Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has now lasted longer than World War I (Ukraine Battlefield update, Day 1,567)
Every day, the Ukraine Battlefield update newsletter offers a clear look at how the war is unfolding on the ground. Subscribe for free here to get the full text delivered to your inbox.
What can be inferred about a long war from a short post by a Russian blogger.
Air power is one way to break the stalemate, Russia has a new tool in which it pins high hopes.
The battle for Kostyantynivka is nearing its end.
Flamingos struck an important arms plant, for the first time they were filmed in daylight en route to the target.
Nothing new in Crimea, petrol is still in short supply.
Maps of the day – Kostyantynivka
Videos of the day – Flamingos strike an arms plant one thousand kms behind the front line; an unusual angle on a downed drone; an attack on the occupied port of Mariupol.
What can be inferred about a long war from a short post by a Russian blogger. “Today, the duration of the SMO (Special Military Operation) has exceeded the length of World War I and reached 1,567 days [after it started on 24 February 2022]. Despite huge differences, these two wars have one thing in common – a long-lasting and so far insurmountable positional deadlock (stalemate), which does not allow either side to advance effectively and quickly. They can only gnaw their way through, slowly, with effort and at the cost of heavy losses, km by km,” wrote the Russian telegram channel Military Informer on Wednesday (10 June) morning.
To underline that he meant his comparison deadly seriously, he illustrated it with this photograph of tsarist soldiers with Maxim machine guns in the trenches of the “Great War”. Incidentally, from time to time videos appear showing both armies using this weapon even in the 21st century.
According to some calculations, the threshold will only be crossed on Thursday, but the key point is that in the sentences of this influential Russian source, which Military Informer is, you can find everything you need to know about Russian aggression.
The Russians may still officially call it a special military operation, but already in the second sentence the author clearly admitted that this was no special operation, but a full-fledged war. In 2022, Russians could be sent to prison for using this word, today it is used completely routinely. It is enough if you are obliged to mention a “special military operation” alongside it, but the whole of Russia understands that it is at war.
The second clear conclusion is that this Russian war is stuck. As the Russians themselves wrote, it has ended up in a stalemate, even an insurmountable one.
They also clearly understood that they were not capable of achieving any rapid advance. This was exactly what characterised the trench warfare of World War I. That too emerged because the level of technology at the time did not allow fast manoeuvres and the occupation of large swathes of territory. The mass use of artillery and machine guns, combined with thousands of kms of trenches, made any advance almost impossible. Today artillery and machine guns have been replaced by drones, but the outcome is the same.
And finally, it has long been no secret in Russia that the failure of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his regime is costing the country “heavy losses”, in other words a very large number of dead. This is beginning to show in fewer volunteers willing to go to the front and be killed for money, and in the ever more frequent repetition of the word mobilisation.
Air power is one way to break the stalemate, Russia has a new tool in which it pins high hopes. The photo below was published by French analyst Clément Molin. It comes from the Huliaipole area and he used it to illustrate the accuracy of Russian air power.
Notice the strips of greenery separating individual fields. Infantry on both sides use these either to build positions, in the case of the defending side, or to advance, in the case of attackers. Thanks to his systematic monitoring of satellite imagery, Molin noticed that at least in this sector Russian air power was achieving high bombing accuracy and systematically clearing the way ahead for Russian infantry. Of course, the photo shows the result of a long effort, not the state after a single air strike.
The problem for the Russians is that the deployment rate of the Su-34 type, which carries out this kind of mission, is high, leading to wear and tear on both equipment and personnel. Russia has therefore come up with an innovation: instead of four precision-guided bombs it has started hanging as many as six under its tactical bombers. In theory, this means increasing the effectiveness of air power in support of the army by up to 50 percent.
“Air power is trying its utmost to implement the plan to increase the amount of munitions dropped on the enemy,” the Russian aviation channel Fighterbomber said in this context.
As early as the beginning of May it claimed that while the current monthly maximum was 10,000 precision-guided bombs dropped, after this modification there was a chance to reach 15,000, at most 16,000 bombs. Fighterbomber mentioned a lack of qualified ground crew as one of the reasons why it was not possible to achieve a higher intensity of bombing.
The Ukrainian aviation account Sunflower questioned these claims at the end of April. Even then, it was reacting to reports of the modification described above. It argued that, despite the modification, Russia was in reality capable of dropping a maximum of 300 bombs a day, which is just under 10,000 per month.
In an extreme case and for a short period, Russia could, according to Sunflower, reach 600 bombs a day, but only at the cost of losses. For these ambitions to be sustained over the long term, Russia would, in the author’s view, need at least 200 aircraft and ideally around 300 crews.
The battle for Kostyantynivka is nearing its end. “Several positive signals allow us to consider options for the further advance of the Russian armed forces in Kostyantynivka and possibly beyond it,” the Russian outlet Rybar wrote, more cautiously than several other Russian sources.
