Two years of Ukraine war: Deadlock in a transparent battlefield

Sandeep Dikshit

Drones of all shapes and sizes keep a close vigil on the battlefield from above. Electronic communications intercept every transmitted word except perhaps from the ultra-secure military lines. But the highly mechanised armies of Russia and Ukraine/NATO barely move and are more into trench warfare.

Despatches from war correspondents are studded with words like “interference countermeasures”, “radio suppression of air defence”, “special aviation jamming” and “electronic and cyber reconnaissance”. Coupled with videos being transmitted by drones, the visibility of the battlefield is complete.

Timeline

February 2022: Russian forces attack Kyiv but pull back after weeks of fighting.

March: Russian forces take Kherson region.

April: Offensive gathers force in Donbas. Ukraine sinks ship Moscova.

May: Russian forces take Mariupol after a bitter battle.

August: Ukraine counteroffensive with West-supplied weapons.

September: Ukraine retakes parts of Kharkiv.

October: Explosion damages Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea with Russia.

November: Russian forces withdraw from Kherson.

December: Ukraine drones hit military bases inside Russia.

January 2023: Missile attack on Makiivka kills several recently recruited Russian soldiers.

February: Russian forces close in on Bakhmut. Biden visits Ukraine.

June: Putin’s right-hand man Yevgeny Prigozhin stages short-lived rebellion.

July: Drones again damage Kerch bridge.

August: Prigozhin among those killed in plane crash.

November: Russia launches massive drone strike on Kyiv.

December: Ukraine destroys one of Russia’s Black Sea warships.

January 2024: Putin offers foreigners Russian citizenship to fight in Ukraine.

Feb: Russians take city of Avdeevka. What lies ahead: Russian assaults on Konstantinovka, Kramatorsk.

Artillery, primarily long-range and high-precision, has been returned to the pedestal of the ‘God of War’. The determining factor in the ongoing battles is the number of shells fired and the NATO artillery is superior, admits Yuri Baluyevsky, Chief of the Russian General Staff for four years till he was dismissed in 2008.

There is also a renaissance in infantry combat for the first time after World War II and the importance of hypersonic missiles to strike deep has come to the fore.

But superior air defences have unexpectedly triumphed over military aviation, which cannot swarm enemy territory. In fact, they are being forced to fly cautiously even over own territory. Combat aviation in the form of massive air strikes is passe. Which is why, perhaps, the news of F-16s being poised to join combat from the Ukrainian side doesn’t overtly bother the Russians.

The sky is choc a bloc with micro-devices — hexacopters and bomb-dropping drones — hunting for almost every infantryman and tank. The sky will soon get more crowded after the European Union announced plans to provide 10 lakh drones to Ukraine. GlobalData’s 2023 report, “Drones in Aerospace & Defense”, notes that Ukraine’s drone fleet has destroyed crucial Russian supply trucks, delayed the Russian military’s advances, and exposed the Russian army’s vulnerabilities. Russian military channels also report drones destroying some famous western brand names in armoured and artillery warfare.

As with military aviation, the tank has also become the hunted. Despite the jugaad of cages fitted above the hatches to prevent bombs from striking the mainframe, videos show how easily they turn into balls of fire. And if drones won’t, the liberally scattered mines immobilise tanks. Military planners need to put their heads together to retain the role of tanks as the main striking force or a means of breakthrough.

But the apparent stalemate hides a slowly widening battlefield. The area of combat is widening deep into Russia with civilian casualties recurring in the city of Belgorod. Western countries are also overtly supporting the war with public declarations of supply of weapons while in the process, arm-twisting their third world client states into parting with Soviet/Russian weaponry to bring down the Russian Goliath once and for all. The Contact Group on the Defence of Ukraine now includes about 50 countries.

NATO intelligence openly admits to sharing reconnaissance responsibilities along the Russian borders. Italian Air Force, for instance, has the responsibility of reconnaissance flights over parts of Poland bordering Belorussia, a declared Russian ally since the start of the conflict. The Poles are deploying tanks and infantry along the Belarusian border alongside American and NATO mobile strike units. In videos, machine gunners and infantry men engaged in combat from the Ukrainian side are frequently heard talking in nearly every tongue on earth.

The arena of the conflict has expanded thousands of kilometres thanks to drones. Some Ukrainian ones have even reached the Kremlin. But if that was symbolic, the Russians are getting hurt by western drones as far afield as St Petersburg, striking fuel depots.

