defense, followed by its quick counterattacks, which have gained more ground faster than the Russians have been able to do. There may or may not be some new antidote some day, but it is not apparent this summer in Ukraine and not likely to appear this fall or winter, either. JL

Giorgia Provinciali reports in Medium:

One of the largest armored breakthrough attempts in months ended with the wreckage of Russian armor burning among sunflower fields strewn with corpses. Even Russia's new anti-drone active protection system, which was supposed to intercept incoming threats: proved useless against Ukrainian FPV drones that locked onto them one by one, striking their known weak points. To infiltrate a few dozen soldiers beyond Ukrainian positions, Moscow is willing to lose fourteen mechanized vehicles - nine of them tanks - and more soldiers on top of that. It is a doctrine of expendability taken to extreme consequences. In a drone-dominated kill zone, everyone advances by infiltration - but while the Ukrainians do it by first putting out the enemy’s eyes and sparing their own men, Russia no longer has the capacity to conduct such operations, and it compensates with the only resource its doctrine considers unlimited: flesh. The mechanized assault at Dobropillia is not a return to maneuver warfare: it is its funeral

A few days ago, on the Dobropillia axis, the Russians did something they had not done in quite a while: they launched a genuine, full-dress mechanized assault against Ukrainian positions — tanks in the lead, support vehicles behind. Although the defenders themselves were the first to acknowledge it, we had no way to verify it at the time, so we preferred to wait until we were back here, among the hottest Ukrainian positions in the Donbas, to cross-check direct testimony at several levels with our own observations from the field.

It was one of the largest armored breakthrough attempts in months anywhere on the southern flank of Donetsk region. And it ended the way it was easy to imagine it would end: with the wreckage of Russian armor burning among sunflower fields strewn with corpses.

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The tally leaves no room for interpretation: all nine tanks the occupiers committed were destroyed, and with them the secondary vehicles too (two armored fighting vehicles and three BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launchers). Some of the T-72B3s, in the modernized 2022 version, even carried the Arena-M active protection system, which was supposed to intercept incoming threats: it proved useless against the Ukrainian FPV drones that locked onto them one by one, striking their known weak points. The Russian soldiers wounded or killed in the operation number several dozen — but it is precisely on this point that we feel obliged to be clear: this episode must not be read through a twentieth-century lens, filed away as a repelled armored offensive, that is, a failed breakthrough.

The purpose of this kind of offensive is not to break through. It cannot be, for the simple reason that there is no linear front to break.

When we explained that the front, in this war, is not a line but a volume — a belt tens of kilometers deep, saturated by both sides with drones, sensors and small teams of infantry lying in wait — the direct consequence was exactly this: in a volume you do not break through, you infiltrate. Both sides do, reciprocally. The armored column, then, does not serve to rupture any front: it serves to carry forward, under armor and in the chaos of the attack, a few dozen infantrymen to be dropped deep inside while the vehicles burn. The wrecks of those tanks are nothing but the armored, expendable taxis of an infiltration. 

What those infantrymen do once inside is something we documented on video from Dobropillia itself last year: they hide in cellars, in tree lines and in farmhouses — killing farmers and entire families — they wait for other groups to trickle in and join them, they try to accumulate until they can claim a presence that maps compiled synthetically from afar will record as an “advance”. In the meantime they are hunted down, one by one, by Ukrainian drones and search teams. What we have been describing for a long time now is a war of reciprocal attrition-by-drip, in which possession of the ground is no longer measured in lines drawn on a map but in who manages to make the volume unlivable for the other.

And this is where the arithmetic becomes staggering.

To accumulate the human material needed for these attempts, the Russians lost an enormous number of men in the preceding months on this very axis — a continuous hemorrhage of small assaults consumed against the Ukrainian engagement zone.

And they lost still more in this attempt, in a manner so identical to the previous waves fed into the Ukrainian meat grinder that we could reuse, word for word, the article we wrote from these same places last year to document an identical attack. That is the whole point: to infiltrate a few dozen soldiers beyond the Ukrainian positions, Moscow is willing to lose fourteen mechanized vehicles — nine of them tanks — and then more soldiers on top of that.

It is a doctrine of expendability taken to its extreme consequences, in which even the individual armored vehicle and the individual man are not assets to preserve but ammunition to spend. 

There is another aspect, too, that almost always escapes notice from afar and that here you can touch with your hands: to get those vehicles and those men all the way to the line of contact, the Russians must have struggled mightily.

