ISW is reporting that the Russians are attempting an offensive. That's probably why Russian losses have gone up the last few days.
Institute for the Study of War
Another 900+ Russians dead. Third day in a row with these kinds of losses.
https://www.mil.gov.ua/en/news/2023...osses-of-the-enemy-from-24-02-22-to-09-02-23/
Some sources are saying that the Russians are throwing 100,000 troops into this offensive. The Ukrainians have been holding the line for three days now. I expect they will probably lose some ground just from the sheer weight of Russian bodies being thrown at them, but the Russians will pay a steep price for every meter and then the Russian offensive will start to falter when they start running out of supply or they struggle to move the supply they have on hand.
Assaults consume tremendous mountains of supply and as the troops move forward, the supply train needs to keep up. Russia has shown weak logistics when it comes to moving supply the last leg from the railhead to the frontline. Russia's rail is very good at getting supply near the front. They have an entire branch of the military dedicated to the railroads. But they started the war with too few trucks, have lost a staggering number of the trucks they had, plus after a year a lot of the surviving trucks are wearing out. They have pressed civilian trucks into service, but those aren't equipped for the types of conditions battlefield trucks have to face and their life expectancy is probably pretty low. Because of its rail network Russia has a small civilian truck fleet for the size of the country.
When the supplies run out, the offensive stalls. Operation Bagration was probably one of the largest single battles in history. To keep the Germans tied down on the Eastern Front and give the western Allies a chance in France the Soviets launched a massive assault on Germany's Army Group Center in August 1944. Zhukov piled up a staggering mountain of supplies for the operation and had a massive fleet of American built trucks to move it.
The Russians blasted a hole in the German line close to 1000 miles long and pretty much obliterated Army Group Center, which was a massive force of about 850,000 men. The German casualties range from 150K to 500K depending on the estimate. Russian casualties were around 770K.
Army Group Central was devastated and nothing stood in the way between the Russians and Berlin, but they burned up so much supply and took so many casualties on the initial assault they couldn't exploit the opportunity and the Germans had time to regroup and build a new defensive line.
Operation Bagration - Wikipedia
It all boils down to logistics in the end. And Russian logistics once away from rail lines in the last 100 years have never been very good.
ISW suggests that Russia may be handing over the frontlines to DNR and LNR units to free up Russian units for their offensive. That exact thing happened 81 years ago when the Russians were bogged down in a massive attritional fight at Stalingrad. The Germans stripped out all their units holding the flanks at Stalingrad and threw them into the cauldron in the city. They gave the responsibility to holding their flanks to the weaker Hungarian, Italian, and Romanian units fighting with the German army. Zhukov took advantage of this once he had built up enough forces and supplies to conduct a Russian offensive. He attacked the German's flanks and broke through the weak forces holding them. This allowed the Russians to surround the city and trap the German 6th Army inside the perimeter.
In Igor Girkin's latest interview he was talking about how the Russian don't have enough of anything to go over onto the offensive successfully. He's very pro-Russian, but he's also the most realistic of the commentators on the Russian side. In his estimation the Russians don't have the supplies for a full offensive and the troops are too poorly trained to sustain an offensive.
I expect the Russians will make some gains in the offensive, and there will be plenty of hand wringing that Ukraine is doomed and/or "see the Russians were just sandbagging". But the offensive will fall apart and the Russians will then have a much weaker force to defend against the next Ukrainian offensive. If the Russian flanks are being held by LNR and DNR forces exclusively, expect there to be the point for the Ukrainian offensive.
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