The Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022: 11 Days In

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11 days in
State of play is not very easy to asses
High pace of operations
Not easy to tell what's happening day to day on the ground
Russian forces have made gains but have been frustrated in achieving many of their objectives -- no quick victory
Ukrainian forces have offered robust resistance and are holding
However, several major cities are either encircled or nearly encircled
Large breakouts by Russian forces in the south
Russian forces stalled in the north
Greater use of Russian air power over the last three days, but that's also led to Russian losses, both helicopters and aircraft
Which cities are still under assault and which cities have fallen?
- Sustained fighting in the outskirts of Kyiv
- Kharkiv is being steadily enveloped -- not clear if it's fully encircled yet
  - Same with Sumy
- Mariupol has been encircled and there has been heavy shelling and fighting there
- Melitopol and Kherson are occupied by Russia, but you see quite a few Ukrainians coming out and protesting the occupation
- Difficult to say what Russian forces "control"
  - Russian forces are moving out across a large swath of territory
  - However, they haven't tried to exert political control over much of the areas that they technically occupy
- Russian forces have been stymied on the outskirts of Mykoliav, which is past Kherson
- Russian forces in the northeast have been steadily advancing
  - Russian forces are trying to get around and envelop Chernihiv
Reluctance by Russian forces on the ground to fire on civilians
- Protests in Russian-held areas, showing Ukrainians walking, unarmed, towards Russian troops
- Is this a matter of Russian troops being constrained by rules of engagement or is there a genuine reluctance on the part of Russian soldiers to fire on Ukrainians?
- Early on, it's clear that Russians were constrained by tight rules of engagement
- They were told that they were going into Ukraine to help the Ukrainian people liberate themselves
- That's why Russian troops were going into Ukraine went in as if they were still driving around in Russia
  - Small unit detachments
  - Sticking to roads
  - Not really planning to fight
  - Not seriously organized for a military operation
- Since then there have been major adjustments in how the Russians have organized themselves
- Now the Russian reaction to Ukrainian protests has been more mixed
  - Sometimes Russian forces fire into the air and back off
  - Other times, they have fired on protesters
  - More violence predicted - things are going to keep getting uglier
The bulk of Russian forces going into Ukraine seem to have been informed that they were going into Ukraine right when the invasion began; in the past have there been any examples of an aggressor state not telling its army that they were going to invade until the last minute?
- Russia has made two big mistakes, which have made it much more difficult for them to achieve the political objectives
  - Hugely mistaken assumptions about the political situation inside Ukraine - smaller big mistake
  - Only informed officers that the invasion was happening less than 24 hours before units were ordered into Ukraine -- biggest mistake
    - Officers were under the assumption that they were on a set of training exercises
    - No psychological or material preparation
    - No preparation or planning for the invasion
    - But why? Is Putin this paranoid? Does he trust his own armed forces this little?
  - This is why morale among Russian soldiers has been so low and desertions have been so high -- these soldiers felt like they've been sent into a war under false pretenses
Air power - the Russian air force is still largely MIA. Despite increasing close air support in the past few days, the majority of the air assets mobilized for this conflict are still unused. What explains this?
- First of all, we can't really judge in real time how air power is being used - this is one of the limitations of OSINT
- The Russian air force is plenty capable of performing complex air operations - we saw this over Syria
- The Russians are not out of PGMs, and many of the units seen flying over the past few days have been units that flew in Syria and have experience using PGMs
- The reason we didn't see a lot of air power in the initial days is probably more to do with the planning failure alluded to earlier
  - Combined arms operations require a lot of planning in order to properly coordinate air forces and ground forces
  - This planning wasn't done, and so ground forces weren't able to call in airstrikes like they usually would
- Another reason for the relative lack of air power is that Russia may be holding its air power in reserve
  - The Russian military commanders may be concerned that this will evolved into a regional military conflict
  - As a result, they may be holding back their satellite and laser guided bombs until either
    - NATO intervenes or
    - It becomes clear that the conflict will remain limited to Ukraine
- The Russian air force is not good at suppression or destruction of enemy air defenses, and they know that, so they're not trying to gain air superiority over all of Ukraine
- Instead they're trying to gain limited air superiority over the areas that they're fighting over
- This is very different from US doctrine, which emphasizes having total air superiority over the theater in order to use air power against enemy rear areas
- Seeing increasing use of helicopters to protect convoys
Social media - what are some of the false narratives out there on social media?