 

Gasoline in Russia is rationed after months of Ukrainian strikes on refineries, and diesel at the front is counted liter by liter. This is the substantial difference from last year, and it is in this key that the final result must be read. Every kilometer of the rear is now beaten by a Ukrainian firestorm of reconnaissance drones that see everything, strike drones that hit everything that moves, and artillery that closes the roads. A column of fourteen vehicles that even manages to show up at its own jumping-off point for the assault is already, in itself, a logistical survivor: it means someone found the fuel, hauled it there canister by canister under a sky saturated with drones, gathered the vehicles scattered in their hides and moved them by night along roads that guided artillery knows so thoroughly by heart it has turned them into a lunar landscape. To then consume that column in an hour, for the result everyone saw, gives the measure of the cost-benefit ratio the Russian command considers acceptable.

That this was no isolated episode is confirmed by what is happening right now: according to the National Guard’s “Rubizh” Brigade, which defends this sector together with the 1st “Azov” Corps, the Russians are already massing fresh forces toward Dobropillia. Only this time, their armor spent, they are relying on quad bikes and motorcycles: small, fast groups on two or four wheels — or on foot outright — trying to filter between positions, betting everything on speed and dispersion. It is the same logic of infiltration, stripped even of its armored taxi. Dobropillia, after all, is the gateway to a logistical sector supplying Kramatorsk and Sloviansk that we know by heart: this is where the Russian design wants to arrive, and this is why men keep dying here in waves.

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I took this picture in Kostiantynivka, Donetsk, Ukraine 🇺🇦 – copyrighted photo Giorgio Provinciali

It is exactly the same thing the Russians are attempting — without success — at Kostiantynivka. There is no breakthrough there either; only small infiltrations: small groups that slip in and are driven out or eliminated one after another. Contrary to what is described by many self-styled analysts writing from another time zone without ever having seen a terykon in their lives, the few Russians present in the city are confined to the southern sector and have no possibility of doing anything: the then commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, spoke little more than a week ago of no more than 145 men left inside the city limits, hunted by Ukrainian FPV drones and night bombers. The ones firmly garrisoning the city’s bastion — the southern hinge of the fortress belt that shields the Kramatorsk agglomeration — are the Ukrainians. And yet the Kremlin announced as early as July 3, through Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov, its «full control» of Kostiantynivka. In that case too, a good share of the long-distance cartographers rushed to color in their maps accordingly. Though it cost two prisoners, the sweep of the city center — carried out this past July 18 — was real, and the city remains Ukrainian. Yet, people who do not even know what Kostiantynivka looks like — its sprawl, its industrial districts, the depth of its defenses — keep assigning it positions and percentages of control to this day, on the basis of more or less well-geolocated footage and milblogger claims. A city, even more than the front, is a volume: of streets, cellars, warehouses, mezzanines. One hundred forty-five men scattered through a volume like that “control” nothing: they survive, for as long as they manage to.

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I took this picture in Donbas, moments before writing this article – copyrighted photo Giorgio Provinciali

One interesting detail. In mid-July, Ukrainian air assault brigades, with the support of adjacent units, conducted in the occupied part of Dnipropetrovsk region one of the deepest Ukrainian offensive operations in recent memory, producing a 25-kilometer advance that liberated six villages — Ternove, Zaporizke, Novoheorhiivka, Vorone, Sichneve and Maliivka — and more than 120 square kilometers of territory: a weighty piece of the 743 square kilometers Ukrainian forces have liberated since the start of the year (a figure Syrskyi himself chose to put on the record in his farewell message on relinquishing command).

The way they did it is the exact reverse of the armored column burned at Dobropillia: no mechanized buildups, but dozens of small, dispersed, simultaneous assault groups, covered by an electronic warfare shield that blinded Russian reconnaissance drones while dedicated teams hunted the enemy’s drone crews and electronic warfare operators, triangulating their frequencies and passing the coordinates to artillery and hunter drones.

First you put out the enemy’s eyes; then you move through the volume those eyes can no longer see: that is how the Russian 656th Motorized Rifle Regiment was annihilated at its concentration points in Temyrivka, and how the 120th Naval Infantry Division, newly formed with personnel from the Baltic Fleet, suffered critical losses along with units of the 68th Army Corps. This was no twentieth-century “breakthrough” either: it was an infiltration conducted with method, one that emptied the enemy’s volume instead of trying to punch a hole in it.

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I took this picture moments before writing this article – copyrighted photo Giorgio Provinciali

The picture that emerges is consistent from one end to the other of the flank we are writing from.

In the volume, everyone advances by infiltration — but while the Ukrainians do it by first putting out the enemy’s eyes and sparing their own men, Russia no longer has the capacity — assuming it ever had it in this war — to conduct operations of that kind, and it compensates with the only resource its doctrine considers unlimited: flesh.

The mechanized assault at Dobropillia is in no way the sign of a return to maneuver warfare: it is, if anything, its funeral — celebrated by burning, in a single afternoon, more armor than had been seen in months, to buy entry into the volume for a few dozen men who, in all likelihood, will never come out of it.