The Economist - UK (2022-04-30)

ShareofUkraineoccupiedbyRussiaas

ofApril23rdSource:theukrainemap.com

20.6%

Melitopol Mariupol

Mykolaiv

Odessa Kherson

Dnipro

Kramatorsk

Zaporizhia

Kharkiv

Izyum

Slovyansk

Kyiv

Black

Sea

Seaof

Azov

Dnieper

UKRAINE

ROMANIA

MOLDOVA

Crimea

Ukrainianterritory

annexedbyRussia

Luhansk

D netsk

Areacontrolledby

Russian-backed

separatistsbefore

Febth

Do

nba

s

150 km

ClaimedasRussian-

controlled

AssessedRussian

advances*

AssessedasRussian-

controlled

Unitmovements

Russian Ukrainian

ClaimedUkrainian

counter-attacks

Aprilth

*Russiaoperatedinorattacked,

butdoesnotcontrol

Sources:InstitutefortheStudy

ofWar; AEI’s CriticalThreats

Project; RochanConsulting

The ninth week of war: The military situation Russian casualties

Russian forces in eastern Ukraine are

slowly advancing out of Izyum, towards

thetowns of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.

ButWestern officials say that Ukraine

isimmediately counter-attacking each

timeRussia captures a village.

Britain’s defence minister says that

a quarter of Russia’s initial invasion

force is out of action, and that 15,

Russian personnel have died. American

officials say the toll is lower; Ukraine

says it is higher.

16 Briefing Russia’s armed forces The Economist April 30th 2022

missiles were flaunted at parades in Mos­

cow.  Russia  tested  new  tactics  and  equip­

ment  in  Donbas,  after  its  first  invasion  of

Ukraine  in  2014,  and  in  its  campaign  to

prop  up  Bashar  al­Assad,  Syria’s  dictator,

the following year.

A  retired  European  general  says  that

watching  this  new  model  army  fail  re­

minds  him  of  visiting  East  Germany  and

Poland  after  the  end  of  the  cold  war,  and

seeing  the  enemy  up  close.  “We  realised

how  shite  the  3rd  Shock  Army  was,”  he

says,  referring  to  a  much­vaunted  Soviet

formation  based  in  Magdeburg.  “We’ve

again  allowed  ourselves  to  be  taken  in  by

some of the propaganda that they put our

way.”  Russia’s  army  was  known  to  have

problems,  says  Petr  Pavel,  a  retired  Czech

general who chaired nato’s military com­

mittee  in  2015­18,  “but  the  scope  of  these

came as a surprise to many, including my­

self—I  believed  that  the  Russians  had

learnt their lessons.” 

The charitable interpretation is that the

Russian army has been hobbled in Ukraine

less by its own deficiencies than by Mr Pu­

tin’s delusions. His insistence on plotting

the  war  in  secrecy  complicated  military

planning. The fsb, a successor to the kgb,

told  him  that  Ukraine  was  riddled  with

Russian  agents  and  would  quickly  fold.

That probably spurred the foolish decision

to  start  the  war  by  sending  lightly  armed

paratroopers to seize an airport on the out­

skirts of Kyiv and lone columns of armour

to advance into the city of Kharkiv, causing

heavy casualties to elite units. 

Yet, this coup de main having fizzled, the

army then chose to plough into the second

largest country in Europe from several di­

rections, splitting 120 or so battalion tacti­

cal  groups  (btgs)  into  lots  of  ineffective

and isolated forces. Bad tactics then com­

pounded  bad  strategy:  armour,  infantry

and artillery fought their own disconnect­

ed  campaigns.  Tanks  that  should  have

been protected by infantry on foot instead

roamed alone, only to be picked off in Uk­

rainian  ambushes.  Artillery,  the  mainstay

of  the  Russian  army  since  tsarist  times,

though directed with ferocity at cities such

as  Kharkiv  and  Mariupol,  could  not  break

through Ukrainian lines around Kyiv.

Problems in profusion

In recent weeks officials and experts have

debated  the  causes  of  Russian  failure.

Some have drawn comparisons to the col­

lapse  of  the  French  army  in  1940.  But  the

analogy  is  not  apt,  says  Christopher

Dougherty, a former planner for the Penta­

gon. “France failed because it followed bad

doctrine,” he says. “Russia’s failing in part

because  it’s  not  following  its  doctrine,  or

basic principles of war.”

Inexperience is part of the problem. As

the historian Michael Howard once noted,

the expertise a military officer hones “is al­

most  unique  in  that  he  may  only  have  to

exercise it once in a lifetime, if indeed that

often.  It  is  as  if  a  surgeon  had  to  practise

throughout  his  life  on  dummies  for  one

real operation.” America has been wielding

the  scalpel  nearly  continuously  since  the

end of the cold war, in Iraq, the Balkans, Af­

ghanistan,  Libya,  Syria  and  so  on.  Russia

has  not  fought  a  war  of  this  magnitude

against  an  organised  army  since  seizing

Manchuria from Japan in 1945. 

Things  it  could  do  in  smaller  wars,  in

Donbas and Syria—such as using electron­

ic  sensors  on  drones  to  feed  back  targets

for artillery—have proved harder on a larg­

er  scale.  And  things  that  appeared  easy  in

America’s wars, such as wiping out an ene­

my’s  air  defences,  are  actually  quite  hard.

Russia’s air force is flying several hundred

sorties  a  day,  but  it  is  still  struggling  to

track and hit moving targets, and remains

heavily  reliant  on  unguided  or  “dumb”

bombs that can be dropped accurately only

at low altitudes, exposing its planes to an­

ti­aircraft fire. 

All  armies  make  mistakes.  Some  make

more than others. The distinguishing fea­

ture of good armies is that they learn from

their mistakes rapidly. In abandoning Kyiv,

focusing  on  Donbas  and  putting  a  single

general, Alexander Dvornikov, in charge of

a  cacophonous  campaign,  Russia  is  belat­

edly showing signs of adaptation. In early

April  a  Western  official,  when  asked

whether  Russia  was  improving  tactically,

observed that armoured columns were still

being  sent  unsupported  and  in  single  file

into  Ukrainian­held  territory—a  suicidal

manoeuvre. On April 27th another official

said  that  Russian  forces  in  Donbas  ap­

peared unwilling, or unable, to advance in

heavy rain.

In  part,  Russia’s  woes  are  down  to