“Putin is a very risk averse individual” - ISW - So why did he invade Ukraine? - supreme confidence in plan A from his spies - take over Kyiv government in 2 days - and Ukraine in 10 days - no plan B
- which he had to keep secret from his generals - the very people to warn him it was BS
I am writing this right now because many people are worrying that Putin will attack NATO if the US and UK give Zelensky permission to use the ATACMS and Stormshadow missiles (which they already have) to hit targets in Russia (which they are already hitting with other US and UK missiles).
No, Putin will NOT attack NATO for this reason, because he isn't stark raving mad. It is the opposite. Despite all his bluff and bluster he is very risk averse as the Institute for the Study of War so often puts it. Here is one of his tweets.
“Putin is a very risk averse individual. He is extremely calculated, and he oftentimes really prefers not to make urgent, rash political decisions that would specifically impact the health of his regime,” said ISW’s Russia deputy team lead @ KatStepanenko
He was so sure of this plan he never told his military staff or most of his generals about it in advance.
TEXT ON GRAPHIC
Putin is "A VERY RISK AVERSE INDIVIDUAL" (ISW).
So why did he invade Ukraine? He thought it was ZERO RISK.
Exercises in March 2021 were part of the preparations for invasion.
He planned to
- take Hostomel airport on day 1.
- land tanks and take over Kyiv government next day.
- take over Ukraine in 10 days.Then this happened.
Debris from unexpectedly destroyed Russian helicopters
Putin was so sure the risk was zero he had no plan B.Putin was so sure of this plan devised by spied he kept it secret even from most of his generals (Gerasimov knew).
“no evidence in the Russian planning that anyone had asked what would occur if any of its key assumptions were wrong.” — RUSI
There is NO WAY Putin could think using nukes is zero risk.
Photo of the damaged airport from: Occupiers fail to secure their foothold in the attack on Kyiv
Map: Antonov International Airport (GML) to Kyiv
RUSI quote from (Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 : page 12)
We saw that with the Kursk incursion. The Ukrainians are using the US supplied HiMARS already on Russian soil against targets in Russia. All Putin did is dither for 3 weeks and they still are not sure what to do a month later.
Putin didn’t think for a moment to attack NATO. What good would that do? Nothing. Ukraine would continue to fight Russia and he would have to fight NATO as well, the strongest army in the entire world.
Nobody would do that. It's bizarre to suppose he would.
He is not stark raving mad. He is not a movie villain or a comic book character. This is the real world with real people in it.
See:
So at this point almost everyone says
“But what about the Ukrainian invasion - doesn’t that show that Putin is unpredictable and could do anything?”
Well actually, NO.
I will give a short answer then a longer answer then I will give all the details based on reliable sources.
We now know very well exactly why Putin invaded Ukraine due to secret material assessed by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and other details that have been revealed publicly since then.
From the extensive research we now have, it is clear that if Putin's spies had told him the truth in July 2021
that the Ukrainians would resist strongly rather than welcome the invasion,
and if Putin's team had done red teaming,
military planning challenging their assumptions instead of just optimistically
assuming everything would go well
that he would NOT have invaded Ukraine.
See also
Also
SLIGHTLY LONGER ANSWER
First the details here prove that Putin is VERY RISK AVERSE. Back in spring 2022 he THOUGHT he had worked out his plan in detail and that it couldn't possibly go wrong.
He invaded because he thought he had such a good plan it didn't even need a plan B.
Putin's spies told him that all he needs to do is to
order his 200,000 soldiers with all their tanks to invade Ukraine from many directions at once, North, East and South (landing from the Azov Black Sea and crossing over from Crimea)
DON'T tell his generals in advance so that the soldiers can't leak the plan
all that was just a distraction to get the Ukrainian military out of Kyiv city but the generals have to think it is genuine so they must not know the secret plan
The next phase of Putin's plan was
send a small force of elite paratroopers by air to secure Hostomel airport.
This is the airport just north of Kyiv city
Then after they secured the airport which they planned to do on day 1:
set up an air bridge flying supplies to Hostomel airport including tanks [large military transport aircraft can carry tanks
quickly drive those tanks into Kyiv city before the Ukrainian military notice what is happening
The spies told Putin that
the Ukrainian civilians are oppressed and will welcome the tanks with flowers
they could quickly take over the Ukrainian government.
imprison or kill Zelensky if he hasn't already left Ukraine as he is a repressive leader [FALSE].
So what about the Ukrainian military? Putin's spies told him that:
as soon as they see the government is gone the Ukrainian generals will all switch over to serve under Putin.
this will all be done in 2 days, Kyiv will then be in Russian control
Then the plan after that was
Ukrainian generals would order their soldiers to join in with Russian soldiers and subdue the rest of Ukraine
Within 2 weeks all of Ukraine would be in control of Russia.
Putin was so sure of this plan he had no plan B.
Everything since then has been improvising a plan B.
So the big ground invasion with tanks was just meant as a distraction so he didn't work out any plans for the military. He never talked to them about it.
Indeed the officers and soldiers thought they were just doing exercises until 24th February when they were told to invade.
Many of the soldiers at the lowest level thought they were on exercises even AFTER they crossed into Ukraine (only the tanks at the head of the convoy would know they had to shoot the border guards to get in). They didn’t even know they WERE in Ukraine.
This is why they kept running out of fuel. Because the generals didn't know to get in fuel supplies for a full invasion and they didn't have enough fuel for their tanks to drive all the way to Kyiv.
Anyway - so all that was just a distraction.
SO WHAT STOPPED IT - WELL IT WOULD NEVER HAVE WORKED BUT EVEN THE AIR BRIDGE FAILED BECAUSE OF A VERY SMALL GROUP OF NEWBIE UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS AND OFFICERS WITH NO SERIOUS COMBAT TRAINING
Naturally Ukraine had sent almost all their best soldiers to the front lines to meet the invasion (a few were left in Kyiv to protect the president etc).
However they did have a small detachment of not very well trained Ukrainian newbie soldiers still left in Hostomel airport.
Their officers had no combat experience and were trained in paperwork not in combat. But they had enough equipment to shoot down a few helicopters and they were able to damage the runway too. Not enough to stop helicopters but enough to prevent a plane landing - as it turned out the Russians were hoping to follow through with military transport planes but weren’t able to.
Their officers had no combat experience and were trained in paperwork not in combat. But they had enough equipment to shoot down a few helicopters and they were able to damage the runway too. Not enough to stop helicopters but enough to prevent a plane landing - as it turned out the Russians were hoping to follow through with military transport planes but weren’t able to.
They showed a lot of bravery for a very small group of very inexperienced soldiers. When they shot down their first helicopter that was the first time they realized they had a chance and they kept on fighting.
They were able to stop the Russians from setting up a foothold on the airport for a vital few hours, long enough to get reinforcements.
I will tell this story in detail in a bit. It is an extraordinary story!
Meanwhile Ukrainians with older manpads were able to shoot down a helicopter.
Putin realized that it was too dangerous to send his paratroopers to Hostomel airport on day 1 and called the operation off.
AS YOU SEE THIS IS A VERY RISK AVERSE PUTIN
So you can see - Putin is VERY RISK AVERSE.
He would have NEVER done this invasion if he'd know what would happen.
However by then he was committed. He could have just withdrawn across the border but then everyone would know that Ukraine had defeated the Rusian army.
He couldn't do that. So all the rest of the war since then is improvising with no plan B.
