The Opera Curtain Opens At Bakhmut
The Opera Curtain Opens At Bakhmut
And in Moscow
The overture fades.
The curtain is opening.
Behold the opera of annihilation, slowly brought into view.
Two long battles for Bakhmut ended in Russian failure over nearly a year. The third is turning into a Ukrainian victory. Disciplined attacks with combined infantry, armor, artillery, and command/control have broken what are supposed to be VDV units on the flanks of Wagner, which is still attacking Bakhmut. Russia has lost most of her prewar paratroopers, to be sure, but these are still the soldiers that the Russian Army put the most effort into training and mobilizing last year, and they are folding like a cheap card table.
Ukraine has trained and mobilized a force at Bakhmut capable of inflicting an historic defeat on their foe. Putting Wagner out of the war, maybe even attriting the Chechen units policing the Russian rear, would score as victories in the eyes of international backers. It could also break the morale of Russian Armed Forces (RuAF) all across the 3,700-kilometer (2,300 mi) front, so that when Ukrainians attack somewhere else next week, or the week after, or even in June, the Russians they meet will fear them more than the Chechens cosplaying as military police at their backs.
A discernible shift has occurred in the dialogue about Ukraine’s counteroffensive. The expectations that were managed in April are being massaged in May.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy now downplays the immediacy of any sweeping maneuver. He would like more stuff please, for this will be a long fight.
At the same time, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense announces that almost everything they expected to get has arrived, so the opera may begin any moment now. Yep, any old time, now. What you see right now at Bakhmut? Those are just “defensive actions.”
Ukraine is holding back, you see. (Smashes VDV.) The weather must get better before we make any big moves. (Smashes Wagner.) We would really like some F-16s before we do anything serious, here. (Smashes Russian reserves.) Oh did we just retake Bakhmut? Huh. Maybe we could talk about the F-16s, now. There is still time before summer…
Suppose, reader, that I convinced you to see an opera with me.
Opera tickets are expensive. We will dress to the nines, which is expensive. We will have balcony seats and opera glasses and gilded guides to the libretto. Pricey, but no matter, because this is supposed to be a magnificent production. The diva comes with the highest of plaudits.
If we believe the reviewer for The New York Snobbist that the show will be a 10 out of 10, a perfect score, the perfect opera, with perfectly flawless performances, we will expect nothing less.
So then if the show is an 8 out of 10 — a good show, perhaps, but with a few minor flaws — we will walk out of the theatre disappointed, and distrustful of that Snobbist reviewer, and we will conclude the diva is a bit shit.
We will be less likely to buy any more opera tickets.
However, if the reviewer for Snobbist tells us that this same show is a 6 out of 10 — meh, basic, good for teaching kids how to behave in elite public spaces — and sit in cheap seats wearing office casual, we will walk out of the same theatre exhilarated by that same show, loving opera and eager to return, fans of the diva forever.
We will become critics of that Snobbist reviewer, if they gave that show a 6. What a snob. Why, it was at least an 8. Maybe a 9. We still won’t know much about opera but it was wonderful.
We will tell everyone at the office we enjoyed it. We can tweet a five-star review in the Uber using our smart phones. Consumer behavior is that we will also scroll the schedule in search of another, upcoming opera to watch. We will want to repeat the thrill of seeing an opera. It was so much fun we will buy tickets to see it again.
We will send the F-16s.
Zelenskyy, a showman in his previous career, has sold opera tickets to the United States and Europe as well as other nations. It was important to manage expectations upwards during this process because he had to get so much out of them in order to make it happen.
Staging an opera is a huge endeavor. Months of planning, carpentry, lighting, painting, and technical work go into the scenery alone. The performers require time, space, and a whole staff to handle everthing from the wardrobe to the front office. People work backstage to make sure props are ready and curtains open on cue. If the reader has never been backstage during a theatrical event, and has the opportunity to do so, they are advised to bear in mind that the stage manager is God. You will obey the stage manager. If you are backstage and the director and producer both scream at you to jump while the stage manager says to stand still, you stand still.
Stage managers are the sergeants of the theatre. The theater of war is not a play, of course, but the analogy holds at Bakhmut. It is clear to me from watching tactical videos in the last 72 hours, most often from GoPro cameras mounted on the helmets of Ukrainian enlisted soldiers, that their Army has fully embraced the western concept of the noncommissioned officer. Leadership is evident, actions efficient and effective. Ground that took RuAF and Wagner three months of effort and 3,000 casualties to “control” has been retaken in three days.
“I tried to change the culture in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” Commander in Chief of Ukrainian Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhny said in an interview this week with a Ukrainian TV show, “so that each commander listens to the opinion of his subordinate, treats his subordinate as a person, so that normal relations are built between people in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
“There were cases when a sergeant who is on the front line called the commander in chief and said that it was necessary to deliver a fire strike at one point or another,” Zaluzhny said. This horizontal distribution of firepower authority is enabled through an app which allows artillery commanders flexible response to changing conditions. For example, as I am writing these words, my newsfeed tells me that a Russian headquarters in Klischiivka, south of Bakhmut, has been destroyed. Defending units within the salient have no command, and also no real chain of command. No slack exists in the Russian system of command.
