Russian forces face rout at Vuhledar in largest tank battle of invasion

KYIV -- A three-week long Russian offensive near the Ukrainian mining town of Vuhledar is stalling after Russian forces suffered "catastrophic losses", according to war monitors.

"Russian forces suffered catastrophic losses in a recent three-week offensive near Vuhledar, and severe personnel and equipment constraints are likely preventing Russian forces from making even marginal advances in this direction," the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in a Saturday (March 4) report.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu visited the front the same day, apparently to "assess the extent of Russian losses around Vuhledar and the possibility of further offensives," according to the ISW.

Ukrainian officials have described the offensive as the biggest tank battle of the war so far.

Russian forces attempted to overcome Ukrainian fortifications in Vuhledar by deploying armoured columns that ran into numerous ambushes.

"These actions caused the enemy to lose about 130 armoured vehicles at the Vuhledar front alone," Lt. Gen. (ret.) Ihor Romanenko, a military analyst and former deputy chief of the Ukrainian General Staff, told Caravanserai.

"This is the largest amount of enemy equipment used and destroyed in a single battle," he noted, meaning in the war so far.

"If you look at the numbers ... over the past year more than 1,000 [Russian] armoured vehicles were destroyed, but to have that happen in one place like this -- this is a first," Romanenko said.

'Wave after wave'

Russia's stunning losses are due in part to poorly trained conscripts.

One of the Russian tank operators captured by Ukrainians near Vuhledar turned out to be a front-line medic, the New York Times reported March 1.

His commanders had simply put him behind the controls of a tank and sent him off to attack.

"The story with this medic-turned-tanker confirms that they are taking everyone," said Romanenko.

"This disaster is due to haste. The Russians don't have time ... everything is closing in. They were supposed to launch this offensive at the end of January ... before we received equipment and managed to train our reserves -- this was a window of opportunity," Romanenko said.

Russian forces -- with their tanks destroyed -- then turned to waves of infantry assaults.

The tactics have led to the near-complete destruction of Russia's 155th and 40th naval infantry brigades, according to various reports.

"There are just human waves exactly like before in the attack on Soledar," said Alexander Kovalenko of Kyiv, a military correspondent for the website InfoResist, referring to the five-month-long battle for a town with a pre-war population of about 15,000.

"Just wave after wave," Kovalenko said.

'Quantity does not mean quality'

"There was an intense battle near Vuhledar," said Kovalenko, referring to a failed Russian offensive last November.

"But they were stopped around Pavlivka, where they were completely defeated... They thought they needed more manpower and resources," he said.

"But quantity does not mean quality."

The Russians have used "unimaginative training manuals" for offensive operations since the Soviet era, he said, adding that a battle formation of tanks going on the attack might look impressive in exercises but is absolutely senseless in war, Kovalenko said.

"The main mistake is that they didn't fundamentally change anything," Oleksandr Kraiev, a political analyst with the Ukrainian Prism Foreign Policy Council, told Caravanserai.

"We have seen abundant reshuffling of the military high command. We have seen reshuffling even in the political administration. The commanders of front-line military districts have been replaced. Many things have changed."

"But as soon as they launched a new offensive, they repeated all the same mistakes that occurred in the attack on Kyiv a year ago," said Kraiev.

Without any preparatory artillery bombardment, sufficient reconnaissance and direct air support, "tank columns crawled forward on narrow sections of the front and they suffered what they experienced near Kyiv," he said.

The same thing happened more than 80 years ago in Finland, Kraiev noted, referring to the 1939–1940 Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in which Finnish defenders inflicted heavy casualties on the Soviets. The Finns would disable the lead and rear vehicles of a Soviet column, turning the immobilised column into a shooting gallery.

"For dictatorial regimes, this [failure to reform] is a classic approach. Putin changed generals, hoping that the army would change. But that's not how the system changes. The logic of combat operations, the logic of army co-ordination remains the same," said Kraiev.