BECAUSE HE HAD NO PLAN B THE ARMY NEVER SERIOUSLY TRIED TO DESTROY THE UKRAINIAN AIRFORCE - PUTIN DIDN’T GIVE THEM TIME TO DO THAT
Because he didn't prepare in advance the army didn't even do a proper job of trying to destroy the Ukrainian airforce. When I read about this before the war started all teh experts said Russia would start with a couple of days of bombing, to destroy all the Ukrainian airforce or as much as they could before they started the invasion.
But no, Russia just did a few hours of half-hearted bombing.
Many of the mig-29s and other fighter jets took off from their airports. There's dramatic imagery on Twitter of them getting into the air just before bombs hit the runway behind them.
The Soviet era fighter jets can land and take off from public roads so they soon dispersed throughout Ukraine. Ukraine kept about half of its airforce and built lots of small hidden runways throughout Ukraine for them.
They were outnumbered 10 to 1 but it turned out that Russian fighters are not trained to work with each other and they couldn't take over the Ukrainian air force.
After a few weeks, Ukraine had total control of the air space part from the occupied regions of Ukraine even without air defences. This was one of the biggest surprises of teh war for Western analysts.
So that is how Putin failed.
He invaded Ukraine because he only relied on spies.
His plan would NOT have worked. There is NO WAY that the ordinary Ukrainians would have welcomed his tanks with flowers and NO WAY that the Ukrainian generals would have instantly switched allegiance to Putin.
So Putin was very badly mistaken. He was mislead by his spies who may well have known what they said was false but Putin is very harsh with people who tell him things he doesn't want to hear.
Putin expected it to be easier than when he took over Crimea. It was instead impossible.
So - he was NOT mad. He was NOT reckless. He was just misinformed.
This is why the open source experts I used all said that Putin would not try a big invasion like this because militarily there was no way it could succeed.
What they missed is that Putin didn't consult with his generals before ordering them to invade Ukraine.
Only the US and UK knew what Putin planned and they warned Zelensky just before the invasion secretly. Macron didn't know this. Putin's own generals didn't know this. From this can see there was some leak from Putin's spies at the highest level to the UK or the US, either a mole or maybe spyware or eavesdropping on transmissions.
And the US and UK can't have known about the Hostomel air bridge idea or they would surely have told Zelensky. But they DID know that Putin intended somehow to try to take Kyiv.
Since Putin is NOT mad he is NOT going to try to attack NATO. No matter what his spies tell him he could not possibly believe that he could take over NATO in a couple of days. He knows very well that he would lose that war and that it would be the end of his regime.
This is why Putin will NOT attack NATO. And why Ukraine and its allies KNOW that Putin will NOT attack NATO.
THIS IS WHY I GOT THINGS SO WRONG WHEN I SAID THAT RUSSIA WOULD NEVER INVADE UKRAINE - BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW THAT PUTIN WAS ADVISED BY SPIES AND NEVER CONSULTED HIS GENERALS
I apologized at the time. I made the same mistake as many academics. I now understand WHY it was wrong.
The reason is that Putin when he invaded didn't consult wth his generals. If he had consulted with his generals they would have told him all the things that my sources said and he would never have invaded Ukraine.
He believed his spies who told him that the Ukrainians would welcome the tanks with flowers, that the Ukrainian generals would defect en mass to Putin as soon as he took over the governmetn and that he could topple the Kyiv government in 2 days and take over Ukraien in 2 weeks.
Of course I couldn't know this. Macron didn't know this. Zelensky only learnt at the last minute from the UK and the US.
The only reason the UK and the US knew this is because they had excellent means of spying on Putin. They knew that he would invade. They told Zelensky and he then was more prepared for the invasion as a result.
THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT - THERE IS NO WAY COULD BELIEVE THAT HIS SPIES HAVE A TOTALLY RIKS FREE PLAN FOR RUSSIA TO TAKE OVER NATO IN TWO WEEKS - INDEED HE KNOWS FULL WELL HE WOULD LOSE AND LOSE QUICKLY - SO THE VERY RISK AVERSE PUTIN WILL CERTAINLY NOT ATTACK NATO
The important thing is that this time is different.
There is NO WAY that Putin's spies will tell him that he can take over NATO in 2 weeks. Or if they
lied and did tell him this even Putin knows very well that he CAN'T take over NATO ever never mind quickly.
So Putin will not attack NATO. He knows he will lose and lose quickly.
So hopefully some of you are less scared now.
AS Admiral Radakin explained Russia would just lose that match and lose it quickly.
It would be very absurd for Putin to attack NATO when it finds it is losing to Ukraine
.
TEXT ON GRAPHIC:
NASA, huge and powerful but very timid
Russia knows it can't use nukes in reality
Russia tiny and weak, bluffs as meaningless as soap bubbles
Even the Soviet Union had no way to win a war with nukes
Imagine if your team was invisible - how easily you could win a game of football.
That is how much better NATO's F-35 jets are than anything Russia has.
NATO's technology is vastly superior (one of many ways)
…
Also
Text: The biggest reason that Putin doesn’t want a conflict with NATO is because Russia will lose. And lose quickly.
BLOG: How to see Putin will NEVER attack NATO - “Because Russia will lose, and lose quickly” - Admiral Radakin - and Putin isn't even trying to protect Russia from NATO [By lose quickly, Admiral Radakin means pushed right out of NATO territory, and any missile sytems firing at NATO destroyed - NATO wouldn't try to defeat Russia as it is purely defensive]
And NO, Putin can’t win by using nukes. They are not nearly as powerful as people think. The Soviet Union could NEVER win a war with nukes, Nor can Russia.
BLOG: Nukes are used as one way to prevent war - debunk of fantasy ideas - nukes can’t make a country uninhabitable - Soviet Union/ Russia NEVER had ability to win with a nuclear “first strike” nor did USA
Putin will just go Meh as always
,
TEXT ON GRAPHIC:
After Ukraine first uses ATACMS against targets in Russia
All Putin will do is to go "meh" and say FALSELY that:
ATACMS are 40 years out of date
Russia has far better systems
we shoot them all down
nothing happened (even if ATACMS destroy 100 fighter jets and helicopters)
Russia is winning this war
no longer claims NATO countries operate them
ALWAYS does this.
Graphic Putin_after_ATACMS.png from: Grinning Vladimir Putin suggests support for Kamala Harris as U.S. accuses Russia of election interference
[Nothing to do with this topic but I thought his reaction was similar enough to be relevant here]
see my:
THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THE DEFENCE OF HOSTOMEL AIRPORT - HOW A SMALL GROUP OF INEXPERIENCED SOLDIERS SAVED THE DAY WHEN SURPRISED BY PUTIN’S MOST ELITE PARATROOPERS ON 24TH FEBRUARY 2022
Putin worked it out with his spies who had a cunning plan to set up an air bridge to Hostomol airport, just outside Kyiv, and meanwhile instruct their generals to invade in many places around Ukraine to distract the Ukrainian forces away from Kyiv.
The spies told Putin that while the Ukrainian army was distracted they should drop in lots of shock troops into Hostomol airport, and follow up with transport military aircraft with large amounts of gear including military vehicles, and just drive into Kyiv when nobody expected them and take over the government.
They assured Putin that the Ukrainians wanted to be liberated. He seems to have expected his army to be welcomed by the civilians throwing flowers and for all the generals to switch allegiance instantly to Russia and help them subdue the rest of Ukraine. Zelensky would be imprisoned or assassinated.
Putin was so confident in this and his spies presented him with such an optimistic rosy picture that he didn't bother to run it past his generals.
Putin was an ex KGB spy so he trusts his spies over his generals and he was so mistrustful of his generals that he didn't even tell them what he planned to do.
