Ukraine: why Ukraine is winning

By Richard North - April 9, 2022

A couple of days ago, I wrote a piece entitled “why Russia is losing”. So, when an article popped up in The Atlantic headed: “why Ukraine is winning”, the opportunity to review it was irresistible.

The piece is written by Phillips Payson O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. We are told that he is also author of “How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II”, so he has a track record in this subject.

O’Brien’s central thesis is that Ukraine’s “success” has illuminated a strategy that has allowed a smaller state, so far, to outlast a larger and much more powerful one. Battles, he says, “reveal more than they decide”, demonstrating how effectively combatants planned, prepared, and executed before the fighting began. The result of a battle exposes not only how well matched the sides are, but also how the war might unfold in the future.

This is an intriguing thesis which O’Brien applies to the outcome of what he calls “the Battle of Kiev” which, he avers, “was never in doubt”. Russia’s and Ukraine’s preparations for the fight essentially preordained the result. He then goes on to add that the battle revealed “a great deal about why Ukraine has done so much better in the war than many analysts predicted”.

Ukraine’s successes, he says, stem from the “Ukrainian way of war” – a coherent, intelligent, and well-conceived strategy to fight the Russians, one well-calibrated to take advantage of specific Russian weaknesses.

In broad principles, this “way if war” has what O’Brien defines as four “foundational elements”: contesting air supremacy over the area of battle; denying Russia control of cities, thereby complicating the Russian military’s communications and logistics; allowing Russian forces to get strung out along roads in difficult-to-support columns; and attacking those columns from all sides.

Denying the Russians air superiority, O’Brien then says, is the foundation of Ukrainian success, allowing Ukrainian forces to manoeuvre while making Russian forces nervous that they could be subject to Ukrainian air assault.

This assertion is actually worth a review of its own and, doubtless, will become the focus of many post-war studies. But, even at this stage, there are arguments that the Ukrainians did not deny the Russians air superiority, as such. Rather, through doctrinal, equipment and other problems, the Russians failed to secure it.

The difference in view could be quite significant. In effect, the Ukrainians didn’t win this phase of the war – the Russians lost it. But, in so doing, the Ukrainians have since exploited weaknesses and, with the provisions of additional anti-air assets, they may continue to do so.

As to O’Brien’s second point, denying Russia control of cities, he would have it that Ukrainians have turned their cities into fortresses and roadblocks, complicating Russian logistics and communications. In a detailed announcement about the Ukrainian victory in the Battle of Kiev, O’Brien recalls that the country’s ministry of defence noted that the capital was “largely saved by the heroic fighters in Chernihiv and Sumy Regions”.

However, there is something missing here. Important though they were, the battles in the Chernihiv and Sumy Oblasts were to the east of the Dnieper, approaching Kiev via the “back door” guarded by multiple bridges and an extensive river network. As such, they were secondary to the main thrust, which was the route down the west of the Dnieper via Chernobyl and Inankiv, ending up in Irpin.

As to the “way of war”, the running fights down this corridor, with the demolition of multiple bridges and the partial flooding of the Irpin basin, were part of an essentially conventional blocking battle. Similarly, much of the fighting in the Chernihiv Oblast was initially conventional, involving some serious tank-on-tank battles and at least two blown bridges.

This is exactly the sort of fighting retreats that occurred many times through the Second World War, as the defending forces slowed down the advances of their enemies as they fell back on defensible positions, usually across a water feature such as a river, where the crossings were demolished or contested in strength.

Adopting this approach, only after the Russian fronts had stabilised did the Ukrainians adopt, in part, the hit-and-run attacks on the supply lines, etc., to which O’Brien refers. But they also conducted an amount of interdiction using heavy artillery, with UAV observation, as he points out. Nevertheless, the logistic issues were probably over-stated.

