OPINION: The Invisible Front, Markus and Drapaty, Goeben und Breslau und ein Boot

Probably the punchline for this week is all the activity in the war that hasn’t even shown up as a backpage story in the mainstream West. I get that everyone has their own lives to live, yes Christmas is coming, but sometimes I am amazed at the amount of war and destruction mainstream media seems able to ignore. But then, I am a pretty old school journalist: If it bleeds it leads. Or if it’s an animal, like a pig sniffing a Ukrainian drone.

Frontal battles and big time bombardment

As noted in the last review, there absolutely has been a drop off in the quantity of Russian ground assaults, but they’re still coming. The Russian military is grappling with insufficient men and machines to make the major assaults that would really eliminate a serious chunk of Ukrainian positions, and orders are from Moscow to maintain the pressure no matter what. This is translating on the ground to the same types of attacks as in the past, but less frequently and more scattered.

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The epicenter is still the Kurakhove sector and as I write this there are reports that in two villages south of Kurakhove Ukrainian troops are cut off and possibly surrounded. Reports from the Ukrainian side say the situation is “critical,” which is commonly the code word for “we’re going to lose this ground.” The Ukrainian military media is furious that Joint Force East hasn’t been able to get the people out, and I too would love to see evidence that this isn’t another case of “Your orders are to hold we’ll get you help.”

The Ukrainian officer blogger Govoryat Snaiper is like most of the blogosphere – livid at the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) high command. His comment on Kurakhove posted this morning was, liberally translated by me:

“The situation in the Kurakhiv direction is really difficult, as always ‘No one expected this.’ I once thought that the Russians could not overmatch any of our generals, because they (Russians) were crooked-handed moron a*sholes, but then I realized that there is no worse enemy, than a crooked-handed moron a*shole friend.”

The thing I’d like to bring out is the scale. This is probably a battle between, a couple of platoons of Ukrainians against four or five times as many Russians – in other words, maybe 40-50 men vs. around 150-200 men. Both sides have, minimum, a quarter of a million men deployed along a 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) front. I’m not saying this Kurakhove mess isn’t a disaster in progress, because to me right now it definitely looks like it is.

As a possible indicator of Ukrainian command efficiency (next section), it’s a very serious indicator meriting concern. But, that said, in terms of the entire war and attrition to both sides’ armies, men and material, the battles around Kurakhove are a very small piece of a very big war. 

I’ve slapped a map together to try and show the disconnect between a violent and decisive battle on the tactical level, and how it stacks up relative to the entire front. The real news, I would say, is that people are dying all along the fighting line, but overall the front absolutely is static. The Russian winter offensive in operational terms is dead. It looks to me like they’re out of steam.

In the Kursk sector, the rah rah Russian media pushed out reports that the North Koreans had been committed to combat for the first time – vicinity of a village called Plekhovo – and according to those sources, Ukrainian positions were swamped, the North Koreans took no prisoners, 300 Ukrainians dead, etc.

However, within hours, drone video surfaced of soldiers, possibly North Korean, dragging dead/wounded down snowy roads, geo-located to Plekhovo. The Ukrainians keep saying they’ve already killled North Korean troops. Screengrab of that.

The Ukrainian sources claimed the North Koreans got cut to bits by the usual symphony of drones, artillery and mines. Both sides agree that 810th Naval Infantry – one of the most cut-up units in the Russian military – probably was involved. I don’t have a good read on what actually happened, but the presence of powerful Ukranian combined arms formations in the Kursk salient is well-documented, and none of those units (36th Marines, 21st and 47th Mech, 3rd SOF, among others) seem to have been hit really hard since November as far as I can see. I certainly don’t see evidence of a giant North Korean attack and Chosin Reservoir in Sudzha region. Ukrainian army propaganda photo of a Swedish CV-90 I assume is being operated by 21st Mech attached.

And there was this, which is not major news but still newsworthy, on Wednesday the Ukrainians claimed they had just set a new wartime record for a precision strike with an artillery piece – 70 kilometers (44 miles) using a Vulcano enhanced range round from a Polish Krab 155mm howitzer. No confirmation but reports like this are exactly the stuff people like to read about. Infographic about a Krab attached.

On the bombardment front, the Ukrainians have been busy. This week long-range drones burned oil refineries in Bryansk and Kaluga, the latter with those spiffy new Ukraine-manufactured jet drones.