This led to the bizarre situation where the US government knew what Putin planned to do, because for some reason they had access to the same information as Putin's spies, but his own generals didn't have a clue.
As a result the generals thought they were just doing exercises. When Putin ordered them to invade Ukraine on 22nd February they were not prepared. In particular they hadn't got in enough fuel for an invasion which is why their tanks kept running out of fuel. Also if it had been led by the military they would have spent a day or two just firing missiles at the military airports to destroy Ukraine's 98 military fighter jets and other military support aircraft before sending in the army. But instead faced with the order to drive their tanks over the border, they just did a rather half-hearted strike at some of the airports which is why the Ukrainians were able to save about half of their fighter jets which turned out to be enough to prevent Russia from taking over the Ukrainian airforce.
Even with a 10 to 1 ratio of Russian to Ukrainian fighter jets, the Russians were unable to take over the Ukrainian air space. This is because Russian pilots don't train in those kinds of scenarios, and didn't know what to do. Even to this day they are not trained to do this because it takes a lot of training to change a pilot used to flying point to point bombing missions to one who is able to take the initiative in aerial combat, and to collaborate with ground forcers.
Putin's plan failed in the air too. Latvia and Lithuania had given Ukraine some last minute shoulder mounted stinger ground to air missiles. Then - Hostomol airport wasn't completely undefended, Ukraine had 200 soldiers there, led by officers who were more like finance officers with no military training.
They had no tanks or artillery just one anti-aircraft gun and older manpads to protect the airport. But they parked vehicles all over the runway to make it impossible for aircraft to land and destroyed several Russian helicopters as they tried to land, while waiting for reinforcements from the rest of the Ukrainian military. These were very inexperienced soldiers, no combat experience, but after they got in a lucky shot on their first helicopter they began to think they could do it. They stayed there and fought.
When Putin realized what had happened, that he had no air bridge and that any transport planes had a high risk of being shot down he cancelled their flights to Hostomel airport.
As a result the Russians never got out of the airport in the first day. The Russians did continue to send assault forces in helicopters to try to take the airport. Many were shot down. The Russians did eventually take Hostomel airport - but by then it was too late, Kyiv was well defended.
Putin's generals would surely have warned him of the difficulties involved in establishing an air bridge if he'd involved them in the planning but he intended it to be ultra-secret and so they didn't know.
QUOTE STARTS
We believe the Russian military expected minimal resistance at Hostomel, since only a small number of Ukrainian forces were left to defend the capital. The 72nd mechanized brigade, which was charged with Kyiv’s defense, was still on the move from its garrison south of the city. While many Ukrainian units began moving the day prior, they had not yet reached their planned defensive positions when the airmobile strike force arrived at Hostomel.
Thus, on the morning of the attack, approximately 200 soldiers from the Ukrainian National Guard’s 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade were left to defend the airport.
...
the defenders were left with small arms, older Igla man-portable air defense missile systems, and at least one ZU-23-2 towed 23×152 millimeter anti-aircraft gun to defend the airfield. They also had some air support consisting of two Ukrainian Su-24M bombers and two Mig-29 fighters. The handful of officers left were more akin to finance officers than infantry officers. Nonetheless, this small group had the enormous responsibility to defend the airfield.
...
Rudenko had deployed his small force to defend the airfield earlier in the morning. Roughly 20 Ukrainian National Guard soldiers defended the radar at the northern end of the airfield with the ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns while the rest — which included a couple of squads of National Guard reinforcements that had been sent to help defend the airfield earlier in the morning — defended the airfield from battle positions at the airfield’s south. The Ukrainian military had also moved large trucks and other vehicles onto the airfield to make it unserviceable for fixed-wing aircraft until after the vehicles had been moved.
...
As one of the KA-52 Alligators was making a strafing run, a soldier attempted to engage it with his 9k38 Igla (SA-24) infrared-homing surface-to-air missile system, but the Russian helicopter was too close. As it passed, he reacquired the attack helicopter in his sights and fired. The direct hit brought the helicopter careening onto the runway, fortuitously creating another obstacle. This successful engagement provided a morale boost that quickly spread across the Ukrainian fighters. The rear echelon conscripts started to believe that they could actually succeed in fighting the Russians. It was the first, but not the last, helicopter that these soldiers would bring down. Over the next two hours, the National Guard defenders appear to have downed two more KA-52s and one Mi-8s using a mix of man-portable air defenses, anti-aircraft guns, and small arms fire.
...
You can read the rest of the story here.
. The Battle of Hostomel Airport: A Key Moment in Russia’s Defeat in Kyiv - War on the Rocks
This is a summary from the Imperial War Museum about how the Ukraine invasion was a spy led invasion with no plan B and devised without ANY consultation with ANYONE with military expertise:
Video: YouTube
QUOTE STARTS FROM TRANSCRIPT
According to research by the think tank RUSI, when Vladimir Putin began his invasion, he expected to take control of Ukraine within ten days. So what went wrong? Why did his plan fail? And how close did he come to succeeding?
Well, to find out, we first need to take a closer look at Putin's plan.
The Russian invasion plan was based on a number of assumptions. Russia's President Vladimir Putin believed that Ukraine and Russia were 'one people'. And that, freed of their supposedly Nazi leader in Volodymyr Zelensky, the apathetic people of Ukraine would willingly align with Russia. Essentially, he did not believe that they would put up a fight.
So, instead of a conventional invasion led by the military, Putin planned for what he termed a Special Military Operation led by the Russian Security Services or the FSB. To avoid Western sanctions, they planned to complete the operation as quickly as possible, using infiltrated groups to neutralise Zelensky and the Ukrainian political leadership, before setting up a more friendly regime.
Conventional military forces were only a supporting element of the operation. They were to fix the majority of the Ukrainian army in the Donbas, while advancing quickly on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. They wanted to give the impression of a rapid envelopment and help facilitate that collapse of Ukrainian political power. After 10 days, the conventional forces would switch to an administrative role, supporting the FSB in controlling the Ukrainian population.
Ed Arnold: "The issue with a special service making the plan and not the military is that you actually miss a lot of the key professional military interjectors needed to make a coherent military plan. What's also come to the fore now, and is very obvious is that there was no plan B. As soon as their plan A failed, they just could not switch to a plan B because they didn't have one."
Ukraine's military on the other hand was fully prepared for the invasion. While they were a substandard force, in 2014 when the War in Ukraine began, a top to bottom review meant that by 2022, the Ukrainians had become an effective fighting force. With Western assistance, they modernised their artillery, becoming Europe's 2nd largest artillery force after Russia. They overhauled their air defence, with better targeting and more mobile SAMs, and in January 2022, they created a new territorial defence force.
Ed Arnold: "They'd been fighting in the Donbass since the operation in 2014 and they cycled units through. So actually there was a lot of experience within the wider professional Ukrainian military. It was very key in the first 3 to 5 to 10 days to be able to hold back Russian forces to allow these newly mobilised recruits to be equipped and to be put into defensive areas where they could actually have an effect."
...
Only when it became clear that Kyiv was the main Russian target some 7 hours before the invasion, were Ukrainian forces ordered to redeploy. As such, they would have to meet the Russian invasion without prepared defensive positions. Achieving surprise like this was a key objective of the Russian plan, however it came at a cost.
Ed Arnold: "The Russians were so concerned about the plan getting out and Ukraine being able to prepare, that they actually didn't tell their soldiers. If you don't tell soldiers what they're about to do, they can't achieve their objective. There were actually some soldiers who thought they were there on an exercise. They didn't actually even believe that there was a military operation taking place.
