It was Boris Johnson who declared, in November 2021, four months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that “the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on the European landmass … are over”. Today, dozens of destroyed Russian tanks dot Ukraine’s eastern Donbas fields near Vuhledar, smashed, rusting emblems of a traditional heavy warfare that has returned to Europe.
Events have moved fast since Russia invaded last February, but it is worth restating how far planning for conventional war had gone out of fashion before then. Although it was recognised that Russia was a threat, the dominant military thinking was that the goal of authoritarian regimes was “to win without going to war”, as then chief of general staff Sir Nick Carter said in September 2020.
It was not just a UK assumption; the idea was widespread that future conflicts would be economic, or fought in cyberspace; by mercenaries or simply deniably in the way Russia’s first incursions into Ukraine in 2014 were led by separatist rebels infiltrated by Moscow’s forces. War, in short, would be less bloody – and much cheaper.
Such thinking underpinned Johnson’s Global Britain strategy, published in March 2021, centred on the deployment of one of two new aircraft carriers to assert relatively obscure freedom of navigation rights in the South China Sea, part of an Indo-Pacific tilt in support of the US’s long-term rivalry with Beijing.
“Hi-tech was the flavour at the time, and there was an unstated assumption that Britain would not be fighting a war in Europe again. Now, we need to adjust from the swashbuckling of Global Britain to recognise that it might be necessary to adopt a war tempo to support an ally,” said Lord Ricketts, a former British national security adviser.
What has followed is a land war that has been violent, expensive and in Britain’s European back yard. When asked what the key lessons were from the Ukraine war so far, Ben Hodges, a former commanding general of the US Army in Europe, said one of them was simply “ammunition stores”.
Ukraine’s unexpectedly successful resistance, preventing the Russians from seizing Kyiv in early April, rapidly led it into a dilemma. The defenders quickly realised they were running short of Soviet-standard 152mm artillery shells – the Russians were able to fire as much as 10 times more a day by the summer – forcing it to turn, successfully, to the UK in late March and then the US, the latter of which agreed to provide the first of many M777 Nato standard 155m howitzers, and related ammunition.
Simple artillery has been the most prevalent – and necessary – weapon on the battlefield, used grimly by the Russians in a “total war” strategy that sees it slowly raze population centres such as Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk and now Bakhmut, to the ground as it has no other way of capturing them. But to sustain Ukraine, it needs continuous help for its own artillery, bringing the west’s traditionally high-specification and slow moving defence industries into a proxy war against Russia.
The demands have proved extraordinary. In December, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s top commander, said he had told his British counterpart Adm Tony Radakin that “the British army fired a million shells in world war one” (in fact the true figure is far higher) – prompting, he said, an anxious reply: “We will lose Europe. We will have nothing to live on if you fire that many shells.”
Recent estimates, however, suggest that Ukraine is firing about 5,000 rounds a day, 1.8m rounds a year – and Russia between 5,000 and 20,000 a day, although this is down from a summer peak of 60,000. The future of the war will depend in part on how long each side can continue firing. Both sides are keenly focused on resupply, with speculative reports that Ukraine is waiting on fresh deliveries for the front – while Russia still wants to obtain missiles, as well as drones, from Iran and continues to woo China, a relationship monitored with concern by the US.
Ukrainian commanders emphasise their two other key weapons are longer range, more accurate Himars and other rocket artillery, plus reconnaissance drones that help correct the gunners’ aim. Hodges said that “precision can defeat mass if you have enough time” and said he believed it may be possible to force Russia to abandon Crimea, as it was forced to abandon the isolated Kherson last November, by repeatedly striking the two main roads that run south into the occupied peninsula, as well as the airbase at Saky and the naval port at Sevastopol.
Fixed wing reconnaissance drones, such as Russia’s Orlan-10 and for Ukraine drones from Danish companies Sky Watch and Nordic Wings, have also reduced the surprise element available to attackers because they are able to detect force concentrations behind enemy lines. Lt Col Pavlo Khazan, who leads a reconnaissance unit in the Ukrainian army, says drones are “the only way to get real-time battlefield information” and the goal is to automatically integrate their work with artillery units.
Similarly favouring defenders has been the minimal presence of combat air power, a stark contrast to the west’s favoured model of war fighting, most recently in the bombing campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Ukraine’s air force is small, hanging on for dear life, but Russia has adopted a risk averse approach to avoid losing significant numbers of aircraft to Ukraine’s surviving – and improving – air defences.
Russia has only lost 6-8% of its active prewar air force and its combat jets, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) thinktank, because they rarely operate beyond the frontlines, compared to 40% of its main battle tanks, hurled into battle with little apparent tactical forethought.
“There is no substitute for competence,” says Ben Barry, a land warfare specialist at the IISS, reflecting the chaotic initial Russian plan to take Kyiv or the efforts to capture cities such as Bakhmut through repeated waves of attack by newly mobilised soldiers. “The Russian forces appear to have a very poor standard of training compared to the Ukrainians,” as well notably lower morale, Barry continued, allowing Kyiv’s forces to pick them off in places such as Vuhledar in the Donbas.
This too has helped the Ukrainian defenders, raising the question whether either side can break through, in a costly conflict that resembles the first world war, with drones, computers and social media clips attached. So far, international military, financial and aid support for Ukraine has totalled €157bn according to Germany’s Kiel Institute and countries such as Poland rearming, by lifting defence spending to 4% of GDP.
Amid this apparent slog, military experts have raised the question that so called “manoeuvre warfare” is over given the prevailing stalemate – attempts led by mechanised forces to break through behind enemy lines and force chaos, defeat or retreat by a speedy outflanking – the style of a second world war blitzkrieg. But Ukraine’s spectacular September offensive in Kharkiv tells a different story.
It led to the rapid liberation of Kupyansk, Izium and Lyman, showing that “surprise is still possible”, in the words of Barry – and hopes that with western tanks Ukraine can drive the Russians back further in a type of war that nobody expected would be fought again.