I want to apologize to my subscribers for the gap in updates, something which has also been reflected in lessened engagement on Twitter. I spent the last two days driving from Jacksonville, Florida to New Hampshire with a stop-over in DC. Beyond exhaustion, the trip also made me reflect a bit on how nobody involved with the planning of Russian operations around Kyiv seems to have experience driving or maintaining a modern automobile in a cold climate.
About that Convoy
The reason I bring this up is that the oversights which produced the traffic jam northwest of Kyiv where the now-infamous 40-mile long Russian convoy is still stuck(after more than ten days) would not need to have been very large to produce disaster on a large scale. Anyone familiar with civilian traffic jams during rush hour would be aware of how easily a single accident can bring traffic to a halt for several miles. Add in sub-zero temperatures, military-grade vehicles introduced in 1976, and single lane roadway, and things are hanging by a thread.
At this point, all you need is for one vehicle to fail and you have a cascade as the whole column comes to a halt.
The obvious and easiest move is to push the vehicle in question off the road. This is only easy if the vehicle’s cargo can be safely discarded. A truck full of food is unlikely to cause problems. If, however, you have mixed ammunition and/or fuel with other cargo, it would probably be unsafe to push the vehicle off the road violently without first unloading it, further delaying the column.
In the meantime, modern engines burn fuel regardless of whether wheels are turning. With temperatures below freezing, it seems obvious that Russian troops would leave their vehicles running for warmth. Turning the engines off while leaving the heat on, or charging mobile phones would risk running down the batteries. Leaving them on would force vehicles to rapidly burn through their fuel supplies, requiring refueling which in a column could only be done manually, again while the rest of the column is halted.
All this time, as an increasing number of vehicles are running their tanks dangerously low, the cold weather will be causing the tanks to freeze.
I am not present with that convoy, so I cannot speak to what instructions the Russian troops within it have been issued, but based on my own knowledge of military matters, and experience with vehicles, I increasingly agree with the conclusion of Michael Kofman, that it would be “extremely hard to undo” the traffic jam problem once it emerged. I would go further and say that rather than believing it can be undone, there is a high probability it cannot. The longer it goes on, the more vehicles will fail, the greater the stress of manual refueling, and the more vehicles will be unrecoverable. At a certain point a majority or near majority of the vehicles will be out of fuel, have dead batteries, and there will be no viable way to actually get gas to them or jump start the engines. With a cold snap coming, both men and vehicles may freeze if they have not already done so.
This is not the consensus view. As the Washington Post notes, the convoy has attracted the attention of plenty of armchair generals. A large number of analysts, assume that the Russian supply issues are temporary and that time will resolve them allowing for an assault on Kyiv. This is without a doubt the view not just of Pro-Russian analysts, but also of the Russians themselves based upon impressions I received over the weekend. They acknowledge what happened and even to a degree why, but they were convinced that 48-72hrs would straighten it out. That was one reason I was reasonable certain that Russia would float a series of cease-fire requests this week following upon their “operational pause”. Because the belief is genuine that waiting will resolve everything.
For the reasons I outlined above, I remain skeptical. I find it significant that not one of those who predicates their analysis of the military situation on the Russian logistical situation resolving itself has provided any explanation of how it will or even could do so. The analysis is from 35,000 feet. The Russian logistical situation will resolve itself because it must. If the Russian leadership knows what has happened to their 40-mile convoy, knows why it happened, they must be in a position to do something about it.
But what? What can they do? They can avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future, but that will involve dispersing their supply columns. Those columns may now actually arrive, but the columns that arrive will arrive later than planned(in pre-war assumptions) and will contain fewer supplies. They will be able to support fewer troops engaging in more limited operations. They can adapt, for sure, but not without costs.
None of that adaptability will help the 40-mile convoy and no has been able to explain how it might when it has been stuck for more than ten days. Being stalled for 72hrs is very different from being stalled for two weeks, and the longer it does not move, the greater the number of vehicles which will never move. Why should efforts which failed to get the column moving in the first 48hrs work two weeks later when more vehicles have failed? No one has been able to answer.
Nor have those predicting that the problems will resolve themselves so as to allow the Russian army to encircle or assault Kyiv in the next 48-96hrs explain how this is supposed to happen when the weather is about to get a whole lot worse. Temperatures are predicted to drop as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius.
We need to seriously contemplate the possibility that the entire column is lost.
If that is the case, the implications for Russian operations against Kyiv are profound. The Russians will not only be unable to utilize the convoy. The convoy’s corpse will render the P02 highway unusable for months until it can be cleared. Any future supply line for a Russian advance on Kyiv will have to use a different route.
If both of the below routes are impassible, Russian supply-lines for any encirclement of Kyiv may be extended by as much as 60 miles even if they did everything “correctly” from this point onwards. Those are long-term implications.
Perhaps the column will move. But the point is that a whole lot of analysis has assumed things will happen because they must happen. And those have been the predictions most prone to failing to come to past.