A friend of mine wrote this. He's well versed on military history (as well as a bunch of other things. A true Renaissance man) . It's on his facebook page where you'll also see some fairly mind-blowing fabrication:
"Henry Chang
Ukraine - Day 102
Someone pinch me!
The Ukrainian military may be in the process of having pulled off a rare tactical masterstroke. They seem to have staged a feigned retreat through most of Sievierodonetsk, the city in the Donbas. This is the very eastern edge of the conflict where the Russian military has concentrated almost all of its available reserves in an attempt to salvage some sort of military 'victory' Putin can present to the Russian people before annexing the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts.
The last week has been troubling for any pro-Ukrainian observer. Russian artillery has been able to inflict nonstop barrages on Sievierodonetsk and the surrounding environs, degrading the Ukrainian units unfortunate enough to be placed in those positions. Reports have been filtering out of Ukrainian troops losing morale to the point of mutiny as they were given a mission which cannot be fulfilled with their current weapons system disparities (the artillery). Russian Wagner Group mercenaries flanked the Ukrainian trenches in Poposna, overrunning them as the Ukrainians fled a system designed to handle a frontal assault, but not an attack from the side or the rear. Russian lines were moving forward in the very eastern edges of the Donbas cauldron, it seemed as if the Ukrainians were on the point of collapse. the Ukrainian military brass warned of the possibility of having to withdraw from the cauldron on May 28. Russia poured in all available reserves into Sievierodonetsk the last few days, meeting very little resistance as they advanced against a demoralized, routing adversary.
Bloggers despaired, retired American generals were fooled, one even stated a few days ago on a podcast with on the youtube Council of Foreign Relations channel that it was impossible for Ukraine to evict Russia from Ukrainian territory.
Turns out it was all a ruse! (although that may not be true of Poposna)
The Russian Chechen forces (who are almost a parody of themselves) made celebratory videos of themselves in residential areas of Sievierodonetsk. There are no Ukrainians in sight, no soldiers, no civilians. It should have been a very loud warning sign to the Chechens, but this is a military which has not been trained in such subtleties. There is no one around because everyone (except the Russians) have been warned that all hell is going to break loose.
Today, the Ukrainians, holding the last bit of Sievierodonetsk with their backs to the river, wheeled and counterattacked the Russians. It is a classic feigned retreat, executed on a scale which hasn't been seen (to the best of my knowledge) in a long time. The Ukrainian military leadership played into it with press releases that they might have to retreat from the Sievierodonetsk cauldron, that's feigning retreat on a global level as both Eastern European bloggers as well as observers half a world away (me included) bought into the feint.
The city of Sievierodonetsk is situated on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donetsk River. On the other side of the river occupying the western bank is the city of Lysychansk. Lysychansk is built upon ridge which has a birds eye view of the river and the flat territory beyond. Lysychansk's ridgetop averages 190 meters above sea level. Sievierodonetsk, on the flat ground on the other side, averages about 60 meters above sea level. Given the proximity of the front line and the elevation advantage, it means that Ukrainian artillery on the ridge can point its howitzers directly into the front Russian lines and aim using the human eye. They can sight down the barrel. This is a deadly advantage because dumb munitions suddenly are very accurate. Normally, artillery fires from many miles away, the shells are fired into the sky and they spend a minute or two in the air on a long parabolic arc on the way to the target. If the target is close and the artillery can't see it, the barrel will point almost straight up into the air.. The dumb (unguided) munitions are typically not particularly accurate when firing in this (intended) manner, there needs to be an entire artillery battery utilized to take out a specific target by raining lots of shells. Having the high ground and being able to sight in directly is clearly a massive advantage. Moreover, the Ukrainians drawing the Russians into urban fighting reduces the distance between the forces to near zero where the Ukrainians have the upper hand in close combat fighting. It also means that the Russians aren't able to launch artillery barrages without the risk of taking out their own troops along with the adversary. To top it off, the Ukrainian high ground advantage gives its artillery greater range relative to the Russians. The Russian artillery has to go through a no man's land where they are within range of Ukrainian artillery, but the Ukrainian batteries are not yet within range of the Russian guns.
Initial unconfirmed reports are that the Chechens, along with other Russians engaging in their cavalier cellphone camera video selfies took heavy losses. Not surprising. When the barrage starts and you're out in the open in newly conquered territory, you're not gonna know where the cover is. They likely immediately hit the ground, but that's not really good cover, they needed to be in a trench or a basement.
The Ukrainians took back 20% of the city, but didn't press on. It's brilliant. They need to maintain that zero line of contact. They are much more motivated than the Russians so Ukrainians will have the upper hand in close quarters urban combat. In close combat, the prime mover isn't weapons, it's motivation. The Ukrainians also need to keep the Russians within direct fire range of their howitzers across the river and hope that the Russians are too dumb (ie. Putin being too dumb) to retreat into more defensible positions.
