The war between Russia and Ukraine has been going on for one third of a year now.
And while propaganda is busy celebrating the seizure of Sievierodonetsk,
while the missiles are aiming at residential houses of Kyiv and Kharkiv, while the civilians die without any military reason,
we need to come back to the main question – how did 3 days turn into a third of a year?
Very soon it became clear that the decision to start a war was based on a bunch of illusions.
Those were global illusions about the social and political situation in Ukraine, its army,
the opponent’s situation in the country and, finally, about the power of its own army. Today we’ll discuss the last one.
The Russian army’s decay is easily attributed to corruption. And to the great extent it is true.
When, on the one hand, we have several-years-expired combat ration
and on the other hand we can see vulgar palaces of the Minister of the Defense
and of the others who benefit from the Russian army, it’s not that difficult to feel the connection between those things.
Corruption is the correct answer but not full. Because the second part of the answer is incompetency.
And it would be nice to understand where it comes from.
The first reason is on the surface. We’ve said it before
that with the collapse of the Russian empire the army stopped being a political subject forever,
and career officers weren’t allowed to participate in decision-making.
They feared the Bonapartist plot and military coup in the USSR, and Putin inherited this fear in full.
Both in the USSR and now, the army is just the executor of other people’s decisions.
And among those people who made a decision about the intrusion into Ukraine,
among that small group of the Security Council members, there are no career officers with any battlefield experience.
There are no people who can make the former secret service agents get back to reality.
But there is the second reason – their readiness for the war.
The last time when the Russian army dealt with a similar-sized enemy was when there was no Russian army.
The last time this enemy, the regular army of the industrially developed country, was the Wehrmacht 80 years ago,
7 years before Vladimir Putin was born.
The wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Georgia were nothing like the war in Ukraine in terms of involved power and resources.
Even those Russian officers who have real battlefield experience, have no experience relevant for the war with Ukraine.
Because it's a very different war experience.
For any person it’s natural to lean on his own experience, especially if it’s successful. Vladimir Putin is no exception here.
Planning the attack against Ukraine, first of all, he considered his previous military campaigns under his command.
There were 4 of them.
The first ones both in terms of chronology and importance were the first and the second campaigns in Chechnya.
Those campaigns were quite remarkable for Putin because after having Chechnya tamed, he came to power.
The win over the gunmen of Khattab and Basaev turned some grey invisible bureaucrat into a hero
and provided him high ratings which created the still-living myth of nation-wide support.
The second campaign was the war in Georgia in 2008.
It was the first time our army encountered another former Soviet country’s army on the battlefield.
As Putin thinks, this experience was successful too.
He managed to cut two regions off from Georgia – Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia –
and create a territorial conflict preventing Georgia from integration into the EU and NATO.
The next point is the Ukrainian campaign of 2014 including the rapid annexation of the Crimea and battles in Donbas
where pro-Russian forces managed to defeat the Ukrainian army and create DNR and LNR.
In fact, they repeated the Georgian scenario and created two quasi-countries on a bigger scale.
And the fourth war was Syria. Putin had several goals there –
he wanted to support his autocratic ally Bashar Asad and, as we now know, to train his army for the battles near its own borders.
If we have a look at those 4 conflicts from the tactical point of view, we’ll see they can be divided into 2 groups.
The first one is Georgia and Ukraine. Let’s recall the circumstances of the Georgian conflict.
On August 8, 2008 the Russian army crossed the border of Georgia.
In 2 days time the Georgian troops were pushed away from Southern Ossetia.
The Russians took Gori and Poti, the cities of Georgia itself. The path to Tbilisi was clear.
But the attack of the Georgian capital didn’t happen for military reasons, not for the political ones.
In 2008 Putin wasn’t ready to take the neighboring countries’ capitals.
In 2014 in Donbas the situation was the same.
In summer the Ukrainian forces started the attack, and by August the fate of LNR and DNR was on the line.
But Russia interfered and sent its troops to the separatists.
A week later the situation changed dramatically, and the Ukrainian army got trapped under Ilovaisk.
The Ukrainian forces couldn’t dream of Donetsk and Luhansk seizure anymore.
It is questionable if Putin could push his success further and continue the attack.
But the important thing is that he managed to break the course of events and defeat the Ukrainian army.
After that the first Minsk agreement was signed.
It registered the status quo which has remained unchanged for 8 years until a full-scale intrusion of Russia this February.
As opposed to the campaigns in Georgia and Ukraine, the wars in Chechnya and Syria were different.
First, they were longer. It’s not about weeks or months, but years. The second campaign in Chechnya officially lasted 10 years.
The Russian war in Syria started in 2014 and it’s not over yet. There were no rapid maneuvers, surroundings and traps there.
That was an exhaustion war. They consistently destroyed military forces of the enemy and disrupted its ability to resist.
It took months to seize the cities.
It took them 3 months to take Grozny in 2000, and more than 6 months to take Aleppo in 2016.
All that was accompanied by missile attacks and bombings.
Planning the attack against Ukraine Putin, obviously, considered the scenario of rapid effortless success.
It’s like the Georgian campaign at its maximum. We’ve discussed the reasons several times.
They underestimated the power of the Ukrainian army,
overestimated their own resources and knew nothing either about the political situation or the mood in Ukrainian society.
Blitzkrieg failed in the first days of war.
It took them quite long to accept this fact.
But they did and the Russian army’s tactics changed to the tactics they used in Chechnya and Syria.
Whose idea was that – Putin’s or someone else’s – is unknown.
But it’s logical that having failed with the initial tactics which were successful earlier,
they switched to the second one because they had nothing else in their experience.
The current phase of the Ukrainian war looks very much like Chechnya and Syria.