So that inability to allow your soldiers to prepare for what you are going to do means that they just there's no chance that they're going to be able to carry out their task."
While the Russian army had surprised the Ukrainian army at an operational level, the Russian soldiers were completely unprepared at a tactical level and faced Ukrainian soldiers who were psychologically ready for the fight. The question was, could Ukraine last long enough to mobilise its reserves and garner much needed western support.
...
On February 4th, Russian aircraft and missiles struck a raft of targets throughout Ukraine and successfully disrupted Ukrainian command and control.... However, Ukraine's ammunition, aircraft and air defences had been successfully dispersed before the attack and were largely untouched. They would be able to recover.
...
Initial assaults on Sumy and Kharkiv failed with heavy casualties, forcing the Russians to bypass the cities. And at Hostomel, a crucial part of the Russian plan went disastrously wrong.
Two waves of 10 helicopters flew low along the Dnipro River to capture the vital airport just north of Kyiv. The airborne forces successfully took Hostomel but came under sustained Ukrainian artillery fire and were forced out by a counterattack.
Ed Arnold: "Well, the Russian plan really relied on taking Hostomel so that they could bring in heavier transport aircraft from mechanized forces and get into Kyiv much quicker. And when that was no longer an option, they had to move on a land move south from Belarus, and they created this 40-mile-long convoy, which effectively became static because it got bogged down in some of the terrain, it ran out of fuel, ran out of food, ran out of batteries even. And actually, became a target for Ukrainian special forces on the ground."
...
Meanwhile, the Russian troops on the ground were not prepared for a fight. Most units simply had instructions to drive to specific locations by specific times and often arrived in towns without their weapons loaded. The results were disastrous.
Ed Arnold: "They didn't have the mapping or they didn't actually know where they were going, they were moving in administrative columns. So, they were not moving tactically, because they just didn't expect the level of resistance. And because they were going on roads they were very, very vulnerable to anti-tank ambushes, which was something specifically that the Ukrainians were trained on by UK forces at the platoon level to be able to achieve. A lot of the columns were actually knocked out in situ and it stalled the entire Russian advance."
From: War in Ukraine
Institute for Study of War says Putin likely made the decision to invade Ukraine in 2020 to 2021
This is ISW's assessment of how Putin came to believe he could take over Ukraine in 10 days.
We need to remember that in February 2022, that Russia had already previously taken over Crimea quickly and with very little actual military effort in 2014.
There was low level fighting in Eastern Donbas along a front line with occasional exchanges of shelling. But the Ukrainian army would not have seemed very formidable to Russia even though he knew it possessed some tanks and fighter jets.
With hindsight it is hard to understand why he thought he could win against such formidable opponent as we now know Ukraine to be but he didn’t know that at the time.
I have reformatted this quote from the ISW using bullet points and slightly rephrased to make it easier for autistic people to read:
QUOTE STARTS
By 2021, all the ways in which Putin tried to regain control over Ukraine – short of a full-scale invasion – had failed.
Putin failed to
to get Ukraine to join Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union in the 2000s and
to get pro-Kremlin leaders in charge of the Ukrainian government in 2004.
to establish full control over Ukraine even when Yanukovych was in power.
Putin was able to solidify some of his territorial gains in Ukraine through the Minsk II Accords that froze the frontlines in Donbas, but he was unable to exploit those gains to achieve his full desired aims.
Putin tried to coerce
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (2014-2019) and later
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (2019-present) to legitimize the Russia-created illegal DNR and LNR, and Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea in accord with Ukraine’s Minsk II commitments despite the fact that Russia and the proxies it created had not met their commitments.
These efforts, if successful, would have
legitimized the principle of Russian military intervention in Ukraine and
secured for Russia a permanent lever of influence over Ukraine’s politics. (ISW documented this deliberate Kremlin effort in detail in 2019).[38] Putin failed at that too]
Putin’s convictions about Ukraine and the West had likely further solidified over the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Putin entered a state of isolation during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, largely confining his interactions to a small group of trusted idealogues. He reportedly began becoming ever more preoccupied with Russia’s need to control Ukraine and avenge itself against the West for “humiliating” Russia in the 1990s
Sources familiar with Putin’s conversations revealed that Putin began to “obsess over the past” and ”completely lost interest in the present” during the pandemic.
Putin had also just succeeded in a major domestic power play.
Putin had faced a moment of vulnerability as the 2020 oil price crisis and the pandemic occurred in the middle of his campaign to retain power]
Putin was attempting to amend the Russian constitution so that he could run again in 2024]
Putin’s power play went unchallenged, however, and he successfully re-solidified his grip on power with constitutional amendments that effectively allowed him to rule for life.
The success of this domestic power play also undermines the argument that Western “hybrid warfare” was somehow putting Putin’s own rule at risk. Putin’s domestic grip in 2021 was solid and faced no meaningful challenge.
Putin was likely emboldened by his false assessments of
Ukraine’s capability and
will to fight.
Ukraine has
fended off Russian attacks on its sovereignty over the years and
grown in its resolve as a nation
- a process that went largely unnoticed by Putin and his inner circle of advisors.
Putin had told a European official in September 2014 that he could
“take Kyiv in two weeks,” and had evidently maintained the same outlook since invading Ukraine in 2014 despite his military failures that year.[44]
Putin misattributed Kyiv’s unwillingness to yield to Russia to
a small group of Ukrainian politicians controlled by the West (which the Kremlin usually refers to as ‘the Kyiv regime’)
rather than to the growing self-determination of the Ukrainian people to remain a nation--a determination ironically driven in part by the Russian 2014 invasion and continued pressure.
Putin’s propaganda in the lead-up to the invasion reveals that
he and his idealogues lived in an echo chamber dominated by an alternate reality in which
Ukrainians would welcome the Russian forces liberating them from the supposed oppression of the ”Kyiv regime.”[45]
Putin did not see NATO or the West as a power that would counter his ambitions in Ukraine either. A former unnamed intelligence official revealed that Putin’s ”personal banker” and close friend Yuri Kovalchuk, with whom Putin spent considerable time during his isolation, argued to Putin that
the West was weak and that
the time was ripe for Russia to demonstrate its military capabilities and ”defend its sovereignty” by invading Ukraine
Former US National Security Council official Fiona Hill stated that Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was guided by his belief that
the West was weak and distracted
Western analysts argued that some of Putin’s elites supported his vision after
concluding that the West was divided and in decline.
Putin likely concluded that the West
would not have the will or the strength to deter a swift military operation that would collapse the supposedly unpopular Zelensky government within days.
This belief in the West’s weakness again undermines the Russian-created fiction that Russia had to act to preempt some Western aggression—a West too weak and divided to defend Ukraine was certainly not going to attack Russia out of the blue.
Putin, thus, likely decided to
begin setting conditions for the invasion sometime in late 2020 or early 2021.
This is an account from the Vyorstka online newspaper suggests the decision was made in early March 2021.
QUOTE STARTS
An investigative report by the Vyorstka online newspaper says Russian President Vladimir Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine in early March 2021.
According to the report, which is based on interviews with sources close to the Russian leadership, Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine after Ukrainian authorities confiscated assets and media outlets controlled by Russia-friendly Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk in February 2021.
The preparations for the invasion, launched in late February 2022, took a year with Putin’s close associate, billionaire Yury Kovalchuk, the main supporter of the idea, the report quotes the sources as saying.
According to Vyorstka, Kovalchuk persuaded Putin that it was the right time to launch the invasion as the European Union was facing internal problems and disagreements on a number of issues.