A mixed ATACMS/drone strike on Thursday smacked the Taganrog military airfield and targets around it. It looks like the Ukrainian intent there was more degradation of the Russian air defense network around the SE Sea of Azov, and I saw a report that the Russians have repaired the rail bridge over the Kerch Strait sufficently to restart fuel car transit for the first time in about a year. So maybe the Ukrainians will try to hit the bridge again.

There was a huge fire at some kind of military production facility in Novosibirsk last night (screengrab), so either secret agents or poor Russian maintenance/fire safety there.

On Friday (again) the Ukrainians scored drone hits on a police barracks in Chechnya, this time apparently 2nd Regiment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Grozny. This is Ukrainian psychological warfare because these are the guys that repress the jihad in Chechnya. Big explosions in the capital courtesy of Ukrainians fighting tooth and nail for independence from Russia, are probably not conducive to the stability and loyalty the Kremlin pretty seriously needs in Chechnya. Here’s a link to the vid and explosion.

On the Russian side, this morning the Russians launched another one of those big missile/drone wave attacks primarily against Ukraine’s power grid, so those that still choose to respond to air raid warnings (ahem) had to troop downstairs in the early hours of the morning and sit around for several hours. Image of a Kyiv station crammed with people from this morning, this is nuts for a weekend.

Also, stock image of a Russian bomber and missile attached, so I can follow it with an image of Mikhail Shatskiy, general director of the Russian Mars military manufacturing conglomerate, which designs and produces a lot of the missiles Russia shoots at Ukraine. Ukrainian assassins shot him dead in Moscow’s Kuzminsky forest park area on Dec. 12.

It looks like the Ukrainian air defenses shot par for the morning, but it’s still early and I don’t have exact numbers. I read that it pretty much was a record by scale, 93 missiles and about 200 drones. The AFU says they shot down 81 missiles of which 11 were F-16 kills.

Explosions were reported in Chuguev, Kremenchuk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kyiv, Khmelnytskyi, Odesa, Vinnytsia and Cherkasy regions, but how many were shoot downs and how many were strikes, I don’t know. There are several reports near the town of Stryi, Ternopil region, the Burshtyn thermal power plant was hit (again). Ukrenergo said the Odesa grid was the worst hit.

Here in Kyiv, my district of the city had a scheduled power outage lasting until 10:10 a.m., i.e. it was planned well before the Russians shot their missiles. The launches took place about 4-6 hours before that and whatever damage the Russian missiles and drones did, they had finished doing at about 9:00 a.m. Power came back on in my apartment right on schedule at 10:10 a.m.  And then it went off, again on schedule, four hours later. And then, it turned on again, two hours after that, on schedule. So from that perspective, the Ukrainian grid took the Russian strike in stride, but I’m not in Odesa.

LATE ADDITION: The night after the biggest Russian missile strike against Ukraine for the entire war, Ukrainian drones stuck and set badly on fire an oil refinery in Orel, which is about as central in the Russian heartland as you can get. Big explosions, fuel reservoirs torched, fires visible from space. Image.

As I write this I’m seeing reports the Ukrainians hit something near Dzhankoe in Crimea, which historically is air defense.  So if the Russian objective was to beat the Ukrainians into submission with a massive missile strike, it didn’t work.

Reforming the AFU

The endless soap opera of trying to make the AFU a full-on efficient, professional institution with professional leaders and functional processes, saw yet more drama with Wednesday’s appearance of four hours of video comment and criticism of the chain of command by one Valery Markus, whom some of you may remember was the Command Sergeant Major of the 47th Mechanized Brigade.

The 47th was the formation in summer 2023 that was equipped with Bradleys and (later) M1A1 tanks that got orders to break through Russian lines south of Zaporizhzhia. Those attacks failed, bloodily, at least in part because the Russians were ready and waiting with mines and anti-tank missiles. But even at the time, there was chatter that all was not well in the brigade chain of command. Markus was one of the most visible critics of how the 47th went to war.

Markus had and probably has political ambitions and when the 47th was raised he became the face of the brigade, which was being created from scratch in early 2023. The idea at the time was to recruit only volunteers, limit recruitment only to skilled soldiers, place them aboard the best combat vehicles, and then train them to razor sharpness and unleash them on the Russian army. It didn’t work, the 47th ran into heavy fortifications and attacking units were pretty much shot to pieces. There were all manner of recriminations, the brigade commander got sacked, and Markus volunteered for demotion because he said, publicly, the 47th chain of command was stupid and unprofessional.

