Have Flat Tires And Ukraine’s Mud Season Stalled The Russian Column Outside Kyiv?

This week, a widely read Twitter thread posited that Russian Army forces, including the much-discussed giant column approaching Kyiv, have been hobbled by systemically lax maintenance and the Ukrainian mud season. It’s an interesting theory but analysts caution against giving it too much credence.

Twitter user @TrentTelenko, a self-described retired DoD civil servant, Section 22 Special Interest Group list administrator and blogger launched the thread Wednesday. In it, he asserts that Russian trucks [military trucks in general] need to be “turned over [started] and moved once a month for preventative maintenance reasons. In particular you want to exercise the central tire air inflation system (CTIS).”

That’s important Telenko continued, “because direct sunlight ages truck tires. Repositioning of trucks in close parking prevents a lot of this sun rotting and cycling the CTIS keeps the tire sidewalls supple.”

Rotted and brittle sidewalls, the theory goes, become vulnerable to tearing, puncturing or parting from wheel hubs when using low tire pressure settings (for going off-road or seeking better grip on muddy roads). Driving with low pressures for any appreciable distance will cause the tires to fail. This, Telenko concludes, is what waylaid a Pantsir-S1 self-propelled anti-aircraft gun and short-range missile system pictured in his opening tweet.

Russia, he argues lacks a sufficient supply of replacement tires in its (now stretched) logistical system thanks to the same poor maintenance and institutional corruption that hinder its active vehicles.

Further into the thread, Telenko says he was a Defense Contract Management Agency quality auditor in charge of the Army’s Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV) “vehicle exercise program” at the contractor manufacturing them (Stewart & Stevenson) from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. On the subject of rotting, improperly maintained tires he continued:

“There is a huge operational level implication in this. If the Russian Army was too corrupt to exercise a Pantsir-S1, they were too corrupt to exercise the trucks & wheeled AFV’s now in Ukraine. The Russians simply cannot risk them off road during the Rasputitsa/Mud season.”

“Rasputitsa” is a Russian term meaning “season of bad roads.” In spring and fall in the region, muddy conditions from rain or melting snow make travel on unpaved roads or cross-country difficult. This seasonal moisture has hobbled armies in the region before, he points out, citing the 1939 Russo-Finnish War.

The thread generated a flood of replies elaborating on Russian corruption, the Rasputitsa and even the possibility that the Panstir S1 and other Russian wheeled vehicles are equipped with substandard Chinese tires. Telenko responded to many of the replies but not to my request for an interview.

However, Cynthia R. Cook, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), cautions that photos and videos of Russian vehicles with flat tires on unimproved roads like those shown in the thread should be taken with a grain of salt.

“Pictures showing Russian problems may be getting more play in social media, as folks root for the underdog,” she observes. “Wheeled vehicles always do best on the roads, where they have a speed advantage over tracked vehicles. They are not necessarily designed for long trips through the countryside. Going off road also makes them harder to sustain, as fuel trucks need to follow them, and those are often larger heavy vehicles that need to operate on roads.”

The idea that Russian Army wheeled vehicles may be equipped with Chinese tires or use foreign replacements for tires or other vehicle system components is another assumption to treat with care, Cook adds.

“It’s likely to soon to blame any challenge on supply chain issues. While that [using/replacing Chinese tires] is a possibility, getting parts ‘just in time’ on the battlefield would be an unusually risky strategy.”

Cook does agree that Russian mobile forces are facing stiffer than anticipated challenges in Ukraine related to determined Ukrainian opposition, logistics and training.

“Fuel could also be a problem. Right now in the “fog of war” there are still unknowns … Social media reports are that relatively junior and perhaps less well-trained recruits have been sent as part of the invasion force. The United States military excels at training, and this confirms how important it is. It makes sense for the Ukrainians to press whatever advantage they have now and worry about the root causes later.”

The millenia-old tyranny of distance may be as much of problem for the Russian convoy presently outside Kyiv as their tires and vehicle maintenance. Late last year, recently retired Lt. Col. Alex Vershinin, a former modeling and simulations officer in concept development and experimentation for NATO and the U.S. Army, wrote an essay about Russian Army logistics and their implications for possible military forays in the Baltics and Poland.

In it he asserts that “Russian forces might reach early objectives, but logistics would impose requirements for operational pauses.” For a variety of reasons, what the world has seen this weekend of the slow-moving convoy near Kyiv and a third round of ceasefire talks on the Ukranian border with Belarus may be evidence of the operational pauses Russia needs and is seeking to orchestrate.

Vershinin also pointed out that Russia’s truck logistic support, “which would be crucial in an invasion of Eastern Europe,” is limited by the number of trucks and range of operations. Running through some basic calculations, assuming average supply truck speed, loading/unloading, fueling and maintenance, he concluded that the Russian army “does not have enough trucks to meet its logistic requirement more than 90 miles beyond supply dumps.”

The Russian convoy stalled outside Kyiv is approximately 250 miles from Russian supplies and forces at the Belarussian border and 263 miles away from the large Russian logistics build-up around Kursk.

“To reach a 180-mile range, Vershinin wrote, “the Russian army would have to double truck allocation to 400 trucks for each of the material-technical support brigades.”

In his essay, Vershinin also noted that no European military forces (including NATO) use railroads to the extent that the Russian army does. “Part of the reason is that Russia is so vast — over 6,000 miles from one end to the other,” he wrote.

On Friday, he told Bloomberg that the Russian Army is likely seeking to seize Ukrainian railways to improve their logistical support. Unlike the rest of Europe, Ukraine uses the same larger gauge (bigger width) tracks that Russia does. The chicken and egg problem for the Russian military, Vershinin asserted, is that its needs “to take major cities” that sit on key junctions to control the railways, including Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Kherson and Mykolaiv — all cities that have seen major fighting.

Taking them and keeping them will require even more men and supplies — from the rocket and artillery munitions that Russian forces rely on to the fuel and water they need to operate in hostile territory — that they are already short on thanks to simple distance.

If Russian Pantsirs or other trucks do need tires, getting them out to broken down vehicles in the face of Ukranian shoulder-fired missiles, road ambushes, obstacles and muddy roads is obviously a long haul.