Ukraine: a trap of their own making

By Richard North - February 15, 2022

They’ve got themselves in an incredible mess now. Having ramped up the tension, the Biden-Johnson duo have more or less staked their reputations on the Ukraine invasion kicking off tomorrow. And that probably means that preliminary moves have to be in progress today.

Fortunately for them, they’ve already got their excuses ready. Uncle Vlad, we are told, is sending “thousands more troops” to the Ukraine border with the rather convenient potential to extend the current crisis for weeks.

This is according to “British officials”, who estimate that a further 14 Russian battalions are heading towards Ukraine, each numbering about 800 troops, on top of the 100 battalions massed on the borders.

Since the “100 battalions” is a force already believed capable of launching an invasion, the extra 14 are obviously icing on the cake that Johnson insists on having and eating, allowing him to turn drama queen, dumping the dressing up box and rushing back to London to grandstand at a Cobra meeting.

This, incidentally, is the committee he couldn’t be bothered to attend at the start of the Covid epidemic, when he could actually do something about the problem, as opposed to right now when he is entirely in Uncle Vlad’s hands. But, at least, he got some good headlines out of it, as he declared that the situation had become “very, very dangerous”.

Paving the way for his boss’s dramatic dash back to London, forces minister Heappey did the duty turn on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme telling the few people who can be bothered to listen to the BBC any more that “we are closer than we’ve been on this continent” to war “for 70 years”.

This had the Guardian a little bit puzzled as it recalled that there had been several wars in Europe over the past seven decades, including conflicts in which the UK played a military role, such as in Kosovo. Heappey, the paper said, also appeared to discount the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and the war that has been continuing in Ukraine for the past eight years.

Still, that was something of an improvement on his last venture onto the BBC when he claimed that we were being confronted by the largest deployment of troops in 70 years, despite the Vostok-2018 exercises, which fielded 300,000 soldiers. Clearly, the man has a thing about 70 years, even if he can’t quite settle on what he wanted to happen in them.

Just in case Johnson needed further back-up, Miss Trussed obliged with the declaration that Uncle Vlad could launch an invasion of Ukraine “imminently”, which is a considerable improvement on last week when she would probably have been hard put to find the country in an atlas.

How she personally is able to work out the timing of the invasion, though, is something of a mystery as she would not have the first idea of what she was looking at, or the implications of what she had seen.

Luckily, she had Heappey to help her out, having told the BBC that, “All of the combat enablers are in place and my fear is that if all of this was just about a show to win leverage in diplomacy, that doesn’t require the logistics, the fuel, the medical supplies, the bridging assets, the unglamorous stuff that actually makes an invasion force credible, but doesn’t attract headlines. Yet all of that is now in place, too”.

How he’d worked that out, he didn’t say but, not having any real knowledge of where Uncle Vlad is going to strike – if at all – it’s a little bit difficult to foresee what logistics and support elements will be required and where they should be placed – notwithstanding that military exercises impose considerable demands on logistics.

Hard-pressed ministers could, of course, rely on the good offices of the legacy media to provide them with some clues as to Vlad’s intentions, with the situation maps getting more elaborate by the day.

Both the Telegraph and the Times have remarkably similar maps, both with an incremental increase in the number of potential thrust lines, up to 13 from the original nine. Yet both would have Russian forces storming through the Pripet marshes, through the boggy and heavily wooded hinterland of Chernobyl and leaping of the River Desna without troubling about bridges.

When it comes to taking the capital Kiev, though, Roland Oliphant for the Telegraph at least concedes that the attempt “would be challenging due to the topography and an overwhelmingly hostile population”. But it turns out that, in topographical terms, he is thinking of the mud of south Ukraine, as he asserts that “a force invading from Belarus would likely be the best option for Russia, avoiding some of the key obstacles”.

Despite the experience of Grozny, Gulf War II, and the more general failure of Douhet’s “shock and awe” theory, Oliphant thinks that the Russians might not need to enter the capital. He seems to have a poor view of the Ukrainian army, which he posits as being destroyed. With half the country occupied, and Russian artillery parked within range of Zelensky’s office, he argues that the Ukrainian president “would have little choice but to surrender”.

Generally, the hacks’ views on strategy seem to be about as good as their grasp of the different types of military equipment, the Guardian gaily describing a Ukrainian BMP-2 as an “armoured personnel carrier”. But this at least is better than the Mail which insists on calling MICVs “tanks”. Why legacy media journalists think we should take them seriously, when they can’t even get the basics right, is never explained.

Nor do they ever explain why the Russians should be so eager to provide them with a never-ending supply of pictures of their exercises, right down to yesterday’s Guardian illustrating T-72B3s (described as “a tank”), taking part in military exercises in the Leningrad oblast, some 750 road miles from the Ukrainian Border, joined by The Times, which puts the tanks on its front page.

It is interesting, when it comes to tanks, how the Russians are keen to show off their latest kit yet the distinction seems to evade the assembled hackery who seem to afford the same fighting value to a train-load of clapped out B1s, without fitted skirts – clearly not in a battle-ready condition. Since most of them struggle to tell the difference between a tank and an MICV – with some failing to pass the test – it should be no surprise that their military appreciations lack nuance or sophistication.

And still there is the emphasis on the “battalion” – or the “battalion tactical group” (BTGs) – as the key fighting element when the concept, as an army building-block, was largely abandoned in 2015, with the reversion to the traditional divisional structure for large-scale manoeuvres.

Nor is there any recognition of the differences between tank and motor rifle divisions, much less any understanding of their respective roles. It is enough for the average hack to appreciate the difference between tanks and infantry, with not the slightest understanding of how the Russians integrate teeth arms to perform specific functions.

Doubtless, there are professional intelligence officers who are fully aware of the differences and the implications of positioning different formations – although satellite imagery gives frustratingly little information on force mix. But the likelihood is that much of the detail does not get to the political level, not least because we hear the idiot Johnson glibly describing the number of BTGs on (or near) the Ukrainian border, with obviously not the first idea of what he is talking about.

Still, as long as the warmongers can ramp up the numbers, without attempting qualitative distinctions or attempting to match capacities with potential tasks, the likes of Johnson and Biden can parade statesmen credentials and play at seeking diplomatic solutions, while clapping seals in the media applaud their efforts.

Meanwhile, the Russian play their games, leading one pundit to argue that the presentiments of doom could backfire, to Putin’s advantage. All the Russian president has to do is string the western leaders along, and pull the plug at the time of his choosing.

The pundit is Keir Giles, who argues that, before the hype got going, it would have been hard to cast any retreat by Putin as anything but humiliating failure. But, he says, it is now the US that stands to be embarrassed. Furthermore, the credibility of its intelligence disclosures are once again shattered, if Russia chooses an option other than invasion – or even simply continues to sit on the border as the dates named by the US come and go.

Most of all though, it is my view that the West has fallen for the Russian’s own projections of its strength, failing to appreciate the weaknesses of the Russian army and the lack of popular support for a prolonged military adventure. On balance, I would assert that Putin has everything to gain by keeping up the pressure but not invading. Should his troops cross the border, he will have lost.

Bogged down in Cold War rhetoric though, and lacking any real understanding of the game being played, Western leaders – and particularly Johnson and Biden – are falling into a trap of their own making.