Briefly Noted: Perspective On Siege Warfare, Sanctions Fail

Simplicius the Thinker has an interesting article today, covering a variety of topics. In particular he offers some perspective on the topic of siege warfare, to explain why Russian progress in Ukraine seems so slow. In fact, by historical standards—including standards for the last, say, thirty years—their progress has been fairly rapid. We’ll get into that below, but first I want to briefly point out a sanctions related story that Simplicius also discusses. I’ve seen this information referenced in a number of Western media sources during the past few weeks, but the easiest way to deal with it is to simply paste in the Tass story that Simplicius links to:

EU has no clue about whereabouts of 86% of frozen Russian central bank assets — Bloomberg

Of $258 billion that were seized, not more than $36.4 billion has been located, the report said

BRUSSELS, February 9. /TASS/. The EU legal service has effectively confirmed that it has no clue about the whereabouts of 86% of frozen Russian central bank’s assets, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

Of $258 billion that were seized, not more than $36.4 billion has been located, the report said, citing a document that has been prepared for EU leaders ahead of the recent summit attended by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

…

Simplicius adds to this that Dmitri Medvedev has stated that, for its own part, Russia has frozen at least $300 billion worth of Western assets in retaliation. It appears that Russia’s asset seizures are a bird in the hand, whereas the Western seizures are more like a bird in the bush:

My understanding is that most of these assets are things like aircraft. So, not so much money but in kind seizures. It all counts.

Read more at the link below, where we’ll get into the main topic of siege warfare:

SITREP 3/8/23: Southern Advances Amid Prigozhin's Momentous Speech

Here’s what Simplicius tells us about siege warfare in recent history:

Some people have complained that the battle of Bakhmut is taking a ‘long time’. If one has ever actually followed military conflicts before, one would know that city sieges are never quick work—lest you count the fraudulent ‘Iraq War’, where US feigned glory after paying off all the Iraqi generals to surrender.

The Siege of Sarajevo infamously lasted four years:

“It was three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad, more than a year longer than the siege of Leningrad, and was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.^[5]”

The Battle of Aleppo in Syria likewise spanned four plus years. In the current SMO, major city battles thus far average about two to three months each. Mariupol began in earnest in about early March and ran to mid May, although everything but Azovstal was cinched up by late April or so.

With the now redirected Mariupol forces sent to help the Severodonetsk-Lisichansk agglomerate, that large battle took from about early May to early July. Izyum took about one month, although admittedly it’s a much smaller town.

And while Wagner was nipping at the feet of Bakhmut since late last year, they were only marginally engaged at the very northeastern peripheries, in the famous Patrice Lumumba District, while the rest of the forces to the north and south were still wrangling with Soledar, etc., in order to first bring the contact line up to the Bakhmut city limits themselves. That didn’t actually happen until mid-January or so of this year. So Bakhmut does appear to be falling fairly well into the two-ish month timeline for larger city sieges, if you count the battle’s opening from the point when all the forces actually engaged its limits on all sides, rather than when Wagner was merely locally skirmishing on one small road in the northeast.

I’ll simply add this. The fortified cities—fortress cities, really—in Ukraine have been in preparation for these sieges for at least eight years. The Sarajevo and Aleppo defenses were nowhere near as thoroughly prepared. Not remotely close. Now, it beggars belief that the Russians were not well aware of what NATO and Ukraine were up to for all that time. Almost all of the Ukrainian fortified cities are, in fact, heavily Russian in sympathy, so the Russians would have had ready sources of reliable information on these preparations. They could not fail to understand that Ukraine’s strategy would be, if its own planned Donbass offensive failed and they were forced onto the defensive, to draw Russian into a prohibitively costly attritional war of urban sieges.

But that also means that the Russians would have had all those years—again, call it eight years—to come up with their own strategy for dealing with the Ukrainian strategy and to defeat its intent. This the Russians appear to have successfully done by relying primarily on massive bombardments, committing ground combat troops mostly to mop up what’s left over (this has also been the description of Russian tactics provided by Ukrainian sources). It appears that the US really didn’t have a handle on just how vast Russia’s artillery resources would prove to be, and how patient the Russians were prepared to be. That patience is probably a function of the Russian hypersonic missile threat that holds the collective West (i.e., the US) at bay. The result is that the collective West is running out of weapons, munitions, and Ukrainian cannon fodder. For the Russians, time remains on their side and their new/old way of conducting siege warfare is proving to work efficiently both in results and within the available time.