What really made the difference, though, to the extent of being a game-changer, was that the Ukrainians knew the Russians were coming. As identified by the Wall Street Journal, in mid-January, CIA director William Burns made a secret trip to Kiev to tell Zelensky what the Russians were planning, enabling the Ukraine forces to have counter-measures in place before the invasion

Then, though the course of the battle, they enjoyed the provision of intelligence by third parties, including detailed SIGNINT and satellite imagery, all of which had a significant impact of the conduct (and success) of the fighting. The role of good quality, timely intelligence cannot be over-stated, and the Ukrainians’ ability to exploit it has been a core element of their “way of war”.

Oddly, O’Brien doesn’t mention this, referring only to holding Chernihiv and Sumy, forcing Russian troops to contemplate street-by-street fighting and making it impossible for Russia to move troops by rail into the Ukrainian heartland.

In his version of events, having complicated Russian logistics efforts, the Ukrainians then “allowed” the Russian forces to get strung out along roads as they advanced. The Russians made their situation worse by invading during the muddy season, confining them to narrow paved roadways and further limiting their ability to move. With their enemies in such a vulnerable position, the Ukrainians then launched attacks on the long Russian columns.

The attacks, he says, took a number of different forms, including air power (most famously the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones), special forces, long-range artillery, and even large conventional formations. The Ukrainians stretched Russian personnel so thinly that they sometimes failed to defend the columns themselves. Then, he says:

The casualties caused by Ukraine’s harassing attacks hampered Russian attempts to build up enough forces to assault Kiev. Though the Russians tried to advance on three different road systems, from Sumy, Chernihiv, and the northwest, Ukrainian resistance ensured that they never built up enough force to surround, let alone assault, Kiev. All three lines of attack have now been shut down, and Russian forces are in retreat.

Instead of assaulting heavy Russian formations of large tanks and artillery directly, the Ukrainians used light, manoeuvrable forces to take advantage of Russian vulnerabilities and achieve victory. Using handheld weapons operated by small groups, the Ukrainians have regularly disabled Russian tanks and trucks.

This has not only weakened the Russian forces in the field but also kept their logistics lines stretched, limiting Russian access to the fuel and ammunition required to keep up a constant attack. (The number of Russian vehicles that have been abandoned intact but without fuel is particularly striking.)

In using light forces this way, O’Brien says, the Ukrainians have shown that even in a conventional war between states – as opposed to an insurgency – a smaller force can engage the conventional forces of a larger and more technologically advanced enemy and fight them to a standstill.

Thus, we see the narrative being developed – rapidly to become the received wisdom. But, arguably, the Battle of Kiev was won on the second or third day, when the Ukrainians blew the bridges on the approaches to Kiev, flooded part of the Irpin River basin and fell back on prepared positions. Without those measures, the Russians could well have entered Kiev and the Ukrainian “way of war” would have been rather different.

However, O’Brien concedes that Ukraine has not yet won the war. With their defeat in the Battle of Kiev, he says, the Russians have started to concentrate in the east and south of Ukraine, hoping to set up a defensive perimeter that the Ukrainians will have to attack if they hope to regain lost territory. The Ukrainian way of war, he suggests, will have to adapt.

In his view, the Ukrainians, having witnessed the Russian failures in heavy assault, may decide to avoid making the same mistakes and instead continue their light, attritional warfare.

This, O’Brien feels, will probably not result in a swift end to the war, but it offers the possibility of draining Russian military and political will, allowing Ukraine to achieve many of its aims in negotiations. The Ukrainian way of war, he concludes, could yet achieve what once seemed an all but impossible: victory.

About this, though, I am not sure. If the Russians consolidate their lines in Donbass and continue to fortify them, light, attritional warfare can hardly prevail – as it has failed to do since 2014. The opposing sides could end up with a slogging match that no one can win. What we actually need, therefore, is a way of breaking the impasse – which I suggested earlier might come with the use of sophisticated and innovative technology.

Thus, what we need to see is what we have not seen before. When it comes to the Ukrainian “way of war”, we ain’t seen nothing yet. For the moment, though, the Ukrainians have some bridges to rebuild, having made a start on one of the Irpin River crossings (pictured).