First, they’ve stopped moving troops globally and having big battles in an open space.
So, they don’t have the goal to defeat the enemy’s army rapidly, surround it, entrap it, and make it capitulate.
They are slowly and consistently pushing the enemy away from the settlements.
To do that the Russian army creates a huge advantage in people and in gun power and starts long and painful shootings.
So, when the Russian troops enter the city, there are only some ruins left.
Second, they count on the local forces which they use as a meat shield.
In Chechnya there were armed allies of Akhmat Kadyrov, in Syria – the army of Bashar Asad.
In Ukraine the rebels of DNR and LNR play the same role. And their fate is really horrible.
They are not military people. They were taken into the army by force
and sent to the hottest battles against well-trained and motivated Ukrainian soldiers.
Third, this is the war against the civilians too. The “cleanings” in the villages of Chechnya and Syria are not different from Bucha.
We just know very little about it.
Russian and international human rights advocates wrote dozens of reports on the crimes against the civilians in Chechnya and Syria,
but it was somewhere far away, and people weren’t particularly interested in what happened there.
The tactics in Chechnya and Syria are very suitable for informational autocracy
because it provides the necessary picture.
You can report regularly about another success, that is about some taken settlement.
It creates the illusion of success, makes the allies feel confident and demoralizes the enemy.
They have taken Sievierodonetsk (or “liberated it” as propaganda says) and it’s not far away from the borders of the Luhansk region.
It means everything is going according to the plan.
Can this tactic bring success to the Kremlin? In theory, yes.
But there are some factors which can prevent it from happening.
In the case of Chechnya and Syria the Russian army dealt with the rebels instead of the regular army.
Their obvious weakness was coordination of effort. Ukraine has no such problem.
Its army is managed from one center, and they can act consistently in different parts of the front disrupting Russian plans.
For example, now they are trying to create some tension in the Kherson region
and make the Russian commanders send troops there from the Luhansk region.
But what’s more important, the exhaustion war works just against the rebels with limited resources.
Of course, Russia had more armory, guns and soldiers than the rebels in Chechnya and Syria.
Their resources kept fading away and the Russian resources were not.
At some point the enemy’s resistance just stopped because there was no one left with nothing to shoot with.
Russia has more resources than Ukraine. The Kremlin can reactivate old tanks and “Grad” systems.
They are nothing like the modern equipment, but they can still move, shoot and kill the Ukrainians.
The Kremlin can perform hidden mobilization offering huge money to the citizens of poor regions.
For them going to war is the only chance to escape from the vicious circle of loans and microcredits.
What does Ukraine have to respond with? First, with their wish to fight.
The Ukrainians have a very clear goal – they defend their motherland from the intruders.
And the further Russia goes destroying Ukrainian cities, the stronger their wish is going to be.
The breaking point in this war will be the help from the west.
The main threat for Ukraine now is not another attack against Kyiv or Belarus’s participation.
The main threat is the lack of interest in the western countries.
If they don’t lose interest and the politicians in Europe and the US truly support Ukraine and provide necessary equipment,
Putin’s tactic of exhaustion is going to fail.
He has already lost his best assault-landing troops, the LNR and DNR armies have shrunk by half.
And yet it’s a long way until the final breakdown.
The end of this war is not best described by the Russian word “pobeda” (“a win”)
but by the Ukrainian word “peremoga” (also “a win” with a word root from the verb “to overcome”, “to endure”)
as we Russians understand it.
We literally need to overcome it, to be tough and persistent in the long distance.
It will not be solved on the battlefield during a great fight.
It will be solved in the plants where guns are produced, or in the offices where sanctions are being discussed.
Today we can see that the Western allies of Ukraine start realizing the long-term nature of the war and its scale
which is not going to end anywhere close to the “Minsk agreements”.
It’s not about sending dozens of hotwizers and then proceeding with other problems, no.
Equipment and guns should be sent to the front without interruptions.
The G7 summit ended with the statement that Ukraine will receive military and financial help while it’s necessary.
When the European leaders met Zelensky, it was decided that peace is possible just on Ukraine’s terms.
Everything changed, not just for Putin. It wasn’t just Putin who didn’t get the war the Russian army used to lead.
It’s not the war with the armed peasants but with a huge industrially developed country.
Everything changed for the western leaders too.
There is no way they can sit on two chairs and wait for the situation to solve itself.
It won’t solve itself. Ukraine is leading a true patriotic war and it needs the appropriate help.
Massive help is the only way to restrain this war within the borders of Ukraine.
Massive help is the only chance to pay for this war with money instead of the lives of NATO soldiers and of the European citizens.
Putin keeps saying that the world has changed forever. And it’s true. But he won’t like the result of such changes.
If we talk about quick ways to stop this war, the good news is that it’s not about military ways but about political ones.
Bad news is it will happen just when Putin leaves his post.
It’s not important who exactly will take the power as a result of a bloody fight.
For any person from any group of interest the first task will be to return to how it used to be.
To stop this war by all means, withdraw the troops and start over from the point where there is no war in Europe.
He will have to negotiate the alleviation of sanctions, revive the economy,
and find the way out of the most perilous and dangerous situation in modern Russian history.
There will be nothing to talk about while the war is going on.
And what’s more important for anyone who replaces Putin – while the war is going on,
it will be impossible for him to strengthen his own power.
While the outside war is going on, there will be a bloody administrative massacre inside the country too among those
who aren’t losing their own lives or their children’s lives, but their business, assets and hopes for the future.
It’s not a fact that we will love those people who replace Putin,
but it’s a fact that they won’t have any political capital or the resources to continue this war.
So, the quick way out of this war is to change power in Russia. And that's it.
Till tomorrow!