Attachment #8: The War Itself From Russia’s Perspective
The Russian war strategy appears to be changing; will it be a Pyrrhic victory? There is a quote attributed to Lenin making the rounds recently “There are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where decades happen”. This quote rings particularly true now, as in the past four weeks so many people have been affected and so many bombs dropped and missiles fired.
Mere readers and viewers of the war are seeing this war unfold like the Indian parable of the blind men touching an elephant. However, through imbedded media, along with social media, patterns are emerging. Let’s start with the reality is that Russia has the second largest military in the world and is attempting to leverage that size. (It also has the worlds largest nuclear capability.)
It seems Putin was after the whole of Ukraine; all of the people on this “ancient Russian land” that he wanted to merge into a greater Russian identity. But nearing the end of March Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city. The conflict appears to have devolved into a bloody war of attrition. Russia signalled on March 25 it was scaling back its ambitions to focus on securing the Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukranian army for the past eight years. Ukraines’s head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, said that “Putin was aiming to seize the eastern part of Ukraine. In fact, it is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine.”
Putin’s tactics have been blunt in nature – he’s been using indiscriminate attacks to bombard and starve cities into submission, with troops then moving in to hold them. At the same time, he came at Ukraine from the north, east and south, plus is using his air superiority and ships with cruise missiles in the Black Sea. He is also destroying fuel and food storage centres and military repair plants. There is also some evidence they are having logistical and supply problems, but that may be solved with time and might will prevail. Apparently some gas and food supply issues exist, along with morale. Perhaps the determination of the Ukrainian resistance is a factor.
He now appears to have been redeploying troops in a more focussed fashion. If he achieves some kind of “victory” it may well be a Pyrrhic one. As I’ve said, he’d trying to swallow a porcupine.
The Black Sea, the Azov Sea and the strategic ports are critical to Russia’s strategy. The Azov Sea has a long history of involvement in the conflict between Russia (pursuing naval expansion to the south), and Turkey, the major power in the region. Another major military campaign on the Azov Sea took place during the 1853–56 Crimean War with Britain and France against Russia. In 2003, Ukraine and the Russian Federation agreed to treat the sea and the Strait of Kerch as shared internal waters. In 2018, Ukraine announced the intention, in a gesture of military posturing, to add navy ships and further ground forces along the coast of the Sea of Azov, with the ships based at Berdyansk. Russia solved that, as on Feb 27 their forces captured the city.
In the south on the Black Sea they have taken Mariupol (it is under the control of Russian military and pro-Russian separatists) and Kherson, a ship-building city of 280,000 (it was the first major city to fall, and then on March 26 a US defence official said they were no longer in full control of the city). They are close to capturing Odessa. Severing Ukraine’s access to the Black and Azov seas would deal a crippling blow to its economy and allow Russia to build a land corridor to Crimea, seized by Moscow in 2014.