Range of Offensive Options in Ukraine

I was having a discussion on instant message last night with a family member about the new Ukrainian offensive and ended up making the following remarks (yes, I do number my posts even in private discussions):

The range of offensive options in Ukraine are:

  1. Turns into a limited advance because of significant Russian resistance (and with low casualties on both sides).
  2. Turns into a major attack that hits significant resistance and both sides take high casualties.
  3. The Russians withdraw by plan, resulting in low casualties.
  4. The Russians withdraw because of collapsing morale, resulting in low Ukrainian casualties.
  5. The Russians counterattack after the initial Ukrainian attack, turning this into a big fight with high casualties.
  6. The Russians initiate an offensive elsewhere, raising the level of intensity across the entire front.
  7. This could be a Ukrainian feint or a secondary attack and the real Ukrainian attack will occur later, to the NE of Kherson or down from Zaporizhzhia to Melitopol or towards Izyum.

A few other comments:

The goal of the Ukrainian attacks would be collapse the whole Russian defense to the north of Crimea. That could be done by attacking Kherson, attacking to the NE of Kherson, or attacking down towards Melitopol. There are three possible offensive routes toward Crimea. You kind of want to hit the least defended and the least defensible one. If you take Kherson, there is a still a river to cross. Terrain is clear to Melitopol. If you attack down towards Melitopol and then turn right, you threaten to surround all the Russian forces in Kherson and NE of Kherson. The Russians to defend the area north of Crimea have to defend against three attack avenues: 1) Kherson, 2) NE Kherson, and 3) Melitopol. Are they defending all three of them equally? Is Ukraine favoring one attack route over the other? So, we shall see where Ukraine attacks, but more importantly, where are they actually able to advance, if anywhere. And if they do advance, does Russia counterattack to restore their positions. A lot of possibilities here.

Map here: 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (wikimedia.org)

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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6 Comments

  1. As a retired Int O, I’ve been going on about a Southern thrust on Melitopol for over a month. Take Kherson, fix the RA to the East there, then drive down on Melitopol to strand the RA East of Kherson and slowly strangle the Crimea. The only question is, does the UA have the commbat power to accomplish this?

  2. It would be nice to the UKR take the Kherson region N of the Dnepr, but there has been so little in the way of confirmed advances.

    Can they get things rolling ?

  3. At a minimum, I think that Ukraine would want to use the Dnipro River as the final defensive line from which to send forth units to harass and destroy units of Russia and thus the offense in the south would be to regain land down to the Dnipro River. Because such a line running along the Dnipro River is easily flanked in the north by an invasion across the border with Belarus, Ukraine would need to commit significant forces to a defensive line along M07 (a.k.a. E373) between Kiev and the border with Poland that could be reinforced if its allies’ intelligence resources detected the build-up for an attack across the border with Belarus. If that M07-Dnipro line was ever breached then President Putin probably would think that all of the wayward child (Ukraine) could be reunited with Mother Russia. Then it would be a matter of whether or not the people of Ukraine would be willing to fight a long-term guerilla-war (with the initial reaction to the invasion suggesting that they might just be willing to do that).

    The downside of such a defensive line (even if used as a line from which raids could be launched for dissuading Russia from remaining in eastern Ukraine)
    would be that a sense might develop among civilians who have fled from the east of the Dnipro River that the eastern half of Ukraine had been relinquished to Russia. President Putin might get the same idea, and attempt to expand from the presently occupied land in the east to as far as the river in order to have even a broader corridor between the Donetsk Region and the Kherson Region (with its access to the Crimea Region). Rather than then attempt to invade across that river-line, President Putin could always claim that the eastern half of Ukraine was all that he ever wanted in order to protect the Russians in the eastern half from those “Nazi” Ukrainians. Such a situation could lead to a peace treaty allowing for a West Ukraine and an East Ukraine (“deja vu all over again”).

    It seems to me that the alternative would be to fight a war of mobility without resorting to any extensive line of defense. That seems to be the current case, with Ukraine doing a better job than is Russia. So, I expect that Ukraine will counterattack in an opportunistic way (with the opportunities revealed by allies’ intelligence resources). The present opportunity being exploited is probably the opportunity to surround soldiers of Russia in the Kherson Region and then possibly offer a prisoner exchange as part of a diplomatic effort to get back most if not all of Ukraine (including Kherson Region, Zhaporizhzhia Region, Donetsk Region, Luhansk Region and even Crimea Region). The problem is that President Putin probably wouldn’t negotiate if it meant dropping dreams of annexing Ukraine into a restored Russian Empire (unless he saw low-hanging fruit along another border of Russia, easier-to-take fruit that must be taken through “defensive wars” because Mother Russia has always been attacked by its neighbors and needs a buffer zone).

  4. By the way, to complete the picture, the M07-Dnipro Line would need to be protected against outflanking in the southwest by having two armies defending against the limited capability of Russia for launching amphibious assaults along the coastline between the Inhul River and the Dnister River and the border with Romania. So, there would need to be four army commands in all: 1st Army (commanded by a general having expertise/skills/passion/personality for holding a highway while harassing and destroying invaders in the hilly woodlands to the north of the highway), 2nd Army (commanded by a general having expertise/skills/passion/personality for holding a river while harassing and destroying invaders in Eastern Ukraine with its hilly woodlands, forested steppes, and un-forested steppes across the river as one progresses downstream), 3rd Army (commanded by a general having expertise/skills/passion/personality for defending an inlet-bestrewn coastline backed by un-forested steppes with a river on northeastern flank and another river on southwestern flank), 4th Army (commanded by a general having expertise/skills/passion/personality for defending an inlet-bestrewn coastline backed by un-forested steppes with a river on northeastern flank and an international border on southern flank).

    Here are three useful maps:

    https://www.mapsofworld.com/ukraine/ukraine-river-map.html

    https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Forestry-zoning-of-Ukraine-Source-adapted-from-39-and-the-records-of-the-National_fig2_258383304

    https://www.dreamstime.com/ukraine-map-administrative-division-separate-regions-names-color-isolated-white-background-vector-image208992073

  5. Oh, the overall commander-in-chief would be headquartered in Kiev (with responsibility for allocating resources and troops to the four armies while also defending the capital city, thus some urban warfare training would be an asset to go along with strategic/logistic thinking). Rather than his having a numbered army, he would have a heavily armed HQ.

  6. I guess that HQ also would be responsible for countering any airborne assaults into western Ukraine since unsupported operations (think Snake Island) don’t seem to be off the chart when it comes to the Russians.

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