In "continental warfare," each side strives to conserve and, if possible, increase its "operational reserve," that is, the sum total of trained and equipped combat units not directly involved in the fighting. Only with an operational reserve is it possible to make strategic decisions; decisions about holding forces ready to counter an expected enemy offensive, or launching an offensive that pushes it back, or, better still, pushing into the enemy front, deploying, and encircling enemy forces. The Red Army managed to push the Germans back from Stalingrad to Berlin through a succession of offensive “encirclements”. The Allies did the same on a much smaller scale after the Normandy landings in 1944.
Of course, until an operational reserve is built up and offensives can be launched, frontal forces are absolutely necessary, either to resist the enemy's advance or to keep attacking him and thereby prevent the withdrawal of his frontal forces to build up his own reserve. operative. However, the frontal forces can only fight attrition, in the style of the First World War, to cause deaths and injuries among the enemy troops deployed in front. And a war fought entirely through attrition lasts for years during which soldiers on both sides are killed and maimed until one of them surrenders from sheer exhaustion.
This is what happened on November 11, 1918, when Germany surrendered, despite the fact that not a single Allied soldier had entered German territory; that territory remained largely untouched, save for a few British and French air raids that hit a few buildings somewhere or other. The fact that it was not devastated or occupied after its surrender meant that Germany could return to war just 20 years later, with catastrophic consequences. In other words, attrition is not only costly in lives, but also inconclusive as it does not exhaust the will to fight.
Why is that relevant? Since the failure of the Russian air assault on Antonov airport on the first night of the invasion, an assault that was to open the door to the conquest of Kyiv and the country's surrender, Ukraine has not stopped waging a war of attrition. At the price of mounting casualties, the Ukrainian frontal war has been successful enough to: induce the Russians to withdraw from Kharkov, the country's second-largest city; prevent what seemed the inevitable conquest of Odessa, the main Ukrainian port; and limiting Russian advances in the most disputed regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, as well as managing to keep Bakhmut in house-to-house, street-to-street fighting, despite incessant attacks by Wagner's Russian mercenaries.
However, the greatest success of the Ukrainian frontal resistance has occurred behind the front lines, with the gradual accumulation of an increasingly numerous, trained and equipped operational reserve of combat units that has been able to be kept out of the fighting. because the frontal forces have shown enough strength to stop the Russian advances without the need for large reinforcements. That means that, for the first time since the start of the war, the Ukrainian leadership can take the initiative instead of simply repelling one Russian attack after another on different sectors of the very long front.
Thus, they can choose a course of action from a range of risks and possible gains: from staying generally on the defensive while launching successive attacks, to driving the Russians back in one sector after another, calculating for each. a limited risk effort to the bolder option of concentrating all available forces for a deep penetrating offensive capable of cutting the roads and rail lines holding Russian forces within an entire region. The peculiar geography of the war, dominated by the bend of the great Dnieper River, offers several options for such a bold move; the most ambitious would be an all-out offensive from Zaporizhia to the Black Sea around Berdyansk, or even Mariupol, just 60 kilometers from the Russian border.
Whichever sector is chosen, and unless the Russians have large forces ready to counterattack with a power that can quickly drive the Ukrainians back, the result of an all-out offensive could be a spectacular Russian defeat, with unprecedented numbers of prisoners. It could even end up raising challenges to Putin's leadership of the war and thus to his mandate.
The fact that the Ukrainian leadership can finally choose between different options is a big step forward, even if the chosen option is to withhold the operational reserve until the Russians make the move. This is a real possibility: the assault on Bakhmut that has dominated the headlines for so long has been intense, but also very limited in scope. The Russians who have fought and died in house-to-house fighting are not professional military men from elite forces, nor deployable troops drawn from last year's call-up of 300,000 reservists, nor units commanded by contract soldiers, but more quite expendable soldiers of Wagner.
That means that there is somewhere (perhaps in Belarus, Russia itself, or occupied Ukraine) a large enough number of uncommitted Russian forces with which the Kremlin can launch its own offensive. In any case, perhaps that would not constitute conclusive action either because the only thing that would be decisive would be a conquest of Kyiv, which is now an impossibility unless the entire Russian army is mobilized to achieve it.
In the event of a Russian offensive, a Ukrainian counteroffensive launched after the Russians had used up their operational reserves could yield even greater results and force the Kremlin onto the defensive, perhaps to the point of seeking a ceasefire. If Kyiv and the West are looking for the most likely path to victory, that is it.
Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
