The Russian attack on Ukraine, which began in the early hours of Thursday (24) in local time, combines military tactics never before used by Russia with a considerable degree of risk taken by President Vladimir Putin.
After World War II, when the might of the Soviet Union’s Red Army repelled the brutal 1941 Nazi invasion back to Berlin, taken four years later, Russian forces had never been involved in such a massive action.
There were repressions in the Soviet bloc against Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), skirmishes with the Chinese in the 1960s, the disastrous occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89), the two local wars in Chechnya (1994-6 and 1999-2000) , and the one-off actions in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014), and the intervention in the Syrian civil war (2015 onwards).
Nothing like now. “The action is being carried out according to a new technique, apparently partially tested in Syria. The missile attack, including cruise missiles, was powerful and unprecedented”, says Ruslan Pukhov.
He is the director of the Moscow Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, and is reputed to be one of the most knowledgeable military analysts in the country. “The effectiveness is not clear yet, but it has made it possible for Russia to quickly deploy helicopters and planes,” he said.
The tactic is well known in the West, having had its media debut in the first Gulf War, in 1991. The difference is that now Moscow also has its cruise missiles, mainly the Kalibr, fired by ships and submarines. The Krypton air-to-ground missile, targeting radar installations, was also heavily employed.
And the mistakes of the 2008 war, which was also against another state, were not repeated: there was clear coordination, scaled objectives and professional action.
There were at least two main dams, one around 5am and the other around 1pm. Russian forces advanced overland as well, supported there by multiple Smerch rocket launchers and artillery, although it has not been an invasion with military occupation characteristics so far.
The attack was on several fronts, targeting the areas of larger cities such as Kiev, Kharkiv, Sumi and Kherson. Next to the capital, airborne forces by helicopters were 35 km from the capital in the late afternoon, having taken an airport to the north of the city. In the south, Crimean tanks reached the Dnieper River unopposed.
“For now, Russian troops have not entered the cities, but bypassed them. It can be assumed that the entry of large masses in a land operation is just beginning,” says Pukhov. He points out that the actions in Donbass, Putin’s official justification, were large, but appear to be aimed at distracting Ukrainians.
“The shock and disorganization are very strong, but they will hardly last long”, he evaluates, pointing out the resistance to the Russians at the aforementioned airport, in Hostomel. The extent of an important political issue, the size of the Belarusian support from which armored vehicles and helicopters flew to Kiev, is still open.
The Ukrainians are in trouble, even though they can do a lot of damage to the invaders. Numerically, there are about 215,000 soldiers in all, compared to almost 200,000 Russians much better equipped. Since Putin annexed Crimea and supported the civil war that finally gave him the excuse to act in 2014, Kiev has received $2.5 billion in US military aid.
It looks like a lot, but it’s not. In recent months, under the shadow of Russian military escalation, the West has advertised the dangerous Javelin anti-tank missiles supplied by Washington, but the numbers are unlikely to stand up to a massive armored invasion.
For that, aerial interdiction would be necessary, with attack planes, or missiles. The first seem to have been neutralized on the first day of the campaign, and the second, these would need to be fired by NATO (Western military alliance), which will not happen.
While military theory multiplies defenders by two or three, the numerical reality is bleak for Kiev. Aside from the forces themselves, Russian military equipment today is 70% modern, down from half that or less before military reform started after the country’s near-fiasco in Georgia in 2008.
Even if some NATO country were to decide to enter the war, the alliance clearly does not have the elements or training for coordinated actions in the conventional way that Russia has now mobilized.
This is a hard lesson for the alliance, which since the beginning of the crisis has insisted that it will only defend itself and can do nothing for Ukraine. Logic says that Putin will not dare to mess with countries in the club because, in the end, he does not seek a direct confrontation with the US, relying more on the Western insistence on sanctions to which he has become accustomed.
And there is no mention, of course, of the nuclear arsenal that Putin waved again in the West’s face this Thursday in his speech. There, only the US is a match, and both sides know that there is no victor in atomic warfare. That said, the possibility worries many Russians, as made clear by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitir Mutarov.
So, the question now is whether Putin will try to force an entry to decapitate the regime in Kiev, which he avoided doing by not attacking the center of the capital, or whether he will force a kind of siege there and at points like Kharkiv. .
The second option is tricky because it exposes troops that have advanced too quickly. It is unclear whether Putin intends to send an occupation force, something that Western accounts say would require 600,000 of his 900,000 troops, albeit using police units. For the public, the Kremlin denies this, fueling the idea that it intends to overthrow the government.
The consideration is quite political. As Putin says in his speeches, he sees Ukrainians and Russians (and Belarusians, for that matter) as one people, to be ruled by the Kremlin. This goes back in centuries, to the foundation of the common state that generated the current three.
If you want to bend Kiev to your will and take its neighbor out of the potential orbit of NATO and the European Union, it will be difficult to do so if it kills a large number of Ukrainians, especially without uniforms. So far, while the US has taught that smart weapons are often pretty dumb, Russia seems to have tried to spare civilian areas as much as possible.
But to make comedian-turned-president Volodymyr Zelensky back out of the fray, his siege needs to be long-lasting. “It is possible that this is the intention of the Russian side, but I have little idea how it will be possible to do this for long,” says Pukhov.
For TV presenter and editor-in-chief of the magazine Russia in Global Affairs Fiodor Lukaniov, the situation is complex. “Russian missiles in Kiev? It’s a nightmare. I’m over,” he said, who until last week joined the current of political analysts who rejected the Western alarmism of recent months, believing that Putin would not fire.
Pukhov, military considerations aside, says he believes that if Russia wanted to act against Ukraine, it should have done so in 2014 and 2015 decisively, reinstating the overthrown government of Viktor Yanukovych.
“We now have a long and hard fight against losses, especially as we essentially challenge the US and NATO,” he said, noting that the success of the campaign could “give money to a deal.” But, he says, “the moral and political damage to Russia will be colossal”, something hard to disagree with.