Key to understanding this event is that the Ukrainian fire mission took place at a time of their own choosing, with resources ready to hand. Either the location of the headquarters was known in advance, and the strike timed for desired effects on forces defending the salient, or its location was discovered recently, as little as a few minutes beforehand, perhaps as frantic radio traffic gave it away.
Fire support is notoriously slow with the RuAF. Command is vertical and brittle. These habits predate the current conflict. In his interview, Zaluzhny spoke of this Russian style of military authority with contempt. “I did not serve in the Soviet army, but the Soviet army lived in the Armed Forces of Ukraine [AFU] for a very long time, and in some places has not yet completed its existence,” he said. Some observers have in fact expressed concerns that western-trained officers were being killed at Bakhmut instead of the old guard, but Zaluzhny has fostered the culture of sergeants with fire support. “If I find a representative of the Soviet army somewhere among us, I won't investigate for a long time,” he added, meaning that such officers are not promoted.
The historiography of artillery war shows that gun tubes and rockets are not enough to advance rapidly on a broad front. This is why the haggling over F-16s matters. Artillery and close air support, working together, multiply the effects of each. Operational art with combined arms works best when both the commander and the sergeant have a range of choices at hand and flexibility in their use.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, show producer, is not happy.
“In this stupid war, the only saint and totally innocent of all mistakes is the Russian soldier, who has been abandoned to his fate and decided that he must die the way they like from their mahogany offices,” he ranted in a video today. “And when this Russian soldier realizes what is going on around him, raises his head, I am sure he will figure out who is framing them and tear their asses to the fascist sign of those guilty of the tragedy he was abandoned in.”
Evoking the image of ‘Z patriots’ turning on the ruling regime with all the fury of prison culture, the former inmate-turned-leader of prison inmates-turned-mercenaries was in full fury. His contentious relationship with the Ministry of Defense (MoD) and RuAF over ammunition and support seems to be reaching a decision point. His threats to withdraw last week are forgotten as he blasts the RuAF for falling back. He stands to lose his Wagner army to encirclement in Bakhmut, exactly as he had worried aloud.
Whereas “the overall Russian information space response appears to be focused on the idea of avoiding spreading panic” right now, according to the Institute for the Study of War, Prigozhin is watching after the image of Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner here.
The force directed at Bakhmut is still attacking at this hour. Prigozhin’s enemies in the MoD would likely celebrate its destruction. He could pull them back at any time. Bear in mind that although Prigozhin could survive the annihilation of Wagner in Ukraine, any Wagnerites who survive the war are still likely to display extreme loyalty to him in the postwar environment.
That matters to politics in a country that has been de-politicized. Having highly-motivated people counts most in a discourse where motivation has been deprecated for a long time.
The dead will not be around to matter. Defeat does not deflate Prigozhin at all because he has no direct stake in the result. In fact, he gains further influence the worse off the Ministry of Defense becomes. This is all arbitrage, now.
If Vladimir Putin is forced to make peace on Ukraine’s terms, he might still die in the Kremlin, but his image will be destroyed “to the fascist sign” (meaning Ukraine) in which the Russian soldier was “abandoned.” Meanwhile, Putin’s legacy is becoming a re-Sovietized state, starting with the defense industries. Prigozhin, “the most dangerous criminal in Putin’s entourage” according to Russian opposition activist Leonid Volkov, could inherit a very different, much darker Russia than the one we knew before. The opera unfolding in Moscow after that would resemble Götterdämmerung.
I defer once again to your expertise. I study historical trends more than battles and wars, so i always appreciate your in-depth analysis. you gave me a great deal of insight on the reasons behind Russia's historic military patterns of failing military. Historically, Ukraine has a spottier (because they sort of fell out of history after Catherine (last of the Russian 'conquerors' (although she was Germanic) but traditionally Ukraine has had a tendency towards greater military success including too a large degree conquering Russia and and their ruling families behind familiarly tied. But the problem with that simplicity is that Ukraine has long had a history of being conquered and the becoming conquerors. Of course they were kind of in a crossroads position for both migrations fleeing other conquerors and conquerors in pursuit. It was also environmentally fertile and many cultures often ended settling and interbreeding (similar to the Georgian Caucasus, but of course a different terrain. "Whiteness" as a race probably stems from this area becoming a cross-cultural breeding ground.
And so my question to you is, do you think the Ukraine's seeming success has any historical military precedent in their organization, or do you think this merely a current organizational military development?
(And not to sound racist, but it is quite evident that racial interbreeding tends to favor lighter and lighter shades, and genetic studies pretty definitely rule out a genetic evolution of "white people". Kind of puts to bed the great displacement theory, because the white race developed as a genetic replacement from racial inter-mating, and if the white replace intermingled more freely with the darker races there would be a tendency for the offspring to have lighter skin.)