Defense expert Ko Colijn has been providing Dutch people with information on armed conflicts for almost fifty years. For NU.nl he follows the battle in Ukraine and answers our (and your) questions. This time the question is: is the battle in the Donets Basin still going according to plan for Russian President Vladimir Putin?
British intelligence tweets every day about the war in Ukraine. Not such an objective source, because that service doesn’t want to show the back of the tongue either. But hindsight proves that the British have often been right. If misinterpreted, they would of course also make a mud figure.
Last week they reported that Russia has now actually outsourced the battle in the Donets Basin to the private mercenaries of the Wagner group. That would show that Putin’s plan to organize new cannon fodder himself has in fact failed, so that he has now turned to plan B. Putin will probably make another effort to explain to the world that he has nothing to do with the Wagner group, but nobody believed that denial anyway.
The UK tweet is quite plausible and you could add something to it. The Wagner group often fights with means beyond Putin’s control – or simply does not want to know. So the murder of Ukrainian POWs in Olenivka Prison may have been their work.
The Russians claim that the Ukrainians carried out the killing themselves with a HIMARS missile fire. Satellite images that have surfaced in the meantime do not support that, because a HIMARS shelling looks different. And the (miraculously spared) Russian security personnel turns out to have had ‘off’ by chance.
Plan A, B, C…
The battle in the Donets basin is also at a relatively low level. The Russians seem to be mainly focused on securing the fake referendums that should turn the occupied territory into a kind of Russian province. They should probably take place in the first half of September.
Of course, Ukrainian troops are resisting the Russian push. It seems that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has even called on his citizens to run. That could mean he wants to thwart the Russians and frustrate their preparations for the “Russification” of the region. It may also indicate that he is already seeking protection from death squads from the Wagner group.
Anyway, after the failed capture of the capital Kyiv, Putin’s plan B is also a joke. The Russian pincer movement that should have included the Ukrainian inspection troops (about 40,000 men) in the east has turned out to be an illusion. The conquest of the whole of Ukraine east of the Dnipro River (generously predicted by Dutch experts) has come to nothing.
In de val in Kherson
Then the south. Ukraine has been announcing an offensive for weeks. That should start with the recapture of the city of Kherson. On July 18, a bridge over the Dnipro, northeast of that city, was shelled by Ukrainian artillery. After that, the same happened with the Antonivskyi Bridge and an adjacent railway bridge at Kherson itself.
The HIMARS rocket launchers supplied by the United States would have been responsible for this. Precision is more important than range here, although the Ukrainians still want the long-range versions of the HIMARS missiles (with a range of 100 to even 300 kilometers).
According to (again) British military intelligence, all bridges are now so damaged that they can no longer be used. The Russian troops in Kherson are now rapidly decreasing, as they depend on train traffic over the bridge for the supply of fuel and ammunition. If they don’t get outside help, they’re basically trapped like rats.
A striking detail is that Western arms aid, including the HIMARS missiles, thus reaches the Ukrainians quite effortlessly. The Russians appear to have little control over the arms flow.
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