I haven’t (yet) gone through all the videos, but already it’s a lot clearer to me what went wrong when the Ukrainian army attempted to create a mechanized infantry brigade from whole cloth and threw it into Russian defenses that were clearly ready and waiting.

According to Markus, a big part of the problem was lack of time (which we knew), so training was superficial and chances to practice very important things like coordinating artillery fires and clearing minefields at speed were really limited. My sources tell me the training for the 47th staff organized by the Americans in Germany was, if one is honest, pretty primitive and not realistic.

Probably even worse, Markus says that a significant portion of the soldiers that were in the 47th weren’t volunteers, they had been forcibly transferred from the 30th brigade. It seems like the AFU command decided the 47th must go to war at a specific date and that deadline was so important the idea of manning the unit only with skilled volunteers was thrown out the window. Anyone with more than a day in the military knows what happens when a unit is told to surrender people to another unit – the worst ones are inevitably sent.

Markus says the time pressure stemmed from very high echelons insisting that the Big Summer Offensive start in June, no matter if the units that were going to do the fighting were ready or not.

I strongly suspect that pressure originated in the White House and specifically with the NSC head Jake Sullivan. This is because Pentagon guys know better than anyone else in the world that handing an army US combat vehicles does not make them combat effective like the US military. It takes training, time, and above all professional officers and NCOs. From the Pentagon point of view, it’s absurd that a unit still taking in recruits in April could be expected to fight well against the Russian army in June.

Add in to this that, at the time the 47th was being spun up, AFU leadership (Zaluzhny) was openly hesitant about launching a Big Offensive. So my journo spidey sense tells me the White House and Sullivan pressured the Ukrainians to launch an offensive the Ukrainians knew had little chance of succeeding. But I can’t prove it. 

Other videos released by 47th vets tell of limited training and junior officers who had little idea about standard officer stuff like forcing NCOs to teach first aid and drilling down on tactical drills. The picture of a green unit thrown into combat with insufficient preparation – which most of us had suspected for some time – is abundantly clear. At least, our understanding of why some Ukrainian brigades fail in combat is better. Image of Markus attached.

It is only fair to add that since then the 47th and its new leadership has pulled itself together and now the brigade is one of the AFU’s best. But that of course begs the question why it took General Zaluzhny and later General Syrsky more than a year and probably hundreds of soldiers’ lives to turn the 47th into a decent fighting outfit.

Which leads me, fairly neatly, to the other interesting development in Ukrainian army reform this week. This Thursday, the new commander of the ground forces of the AFU, General Mykhailo Drapaty, put out his first manifesto of how the AFU is going to change and improve. As some of you will recall, he got bumped up to that job last month in the latest round of AFU top-level musical chairs, and most observers think Drapaty is a new-generation, fully non-Soviet officer whose entire way of military thinking comes from a decade of fighting the Russians – he’s not NATO and he’s not Soviet – he’s home grown Ukrainian. He has an excellent reputation with the troops but, as always, getting promoted is not the same as automatically being able to handle more responsibility.

Drapaty says his key priorities are people, technology, and transparent management, and that his goal is to transform the AFU into a modern force that will fight the Russian army on its terms and win.

The reforms – the word he uses is “transformation” – will cover everything: recruiting, training, implementation of new tech, digitalization of everything possible, pushing digital combat movement down to really low levels, and making work with volunteers (and there are millions of them) systematic. That would be good because right now the Ukrainians are fighting a major war and the way it looks to me something like half of the daily food, water, personal equipment and light vehicle transport isn’t from the Ukrainian government, it’s from volunteers. This is amazing and commendable but I question whether it’s the best way to fight a big conventional war against Russia.

If you’re talking drones on the front line, that figure is probably 70-80%. War has never seen anything like this. Drapaty’s take is that the AFU will incorporate drones on an even more massive scale – which would be something because right now the AFU operates drones with a density and efficiency unlike any other army in the world.

By this I mean that unless a NATO brigade had absolute air superiority, I would expect it to get cut to bits by a Ukrainian brigade of the same size. That’s how effective I think the Ukrainians are with drones. Drapaty obviously sees what works on the battlefield.