A source told Vyorstka that initially Putin planned to openly threaten Ukraine with aggression in his controversial article On The Historical Unity Of Russians And Ukrainians, which was published in July 2021. However, the threat was taken out of the text at the last moment.
The report quoted a source as saying that a top Russian official said during private conversations on the sidelines of an economic gathering at the Valdai Discussion Club in October 2021 that Russia planned forcibly change the government in Ukraine.
Another source said that, in December 2021, Russia's top officials discussed how Ukraine will be shared between major Russian corporations.
The report quotes a person whom Vyorstka called "Putin’s old friend" as saying that Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu supported Putin's plan as he was sure that the military operation would be quick, in a manner similar to the annexation of Ukraine's Crimea in 2014.
A source in Putin’s administration told Vyorstka that Putin planned to take over Ukraine quickly and did not expect it to last long. That, however, has been proven wrong with Ukraine putting up staunch resistance with the backing of NATO and many of its Western allies.
A former Kremlin official told the website that almost everyone in Russia's political and military elite is against the war in Ukraine.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-putin-lanned-ukraine-invasion-march-2021-vyorstka/32379171.html
So it was NOT an emotional decision. It was a year in planning.
And he was sure the military operation would be quick like the invasion of Crimea.
That is why he did it. Not out of an emotional decision.
There are many others who say that it wasn't a sudden decision, that Putin made this decision long before and that when he was promising peace to Macron etc it was just a game, he had already decided to invade.
Putin is NOT doing anything like this for NATO - not amassed any troops, removed them to fight in Ukraine - could not win with nukes - would assess 0% potential of success with nukes - nothing his spies could say to convince him he could take over NATO
You can guarantee he won't attack NATO so long as he is capable of coherent thought and isn't completely mad. It is very different from the invasion of Ukraine.
There he built up for it with his soldiers doing exercises outside Ukraine. He had a plan for it which he thought was such a clever idea he never had a plan b
All those exercises, all those 200,000 soldiers, just to distract Ukraine's army by attacking all around the border and quickly send an elite troop via helicopters to Hostomel airport, take it over, drive into Kyiv and take over the government before it had time to react.
But he can't have any such plan for attacking NATO. He has not amassed any troops on NATO borders. The opposite, he removed them. He removed the tanks from Moscow and the air defences.
His nukes are not able to win a war without soldiers to back them up indeed they can't win a war at all.
All they would achieve is to turn the entire world against him politically, to lose even neutral support from China and India, and to make it so that NATO's top objective is to make sure Russia can't launch any more nukes.
Attacking Ukraine was the action of a ruthless, over confident but rational man with a cunning plan to win quickly in 10 days - attacking NATO would be a dim incoherent plan by a man who has lost the ability for rational thought - bluffing about nukes is the response of a rational man again who finds his bluffs work
The Ukraine war was the plan of
a ruthless, over confident, but basically rational man who thought he had a cunning plan to win quickly and prepared for it carefully for at least a year (from his previous exercises a year before)..
A plan to attack NATO without any preparation when Russia is at its weakest ever is
a dim incoherent plan by a man who has done no preparation and has to be delusive at the level where perhaps he thinks Ukraine is being attacked by skyscraper-sized spiders or something equally bizarre.
Do you see the difference?
And meanwhile constant bluffing is the reaction of
a rational man who has seen that his bluffs always lead NATO countries to delay sending significant capabilities to Ukraine to help it defend itself and
has previously used nuke bluffs to achieve months and sometimes years of delay of critical systems that could have helped Ukraine defend itself
MORE DETAILS: RUSI: Putin’s invasion based on what he thought was a certainty that he could take over Ukraine in 10 days - so certain he never devised a “plan B” - and a decision made nearly a year before the invasion
This is based on a summary by the Imperial War Museum based on the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) assessment which in turn is based on secret information that can’t be revealed for operational security reasons
. I start with my summary of a longer quote from them.
He thought he had a
100% certain way to take over the Kyiv government in 2 days and
all of Ukraine in 10 days.
His plan was to use the invading soldiers as a distraction while he
day 1 (24th) a small group of elite paratroopers lands in Hostomel airport to take over the airport and set up an air-bridge. He then sends heavy equipment via military transport planes, all of this on day 1
day 2 (25th) they set off from Hostomel airport and drive into Kyiv. He believed from mistaken reports that the people of Kyiv were oppressed and wouldn't oppose his soldiers and that he would quickly take over the government and capture or kill Zelensky or he'd flee.
They would then set up a puppet government
days 3 to 10, takes over all of Ukraine and the military then acts as a temporary administration for Ukraine.
It was NOT an emotional last minute decision. He knew he was going to do it long before.
It seemed like a last minute decision because of the way he promised peace to Macron and to Biden and others right up to the day of the invasion. But he didn't suddenly change his mind. He knew he was going to invade already and was just playing a game with them.
That summarizes this more detailed account by the Imperial War Museum of what RUSI found out:
QUOTE STARTS
According to research by the think tank RUSI, when Vladimir Putin began his invasion, he expected to take control of Ukraine within ten days. So what went wrong? Why did his plan fail? And how close did he come to succeeding?
Well, to find out, we first need to take a closer look at Putin's plan.
The Russian invasion plan was based on a number of assumptions. Russia's President Vladimir Putin believed that Ukraine and Russia were 'one people'. And that, freed of their supposedly Nazi leader in Volodymyr Zelensky, the apathetic people of Ukraine would willingly align with Russia. Essentially, he did not believe that they would put up a fight.
So, instead of a conventional invasion led by the military, Putin planned for what he termed a Special Military Operation led by the Russian Security Services or the FSB. To avoid Western sanctions, they planned to complete the operation as quickly as possible, using infiltrated groups to neutralise Zelensky and the Ukrainian political leadership, before setting up a more friendly regime.
Conventional military forces were only a supporting element of the operation. They were to fix the majority of the Ukrainian army in the Donbas, while advancing quickly on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. They wanted to give the impression of a rapid envelopment and help facilitate that collapse of Ukrainian political power. After 10 days, the conventional forces would switch to an administrative role, supporting the FSB in controlling the Ukrainian population.
Ed Arnold: "The issue with a special service making the plan and not the military is that you actually miss a lot of the key professional military interjectors needed to make a coherent military plan. What's also come to the fore now, and is very obvious is that there was no plan B. As soon as their plan A failed, they just could not switch to a plan B because they didn't have one."
Ukraine's military on the other hand was fully prepared for the invasion. While they were a substandard force, in 2014 when the War in Ukraine began, a top to bottom review meant that by 2022, the Ukrainians had become an effective fighting force. With Western assistance, they modernised their artillery, becoming Europe's 2nd largest artillery force after Russia. They overhauled their air defence, with better targeting and more mobile SAMs, and in January 2022, they created a new territorial defence force.
Ed Arnold: "They'd been fighting in the Donbass since the operation in 2014 and they cycled units through. So actually there was a lot of experience within the wider professional Ukrainian military. It was very key in the first 3 to 5 to 10 days to be able to hold back Russian forces to allow these newly mobilised recruits to be equipped and to be put into defensive areas where they could actually have an effect."
...
Only when it became clear that Kyiv was the main Russian target some 7 hours before the invasion, were Ukrainian forces ordered to redeploy. As such, they would have to meet the Russian invasion without prepared defensive positions. Achieving surprise like this was a key objective of the Russian plan, however it came at a cost.
Ed Arnold: "The Russians were so concerned about the plan getting out and Ukraine being able to prepare, that they actually didn't tell their soldiers. If you don't tell soldiers what they're about to do, they can't achieve their objective. There were actually some soldiers who thought they were there on an exercise. They didn't actually even believe that there was a military operation taking place.
