Resolution. . .

(Resolution. . .)

All is quiet on New Year's Day. Except in the Russo-Ukraine War. One of the things that was going to carry over from last year and any resolution at this point is nowhere evident. New Year's Day 1943 had the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad with about one more month of "life," before final capitulation was inevitable. Today, the city that had been known as Stalingrad is now called Volgograd, because it lay on the Volga. That being said, Sixth Army's rear area was astride the Don River. The current theater of operations is several hundred miles west of the Don.


January on the Russian/Ukrainian plain, when the ground is frozen, is ideal for armor. Tank warfare had been perfected on the Eastern Front in World War II, and as the conflict progressed, tens of thousands of armored vehicles took to the field. The Soviets lost over twenty million military and civilian fatalities in what had been colloquially referred as the Great Patriotic War. Before he was executed in the Great Purge, Marshal Mikhail Tuchachevski, himself set forth his own theories on armored warfare. Here the Soviet Marshal joins the likes British experts Basil Liddel Hart, J.F.C Fuller, and German Heinz Guderian who had been the first to develop blitzkrieg, "lighting war" tactics.


If the wealth of authority behind the Russian way of armored and mobile operational warfare, why is the Russian tank force suffering such attrition ? On the surface, it could be the introduction of various Western-supplied anti-tank munitions but that is simplistic. As Soviet armies made the approach into Germany, the defenders maintained a large stock-pile of panzerfausts, a single shot shaped charge that could penetrate Soviet tanks. When the inventory was determined, there was at least one panzerfaust per Soviet vehicle.


As has been mentioned, February marks one year since the start but the situation on the ground cannot persist much longer. Neither side can continue with the level of operational intensity for much longer, This might be New Year's Day but the one place that needs a resolution is the last place on earth to find one.

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