- Lot of misleading takes on social media
- Example: Russia isn't using very many PGMs, therefore Russia must not have very many PGMs
  - Russia has plenty of PGMs and we know that they do
- The Russian military is a paper tiger
  - The Russians have been making some basic tactical mistakes
    - Not doing reconnaissance
    - Not using drones
  - In some ways, the Russian military is fighting more poorly today than they did against Georgia in 2008
  - But that's not because the Russian military is a paper tiger or a bad military -- it's because of drastic lack of planning for this operation
  - A lot of the gaps in Russian military capabilities can be explained by lack of proper prepositioning
- Russian logistics are bad
  - Russian logistics were initially bad, but they're rapidly consolidating their rear areas and working on improving how they're able to support their forces
- Corruption has rotted the Russian military from within
  - The Russian military has performed both well and poorly over the last 20 years
  - It can't be just corruption that's the cause of poor performance
  - Corruption is, at best, a contributing factor
Aside on military power
- Military power is always context-dependent
- Military power isn't like money
- It's very difficult to analyze military power in the abstract
- Excel spreadsheets don't fight!
- This the largest operation the Russian military has attempted since World War 2 - mistakes are to be expected
- The big worry is that we've gone from a modest overestimation of the Russian military to a drastic underestimation
- This war has strong Winter War vibes
- We don't want to make the same mistake that Germany made in 1940, thinking that the Russian military is a rotten barn and all we have to do is kick the door down and the whole thing will collapse
- The Russian military's performance in this "botched regime change" is not indicative of how they would perform in a high-end conflict against NATO
The effect of morale has been underreported
- The Ukrainians have extremely high morale - they're fighting for their existence as a nation-state
- The Russians have low morale - were not told that they were going to be fighting until immediately before the conflict
- Russians would probably have a much higher level of morale fighting against NATO
One thing the analysts who predicted war got wrong was assuming that the Russian military would be able to fight a normal combined-arms operation
- Assumed there would be a clean handoff between the political leaders and the military commanders
- But that's not how personalist regimes work
- The regime imposed its own assumptions on the military campaign
Kofman doesn't believe that the Russians can achieve their political objectives
- Similar to quandary the US found itself in with Iraq
- Political objectives cannot be achieved no matter how much military means are applied
Book recommendation - Alistair Horne: Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century
The convoy north of Kiev
- What is happening
- Do the Ukrainian have the convoy pinned down?
- The reason the Russians are in this predicament is because they stated off the war apparently working on a timetable that had them taking the Ukrainian capital in a matter of days
- Pushed too many forces down one ground line of communications from Belarus
- Ukrainians have blown bridges and flooded some fields, which has had some effect
- However the largest factor appears to be the fighting in Bucha and Irpin on the outskirts of Kyiv
- The convoy needs to reorganize and possibly split up in order to account for the fact that the outskirts of Kyiv are still contested
- The Russians don't have a single 40 mile long convoy - that's due to botched media coverage
- What we're seeing is a series of battalion tactical groups and their associated support units
- Going back to the prepositioning argument above, one of the reasons that these units have been advancing so slowly is because they didn't bring bridging equipment with them
- Thus when they encounter a blown bridge, they have to wait until bridging equipment arrives from Belarus, and only after the bridge is repaired or a new temporary bridge is laid down can they advance
- The initial plan appears to have been that the Russians would seize Hostomel airport quickly and use it as a forward operating base
- When Hostomel did not fall in the initial days of the war, it threw the Russian plans into a bit of a disarray
The advance northwest of Kyiv, combined with the Russian advance currently attacking Chernihiv reminds Michael Kofman strongly of the Russian attack on Grozny
The Russians might devastate Kyiv in the same way that they're currently devastating Kharkiv
What happens after Mariupol falls?
