What Will Break First?

Jim Geraghty has a fine column today at NRO in which he asserts that: The Russian invasion of Ukraine will end when one or more of four things breaks:

• the Russian supply lines;
• the Ukrainian ability to effectively resist;
• the Russian economy;
• the patience of some armed individuals around Putin.

The explanations he gives for each of these four are interesting, and readers following what's happening in Ukraine will want to read his entire piece. I'll just highlight what he says about his first point.

He writes:

On Friday, there was a rumor that “Russia has resources left for the war until Sunday, after which they will collapse.”

There are numerous reports of Russian attacks as of this morning, so that rumor sounds like an exaggeration of a real phenomenon — that Russia invaded with far too few resources, that frontline Russian units are stretching their supply lines thinner and thinner, and that many Russian units are getting literally and metaphorically stuck in a quagmire.

Trent Telenko, a retired technical analyst at the U.S. Defense Contracts Management Agency, offered another fascinating assessment of the logistics and terrain challenges Russian forces are facing over at the ChicagoBoyz blog:

The head and first dozen or so kilometers of the southernmost column north of Kiev have been stuck there for EIGHT DAYS. The Russians have since rammed more and more vehicles into this monster traffic jam (idiotically “following the plan” Soviet-style) so the whole thing is now 65-70 kilometers long (almost 40 miles).

And, because the trucks can’t go off-road due to the Rasputitsa mud and tire problems, they’re stuck on the roads and the roads’ shoulders three vehicles wide for the whole 40 miles. That means fuel and resupply trucks can’t move on or off road to deliver anything to anybody.

So all the columns’ heads are now out of fuel and battery power. They can’t move north, south or sideways, and everything behind them is stuck because of the mud, and rapidly running out of fuel and vehicle battery charge too (assuming they haven’t already).

Nor can any of those columns defend themselves because they’re too densely packed. They’re just targets waiting for the Ukrainians to destroy them.

Only the Ukrainians had something better to do. They opened the floodgates of reservoirs around those columns to flood them and turn the surrounding areas into impassable quagmires for months – probably until July or August.

Probably several thousand Russian vehicles in those columns will be irrecoverable losses. Hundreds of Russian soldiers might have drowned.

This was not just a debacle, but an EPIC one. About one-fifth of the Russian force in Ukraine is now flooded or trapped and are definitely out of the war for good.

There's more:

In a November 2021 essay, Alex Vershinin of War on the Rocks explained why the Russian army would face intensely challenging logistical problems if it invaded, and why each Ukrainian attack on Russian supply-chain trucks would exacerbate those problems:

As a result of extra artillery and air defense battalions, the Russian logistics requirements are much larger than their U.S. counterparts. If an army has just enough trucks to sustain itself at a 45-mile distance, then at 90 miles, the throughput will be 33 percent lower. At 180 miles, it will be down by 66 percent.

The further you push from supply dumps, the fewer supplies you can replace in a single day. . . . The Russian army does not have enough trucks to meet its logistic requirement more than 90 miles beyond supply dumps.

To reach a 180-mile range, the Russian army would have to double truck allocation to 400 trucks for each of the material-technical support brigades.

We’ve already seen videos of Russian soldiers looting shops and grocery stores for provisions. This is day twelve of the war; numerous reports indicate Moscow expected Ukraine to capitulate within a couple of days.

The longer Russia takes to subdue the Ukrainians the more their supply chains will be harassed and degraded. Not only is more weaponry entering the theater from the countries to Ukraine's west, but it looks like Poland will also soon be delivering Russian-made MIG fighter jets, which will further increase the hazards to Russia's supply lines.

When this war started twelve days ago all the experts were saying that the Ukrainians were fighting valiantly but that an eventual Russian victory was inevitable. Yet if Ukraine can hold out for another week or two the number of Russian troops who surrender may well turn into a flood, and if that starts happening there may be reason to hope that the whole Russian miltary effort will collapse.

Experts are often, if not usually, wrong.

Read the rest of Geraghty's analysis at the link.