So that inability to allow your soldiers to prepare for what you are going to do means that they just there's no chance that they're going to be able to carry out their task."
While the Russian army had surprised the Ukrainian army at an operational level, the Russian soldiers were completely unprepared at a tactical level and faced Ukrainian soldiers who were psychologically ready for the fight. The question was, could Ukraine last long enough to mobilise its reserves and garner much needed western support.
...
On February 4th, Russian aircraft and missiles struck a raft of targets throughout Ukraine and successfully disrupted Ukrainian command and control.... However, Ukraine's ammunition, aircraft and air defences had been successfully dispersed before the attack and were largely untouched. They would be able to recover.
...
Initial assaults on Sumy and Kharkiv failed with heavy casualties, forcing the Russians to bypass the cities.
And at Hostomel, a crucial part of the Russian plan went disastrously wrong.
Two waves of 10 helicopters flew low along the Dnipro River to capture the vital airport just north of Kyiv. The airborne forces successfully took Hostomel but came under sustained Ukrainian artillery fire and were forced out by a counterattack.
Ed Arnold: "Well, the Russian plan really relied on taking Hostomel so that they could bring in heavier transport aircraft from mechanized forces and get into Kyiv much quicker. And when that was no longer an option, they had to move on a land move south from Belarus, and they created this 40-mile-long convoy, which effectively became static because it got bogged down in some of the terrain, it ran out of fuel, ran out of food, ran out of batteries even. And actually, became a target for Ukrainian special forces on the ground."
RUSI: Summary based on secret documents the authors can’t yet make public
We can also go to the RUSI assessment itself to find more details. This is written by authors with access to secret material in the possession of the Ukrainian military which they couldn’t release for operational security reasons.
military which they couldn’t release for operational security reasons.
TEXT ON GRAPHIC
Russia’s military exercises in spring 2021
We now know that Putin and his spies had ALREADY decided to invade Ukraine
Objectives were:
— pressure the West to encourage Kyiv to make more concessions
— preposition military assets for the invasion in 2022
— assess reactions of Ukraine’s international partners to invasion preparationsBased on RUSI analysis [Royal United Service Institute]
Photograph from: Russia’s Zapad-21: Lessons Learned
Summarizes part of (Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 : page 7)
The 2021 military scenario was a defensive one, and even the soldiers didn’t know the real intention.
You can get a quick overview of this section by just reading my summaries before the longer quotes.
You can get a quick overview of this section by just reading my summaries before the longer quotes.
RUSI say that the plan was to take over the whole of Ukraine in 10 days and annex it by August 2022.
Russia planned to start by capturing Kyiv and used deception to keep most of the Ukrainian forces well away from the capital. They had the advantage of a 12 : 1 ratio of forces north of Kyiv. However they weren’t able to use this advantage to take the capital because they
kept the plan so secret the Russian forces weren’t prepared to carry out the plan effectively
hadn’t put any plans in place to retreat out of situations in response to setbacks [no plan B]
I have just edited the text here to insert extra bullet points, no rephrasing.
QUOTE STARTS
Russia planned to invade Ukraine over a 10-day period and thereafter occupy the country to enable annexation by August 2022. The Russian plan presupposed that speed, and the use of deception to keep Ukrainian forces away from Kyiv, could enable the rapid seizure of the capital.
The Russian deception plan largely succeeded, and the Russians achieved a 12:1 force ratio advantage north of Kyiv. The very operational security that enabled the successful deception, however, also led Russian forces to be unprepared at the tactical level to execute the plan effectively. The Russian plan’s greatest deficiency was the lack of reversionary courses of action [ways to retreat out of a situation].
As a result, when speed failed to produce the desired results, Russian forces found their positions steadily degraded as Ukraine mobilised. Despite these setbacks, Russia refocused on Donbas and, since Ukraine had largely expended its ammunition supply, proved successful in subsequent operations, slowed by the determination – rather than the capabilities – of Ukrainian troops.
The plan was formulated by Russia’s special services and a core group in the presidential administration. It was supported by senior Ministry of Defence officials.
RUSSIA’S STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE in its invasion of Ukraine was the subjugation of the Ukrainian state. This plan was formulated first and foremost by Russia’s special services and a core group within the presidential administration, supported by senior officials in the Ministry of Defence.
RUSI say the plans go back to the exercises of March 2021 which were intended to test how the West would respond to the first stages of a real invasion.
Russia’s military build-up against Ukraine began in March 2021 when large numbers of conventional troops were added to existing forces along Ukraine’s borders. This build-up performed three functions.
First, it put pressure on Western governments to re-engage in the Minsk II negotiations to encourage Kyiv to make concessions and thereby avert a conflict.
Second, it pre-positioned military equipment around Ukraine that would allow for a more rapid build-up of forces when the time came for the invasion.
Third, it provided an opportunity for Moscow to assess the reaction of Ukraine’s international partners.
Ukraine’s international partners dismissed the threat in spring 2021 because they did not observe the necessary enablers deployed with the Russian formations nor the necessary political shaping of the information environment in Russia to support an invasion. They were correct on both counts – the build-up turned out to be a mobilisation exercise.
However, the lesson for the Kremlin was that
the enablers could be brought to the formations faster than Ukraine’s partners could bring military capabilities:
if these were the indicators that would cause international partners to react, they would do so too late.
The Kremlin’s confidence that it could invade Ukraine without significant international interference was an important reason for undertaking the full-scale invasion.
Then the FSB did extensive surveys in Ukraine which painted a picture of a population that would respond apathetically and favourably to an invasion.
In July 2021, the 9th Section of the 5th Service of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) was enlarged into a directorate and tasked with planning for the occupation of Ukraine.
As part of this preparation, the FSB drew on extensive surveys carried out in Ukraine. These surveys painted a picture of
a largely politically apathetic Ukrainian society that distrusted its leaders,
was primarily concerned about the economy and
thought an escalation of the war between Russia and Ukraine was unlikely.
Moreover, Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally articulated in an essay in July 2021 his belief that
the people of Ukraine viewed Russians favourably and
believed they were part of a shared civilisation, cruelly divided by historical political mistakes.
(Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 : pages 7-8)
Putin believed that if he could eliminate the government in Kyiv quickly the population would quickly turn to support the Russians. General Gerasimov assured Putin that Russia’s military was able to do this.
The barrier, in his [Putin’s] view, to correcting these mistakes was
the government in Kyiv, which he accused of being a puppet to external powers hostile to Russia.
The Russian military leadership was also
confident that it would defeat the UAF after more than a decade of modernisation.
Assurances from General Valery Gerasimov on Russia’s military capabilities played a key role in shaping the confidence of Russia’s special services in their plan. As Gerasimov told international interlocutors on the outbreak of the war,
‘I command the second most powerful Army in the world’. Separately Gerasimov told British counterparts that Russia had achieved conventional military parity with the US
The conception of the Russian invasion therefore was developed around several key assumptions:
Speed was critical to success to render the response of the international community irrelevant.
The removal of Ukraine’s leaders would remove the barrier for pro-Russian Ukrainians to vocalise support for the occupation.
Controlling heating, electricity and finance would be an effective means of controlling the apathetic majority of the Ukrainian population.
The Russian military could defeat the Ukrainian military on the battlefield.
From these assumptions, the FSB, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, Gerasimov and elements within the presidential administration developed their plan to achieve Putin’s strategic goal.
The key military-strategic tasks for the Russian military and security forces were to:
Degrade Ukraine’s ability to defend itself by destroying its air, maritime and air-defence forces.
