1 Institute for the Study of War & The Critical Threats Project 2022
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 19
Frederick W. Kagan, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
March 19, 3 pm ET
Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed
to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major
Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated.
Russian forces continue to make limited advances in some parts of the theater but are very
unlikely to be able to seize their objectives in this way. The doctrinally sound Russian response to this
situation would be to end this campaign, accept a possibly lengthy operational pause, develop the plan for a new
campaign, build up resources for that new campaign, and launch it when the resources and other conditions are
ready. The Russian military has not yet adopted this approach. It is instead continuing to feed small collections
of reinforcements into an ongoing effort to keep the current campaign alive. We assess that that effort will fail.
The ultimate fall of Mariupol is increasingly unlikely to free up enough Russian combat power to
change the outcome of the initial campaign dramatically. Russian forces concentrated considerable
combat power around Mariupol drawn from the 8th Combined Arms Army to the east and from the group of
Russian forces in Crimea to the west. Had the Russians taken Mariupol quickly or with relatively few losses they
would likely have been able to move enough combat power west toward Zaporizhiya and Dnipro to threaten those
cities. The protracted siege of Mariupol is seriously weakening Russian forces on that axis, however. The
confirmed death of the commander of the Russian 150th Motorized Rifle Division likely indicates the scale of the
damage Ukrainian defenders are inflicting on those formations. The block-by-block fighting in Mariupol itself is
costing the Russian military time, initiative, and combat power. If and when Mariupol ultimately falls the Russian
forces now besieging it may not be strong enough to change the course of the campaign dramatically by attacking
to the west.
Russian forces in the south appear to be focusing on a drive toward Kryvyi Rih, presumably to
isolate and then take Zaporizhiya and Dnipro from the west but are unlikely to secure any of
those cities in the coming weeks if at all. Kryvyi Rih is a city of more than 600,000 and heavily fortified
according to the head of its military administration. Zaporizhiya and Dnipro are also large. The Russian military
has been struggling to take Mariupol, smaller than any of them, since the start of the war with more combat
power than it is currently pushing toward Kryvyi Rih. The Russian advance on that axis is thus likely to bog down
as all other Russian advances on major cities have done.
The Russian military continues to commit small groups of reinforcements to localized fighting
rather than concentrating them to launch new large-scale operations. Russia continues to commit
units drawn from its naval infantry from all fleets, likely because those units are relatively more combat-ready
than rank-and-file Russian regiments and brigades. The naval infantry belonging to the Black Sea Fleet is likely
the largest single pool of ready reserve forces the Russian military has not yet committed. Much of that naval
infantry has likely been embarked on amphibious landing ships off the Odesa coast since early in the war,
presumably ready to land near Odesa as soon as Russian forces from Crimea secured a reliable ground line of
communication (GLOC) from Crimea to Odesa. The likelihood that Russian forces from Crimea will establish
