Ukraine: why Russia is losing

By Richard North - April 7, 2022

A great fever has gripped the international media as it dedicates its considerable resources to hunting for the next Bucha, its journalists driven by the prospect of Pulitzer prizes and similar awards as they seek to bring news of the next Russian atrocity and add to the burgeoning body count.

The clumsy Kremlin-inspired denials are of no interest. They are from a nation whose president denied that his country would invade Ukraine and then did precisely that, and who hasn’t even the courage of his own convictions, sufficient to allow his war to be called a war. Putin and his henchmen have about as much credibility as Comical Ali.

As long as the media fever persists, it will continue to infect the body politic. Even the Pope has joined in the fray, to give the Papal blessing to “martyred” Bucha and condemning the “massacre”.

Meanwhile Western foreign policy regarding Russia and the war has been sub-contracted to Zelensky, with the Pentagon press secretary John Kirby pronouncing that it’s “impossible” to know how long the war will go on if not ended through diplomacy, then declaring that Ukraine “of course” can win.

Any idea of managing the tempo of the conflict, by orchestrating sanctions against Russia on the one hand, and regulating the flow of weapons to Ukraine on the other, seems to have been abandoned. The talk now is of “victory”, with Zelensky dictating the terms and Nato falling in behind him to supply his every need.

Of course, none of this would have come to pass if it was not for the extraordinary incompetence of the Russian military which has so far failed to achieve any of its primary objectives and is now resorting to the destructive brutality for which it is infamous, while intent on covering its tracks.

It is timely, therefore, to have another intervention from Kamil Galeev who has posted a long piece headed: “Why Russia is losing this war?”, running to nearly 4,000 words.

Explaining why so many analysts failed to predict the course of what he calls the “Z-war”, Galeev lists three factors: first, they greatly overestimated (or rather misunderstood) the Russian-Soviet army; second, they underestimated the Ukrainian one; third, they ignored the Russian political goals.

The Russian army, he suggests, is just a superficially reformed Soviet army, which indeed it is. The equipment, with very few exceptions, is from the Soviet era and that which is new is basically an upgrade of Soviet models. And since doctrine determines equipment, which then enables doctrine to be implemented, without any fundamental change in equipment, the army is essentially designed to fight Soviet-style battles.

Galeev describes the Soviet army as a “multitask tool” which was designed for: winning the nuclear war; picking potatoes; and pacifying satellite states. The “picking potatoes” role is a whimsical, if accurate description of the use of the army to complement the agricultural workforce, but it need not trouble us here.

As to its primary role of “winning the nuclear war”, I would disagree with Galeev. More correctly, it became an army capable of winning a war in a nuclear-contaminated environment, after the use of tactical nuclear weapons. This was not an inherent capability as, right up to the T-62 tank, produced long after the doctrine had been established, there was no nuclear protection fitted to MBTs.

In fact, the army was designed primarily for attacking the West, a combined arms army equipped to fight a war of manoeuvre where the sheer scale of the army was intended quickly to overwhelm Nato defences – which could include tactical nuclear weapons, and even, as was once mooted, nuclear mines.

With the way paved by mass artillery, with which the army is lavishly provided, the spearhead element was (and still is) the tank, supported by the mechanised infantry combat vehicle (MICV), initially the BMP-1 and then subsequent improvements, together with helicopter gunships.

The particular characteristic of this army was that the tank was deployed in enormous numbers. At its height, the Warsaw Pact could field 56,000 MBTs – the archetypal weapon of mass destruction.

Relatively lightly armoured (less than 60 percent of the weight of a Nato equivalent), it was cynically – but not entirely inaccurately – said that the idea was to have more tanks than the enemy had ammunition, so that eventually, the sheer weight of numbers would prevail.

I think that it is here that Galeev misses the point. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, the army fell apart and, at its nadir, tank numbers dropped to just over 1,000 badly maintained runners.

Only when Putin decided to reactivate Russian military power at the turn of the century was a re-equipment programme implemented – which largely amounted to reactivating old tanks from store, and upgrading them. But only with a struggle has he managed to build levels to about 2,700 – a mere shadow of the strength of the former Soviet Army.

Yet those tanks – not all of which could be used without denuding the army – were all that Putin had for his invasion, performing the third of Galeev’s roles, pacifying satellite states.

But, as I pointed out in late January, in 1956, when the Soviets invaded Hungary, there were already five army divisions in the country and the forces were topped up to 17 divisions, amounting to 200,000 troops.

Then, in 1968, when the Soviets repeated the process in then Czechoslovakia, the initial forces committed to the invasion comprised 200,000 troops and, over the course of the campaign, it is variously estimated that as many as 500,000 personnel were engaged.

It is also to Czechoslovakia that Galeev refers, with him arguing that the invasion of Ukraine was a copy of the operation which finished the Prague Spring. In 1968, though, the much larger force was split into two echelons. The first, of 250,000, pushed forward, followed by the second which occupied the territory and secured supply lines

When it came to the “Z-invasion”, only 160-190,000 Russians crossed the border. As in 1968, they pushed forward. But no second echelon came to occupy territory behind the first and secure the supply lines. Because it didn’t exist. Putin, says Galeev, didn’t expect resistance thinking the Ukrainians would surrender.

Analysts, he says, mocked “just the roads” maps showing Russian-controlled territory, yet these maps were far more accurate than the many maps showing big blocks of red, purporting to be under Russian control. At least in the North, Russians controlled only the “long narrow appendixes along the roads”. Russians, indeed, controlled “just the roads”.

Thus, the Danube-styled invasion with a much smaller force risked repeating the scenario of the Winter War of 1939-40 when much smaller Finnish forces isolated and decimated the Soviet invaders, using guerrilla tactics.

In this invasion, the Ukrainians saw it coming. They had prepared for the guerrilla war and for operating in the deep rear of the enemy, aided by the flow of modern anti-tank weapons. When the Z-army pushed forward, leaving the unoccupied territory behind, that gave the Ukrainians their opportunity.

There is much more that Galeev has to say, but this covers much of the essence. Once the Ukrainians had decided to fight in this manner, the Russians were never going to prevail throughout the whole country, especially as they had made the additional mistake of mounting far too many separate thrusts, diluting what little power they already had.

But I think we must also add the classic blocking actions conducted by the Ukrainian forces, where they fought the Russians as they attempted to advance on Kiev down both sides of the Dnieper, blowing bridges to prevent them reaching their objective. This was, in many respects, a conventional action, the success of which has been scarcely recognised.

Nevertheless, with the media obsessed with the “human interest” aspects of this conflict, trying and failing to tell the story through the experiences of civilians caught up in the drama, Galeev’s input is a welcome corrective to the mush served up to us daily by the fourth estate.

Now we are entering the next, critical phase, we need more of such analysis if we are to understand the ramifications (and consequences) of the actions, sufficient to hold our own politicians to account for their own actions. Democracy may be a flawed concept, but that is what we must be equipped to do.