The problem that every commander involved in the war in Ukraine faces is that of having to overcome the war of position through maneuver. Even more so, it is the Ukrainians - for a purely numerical question, but also for the dependence on Western supplies - who feel in a particular way the weight of the "battle of materials".
In a certain sense, the conduct of the war by the Ukrainian side, at least since the preparation phase of the summer offensive of 2023, has shown how Kyiv strategists have always tried to obtain a victory in the tactical field so decisive as to have consequences at the strategic level. The culmination of these attempts was the Ukrainian advance in the Kursk Oblast, which tactically worked following the "breaking of the patterns" theorized by General Zaluzhnyi, but which strategically did not achieve the results that were intended.
The Ukrainians responded to the problem of objective inferiority, exacerbated by the "brute force" imposed by the war of attrition, always with the search for maneuver. The same method, a sort of "automatism" in the war of position, that the Germans always implemented during the First World War to counter on the field the superiority (of which the Berlin General Staff was aware) of the Entente.
One has to go back to last year's Ukrainian summer offensive to understand the similarity between the AFU and the Imperial German Army. Just as the Germans during the Kaiserschlacht (March-August 1918 - photo
), the Ukrainians found themselves facing a consolidated enemy defensive system, making less than optimal use of reserve troops, which were sent to support the attacks in the points where fighting was being fought with greater difficulty, rather than injecting new forces into the points of the front where Kyiv's soldiers had more easily managed to break through the Russian line.
The rapid exhaustion of the available forces and the failure to exploit the few open breaches showed how the planning of the offensive was "unbalanced" on the breakthrough of the front, without having clear ideas on how to "manage" the subsequent phase.
Trying to fight a Bewegungskrieg (maneuver warfare) on “continuous fronts”, where it is impossible to identify a single “point of maximum effort”, the Clausewitzian main emphasis, is an error "induced", on both sides, by the strategic-tactical dilemma of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The excessive extension of the front lines “is in conflict […] with all the requirements of a decisive battle” Clausewitz wrote.
The “fire and maneuver” tactic, as Ukrainian General Staff General Oleksandr Tarnavsky summarized it in the summer of 2023, is a tool used obsessively by Ukrainians and Russians, until, due to the characteristics of this specific war, it is abandoned, to flow back into the “organized waste” of friction.
Photo: Ukraine MoD / Bundesarchiv
