Where Russia Advanced, the Cause Was Ours: Corps Reform and Two Kinds of Middle Strike

Russia's offensive season came and mostly did not

Russia's pattern for years has been an offensive running roughly April to late October. Dmytro Putiata's observation is that the end of spring arrived and nothing extraordinary came with it.

His reading is not that something larger is being prepared. The opposite: Russia has decreased its appetite for the encirclement-and-destruction objectives it pursued for years.

What happened instead was regrouping, and a good deal of it was reactive. Ukrainian counteroffensive action forced Russia to move two marine divisions, a formation that had been held as reserve. Having committed them, Russia failed to achieve much with them. Troops were shifted from the Pokrovsk direction toward Ocheretyne, and from Novopavlivka toward Pokrovsk, which Putiata expects to become the next focus.

An army that spends a season moving reserves to plug problems is not an army executing a plan.

Where Russia did advance, the cause was on the Ukrainian side

This is the uncomfortable part, and Putiata states it about his own army rather than about the enemy.

Around Sloviansk there are continuing problems, and he names the reason: the 11th Army Corps did not manage to handle several categories of issue.

His judgement about the wider pattern is blunt. Where Russia has advanced, it is generally not because it invented something new, nor because it fielded more drone operators or more drones. It is because of internal Ukrainian problems that have existed, frankly, since the beginning of the war.

That is a meaningful claim. It moves the explanation for lost ground away from Russian innovation and onto command structure.

The corps problem, stated precisely

The detail underneath is worth understanding, because "corps reform" is usually discussed as an abstraction.

Some army corps perform well even when they are not commanding their own brigades. Putiata gives the example of the Pokrovsk direction, where the 7th Rapid Reaction Corps works with motorised brigades that are not organically its own, and still does the job properly.

So the capability exists, and it is demonstrably not dependent on a corps owning its formations. Which means where it fails, the failure is the corps, not the structure it was handed.

That is a harder and more useful conclusion than blaming the reform for being incomplete. The reform's design is survivable. Some headquarters execute it and some do not.

Two kinds of middle strike, and they are not the same job

Putiata makes a distinction that most coverage flattens, and it clarifies a lot.

Strikes on operational depth split into two bands with different targets.

25 to 60 kilometres. Trucks, radar systems, air defence systems. This is the band that degrades the enemy's ability to see and to move immediately behind the line.

Deeper than that. Ammunition depots, fuel depots, headquarters, and the buildings Russians actually live in, which includes drone operators and reserves.

The second list is the one that deserves attention. Targeting accommodation is not incidental. Drone crews are the scarce, trained, hard-to-replace element of the modern Russian force, and they have to sleep somewhere. Striking where they rest is a different theory of attrition from striking their equipment.

Putiata's overall verdict is that the combination has produced a much better situation, and that Ukraine has found a workable answer to the infiltration tactics that caused so much trouble.

The seasonal caveat he adds himself

He does not overclaim. The answer to infiltration will be properly tested in summer, when foliage returns and tree lines give attackers natural cover again.

His expectation is that Russia will not repeat last year's level of success. He says expectation, not certainty, which is the correct register for a prediction about a season that has not happened yet.

What to watch

• The 11th Army Corps specifically. Putiata named it. Whether the Sloviansk problems resolve is a direct test of whether the issue was that headquarters.
• Pokrovsk as the next focus. He said it plainly, and the force movements support it.
• Whether infiltration returns with the foliage. That is the falsifiable part of his claim, and summer is when it gets settled.