Who will win the Battle of Donbas?

The Battle of Donbas will pose different tactical challenges for both the Russians and the Ukrainians. It’s tank warfare country, ideal for Russian armour manoeuvre but the Ukrainian defenders are well dug into fortified positions and have had eight years to prepare. Whether the battle proves decisive for Vladimir Putin’s war plans will depend on the Russian military’s ability to address the logistical and command and control failures of the last seven weeks and also whether they are sufficiently skilled and motivated to exploit the geographical advantages of the flat and open plains of eastern Ukraine. For the first time since the invasion began the Ukrainian military will be forced to confront tank and artillery warfare reminiscent of Soviet-German battles of the Second World War. It will never reach the scale of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 when 19 German Panza divisions with 3,000 tanks and 7,000 artillery pieces invaded Russia across a 1,000-mile front. However, the Russian invasion force has amassed tanks, armoured personnel carriers, artillery and helicopters along a front that runs from Kharkiv in the northeast down to Donetsk, the unofficial capital of the Donbas region, and further south, a distance of some300 miles. While heavily outnumbered the Ukrainian military have their best combat-proven units in eastern Ukraine and have spent eight years fighting the Russians and their proxy forces in Donbas. “The Russians are trying to set the conditions for more aggressive, more overt and larger ground manoeuvres in Donbas,” John Kirby, Pentagon press secretary, said. “But this is an area of the country that has seen fighting over the last eight years. This is a terrain both sides understand and know. It’s not like the Ukrainians ever left Donbas and had only been racing to get there in the last few days,” he said. “The Donbas region has been a hot war for eight years and both sides have traded geography with some violence over that period. The Ukrainians do have a not insignificant force posture there and they are fighting,” a senior Pentagon official said. The main challenge for the Ukrainians is that in the large mainly unforested open spaces in the east, their ability to launch guerilla-style anti-tank strikes from concealed positions as the tanks approach will be limited. When the Russians initially sent convoys of tanks across the border into Ukraine they were forced to use roads because of the muddy and tree-covered terrain, ideal, as it proved, for anti-tank ambushes. In preparation for a massed tank assault, the Russians have already begun to fire a barrage of long-range artillery and multiple-launch rocket strikes on the Ukrainian defensive positions in an attempt to destroy key military locations, initially focusing on the cities of Rubizhne, Popasna and Marinka, according to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. The Russian troops, now under the new supreme commander General Alexander Dvornikov appointed by Putin and reinforced by another 11 1,000-manned battalion tactical groups (bringing the total number of such groups to 76 in the Donbas region and the southeast) have the chance and the terrain to carry out full-scale mechanised manoeuvre operations. The Ukrainians have their proven American Javelin and British-supplied NLAW anti-tank weapons and Turkish armed drones which have successfully contributed to the destruction of nearly 700 tanks, according to Ukrainian claims. However, to face the new concentrated Russian offensive in the east, they need tanks, artillery and armoured vehicles. As well as their own armour, they now have Czech-delivered T-72 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles; American 155mm towed howitzers have started to arrive in Poland for a quick turn-around for the Donbas battlefield and British armoured personnel carriers are also on the way. Despite the Russian military’s superior firepower – their artillery ranges, for example, are longer than Ukraine’s - the Institute for the Study of War believes the new offensive is unlikely to be dramatically more successful than previous operations in Ukraine. Some of the Russian battalion tactical groups are still undermanned and damaged from seven weeks of fighting, appear to be “patched up”, and are yet to show any sign they have learned the lessons from earlier confrontations with the "more imaginative" Ukrainians. For example, Ukrainian forces counter-attacked southeast of Kharkiv and have taken control of several small towns, cutting off one of the main routes Russian troops are using to reinforce Donbas. Much will depend on whether the Russians have the stomach to engage in close-quarter combat. So far there has been scant evidence of Russian willingness to deploy covering infantry support to back up tank assaults in the earlier phases of the war. This will make it easier for the Ukrainians to pick off Russian tanks without having to face an infantry assault at the same time. But the Russian commander, Dvornikov, is likely to order a more comprehensive combined-arms offensive, and logistical supplies will be less challenging because Donbas borders Russia to the east.