TL;DR:
The Highs:
Russia takes massive casualties among its remaining veteran units. By the end of the year, US intelligence estimates that perhaps 87% of Russia’s pre-invasion military are casualties: ~315,000 dead or too badly wounded to return to combat.
Russia loses the artillery advantage in multiple sectors due to ammunition shortages (“shell hunger”) and a coordinated long-term effort by the Ukrainians to target and destroy Russian artillery systems.
The Ukrainians retake Klischiivka and Andriivka near Bakhmut. These towns are vital to successfully defending Bakhmut’s southern flank. Suicidal Russian counterattacks to retake these towns result in three Russian brigades being “zeroed,” in which every soldier in the unit — including cooks, walking wounded, and desk jockeys — is sent into one last assault to die.
Ukraine breaches the first layer in the Surovikin line, near Robotyne and Verbove.
The Ukrainians find gaps in the surface-to-air missile defenses near Crimea, allowing for several SCALP/Storm Shadow strikes on ships of the Black Sea Fleet.
The Lows:
The Summer Counteroffensive ends as a Russian victory.
Significant amounts of Western vehicles and kit are damaged or destroyed in Zaporizhia. Western-trained brigades sustain heavy casualties during the summer.
The 3rd Separate Assault Brigade sustains casualties, particularly while taking Klishschiivka and Andriivka.
Russia fights surprisingly well throughout the summer, despite rigidly defending the first line of defense. Putin and the Kremlin likely order Russian commanders to minimize Ukrainian territorial gains to promote the narrative of a failed offensive.
Russia’s 58th CAA holds the line, preventing major breakthrough, though at exceptionally high cost. VDV and Spetnaz forces, sent late in the summer to reinforce the depleted 58th, prevent Ukrainian breakthroughs by constantly counterattacking.
Russia’s electronic warfare and kamikaze drones at least partly offset its loss of artillery superiority.
Part 2: The Summer Counteroffensive
Here’s the funny thing about the way Putin conceives of warfare: the narrative is more important than the battlefield.
Russian hybrid wars include the use of significant conventional forces and conflict. The Russian military defines a “hybrid war” as a strategic-level effort to shape the governance and geostrategic orientation of a target state in which all actions, up to and including the use of conventional military forces in regional conflicts, are subordinate to an information campaign.
The quote above, taken from ISW, is essential to understanding the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. At the center of the war is an information campaign — a narrative. Timothy Snyder, the US’s preeminent Russia-Ukraine scholar, articulates well how a narrative assumes the role of reality in Russian propaganda:
The Western trend toward infotainment reached an apotheosis in Russia, generating an alternative reality designed to promote faith in Russian virtue and cynicism about facts…. It was a striking move toward the world as Ilyin [Putin’s favorite fascist philosopher] imagined it, a dark, confusing realm without truth, given shape only by Russian innocence.
This war is a shared feeling.
Putin micromanages strategic and tactical decisions at the front to create a narrative, for both domestic and international audiences. To do this, he orders his generals to minimize Ukrainian territorial gains during Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive, at all costs.
If Putin convinces the West that the war feels like its failing, then that is what is real.
Even if the battlefield reality is much more complex.
What was the plan?
Advisors in the United States and NATO countries envisioned that the counteroffensive would be a similar campaign to the Invasion of Iraq.
To defeat the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard, the US employed overwhelming air power and precision missile strikes to suppress Iraqi defenses, while a concentrated mechanized push advanced at a slow methodical pace. Slowly, through the careful application of combined arms, the US subdued and dismantled resistance from the Iraqi military.
The Ukrainians feared that Russia would mass its remaining elite forces on a single axis. So Ukraine planned a broad approach — attacking on multiple fronts and forcing the Russians to spread themselves thinly defending multiple locations.
Western advisors think this stretches Ukraine more than the Russians. By defending Bakhmut, the Yooks ran through ammunition needed for the counteroffensive, and even worse, they delayed the operation until June, missing a key opportunity to strike while Russia was still not prepared to defend. instead, by attacking in three different sectors, the Ukrainians chose multiple weak jabs instead of throwing one great haymaker at Russia’s defensive jaw.
Ukraine protests that the West, acting as an armchair general, fails to acknowledge battlefield realities and the limitations of their provided support. The enemy has more planes, anti-aircraft weapons, and radar. Ukraine cannot establish air superiority, and without control of the skies, mechanized forces are susceptible to helicopters, fighter-bombers, and attack drones. Ukrainians also see the losses suffered by the Russians in Bakhmut as still proportionally worse — evidenced by desperate solutions like buying millions of North Korea shells to restock empty ammo warehouses.
From the outset, this discord over strategy leaves the West susceptible to Putin’s hybrid warfare.
The Offensive
On June 4th, Western-trained brigades began offensive operations with massed mechanized assaults in the Orkhiv and Velyka Novosilka directions.
Almost immediately, videos published on Russian Telegram channels suggested that the counteroffensive was off to a rocky start. Since fall 2022, the Russians had been building the “Surovikin Line” — a series of fortifications, defensive kill-zones, and minefields designed to make advancing a living hell for the unblooded Ukrainian brigades.
Minefields were massive and dense, with new antitank and antipersonnel mines constantly being added as specialized artillery exploded and rained down fresh traps. Isolated anti-tank teams were trained to let Ukrainian vehicles pass them before firing and disabling them, making rescue difficult. As soon as one vehicle became bogged down or disabled, more began piling up nearby while trying to find routes around the smouldering wreckage inside the minefields. Artillery hammered any troops trying to navigate their way back to safety. Helicopters appeared briefly in the horizon above the tree line to loft barrages of missiles at the clusters of trapped, smoking fighting vehicles.