Drapaty says that the heart of the reforms is the Ukrainian infantryman who, the vision goes, will be aggressive, well-armed, and the speartip of a lethal organization. All training – both of infantrymen and all the support units – should center on the objective of making it so the Ukrainian infanty can fight and kill, and they know it.

The first areas in the AFU to experience “management changes” will be logistics and military training, he says. Next priorities are digitalization of everything, both what moves and stands still, standardized and transparent recruiting, active social support to soldiers so they can spend their time thinking about how to fight better rather than worrying about their families, and training leaders better to make units more agile and efficient.

All of which is ambitious and it would be hard to find anyone in the AFU that would say Drapaty has the wrong idea. It’s obvious he understand the problems. The solutions he says he will aim at, are common sense.

As always with the AFU, the hard part is going to be the execution, particularly inside an institution that sometimes has done a bad job supporting its soldiers, and whose officer corps is only about 1/3 (my number) really efficient and professional, and the other 2/3, frankly, are resistant to reform because reform means they’re the officers that won’t get promoted, they’re going to stagnate in their careers or get thrown out.

Drapaty claims his reform program is fully supported by Srysky and the national government and his message pretty much warns anyone that doesn’t want to play ball the Drapaty way, at best will soon be looking for a civilian job. Drapaty is a heck of a guy, apparently, but we’ve heard this before, so this army reform story will bear watching.

Which brings me back to Markus, because he went public in detail about what was wrong with 47th Brigade and some of its officers, the same day Drapaty published his manifesto.

It’s possible he felt that with Drapaty pushing reform he could get away with four hours of YouTube laying out how sloppy AFU force generation – and again, it could well be the Americans had a hand in this – was in 2023.

LATE UPDATE: Financial Times reported the commander of joint forces East Oleksandr Major General Lutsenko has just been sacked and Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavsky – an officer with a background and reputation like Drapaty – was appointed to his position. I haven’t seen confirmation. Word is this is because Syrsky isn’t happy about the situation around Kurahove or, if you’re cynical, Syrsky and Zelensky need someone to blame about Kurakhove.

The Goeben, The Breslau und Black Sea U-Boats

Last review I promised some outside-the-box suggestions that would win the war a lot quicker for the Ukrainians if only Ukraine’s allies would be willing to think smart rather than the next election. This is the first of them.

In August 1914 the First World War was just about to start and the British navy chased two German warships, a battlecruiser called the Goeben and a light cruiser called the Breslau, into Turkish neutral waters and the Straits.

Instead of interning the two warships or forcing them back out to see and into the hands of a powerful British squadron waiting in international waters, the Turks exchanged a bunch of telegrams with Berlin and the Goeben was renamed the Ottoman Navy’s flagship Yavuz Sultan Selim, and the Breslau became the Medilli. In due course, the German commander Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon resigned from the Imperial German navy to become a Turkish admiral and commander of the Turkish fleet, and the German swabbies joined Turkish service and I hear they were issued with Fez hats.

The Turkish cabinet was split on whether it was better to stay neutral or join the Germans and the Austrians to fight the Ottomans’ traditional enemy, the Russians. The British of course were furious the two warships had escaped and now it was a lot harder to push the neutral Turks around on the high seas, because the Ottomans now had a modern battlecruiser.

In October the pro-war wing of the Ottoman government told Admiral Souchon he might raid Russian shore facilities in the Black Sea in response to Russian provocations (the Turks said) of Turkish borders in the Balkans and Caucasus, to British provocations (this is raising the Arabs and, eventually, Lawrence of Arabia) in  Ottoman possessions in the Near East.

Souchon, aboard the Selim with Mellili, and several Turkish destroyers in tow sailed to Sevastopol and bombarded it. Feodosia also got shelled. The British, now furious, demanded the Turks hand over the two warships to the Royal navy or else. The Turks declared a jihad against Christians (unless they were German or Austro-Hungarian). This brought the Ottoman Empire to the Entente side in World War One. For the next four years, the Goeben was by far the most powerful warship on the Black Sea, so she owned its waters. The Ottomans didn’t survive the war but the Goeben/Selim did.