- The Russian advance out of Crimea has already met up with the Russian advance out of the Donetsk People's Republic, northwest of Mariupol
- Mariupol is fully cut off
- The forces from the southeast are probably going to push northwest towards Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro and the like
- This will present a major challenge for Ukrainian forces east of the Dneiper river
Urban warfare has featured heavily in this conflict
- Lots of fighting for roads and key towns located at the junctions of roads
- The fighting is almost medieval, in this respect
- Not very many engagements in open fields, instead what we're seeing is a series of sieges, with cities as castles
- Urban warfare has not gone well for the Russian military thus far
- The Russians have very little experience with urban warfare in this generation
- Grozny 2000 was a long time ago
- The Russians have not trained for this mission
- Russian airborne troops, especially, have learned some hard lessons as a result of this conflict
- Initial conclusions
  - As we've seen in the past, urban warfare strongly favors the defender
  - Ukrainian forces have done a great job leveraging the urban environment
    - Good tactics at the squad level
    - Good use of the capabilities provided by the United States and other western allies
  - The Russian military has been increasingly falling back on its traditional approach when faced with stubborn urban resistance
    - Use airpower, artillery and MLRS to start leveling blocks to allow units to make progress and entrench themselves
    - "It's difficult to shoot someone in the face when you're looking at them, but artillery doesn't have that same problem"
Russians have faced very stubborn resistance in Mykolaiv and will face even fiercer resistance in Odesa
The Russians might try a contested amphibious landing in Odesa, but it might not go well for them
The Russian offensive is going to slow down in the coming weeks
- They need to start encircling and taking cities
- However, as we've seen, the Ukrainians are doing a good job of resisting Russian forces attempting to advance into cities
- The Russians are going have a lot of units tied down attempting to take Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolayev and Kyiv
- But that being said the Russians are making progress towards encircling and cutting these cities off from each other
This war is still very much undecided
A lot of this depends on the Russian military's morale and ability to stay in the fight
The bulk of Russian forces are already engaged
A substantial percentage are committed to the fight
Russian forces are known for having poor performance at the start of a fight
- There might be a ceasefire soon, in order to allow the Russians to resupply
- There are already more forces heading to the Ukrainian border
- We should not mistake any ceasefire for an end to the war - likely it will be a pause allowing both sides to reorganize and resupply
How does this relate to regime stability?
- Regime stability is no longer something that Putin can take for granted
- Kofman thinks this is the beginning of the end of Putin's rule
- This might be the beginning of the end, but it still might take a long time
- We should not underestimate the impact of Western sanctions on the Russian economy
- Putin miscalculated badly when he thought that the West was too addicted to Russian oil and gas to retaliate when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine
- In the course of this operation, Putin has thrown under the bus the army, the FSB and the Rosgvardia
  - The FSB is the agency that handles internal security and intelligence
  - The foreign intelligence agency is the SVR
  - Rosgvardia is the national guard and it's used as riot control/protest suppression within Russia itself
  - At some point the people in Ukraine are going to come back home
  - There's going to be a reckoning inside Russia
  - We should always remember the most important thing about Russian history: It can always get worse
- Given the above, it's clear that Putin can't afford to lose
- If this war ends in a humiliating defeat for Russia, regime change is almost a certainty
- This is what we should be thinking about when we ask ourselves if Putin would really level a city like Kyiv
  - Remember what happened in Grozny
  - Remember what happened in Aleppo
What should we make of the nuclear dimension
- It's a form of nuclear signalling
- Not a big change in Russian nuclear posture
- Russia appears to be concerned about two things
  - Western led intervention
    - Example: no fly zone
  - The damage to the Russian economy caused by sanctions
The Russian response to western economic sanctions will be asymmetric
- Russia doesn't have the economic means to inflict equal damage in return to the United States
- They will retaliate in some way, and it remains to be seen what form that retaliation will take
Where does this crisis take us as it keeps going?
Moscow has drawn a set of red lines
- Has declared an intention to use precision guided munitions to hit convoys bringing Western arms to Ukraine
  - Presumably they're going to hit these convoys once they cross the border into Ukraine, otherwise that would be a clear invitation for Poland or Romania to invoke Article 5
- Has declared that any use of foreign airfields by Ukrainian aircraft would constitute participation in the war
- There is a real risk that e.g. Poland will get pulled into this war
- What is the risk that our mistaken optimism about the defeatability of the Russian military draws us into a forward-leaning posture that draws us closer and closer to direct involvement?
The longer the war goes on, the greater the probability of spillover effects