Looking at what is going in in Ukraine around this counter-offensive, I keep coming back to the idea that - regardless of the counter-offensive itself - Ukraine is doing quite a comprehensive job of weaponising the
possibility of it. We are seeing a lot of disruption on the Russian side that seems to be disproportionate to the effort Ukraine is actually putting in.
Case in point: the shooting down of two ECM helicopters and two fast jets, where there seem to be two possibilities. Either Ukraine shot them down using Buk missiles from near the border, but probably using radar capabilities beyond those of the standard Buk radar control systems (supposition seems to be that they've linked more powerful Western radar systems to the Buk setup, to enable them to do detection and targeting from further back inside Ukraine at less risk to them. The second possibility, which appears to be the official Ukrainian line, is that trigger-happy Russian air defence crews shot down their own aircraft - given the depletion of trained and competent personnel on the Russian side, and the climate of heightened panic and fear arising from the arrival of Storm Shadow, and the many UAV strikes Ukraine has launched in the border regions, this seems conceivable, though I imagine it would suit Ukraine well to maintain this story and thus keep their enhanced anti-air capablilities in the shadows for as long as possible.
Either way, it is going to have made quite a big dent in Russia's sense of invulnerability in the air: whatever happened, 4 state of the art Russian assets fell out of the sky
over Russia itself.
Another case in point - the collapse of the lines around Bakhmut. Again, despite the Russian forces holding the flanks around Bachmut being notionally elite units, it appears that the attrition that the Russians have experienced throughout this war means that most of the composition of those units is anything but elite, being made up mostly of mobiks. I'd hazard a guess that quite a lot of the officer level staff are also inexperienced or otherwise of poor quality. So all it has taken has been small, localised attacks at various points along that line (along with a nice bit of decapitation further into Luhansk), and it's been possible to sow sufficient fear and confusion to cause those lines to break up, and start an escalating process of panic and fleeing.
Dr Mike Martin (book out now) talks of the role of psychology in war, and I think it's easy, as we focus on things that go bang, to forget that, to a large extent, it's not the actual bangs that make the difference, but the psychological consequences that result from them. Russia knows this - that's why they have been attacking civilian infrastructure, and why their preferred method of dealing with cities is to bomb them flat with huge amounts of explosive, in a distinctly unsubtle way. Ukraine is, necessarily, because it doesn't have those resources, going for a more subtle approach, presumably on the basis that if you can sow fear in a small way, you can rely on that fear rippling out through the enemy and causing a cascade of failure - hence the Russian outfits holding the flanks collapsing and fleeing, no doubt taking that fear with them back through the lines, and spreading it across a broader front.
Furthermore, I think we will not realise just how effective Ukraine's trolling of the Russians has been until long afterwards, but I think that this might be the first war where the power of social media has been leveraged beyond simply using it as a propaganda medium (
vide the Russian approach to Twitter, with set-piece statements from the Usual Suspects). Stuff like NAFO - which the Ukrainian high command appear to be supporting and endorsing - and the various comments, often sarcastic and subtle (remember the commander who silently produced a watermelon during speculation about the location of last year's counteroffensive?
) that the Ukrainian establishment has gone in for. It might easily be written off as trivial or silly, but I strongly suspect that such of it as reaches Russian ears might well be provoking equal measures of angry outrage and disconcertion. After all, Ukraine was supposed to crumble, not sit there laughing at their invaders.