The combat arena is now well and squarely into the Black Sea where Ukrainian naval drones attacked the large landing Russian ship, Caesar Kunikov. The ship sank. At the time of the strike, an American RQ-4B Global Hawk UAV carried out target designation, controlled by its military personnel.

While funnelling unmentionable amounts of money into Ukraine, the West has brought its repeatedly used tactic of forcing the enemy to fight with one arm tied. Any country which helps Russia is promptly tarred by the western media and the dirty tricks department of Washington’s several agencies is activated against that country. Top officials have flown down to India to dissuade India from doing any trade — military and merchandise — with Russia. All this while its industry-military complex uninhibitedly funnels arms and intelligence, targeting support to whichever party it has chosen — the Ukrainians in Europe and the Israelis in West Asia.

In the first year, leaders of the transatlantic alliance draped themselves in Ukrainian colours while pointing to the injustice of Russia picking on a puny neighbour (never mind that it was being armed to the teeth by the same alliance for over six years). Their enthusiasm remains undimmed even though the US Defence Secretary personally saw the unloading of weapons in Tel Aviv that were to be used against the Palestinians.

On the other side, the second year of the war saw Russia and North Korea becoming overt allies in Moscow’s war effort. There seems to be no shortage of foreign mercenaries here too. Nepalese in combat uniform are seen in some videos explaining the location of their country to a group of befuddled Russian infantry comrades. But there is a difference. Russian recruitment has been done behind the back of foreign governments. The US-European war effort is open and proudly proclaimed. In fact, intelligence agencies here have picked up signals of some European embassies based in Delhi issuing visas for potential fighters from neighbouring countries.

Russia has everything it needs for war. The country’s arms production and economy are growing. But what is not known is how much patience Vladimir Putin has. Will he one day decide that he has had enough and will begin a real war that also suppresses the ability of neighbouring countries to add fuel? Putin may be Russia’s topmost authority but he is increasingly being berated by the hot-headed to add more vigour to the military campaign, now that the F-16s from the Ukrainian side will soon be buzzing on the Russian horizon.

One of them is the influential Elena Panina, Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies. “Wars are not won in defence. Russia has been saying for so long that the collective West is at war with it. And this is not about the lives of useless western mercenaries. So far, Russia forgives everything or almost everything to the enemy. If this continues, NATO will open another ‘hot’ front against Russia, for example in the Baltic or the Barents Sea, in addition to several existing ‘cold’ and quasi fronts.”

“It is obvious that the US and Britain will continue to fight Russia through Ukraine, as long as they themselves begin to bear the unbearable costs of confrontation with our country. It doesn’t matter in which region of the world, although it’s best to be on their own territory. Will Russia start shooting them down, or will they be flying over Moscow soon?” she asks.

Many of her ilk now suggest that Russia should not fight with Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches, but with Ukraine as a state. And it is necessary to start with the destruction of state structures. “Why do ports on the Black Sea coast controlled by Ukraine continue to operate? Why does the grain corridor work, which carries weapons to Ukraine?” they ask.

Soul searching of a different nature is taking place in the US as well. Member of the US House of Representatives Andy Biggs said, “When I asked at the very beginning of the conflict, what is our strategic reason for participating in the conflict, what is the mission, what is the purpose, do you know what they said? They changed them from ‘we are helping our ally’ to change of power in Russia.”

Byzantium games meanwhile in the Kremlin and Kyiv do not cease. The second year of the war saw the elimination of the two most charismatic military figures on either side. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the fast talking and swearing chief of the private Wagner army, was shot out of the sky as his plane was landing in Russia. Equally popular on the other side, Ukraine’s top commander Valery Zaluzhny kept his life but was sacked by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who hung around him the cross of the failure of the autumn offensive that is even now brutal and vicious, but a stalemate.

At the end of the second year of the conflict, India kept its head above the economic watermark. But Germany and the UK — the war’s most enthusiastic proponents —have slipped into recession after two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. China is also feeling the after-effects of the slowdown in Europe and other economies. Meanwhile, the target country Russia manages to keep itself barely afloat.

On the military side, the conflict has led to a reassessment of the role and place of different types of weapons, but on the political side, the West’s increasing involvement is giving an ominous look to the conflict.

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