1 Institute for the Study of War & AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2022
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 31
Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan
August 31, 10:45 pm ET
Click here to see ISW's interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is
updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Ukrainians and the West should not fall for Russian information operations portraying
the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast as having failed almost instantly or
that depict Ukraine as a helpless puppet of Western masters for launching it at this time.
The Russian Ministry of Defense began conducting an information operation to present Ukraine’s
counteroffensive as decisively failed almost as soon as it was announced on August 29.
Kremlin media outlets have also
centrally amplified allegations of civil-military conflict between Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky and Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi to bolster the narrative that Zelensky
sought to conduct a counteroffensive for inappropriate political reasons whereas Zaluzhnyi assessed
Ukrainian forces were not militarily prepared to do so.
Military operations on the scale of this counteroffensive do not succeed or fail in a day
or a week. Ukrainian officials have long acknowledged that they do not have the sheer mass of
mechanized forces that would have been needed to conduct a blitzkrieg-like drive to destroy the Russian
defenses in Kherson Oblast or anywhere. They have instead been setting conditions for months by
attacking and disrupting Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs), Russian command and
control, and Russian logistics systems throughout southwestern occupied Ukraine. The timing of the
start of the counteroffensive is consistent with the observed degradation of Russian capabilities in
western Kherson Oblast balanced against the need to start liberating occupied Ukrainian lands and
people as soon as possible. There is no reason to suspect that the timing has been materially influenced
by inappropriate considerations or tensions. Counteroffensive operations now underway will very likely
unfold over the coming weeks and possibly months as Ukrainian forces take advantage of the conditions
they have set to defeat particular sectors of the line they have identified as vulnerable while working to
retake their cities and towns without destroying them in the process.
Military forces that must conduct offensive operations without the numerical advantages
normally required for success in such operations often rely on misdirections and feints
to draw the defender away from the sectors of the line on which breakthrough and
exploitation efforts will focus. The art of such feints is two-fold. First, they must be conducted with
sufficient force to be believable. Since they are feints, however, rather than deliberate attacks expected
to succeed, they often look like failures—the attacking units will fall back when they feel they have
persuaded the defender of their seriousness. Second, they take time to have an effect. When the purpose
of the feint is to draw the defender’s forces away from the intended breakthrough sectors, the attacker
must wait until the defender has actually moved forces. There will thus likely be a delay between the
initial feint operations and the start of decisive operations. The situation during that delay may well
look like the attack has failed.
The Ukrainian military and government are repeating requests to avoid any reporting or
forecasting of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, a measure that is essential if the
counteroffensive includes feints or misdirections.
