This is part of our weeklong series marking the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, February 24, 2022. See all of the stories here.
A year ago, all but one of Russia’s chief aims in Ukraine were defeated in the first three weeks of the war, before the arrival of Western heavy weaponry. The reasons for this comprehensive Russian reverse — which no Western observer, including myself, predicted — are of great interest to military analysts, even if some of the lessons they teach are very old ones.
Between the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, and the middle of March, Russian forces failed to take the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv; failed to take Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, though it is less than 20 miles from the Russian frontier; failed to occupy the whole of the Donbas; and failed to capture Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. The only Russian bridgehead established west of the Dnieper River, at Kherson, was so limited that it ultimately proved untenable.
The only major objective that the Russians did achieve was to capture the “land bridge” between Russia and Crimea. Even so, the capture of Mariupol took another two months and involved the complete destruction of the city. The diversion of troops necessary for the siege of Mariupol made it impossible to sustain offensives elsewhere.
The errors in initial Russian planning and strategy are now glaringly obvious. Russian intelligence completely underestimated the strength of Ukrainian resistance — or if any of their predictions were accurate, they either never reached Putin or were ignored by him. In addition, it seems likely that it was fear of the domestic political reaction that led Putin not to call up additional reservists for the “Special Military Operation.”
As a result, Russia invaded Ukraine (a country of 230,000 square miles and 41 million people) with barely 200,000 troops and seven different objectives. So while the Russian armed forces as a whole were much larger than those of Ukraine, in practice Russian troops were often outnumbered by the Ukrainians they were facing. This disparity grew as Ukraine called up every man that it could during the summer, while Putin hesitated for seven months to carry out even a partial mobilization in Russia.
Until October 2022 no supreme commander was appointed for the operation — perhaps because Putin feared the emergence of a victorious general who might challenge his own power. So there were serious problems of coordination between the different Russian fronts. This may have contributed to some appalling failures of staff work and logistics, such as the 40-mile-long traffic jam of Russian vehicles that built up on a single road north of Kyiv.
Russian command-and-control problems must have been worsened significantly by the number of senior officers killed by Ukrainian missile and artillery strikes in the first months of the war. U.S. technical intelligence was largely responsible for identifying local Russian headquarters. Like the strike on Makiivka over the New Year that killed dozens (or possibly hundreds) of Russian troops, these successes may also have been enabled by poor communications security on the Russian side.
U.S. satellite intelligence spotted Russian military build-ups and allowed the Ukrainians to anticipate Russian attacks. Ukrainian civilians in Russian-held areas were also able to simply call Ukrainian forces on their cell phones and tell them where Russian convoys were to be found. This in turn partly contributed to the atrocities against civilians committed by Russian soldiers, which have done so much to tarnish the image of the Russian army.
Despite all this, and despite longstanding and well-known problems with the poor quality of NCOs and lack of initiative on the part of junior officers, the Russian army might have been expected to do better. This was because of the colossal Russian superiority in the two weapons of the classical “Blitzkrieg,” as practiced by Germany in 1939-42, the Soviet Union in 1942-45, and Israel in most of its wars: armor and airpower. The failure of these two arms is perhaps the most striking lesson of the war in Ukraine so far, and indicates that Ukrainian hopes that Western tanks and warplanes will allow them to break through may also be misplaced. Their failure has also led to immense casualties among Russia’s best infantry units.
The first obstacle to Russian tanks were Ukrainian towns. For as the Soviet army showed at Stalingrad in 1942 and the Chechens in 1994-95 in Grozny, urban areas are notoriously difficult terrain for armored units; and many of the areas where the Russians found themselves fighting are thickly covered with urban and suburban settlements. As more and more of the world becomes urbanized, this could be a crucial factor in limiting fast offensive warfare in the future. As demonstrated in both Stalingrad and Grozny, from the point of view of the defenders, ruins make just as good cover as intact buildings, thereby reducing the effectiveness of artillery.
Urban warfare maximized the effectiveness of Ukrainian light anti-tank rockets: the U.S. Javelin, the British NLAW, and older but still effective Soviet weapons. Even rocket-propelled grenades fired from cover at close range have proved deadly to infantry fighting vehicles — though, as demonstrated by both Chechens and Ukrainians (and Hizbollah fighting Israeli forces in southern Lebanon), they also require enormous courage and nerve on the part of the soldiers using them.
Russian armor also suffered very badly from small and numerous Ukrainian drones, notably the U.S. Switchblade and the Turkish Bayraktar TB2. Already by mid-April 2022, Russia is estimated to have lost more than 460 main battle tanks out of 2,700 — and these included many of its newest tanks, while others from the total that were held in reserve are of highly questionable quality.
Despite suffering enormous casualties, however, the Russian armored forces have continued fighting. By contrast, even at the start of the war, the Russian air force played a much smaller part than expected, and since then seems to have virtually disappeared from the skies over Ukraine, despite enjoying a huge advantage in numbers over the Ukrainian air force.
At the start of the war, Russian warplanes overall outnumbered the Ukrainians by more than 10-1. Moscow’s air force also had 544 attack helicopters and 739 ground attack aircraft compared to Ukraine’s 34 attack helicopters and 29 ground attack aircraft, respectively. All other mistakes and weaknesses aside, numbers like that ought to have given Russia a decisive advantage.
Part of the reason for Russia’s failure to exploit these advantages may have been that it was holding back its most sophisticated aircraft and missiles for use against a potential NATO intervention in the war; but also, by November 2022, an estimated 109 Russian aircraft had been shot down, mostly by Stingers and Soviet-era missiles. These included a quarter of Russia’s latest attack helicopters, the Kamov Ka-52. The survivors seem to have been largely withdrawn from the battle, partly because of (understandably) low morale.
It is hard to exaggerate the loss this has represented to the Russian forces. The pictures we have seen of Ukrainian tanks and artillery firing from open fields would have been inconceivable in the face of threats from Russian helicopter gunships and Sukhoi ground attack planes. Russian air power also seems to have been gravely hampered by poor coordination with ground units and fear of attacking them (or being shot down by them) by accident. This is a problem that has been noted since the 2008 Georgian-Russian war, but which the Russian armed forces have seemingly done little to correct. This is an indication of the wider failures of military reforms under Putin.
As a result of these initial Russian defeats and subsequent Ukrainian counterattacks, the Russian army has become bogged down in a grinding and dreadfully bloody struggle for very limited amounts of territory in eastern Ukraine. It may be that the capture of the whole of the Donbas (recognized as independent and then formally annexed by Russia, but still not wholly occupied) is now the limit of achievable Russian ambitions, and that this is recognized by the Kremlin.
On the other hand, in this war of attrition, Russian advantages in artillery, munitions, and numbers are also inflicting terrible losses on Ukraine. Parallels are being made with the four years of trench warfare on the Western Front during the First World War — a struggle from which all the participants emerged crippled.
