The AFU is facing a number of problems, among them lack of interaction between units, untimely reporting of the situation on the front line to the high command and shortage of personnel due to mass desertion, ZN.UA reports.
Roman, a lieutenant in one of the territorial defence brigades defending the area south of Pokrovsk, said:
“We can count on reinforcements or at least some reinforcement only when the media write about our direction or there is an enemy breakthrough far to the rear. And there is nothing to talk about global changes. I think there will never be any.”
Journalists manage to talk to the Ukrainian soldier for about an hour as he takes his car to the repair shop. He is not verbal, but he stresses that the direction can be held if a significant number of reserves with armoured vehicles and, most importantly, with high quality training are transferred here. But now the situation south of Pokrovsk is not improving.
On December 12, journalist Yuriy Butusov said that Russian troops had seized an entire AFU fortification near the Shevchenko settlement, which the Ukrainian military had not had time to reach. Just two days later, the Russians themselves demonstrated photos and videos of the defences they had occupied. From the available material, it is clear that this is a well-built bunker with equipped places to sleep and a supply of provisions.
Roman’s territorial defence unit is holding defences not far from this place. The lieutenant stated that the problem is very multifaceted and it is not the first time. A similar situation used to occur in Novohrodivka, which Russian troops recaptured in the summer, as well as in other parts of the front near Pokrovsk.
Having talked to Roman and two other junior officers who are holding the defence in this direction, ZN.UA journalists were able to identify three reasons for such miscalculations:
- lack of well-established co-operation between brigades/battalions responsible for a certain section of the front;
- untimely reporting of the situation on the front line due to the fear of individual commanders to report failures upwards;
- lack of manpower to hold positions, including due to the mass unauthorised abandonment of military units (AWOL), which has become a global phenomenon in the past few months.
The military are unanimous in their belief that these problems cannot be solved through the initiative of individual commanders on the ground. But they are cautiously optimistic after the appointment of Mykhailo Drapatyi as commander of the Ground Forces. They say that if he has the necessary resources, he will be able to correct the situation. But there is little room for decision-making, according to the military.
Only one decision can be made to improve interaction between units on the front line: a switch to a divisional structure. By enlarging the structural units themselves, such an architecture will be able to resolve most issues of interaction on the front line. However, at the same time, it should be remembered that such a transition itself is a very long and complex procedure that cannot be realised in the span of a few months or even six months. This, too, requires additional resources for training officers, retrofitting units and systematising work. Roman summarised:
“Here’s a condition: we hold one village, and next to it another battalion of another brigade holds another village. This is not our area of responsibility, we are different units and have different subordination. And even in co-operation we may not understand what the plans of that brigade are. There were cases when some units simply “dragged” from their positions, and because of that we had to withdraw too, so that we would not be surrounded. And if we had a divisional structure, we would work as one mechanism, as an orchestra. Because now we just sit down together and everyone plays something different.”
Another problem that the military is not on record talking about is the command’s failure to understand the clear situation on the ground. The reason for this is the very long shoulder to deliver information from scratch to the commanders who make the final decisions. Very often brigade commanders (not to mention combatants) are afraid to make a decision even on a tactical scale without coordination “from Kyiv,” fearing responsibility.
The situation is really unique. It is no secret that Ukraine owes much of its defence of the Russian offensive in February-March 2022 to the initiative of its lower leadership. Sergeants and lieutenants who led their platoons and companies into battle without waiting for orders from above were able to turn the tide of the fighting.
However, time has passed, and trends have changed. Now Russia’s Iskanders hit targets 2-3 minutes after intelligence has identified them, which means that the entire vertical chain of command has been completely erased. That is, drone operators give directional coordinates to the launching sites of MLRSs without waiting for any coordination. The conduct of assaults in each direction has been “hung” on brigade commanders, who are now responsible for certain actions on the front line with their own heads.
At the same time, the Ukrainian command is moving in the opposite direction. According to ZN.UA sources in the security services, orders for operational and sometimes even tactical actions on the collision line are approved directly by the AFU Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. Unfortunately, his decisions are often untimely, and delay costs human lives and square kilometres of lost territory. At the same time, brigade commanders and officers of smaller structural units are afraid to make decisions on their own, waiting for the “responsibility” they are often threatened with.
What follows from the above is an ironic thesis that Taras Chmut, head of the “Back Alive” Foundation, likes to repeat: “The small Soviet army will never defeat the big Soviet army.” And there is much more truth in this sentence than it first appears.
The third problem that unit commanders in the Pokrovsk direction talk about is the large number of unauthorised abandonments of military units. It has hardly the smallest scope for a possible solution. According to ZN.UA sources in the Ministry of Defence, every month Ukraine loses from four to five thousand military personnel, taking into account the dead, seriously wounded and AWOL. It is very difficult to restore such a number of losses at the moment.
The problem is not only in the direct implementation of mobilisation, but also in the quality of the average mobilised military man. This is a topic for a separate article, but let us note only one thing: the existing mobilisation figures are sufficient only to address tactical threats in the short term, and there is no need to talk about any strategic planning at all.
In the near future we will see how the above three problems will affect the defence of Pokrovsk, a city of incredible military and industrial importance for Ukraine. None of the three military officers interviewed by ZN.UA answered the question of whether Pokrovsk could be defended if these problems were not solved.
At the same time, Russian troops are eight kilometres from the Pokrovsk-Dnipropetrovsk highway and are slowly taking it under the control of FPV drones. Finally, exactly the same distance from the Russian forward units is the border with the Dnipropetrovsk region.