Probably the most extreme and famous example of a feigned retreat is the Battle of the Kalka River which featured the Mongols (under Jebe and Subutai) against the Cumans (a nomadic adversary of the Mongols) and their allies, a host of Kievan Rus city states. It's a bit ironic since the Kievan Rus are the ancestors of both Ukraine and Russia.
The Mongols were on a long range reconaissance mission across thousands of miles. They had defeated the Khwarezmian Empire (in modern day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran). Subutai and Jebe requested permission from Genghis Khan to take 30,000 soldiers and conduct a long range reconaissance mission through the Caucuses Mountains, around the Caspian Sea, to see what lay beyond the Mongol sphere of contact/knowledge. The Mongols fought some epic battles (which of course they won) on their way to chasing the fleeing Cumans who persuaded the Kievan Rus princes to fight the Mongols, despite Mongol envoys asking them to be neutral as their disagreement lay with the Cumans. The Kievan Rus principalities raised an army of 100,000 to confront the by then 20,000 Mongol force (they had lost many men in the winter crossing of the Caucasus Range). The Mongols panicked, left behind many valuable plunder items in their haste to retreat and for 9(!) days they retreated, leaving behind valuable and heavy treasures to give the impression they were attempting to unweight themselves of such burdens to increase their rate of retreat.
The enthusiasm and greed of the Cumans and Kievan Rus princes played into the Mongol ploy as the princes (and the Cumans) each marched with their own column rather than a single unified force. All were eager to be the first to stumble upon abandoned bits of plunder. By day 9, they were extremely stretched out over many miles. Then the fleeing, seemingly disorganized Mongols turned, assumed battle formation and charged into the first column, the Cumans. Of course they fled and the routing Cuman cavalry caused chaos in the following columns. One of them managed to maintain cohesion and barricade themselves inside a temporary fort of wagons atop a hill. That defense had no chance and in the end, the Mongols took the Kievan Rus princes prisoner, wrapped them in carpets, threw boards atop the carpets and held a victory feast atop the suffocating Kievan Rus nobility. According to Kievan Rus accounts, less than 1 in 10 of the Kievan Rus soldiers returned home from the battle, a battle in which they initially outnumbered the Mongols 5 to 1.
The feigned retreat was the tactic of first resort for the Mongols, but they were only able to utilize it effectively because they had created perhaps the most disciplined army in history. The tactic will not work with an undisciplined force because it's too easy for the feigned retreat to turn into a rout, from a fake retreat into a real retreat. A rout is the least desirable of all military actions because there's zero cohesion and it's comparatively easy to kill an adversary whose back is turned and they're running away.
In WW2 in the very region where the current battles are being fought, the German Field Marshall Erich von Manstein was able to conduct several major "backhand" counteroffensives after losing ground, but from what I recall those weren't feigned retreats, they were real ones. von Manstein had an ability to recognize overstretched Soviet lines and quickly organize the routed forces to take advantage of the enemy's temporary weakness. I mention those operations because those are the only actions in the last century (which I can recall) that even vaguely resemble a feigned retreat. Despite the Eastern Front in WW2 being the largest conflict in human history, it was largely bereft of such tactics due to the "not one step back" and "fortress city" orders of Stalin and Adolph H. respectively. Egotistical and short-sighted bastards, both of them.
I'd like to thank the Ukrainian military for doing such a thing. It wasn't something I figured would ever be seen in my lifetime, it was something which lived only in military actions of long ago legends, the actions of the Mongols, of Belisarius, of Hannibal Barca. Modern military tactics have comparatively lacked that level of imagination and execution, WW1 featured incompetent generals (entitled members of nobility) who literally purchased their commands, then subsequently sent millions of men to charge enemy trenches through no man's land and throw themselves needlessly into sure death against machine guns. Modern weapons had advanced to the point where their lethality had exceeded the scope of those ignorant, ossified generals' imaginations to achieve anything against these new technologies.
Of course this war is far from over. There's still a lot of weapons to be delivered before the Ukrainians reach artillery parity. I wonder though:
Will the Russians stay in their trap? They've committed all available reserves to the effort to take Sievierodonetsk. Will they stay in the city, at a zero contact line, where Ukrainian will gives Ukraine a large advantage in close quarters fighting, or will the Russians withdraw to open ground where their standoff weapons negate that Ukrainian advantage? Withdrawing won't be something that Putin will be enthusiastic about doing, but he probably wasn't enthusiastic about extracting his forces from their suicidal positions around Kyiv either.
I wrote this because 1) I'm excited about it and 2) the US mainstream media has almost abandoned coverage of this conflict. They get more clicks/views about domestic mass shootings at the moment, flawed analysis by some retired generals (it's not always that way, sometimes it's been good) has been largely abandoned and even clickbait stories about Russian atrocities upon civilians are no longer on American channels.
As always, my information is incomplete and my conclusions could be completely wrong."