Defeat Ukrainian Ground Forces by fixing them in Donbas.
Diffuse Ukraine’s will and capacity to resist by eliminating Ukraine’s political and military leadership and occupying critical centres of political and economic power.
Deceive the Ukrainian government as to the time, location, scope and scale of Russia’s invasion.
There was a tension in this plan between the aim of diffusing Ukraine’s political unity and deceiving Ukraine as to the intent. The former would have required a sustained shaping phase preceding the invasion. The latter demanded speed. It appears that Russian planners succumbed to optimism bias as to the dislocating effect that speed itself could achieve in diffusing Ukraine’s will to resist and therefore opted to undertake a shock and awe campaign with little preliminary shaping
(Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 : pages 7-8)
Only a small group of officials knew about these plans. Also, many of those officials only knew part of the plan and not the whole plan.
This small pool of people contributed to the range of false assumptions they shared and didn’t challenge
These plans were drawn up by a very small group of officials and the intent was directed by Putin.
Many officials executing elements of the preparation were unaware of the wider intent.
Russian military personnel – even up to deputy heads of branches within the Russian General Staff –were unaware of the intention to invade and occupy Ukraine until days before the invasion, and
tactical military units did not receive orders until hours before they entered Ukraine.
While this
helped to achieve operational surprise – which was no doubt the intent –
the tiny pool of personnel involved contributed to a range of false assumptions that appear never to have been challenged.
RUSI also give a list of some of the people who devised the plan:
the FSB, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, Gerasimov and elements within the presidential administration
The conception of the Russian invasion therefore was developed around several key assumptions:
Speed was critical to success to render the response of the international community irrelevant.
The removal of Ukraine’s leaders would remove the barrier for pro-Russian Ukrainians to vocalise support for the occupation.
Controlling heating, electricity and finance would be an effective means of controlling the apathetic majority of the Ukrainian population.
The Russian military could defeat the Ukrainian military on the battlefield.
From these assumptions, the FSB, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, Gerasimov and elements within the presidential administration developed their plan to achieve Putin’s strategic goal.
The key military-strategic tasks for the Russian military and security forces were to:
Degrade Ukraine’s ability to defend itself by destroying its air, maritime and air-defence forces.
Defeat Ukrainian Ground Forces by fixing them in Donbas.
Diffuse Ukraine’s will and capacity to resist by eliminating Ukraine’s political and military leadership and occupying critical centres of political and economic power.
Deceive the Ukrainian government as to the time, location, scope and scale of
Russia’s invasion.
There was a tension in this plan between the aim of diffusing Ukraine’s political unity and deceiving Ukraine as to the intent.
The former [diffusing Ukraine’s political unity] would have required a sustained shaping phase preceding the invasion.
The latter [deceiving Ukraine as to the intent] demanded speed.
It appears that Russian planners succumbed to optimism bias as to the dislocating effect that speed itself could achieve in diffusing Ukraine’s will to resist and therefore opted to undertake a shock and awe campaign with little preliminary shaping.
The Russians
don’t seem to have done any independent red teaming
[There red teaming means war gaming with a group that pretends to be the enemy, and more generally looking at the plans with a creative independent group that does out of the box thinking, challenging of assumptions behind their plans and what could go wrong. See The concept of red teaming in corps' warfighting]]
didn’t plan for any way to retreat out of a situation if it went wrong
never considered the possibility that their plan might fail
No independent red teaming appears to have taken place.
Instead, the plan itself – while theoretically plausible – compounded optimism bias in each of its stages and, most tellingly,
offered no reversionary courses of action [no way to retreat out of a situation if it went wrong],
indicated no decision points to determine whether conventional forces should adjust their posture nor envisaged any outcome other than its own success.
Neither did the plan
account for the needs of those tasked with implementing it, nor
afford any agency to Ukraine
[i.e. that Ukraine might have different ideas from the plans Russia had for them]The FSB’s inaccurate assessment of the reaction of Ukrainian society is much less consequential in how the plan actually unfolded than the fact that there is
no evidence in the Russian planning that anyone had asked what would occur if any of its key assumptions were wrong.
(Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 : page 12)
[linked to from summary page: Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022]
Which is why Putin had no “plan B”.
RUSI: Inability of the Russians to do battle assessment - easily fooled by fake reports by the Ukrainians that air defences were destroyed when they weren’t and covering reconstructed hangars for aircraft with enlarged photographs of the destroyed hangars
A critical weakness of the Russian strike campaign was battle damage assessment. First, the Russian military appears to have presumed that if an action had been ordered and carried out then it had succeeded, unless there was direct evidence to the contrary.
Evidence of success appears to have disproportionately relied on three data points:
confirmation from pilots that they hit their target;
confirmation from Russian satellites that a site showed damage; and
confirmation from signals intelligence (SIGINT) that Ukrainians reported a strike and damage to their equipment.
Russian satellite reconnaissance proved very limited, even though Russian survey space reconnaissance of Ukraine has been conducted since at least 2012, and detailed reconnaissance, in the interests of invasion planning, since mid-2021 .
A probable reason for this may be the insufficient number of satellites in the orbital grouping of the VKS and the overestimation of their technical capabilities.
Indirect confirmation of this explanation is provided by the fact that the AFRF began buying additional satellite images of the territory of Ukraine and individual military facilities on the world market in April 2022.
One of the visible failures of satellite intelligence is
the inability to detect on time a significant volume of strategic railway movements by the UAF, which, in March 2022 amounted to three–four echelons per day.
The poor Russian battle damage assessment process made the Russian military highly vulnerable to deception, which has been consistent throughout the conflict.
(Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 : page 25)
Early strikes on Ukrainian airfields, for example, destroyed many hangars.
By photographing this damage and printing the resulting pattern on to sheets, it became possible to clear the rubble and erect covers for aircraft to return to the site, sheltering in positions that the Russians would confirm as destroyed.
This led – somewhat amusingly – to the Russians debating whether Ukrainian fighter aircraft were operating from subterranean shelters at several sites.
Repeated
trikes on dummy air-defence positions also saw a considerable wastage of ammunition,
while Ukrainian troops could confirm that sites were destroyed over the radio even when they were still functioning, causing Russian aircraft to ignore air-defence systems in their mission planning.
The already-publicly reported use of dummy HIMARS (high mobility artillery rocket system) later in the war to lure Russian fires is indicative of the systematic use of deception to ensure survivability by the UAF, and it has proven widely effective.
(Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 : page 25-6)
RUSI: Failure to take over Hostomel airport two helicopters shot down by manpads and then artillery fire after landing
The penetration of Ukrainian territory by Russian air-assault units on the first day of the invasion deserves special consideration given its significance in the overall plan. Air-assault troops were landed at Hostomel in two waves, each comprising 10 helicopters. These followed the course of the Dnipro River from Belarus to remain below air-defence coverage and successfully reached their objective. In the first wave, two helicopters were shot down at Hostomel by MANPADS.
This incident highlights the vulnerability of helicopters to MANPADS as, even under optimal conditions, there is little ability to prevent losses. The assault on Hostomel also highlights why air assault against positions – rather than axes – is extremely dangerous. Upon landing, the Russian VDV came under heavy artillery fire and were subsequently cleared from the airfield by a mechanised counterattack
(Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 : page: 28)
Troops used old maps, and stopped to ask where they were and then were targeted by artillery
.
In understanding why the Russians stalled, despite having the means and forces to push through the small Ukrainian units in front of them, it is necessary to consider the psychological state of the Russian troops. These troops were largely moving in administrative formations.
