Roaming groups of infantry hauling anti-tank missiles, working in the gaps between fortified cities and towns, were the key to Ukraine’s successful defense of its capital Kyiv against Russian invaders in February and March this year.
Ukraine’s light infantry operations “first delayed, then disrupted and finally turned back key Russian supporting efforts along critical ground lines of communication,” Anderson wrote for West Point’s Modern War Institute. “This effort, in both Sumy and the adjacent Chernihiv Oblast, denied consolidation, resupply and mass for Russia’s main effort to encircle Kyiv.”
Russian doctrine calls for artillery to pummel enemy strongpoints before tanks and infantry rush forward, isolating enemy troops so the big guns can finish them off. But applying these tactics across the many miles between the Russian staging points and Kyiv, the ultimate objective of the initial stage of Russia’s invasion in late February 2022, required deft logistics.
And that played directly into the Ukrainians’ hands. Borrowing, and altering, methods from the World War II German, the Ukrainian army fortified towns and cities between the Russian border and Kyiv in Sumy and Chernihiv Oblasts in the hope of slowing, stopping, then reversing the enemy invasion. The mobile teams targeting isolated Russian tanks, of course. But they also began plucking at Russian supply convoys. “Beyond targeting and separating the infantry from the tanks in isolation, Ukrainian forces also took the fight directly to Russia’s vulnerable truck-based logistics,” Anderson explained.
“Russia’s inability to exploit the gaps in the Ukrainian noncontiguous defensive front seems to be largely because of the efforts of the mobile, light infantry forces,” Anderson noted. “The overall effect of this—as well as the defense of Chernihiv, Kharkiv and other areas east of Kyiv—was the disintegration of the Russian offensive operational effort in the first week of April and the abandonment of the Kyiv axis and a complete withdrawal from northeast Ukraine.
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