The Fall of Vuhledar: This Week in Ukraine
This week: the Ukrainians lose a vital location, Shaheds rain, Russians being Russians, and Chechens being Chechens.
Author’s Note: The Flash Traffic Podcast. It’s one of the first available podcasts on Ukraine of the day. It’s available everywhere, but if you want it immediately, I suggest getting it directly from Spotify here: The Flash Traffic Podcast.
1. It Vanished Like Dew in the Sun
This week, the Ukrainians lost the strategic village of Vuhledar located at the intersection of the eastern and southern fronts. Yes, I used the word “strategic” to describe this calamity. Not every lost town or hamlet is “strategic,” and analysts and journalists often overuse that word to describe Russian advances. This time, I believe it is applicable. The loss of Vuhledar presages significant hardships for Ukraine on the southeastern front.
Vuhledar is strategic in part because of its location. The town enjoys a higher elevation than the surrounding area, enabling fire control via artillery and missiles. More importantly, the hamlet is located at the intersection of the eastern and southern fronts, and it has pinned the Russians in this area for the last two years. The loss of this stronghold means that Russia will be better able to “smooth out” this corner of the front, combining their efforts in Vuhledar with their recent and aggressive success toward Pokrovsk, which lies directly to the north. These two efforts are reinforcing, increasing the possibility that Russia could achieve a breakthrough along the front.
This small town is also what I would call an “emotional objective” for Russia. The Russian army has been trying to take this town for over two years, suffering a ridiculous number of losses in the process. The first major battle at Vuhledar took place in early 2023, with the Russian’s 155 Naval Infantry Brigade taking so many losses (almost the entire 500-man brigade) that the survivors mutinied and refused to fight. CNN called the battle a “fiasco” and a “mauling.” Further attacks on Vuhledar fared no better until Russia’s attacks this summer, with the total cost to Russia of taking the town estimated at thousands of troops and over a thousand vehicles. Like in Bakhmut, Russia has been emotionally fixated on taking Vuhledar, and its capture will be a significant morale boost to Putin’s war effort.
So, what does the loss of Vuhledar mean for the larger war effort? In the short term, those factors contributing to Ukraine’s defeat will linger. First, if they are relieved at all, Ukrainian replacement troops to the front are poorly trained. Second, ammunition shortages (especially artillery and mortar) will continue. Although Zelensky said this week that Russia’s artillery advantage has decreased from 8:1 to 3:1, defense requires artillery, and the Ukrainians need more. Russian advances in drone warfare will continue. The Russian army is also refining its infantry tactics, taking advantage of glide bombs and better-trained (relative to the previous Russian “trench meat” we’ve seen) personnel, with little regard for personnel losses. None of this bodes well for Ukraine moving forward.
Vuhledar is an example of the current state of the front lines, with Russia aggressively moving forward at multiple locations. Some analysts have noted that even at the current accelerated rate of march, it may take Russia a decade to take Ukraine. That would be true if battlefield gains were strictly linear, but that is not how fronts work. Any territorial gain by Russia risks a catastrophic breakthrough that could devour large chunks of Ukrainian territory. Like the often-quoted Hemingway line from The Sun Also Rises, “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
2. The Slow-Moving Train Wreck Continues
In the 1930s, the US Air Corps Tactical School celebrated new military technology that supported the idea that “the bomber will always get through.” They were wrong, but perhaps only because contemporary air forces in the 30’s lacked one crucial capability: expendability. Enter the Shahed drone. It’s slow. It makes a lot of noise. It’s basically an Iranian-designed piece of flying garbage. Still, Russia is building a plethora of them, and it doesn’t care if Ukraine destroys them before they get to the target area. The Shahed’s primary mission is to confound and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.
Russian Shahed attacks against Ukraine reached a record high in September. According to the Ukrainian government, Russia launched over 1,300 Shaheds last month, of which over 1,100 were destroyed. Earlier in the war, Russia would attack only on holidays or when Putin had a temper tantrum over a NATO summit or a successful Ukrainian operation. Now, massive air attacks are commonplace. According to one Kyiv resident I spoke with this week, “It’s now total hell; people are on edge. It’s exhausting peoples’ spirit.”
The quantity of drones is also taxing Ukrainian air defenses. The increase in frequency is a result of Russia no longer importing the drone from Iran but producing it in Russia. According to the Kyiv Post, Russia’s Shahed factory can build 6,000 of these drones per year, and it has already delivered over 4,500 this year. Even though the Shahed is relatively easy to interdict, the number of drones makes it difficult for Ukrainian air defenses to keep up. Although Ukraine has been fairly successful with broad-based GPS jamming of Shaheds (don’t even think of navigating via Google Maps during an air raid in Kyiv), a greater number of Shaheds are getting through, not to mention North Korea and Iranian short-range ballistic missiles. The air defense cost curve, which has always favored the attacker, is getting more costly for Ukraine.
3. Pilot Jealousy
The Russians have embarrassed themselves again. This time, one of its manned stealth fighters appears to have destroyed one of its unmanned stealth fighters. It happened over eastern Ukraine on Saturday. A Russian Su-57 Felon stealth fighter used a short-range missile to eliminate one of only a few Russian S-70 Okhotnik-B (Hunter-B) unmanned jets. Whether the human pilot was angry at AI and robots taking his job (they are coming for you next, dock workers and port operators), or Russia lost control of its technology and didn’t want it to fall into the hands of the Ukrainians, it was another example of Russian buffoonery.
4. [Video] The Most Ridiculous Video of This Entire War
The Tic-Toc Chechens have outdone themselves. This week’s video is of the Chechen combat Tesla Cybertruck. When they’re not sliding all over the flat dirt road, these OD green dickheadmobiles are tactically hiding in the woods with their LED lights shining like a beacon of idiocy on the entire exercise. The deranged Grand Poobah of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has three guys cramped into the tiny “bed” of this “truck” trying to shoot down a stationary Mavic quadcopter with a .50 cal machinegun. I haven’t seen such a farcical, bullshit softball of a technology demonstration since the last Missile Defense Agency anti-ballistic missile test.