Russia plans to seize initiative on battlefield within 6 months

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported this. 

As noted, the Kremlin is likely preparing to conduct a decisive strategic operation over the next 6 months aimed at seizing the initiative and putting an end to a series of operational successes of Ukraine.

Experts remind that over the past 11 months, Russia has not been able to achieve most of its main operational goals in Ukraine.

Russian forces failed to capture Kyiv, as well as the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and to maintain gains in the Kharkiv region or hold the strategic city of Kherson.

“The Russian air and missile campaign targeting Ukrainian critical infrastructure under Army General Sergey Surovikin in late 2022 also failed to generate significant operational effects or demoralize Ukrainian society, as the Kremlin likely intended,” the report says. 

However, Vladimir Putin has not given up his maximalist goals, so now he is changing the fundamental aspects of warfare, analysts believe.

ISW emphasized the development of such areas in the conduct of Russian warfare:

• The Kremlin is intensifying both near- and long-term force-generation efforts

• The Russian military is conserving mobilized personnel for future use — an inflection from the Kremlin’s initial approach of rushing untrained bodies to the front in fall 2022

• Russia is attempting to reinvigorate its defense industrial base

• Putin is re-centralizing control of the war effort in Ukraine under the Ministry of Defense and appointed Russia’s senior-most uniformed officer, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, as theater commander

• The Kremlin is intensifying its conditioning of the Russian information space to support the war

Analysts add that the Kremlin's efforts to prepare for what is likely to be decisive strategic action in 2023 are not mutually exclusive with Moscow's efforts to create the conditions for a protracted war.

• Deputy Head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine's Ministry of Defense, Vadym Skibitskyi, said that the next wave of mobilization will soon be announced in Russia. And the newly mobilized soldiers will be thrown into the war for a number of Russian offensive operations in the spring and summer in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine.