•Botched logistics and fierce resistance are causing problems. But the respite could be temporary
Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s enigmatic chief of general staff, once co-authored a short manual for his commanders, called “The principles of victory in combat”. Russian officers had become too predictable, he thought. Surprise is achieved by “striking the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which the enemy is unprepared.” Yet it is hard to think of a less dynamic attack than the one approaching Kyiv from the north-west. A Russian military convoy, no less than 60km long, has been moving at snail’s pace towards the capital. It epitomises Russia’s plodding approach to the war so far.
The convoy stretches from Prybirsk, a town near Chernobyl, down to at least Antonov airport, the site of a Russian helicopter assault on the first day of the war. Its most recent location is hard to pin down, since the area has been cloudy in recent days. But on March 3rd British defence intelligence claimed, with some satisfaction, that the column had made “little discernible progress in over three days”. A day later an American defence official concurred, noting that it remained 25km from the centre of Kyiv.
Perhaps the most important reason for this is logistics. Russian fuel, engineering and other supply units have struggled to keep up with frontline forces, leaving vehicles stranded on the road. Video footage shows Ukrainian tractors gleefully towing away what are purported to be abandoned Russian air-defence systems and armoured vehicles.
In an article published on the War on the Rocks website in November, Alex Vershinin, an American army officer, noted that Russian units are far heavier on artillery and air-defences than their nato counterparts. This makes logistics tougher: a unit that fires 4,000 shells a day needs 50 trucks a day to replenish. Russia’s army would not have enough trucks to “meet its logistic requirement” more than 90 miles beyond supply dumps, he concluded.
Supplying a large invasion force in a huge country would stress any army. But Russia has further woes. “The Russians seemed to have fixed themselves to roads,” observes Mick Ryan, a retired major-general who led Australia’s defence college until recently. That, he says, has slowed them down. Mr Ryan points to the cautionary example of Operation Market Garden in 1944, the Allied effort to shorten the war by seizing crossings over the Rhine in the second world war. Britain’s xxx Corps made an arduous advance over a single narrow road, plagued by boggy ground on either side and German counter-attacks.
Russia’s repetition of that mistake may be a function of deeper military dysfunction. Trent Telenko, a former auditor for America’s Defence Contract Management Agency, has pointed to video footage of a Russian Pantsir-s1 air-defence system that was stuck in the mud and captured by Ukraine. Tires, he notes, need to be periodically moved to exercise the inflation system and to avoid exposing any one part to continuous sunlight.
That Russian forces have not done this basic maintenance may reflect endemic corruption. In 2019 Russian military prosecutors said that losses from corruption had spiralled and exceeded 7bn roubles (around $109m at the time). Neglected tires will fail to get through mud and must stick to paved paths. Images of the convoy show trucks crowded on the road, three abreast, preventing anything from passing. In some cases, Russian soldiers have even punched holes in their fuel tanks to avoid facing combat. Western officials say that the biggest problem is not that Ukraine has blown up key bridges, but that Russian bridging units have been unable to get through the congestion to build new ones.
Such a long and exposed convoy should be a juicy target for air strikes. Ukraine still has aircraft in the sky and its Turkish-made tb2 drones have struck Russian forces in other parts of the country. Yet Russia is likely to have deployed air-defence and electronic-warfare systems around the column, making it harder for Ukrainian aircraft to approach. Troops are another matter. The level of Ukrainian resistance has shocked Russian commanders. Just as German soldiers harassed the British column in Operation Market Garden, Ukrainians appear to be picking off elements of the Russian force.
There has been fierce fighting in Bucha and Gostomel, where the front of the convoy was estimated to be on March 1st, with images showing large quantities of destroyed Russian armour. On March 2nd Ukrainian forces claimed to have liberated the village of Makariv, to the south-west of the convoy. A day later they reportedly counter-attacked at Ivankiv, close to its northern end. American officials say that Ukrainian forces have used Javelin anti-tank missiles to destroy Russian tanks and block the road. At least three Russian commanders have been killed in different parts of the country after they ventured to the front, frustrated by their lack of progress.
Yet the fog of war remains thick. Russia may have chosen to slow down its movement in order to synchronise its various advances on Kyiv. Russian forces to the west of the Dnieper river have moved faster and farther than those to the east of it, which have been held up in fierce fighting. If the aim is to encircle Kyiv, in preparation for a siege, Russia might be waiting for its eastern thrust to catch up, suggests Mathieu Boulegue of Chatham House, a think-tank.
Progress in southern Ukraine has been quicker still, with Russian forces taking their first major city, Kherson, on March 2nd or 3rd and seizing the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, on March 4th. Zaporizhzhia is only 85km to the city of Dnipro, a key junction and crossing point on the Dnieper. Prior to the war, Ukraine’s best and most numerous forces were in the east of the country, facing the Donbas region, the site of a Russian-backed proxy war. Those forces are at risk of being cut off from the rest of the country.
Nor is congestion unknown in big wars. The German advance into France in May 1940 was described as “the largest traffic jam in European history”, by Rolf-Dieter Müller, a German historian. It resulted in a 250km-long logjam through the Ardennes that ended 80km east of the Rhine. The Germans, of course, got there in the end.
Credit | The Economist