After about two weeks of minor advances, heavy losses in the Orikhiv direction prompted the Ukrainians to pause offensive operations to reassess tactics. They ceased massed mechanized operations and begin advancing slowly and methodically using an attrition strategy — prioritizing lives over time.
Not all went poorly for the Ukrainians, though. On the Velyka Novosilka axis, fighting progressed south along a line of towns extending to Staromlynivka. In the first few weeks, Neskuchne, Storozheve, and Makarivka were liberated in rapid succession.
At this time, Ukraine begins focusing on counterbattery efforts. Using HIMARS and kamikaze drones, they systematically hunt down Russian self-propelled guns, towed artillery, mortars, and rocket systems. The impact is not immediate, but by the middle of July Ivan Popov, commander of the 58th CAA, which was heavily involved in the destruction of Mariupol, was fired for his honest assessment that the 58th CAA was in a dire situation and lacked counterbattery fire to compete with the Ukrainians.
While fighting in Zaporizhia was slowly making advances, the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade (SAB), an Azov-affiliated unit, ramped up a prolonged raiding operation in the vicinity of Bakhmut. Despite the presence of relatively elite Russian units defending Bakhmut itself, most defenders south of the city were poorly trained mobiks mobilized in the fall of 2022. Small Ukrainians units of 5-10 sneaked on foot into Russian trenches, killed as many as possible using assault rifles and grenades, then escaped with as many captives and rifles as possible. These daily raids throughout June and July exacted an enormous toll, while Ukraine’s 3rd SAB took very few losses.
For the much of July and August, the Ukrainians found themselves in a drawn-out battle for Robotyne, Staromaiors’ke, and Urozhaine. To prevent the Ukrainians from attacking, the Russians attacked — funneling reinforcements through heavy artillery fire with extreme casualties each day. The Ukrainians refrained from pressing the attack while Russians were busy herding their own soldiers to the killing fields, but in late July the Yooks attempted one more massed mechanized assault near Robotyne. Despite initial losses, Russian defenders were stricken with a sudden surge of competence and hammered one of the Yook pincers, inflicting heavy casualties and destroying a number of fighting vehicles. Still, by early August Staromaiors’ke fell, followed by Robotyne and Urozhaine near the end of the month.
Worth mentioning is the incredible story of how Robotyne finally fell. After months of setbacks, the 47th Mechanized Brigade reshuffled its leadership. The new commander gathered a group of 31 men — some having never been in combat yet chosen as the most dedicated soldiers in the unit — to conduct a focused assault to capture the town. After crawling eighteen hours through minefields, they marched over ten kilometers, assaulted fortified positions in Robotyne, and held them against counterattacks until the rest of the 47th could be brought up to relieve them. Over 40 days, this small group assaulted six different times and conducted a pair of recon missions. None were killed, although seven were wounded, one severely.
Sometime in August, the 58th CAA reached complete exhaustion. Shoigu and Gerasimov, having replaced Popov with obedient supplicants, managed to grind it to a nub. Their first fix is to commit Russia’s operational reserves to reinforce Urozhaine, but a similar emergency shortly thereafter requires shuffling VDV and Spetznaz (special forces) units from "quiet” sectors like Kupyansk and Bakhmut to prevent a major collapse near Robotyne.
Despite gaining the artillery advantage in Zaporizhia, Ukraine failed to break through in spectacular fashion. A fundamental shift occurred as the primary defensive weapon changed from artillery to drone. Russian kamikaze drones proved numerous and punished Ukrainian mistakes. Though Western armor and fighting vehicles kept crews alive even as the vehicle was destroyed, the constant drone attacks chipped away at the Ukraine’s logistical inventory.
Worse, as August gave way to September, the counteroffensive approached its enforced time limit — the rasputitsa or “General Mud”. Around September 16, the 3rd SAB captured Andriivka and Klishschiivka in dramatic fashion — destroying three Russian brigades after their commanders order suicidal counterattacks to retake the cities. Similarly, the emergency VDV units sent to Robotyne were thrown into piecemeal ripostes, suffering crippling casualties. But this time, the 3rd SAB did not escape unscathed. Russian drones proved such a menace that assaults had to be conducted on foot and wounded evacuated only at night. Casualties were high.
By the time the mud arrived in October, Ukraine was threatening Verbove, but it became clear to most observers that both Ukrainian and Russian forces were exhausted and required an operational pause.
The Aftermath
Russia took extreme losses this summer, in addition to mind-boggling casualties in Bakhmut, but in many other areas they eked out defensive successes. By minimizing the number of square miles retaken, Putin created a narrative that has proved exceptionally potent to overeager Westerners: the counteroffensive failed.
Ukrainians did not achieve their objectives, but Russia’s claim that it achieved a great victory is a sickening lie. The loss of Wagner early in the year, followed by the 58th CAA, and subsequently the remaining veteran VDV and Spetznaz reserves leaves Russia with almost no skilled soldiers remaining.
At some point in 2022, the average Russian dying in Ukraine switched from a veteran kontraktniki (professional contract soldiers) trained in the pre-invasion army to former civilians — mobiks, undergeared and undertrained.
The counteroffensive was far from a resounding success, but the structural damage done to the Russian army will not be repaired before this war ends.
The greatest irony is that just as the tide began turning, Putin’s narrative took hold in the West. Ukraine will lose this war if the Republicans continue to hold hostage the military aid to Ukraine originally set to be passed in September. In a testament to Putin’s conception of hybrid warfare, the greatest blow to the Ukrainian war effort had more to do with a feeling, Western malaise, than with battlefield outcomes.