They lacked a clear understanding of where they were. Whole towns did not exist when the maps they were using were made. They
had not anticipated heavy fighting,
nor did they have established communications to report the situation or to receive updated instructions.
Ukrainian forces found themselves bypassed and often confronted with columns of unprepared Russian troops. Even without higher instructions, the immediate task was clear to these units, and, at the tactical level, Ukrainian forces therefore retained the tactical initiative.
For the 1st Tank Brigade, for example, the first days of fighting
saw numerous meeting engagements in forests at around 100–200-m range,
where restricted movement limited the Russian ability to bring their mass to bear against a specific tactical situation.
Better crew training combined with short-ranged engagements where their armament was competitive, and the faster autoloader on the T-64, allowed Ukrainian tank crews to achieve significant damage against surprised Russian units.
Another example of the problem was that Russian units would arrive in towns and begin to try to engage with the civilian population to understand where they were. Their position would be reported and the Russian unit would be engaged with artillery. This contrast between expectations and reality induced panic and caused the abandonment of equipment that was widely observed on social media
(Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 : page: 28-9)
From the Washington Post: FSB surveys in July actually said the Ukrainians would resist but they passed more optimistic assessments to Putin
The FSB were so confident they would quickly take Kyiv, that they told their informants in Kyiv to leave behind their keys to their Kyiv apartments to be used for the influx of personnel taking over Kyiv
KYIV, Ukraine — In the final days before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s security service began sending cryptic instructions to informants in Kyiv. Pack up and get out of the capital, the Kremlin collaborators were told, but leave behind the keys to your homes.
The directions came from senior officers in a unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) with a prosaic name — the Department of Operational Information — but an ominous assignment: ensure the decapitation of the Ukrainian government and oversee the installation of a pro-Russian regime.
The messages were a measure of the confidence in that audacious plan. So certain were FSB operatives that they would soon control the levers of power in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian and Western security officials, that they spent the waning days before the war arranging safe houses or accommodations in informants’ apartments and other locations for the planned influx of personnel.
They were attempting things well beyond their means
“The Russians were wrong by a mile,” said a senior U.S. official with regular access to classified intelligence on Russia and its security services. “They set up an entire war effort to seize strategic objectives that were beyond their means,” the official said. “Russia’s mistake was really fundamental and strategic..
The FSB polls found that large segments of the Ukrainian population were prepared to resist - but fed Kremlin rosy assessments that they would welcome the arrival of Russia’s military.
There are records that add to the mystery of Russian miscalculations. Extensive polls conducted for the FSB show that large segments of Ukraine’s population were prepared to resist Russian encroachment, and that any expectation that Russian forces would be greeted as liberators was unfounded. Even so, officials said, the FSB continued to feed the Kremlin rosy assessments that Ukraine’s masses would welcome the arrival of Russia’s military and the restoration of Moscow-friendly rule.
FSB claiming they would have flowers strewn in their path
“There was plenty of wishful thinking in the GRU and the military, but it started with the FSB,” said a senior Western security official, using the GRU abbreviation for Russia’s main military intelligence agency. “The sense that there would be flowers strewn in their path — that was an FSB exercise.” He and other security officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
FSB reached outskirts of Kyiv at one point but had to retreat
Adhering to these erroneous assumptions, officials said, the FSB championed a war plan premised on the idea that a lightning assault on Kyiv would topple the government in a matter of days. Zelensky would be dead, captured or in exile, creating a political vacuum for FSB agents to fill.
Instead, FSB operatives who at one point had reached the outskirts of Kyiv had to retreat alongside Russian forces, Ukrainian security officials said. Rather than presiding over the formation of a new government in Kyiv, officials said, the FSB now faces difficult questions in Moscow about what its long history of operations against Ukraine — and the large sums that financed them — accomplished.
The FSB did not respond to requests for comment.
From CSIS
First, the Russian military faced considerable logistics challenges, in part because of poor training and planning. During the Russian push to Kyiv in the early phase of the war, for example, Russian ground forces faced massive logistical and command and control challenges operating in contested areas inside of Ukraine. Without access to rail transport and with roads clogged with Russian vehicles, Russian ground forces failed to move fuel, munitions, spare parts, and other matériel quickly and efficiently to forward-deployed units. Supply lines could not keep up with the long combat pushes, and logistics vehicles were not properly protected. The effectiveness of Russian long-range strike—a key aspect of Russian military operations—was also severely impacted by logistical challenges, including an insufficient supply of precision-guided munitions.
Second, the Russian ground offensive appears to have been planned and executed based on poor assumptions about how the Ukrainian military—and the population—would respond, as well as how the West might react. Seizing and holding territory was a major political objective of Russian policymakers. But controlling territory in a foreign country with a hostile Ukrainian population was deeply problematic for the Russian military, particularly since the conflict began to resemble a “people’s war.”3 In addition, Russian forces failed to effectively integrate combined arms to seize and hold Ukrainian territory, including coordination between land power, air power, and long-range fires. The Russian invasion force was also far too small to achieve its objectives and neglected to block Ukraine’s western border and prevent the supply of foreign weapons, systems, fuel, and other aid to Ukraine.
Third, Russian offensive cyber operations and electronic warfare failed to blind Ukrainian command and control efforts or threaten critical infrastructure for a prolonged period. Russian military and intelligence agencies conducted cyberattacks and utilized electronic warfare against Ukrainian targets, including destructive cyberattacks on hundreds of Ukrainian government and critical infrastructure systems. But these attacks did not notably impact the Ukrainian will or ability to fight or communicate. Ukraine was able to blunt most of the effects of these cyberattacks through an aggressive cyber defense, with help from private companies, Western governments, and other state and non-state actors.
...
Nevertheless, cyber was largely a bust for Russia in the war. The Russian military faced considerable operational challenges, in part because of outside state and non-state assistance to Ukraine to identify cyber and electronic warfare attacks, attribute the perpetrators, and assist with remediation. Some Western governments, including U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, provided help to the Ukrainian government. As General Paul Nakasone, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, remarked, “Coordinating with the Ukrainians in an effort to help them harden their networks, we deployed a hunt team who sat side-by-side with our partners to gain critical insights that have increased homeland defense for both the United States and Ukraine.”51
Private sector firms also responded. Microsoft worked closely with the Ukrainian government and cybersecurity staff from other governments and private companies to identify and remediate Russian threat activity against Ukrainian networks before and after the Russian invasion.52 In January 2022, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center identified wiper malware in over a dozen Ukrainian networks and alerted the Ukrainian government.53 Microsoft established a secure line of communication with Ukrainian cyber officials to provide real-time threat information and offer technical support to assist Ukrainian efforts to identify and defeat Russian-linked cyberattacks over the course of the war.54 Microsoft worked with Ukrainian government officials to enable controlled folder access, a Microsoft Defender feature, and helped Ukraine run endpoint detection and response solutions.55
In addition, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX activated Starlink—a satellite internet constellation that provides high-speed, low-latency broadband internet using advanced satellites in low earth orbit—in Ukraine and sent additional network terminals, including over 10,000 dish antennas.56 Starlink enabled members of the Ukrainian military to carry out sophisticated intelligence collection and fire support operations against Russian positions.57 Many of the Starlink kits donated to Ukraine included a 23-inch-wide receiver dish that needed to be mounted outside, as well as a cord that connected to a simple router that projected a Wi-Fi internet signal.58 Starlink helped blunt Russia’s attempt to jam signals, block the internet, and undermine Ukrainian command and control capabilities.
. Russia’s Ill-Fated Invasion of Ukraine: Lessons in Modern Warfare
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