The deteriorating situation of the city’s defenders is illustrated by a time-lapse map by Clément Molin. It too shows the gradual engulfing of the city from east and west. The Russians admitted that they were significantly more successful on the eastern flank, while on the western flank Ukrainian defences were so far more or less holding. Rybar, for example, claimed that the Ukrainians had attempted a counter-attack from Chasiv Yar.
Once the city falls (the question is no longer if it will fall), the Ukrainian army will lose an important stronghold that for a year blocked the Russian advance from the south towards Kramatorsk. But two more strongholds have already been prepared behind it.
The first is the small town of Oleksiievo-Druzhkivka, which had a pre-war population of eight thousand. If this settlement falls, the Russians will face the much larger Druzhkivka, which had a pre-war population of 54,000. Only after taking Druzhkivka could Russia attempt an attack on Kramatorsk from the south. The most likely sequence is as drawn by the OSINT account Playfra on this map:
The same source drew the approximate axes of Russian attacks in this area.
Playfra also described the conditions facing both the defenders of Druzhkivka and its would-be conquerors. The good news is that the town is surrounded by open fields to the south and east, over which drones will dominate, significantly complicating the attackers’ advance.
Flamingos struck an important arms plant, for the first time they were filmed in daylight en route to the target. It is still true of the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile that there has been far more media hype around it than actual results. But there are exceptions. The most recent concerns the company VNIIR Progress in the city of Cheboksary.
It lies 1,000 km from the front, and on Wednesday morning just two of these weapons, the result of improvisation by Ukrainian designers, flew into it.
The Ukrainian army lacked a reliable long-range weapon capable of carrying more than a 50-kg explosive. Flamingo, with a maximum range of up to 3,000 km and a one-tonne warhead, is precisely what fills this gap. However, it is large, relatively slow and not very manoeuvrable, which also makes it easy to shoot down. Moreover, Ukraine has not managed to manufacture it in the numbers once talked about. That is why there are still few confirmed reports of its successful use.
The latest strike is one of the exceptions, because residents of the Russian city managed for the first time to film the missiles in flight as they approached the target and just before impact.
Footage from the impact site itself quickly followed.
The plant hit also manufactures components for Russian precision-guided weapons. Among other things, Kometa antennas and parts for Iskander ballistic missiles.
Given the plant’s importance for the Russian army, all Z-channels naturally took note of the strike. One of them, specifically Two Majors, told its readers:
“You may mock that this missile/drone is slow and can easily be shot down even with a machine gun. In that case, however, there are two questions: if it is such an easy target, why then did it fly 1,000 km?”
The second question raised the prospect that the Ukrainians might one day arm the Flamingos with a nuclear warhead. Naturally, this was nothing more than a manifestation of Russia’s obsession with nuclear weapons, of which it has so many that it could burn the planet to a cinder.
Nothing new in Crimea, petrol is still in short supply. “Dear residents of Sevastopol! Today, fuel will be sold at TES petrol stations ONLY via QR codes. Those who received QR codes on Monday evening (8 June) and Tuesday (9 June) will be able to refuel from 9:00 to 21:00. If you received a code on Saturday or Sunday evening and for some reason did not use it, we would like to inform you that the code has already been cancelled, so there is no point in going to the petrol station and waiting in line,” the city’s mayor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, wrote on Wednesday morning.
In his instructions he also repeated that the limit of 20 litres of fuel per car per week remained in force and recommended that drivers check fuel availability before heading to a petrol station.
He did not state it explicitly, but it is highly likely that the drivers holding vouchers whose validity had expired, as he described, simply had nowhere to refuel.
The following video shows a queue of 261 cars waiting for petrol in Yalta, which lies 50 km in a straight line from Sevastopol.
An everyday situation from an unusual angle.
A compilation of Ukrainian drone strikes on the occupied port of Mariupol.
What are the losses
By Monday morning Russia had demonstrably lost 23,593 pieces of heavy equipment (on Monday 1 June, 23,556). Of these, 18,585 (18,551) pieces were destroyed by the Ukrainians, 982 (979) were damaged, 1,199 (1,199) were abandoned by their crews and 2,827 (2,827) were captured by the Ukrainian army. This includes 4,397 (4,394) tanks, of which 3,300 (3,293) were destroyed in combat.
Ukraine had lost 11,425 (11,397) pieces of equipment, of which 8,888 (8,863) were destroyed, 680 (678) damaged, 670 (669) abandoned and 1,187 (1,187) captured. This includes 1,426 (1,424) tanks, of which 1,091 (1,089) were destroyed in combat.
Note: Neither side provides regular information on its dead or on destroyed equipment. Ukraine publishes daily figures for Russian personnel and equipment losses, which cannot be independently verified. For this overview we use data from the Oryx project, which since the start of the war has compiled a list of equipment losses documented exclusively by photographic evidence.