It pains me to say this, but it really seems like there is no one of any consequence, anywhere in NATO, whose education extended to the naval history of World War One and the Goeben and Breslau, or the teachings of Mahan. For them, very much unlike the leadership of Imperial Germany at the time, the Black Sea appears to be a closed space into which they cannot project force, or imagine the projection of force, because NATO isn’t a belligerant.

This disappointment was reinforced for me, and most of the people living in Ukraine this morning, when the Russian fleet (what’s left of it) sortied from its current home base in Novorossisk and, counts varied, fired between 20 and 30 of the 60 or so missiles Russia launched at Ukraine in today’s strikes. It was anything but an Armada, the Black Sea Fleet is pretty tattered and usually the Russians only manage to sortie 1-2 frigates and a few missile boats armed with Kaliber cruise missiles to shoot missiles at Ukraine.

(As many of you recall, Russia’s Black Sea fleet has operated out of Novorossisk since October 2023 because Ukrainian missile strikes sank too many Russian warships in Crimea, for the most part while they were tied up at wharf in Sevastopol.)

How is it, after three years of war, no one in NATO has understood, that Novorossisk is a sitting duck and it would be child’s play for a single submarine? How is it that these missile launch platforms are sailing out into the Black Sea, shooting weapons at Ukrainian homes and businesses, and then sailing back into Novorossisk without interference? Russian anti-submarine warfare capacity is second-rate. Why isn’t this being taken advantage of?

I’m not talking about finding a sub for the Ukrainians that carries ICBMs and nukes. Just a short-range attack boat. A Cold War diesel-electric. It seems like there are lots of candidates. Canada has submarines. Germany has submarines and they make oustanding ones. Greece has submarines and they’re retiring some of them. South Korea makes submarines, also excellent, and South Korean shipbuilding has a long record of looking for ways to  make money.  The Australians are complaining they can’t find crew for the subs they have. The Dutch, I read, just took two boats out of service (I also read they may reverse that, but that doesn’t change my point, Walrus image attached).

The Spanish have a Cold War boat they’re planning to replace. I didn’t research it down to individual fleet units in other navies, but I read that the Norwegians, Poles, Portuguese, and Swedes all have old(ish) submarines that, possibly, might serve those countries’ national security interests better sinking Russian warships in the Black Sea, than sitting around tied up to a pier in Bergen or Dan Helder somewhere and mostly rusting. There’s only one port left on the Black Sea the Russians can operate from. Remember, a submarine wouldn’t have to torpedo Russian ships on the high seas. It could just mine Novorossisk’s approaches.

Yes it would be complicated. A Ukrainian crew would have to be collected and trained. There would be the getting the Turks on board with allowing the submarine through the Straits before it’s turned over to the Ukrainian navy, there would be figuring out a protected sub pen somewhere, there would be work figuring out how to track the Russian anti-submarine aircraft and warships in the Black Sea, which NATO does but I doubt very seriously they ever tell the Ukrainians a word about it.

I have no doubt whatsover that the reason this suggestion sounds loopy, is that it’s even more dificult than conventional tools of support Ukraine’s allies are attempting to use, and if we are honest not always efficiently and effectively. The present joint effort to support Ukraine with simple solutions is far from running smoothly. Issuing the Ukrainian Navy with a submarine on Mahan principles is complicated.

The proposal becomes more crazy, if we were to start a discussion – which I am not – about maybe putting together a crew of mercenary NATO submariners and throwing them aboard Södermanland class or Walrus class diesel-electric boat, and turning them loose to prowl off the Crimea coast. It would be a great movie  though.

My point is, remember the Goeben and Breslau. German diplomats and naval strategists in August 2014 saw a way to strike at their enemy Russia, a land power, using naval power projection creatively. The solution they came up with was far outside the parameters of conventional naval thinking, but, they made it a reality. In about three months.

As a direct result of that German strategic brilliance, Germany obtained a powerful ally without which – probably – German’s main ally, Austria-Hungary, would have collapsed by 1916. It didn’t win the war for Germany, but in long-term strategy, the pay off relative to effort was giant. The “secret sauce” (not a fan of that term but it fits) was thought outside the box.

It required creative thinking and an assumption from the get-go that “We never did that and no one does that and besides that would be really complicated” is exactly the wrong way to fight a war.

Three years is a long time for imagination to fail.

Reprinted from Kyiv Post’s Special Military Correspondent Stefan Korshak’s blog. You can find the original here.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.