https://acoup.blog/2023/02/24/collections-one-year-into-the-war-in-ukraine/
// Finally,
Ukraine may be running out of soft targets and to explain that it’s worth taking a gander at Ukraine’s strategy here. Clausewitz notes (drink!) there are essentially three centers of gravity that force can be directed on to compel an opponent to yield: one can target enemy military forces, enemy political calculations or enemy public will.4 Ukraine has clearly chosen the former and that makes a lot of sense. Popular Will is a weak lever for a regime like Putin’s that has depoliticized much of its population and rules without public consent in any event, especially since Putin is clearly willing to shift much of the burden of the dying to disenfranchised people in his country. Striking at the Political Object is also effectively out of Ukraine’s hands because the potential for nuclear escalation constrains their ability to attack into Russian territory. That leaves destroying Russian military capacity.5
So how has Ukraine opted to do this? From the very beginning of the war, Ukraine has focused on targeting Russian logistics to force Russian units to retreat, rather than trying to attrit the Russian army out of existence.
Ukrainian Armed Forces have consistently sought means to strike across Russian operational depth (that is, engage the front lines and rear echelon at the same time; again, we’ll talk about this more when we get to maneuver warfare) to render pressured front line positions logistically untenable so they have to be abandoned. Ukraine did that outside of Kyiv, they did it by taking Kupiansk during the Kharkiv offensive, they did it by putting pressure on Kherson while striking the Dnieper crossings and the Kerch Bridge. It’s an approach Ukraine has deployed repeatedly and is
consistent with the old Soviet doctrine; it is a remarkable irony that the Russians are being beaten because the Ukrainians are better at Deep Operations.
But now that the war is largely positional in nature,
the number of positions inside Ukraine which are both reachable by Ukrainian offensives and offer the ability to lever Russian forces out of territory by logistical important dwindles. As noted, logistics hubs in Russia are difficult for Ukraine to do more than harass without raising escalation concerns. Meanwhile, Ukraine has plucked the lowest hanging fruit in Kherson and Kupiansk. There are still key positions of vulnerability for Russia, but some of them are probably too far out of reach (the Kerch Bridge and the Isthmus of Perekop connecting Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland). The most obvious thing to do would be to try and cut the rail and road links through Melitopol, but that is a hard 50 mile advance over terrain that is by now heavily fortified by Russian forces and with substantial risk of counter-attacks on the edges of the salient a push like that would create. A similar push to Mariupol is similarly daunting. In Luhansk, taking Starobilsk would cut a rail line, but it’s not clear to me that doing so would jeopardize the actual key positions in Sievierdonetsk to the south; Donetsk Oblast is denser in roads and rail lines, making that logistical approach harder.//