The Ghost of Zhukov
The war in Ukraine has been raging for over two weeks, triggering a humanitarian crisis that shows no signs of abating.
Senior advisor to Audley and former British Army officer, Jamie Lowther Pinkerton provides analyses Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, and whether it is, in fact, achieving President Putin’s aims.
The political strategy underpinning Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine foresaw the replacement of the democratic leadership in Kyiv by a compliant puppet regime, all couched in terms of the country’s ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarisation’. The Russian President probably anticipated the rapid collapse of Ukrainian resistance would lead to something akin to the annexation and ‘liberation’ of the Crimea, with Russian speakers strewing flowers in the path of his tanks. Such dreams are dead and buried. With hindsight, they have been since the initial faltering steps of the Russian army on days one and two, and first evidence of the extraordinary resistance of the Ukrainian people.
Much has been written over past days of the ineptitude of Russian forces and their failure to live up to Putin’s expectations, let alone achieve his war aims. But is this entirely fair? On one level it certainly is. The dire maintenance of equipment, logistical failings, terrible battlefield communications, the low morale of bewildered conscripts, woeful operational planning, tactical inflexibility, and the seeming failure to prosecute attacks with necessary vigour all point to a creaking dinosaur, not a modernised military, battle-hardened in Syria.
But on another level, the answer may not be quite so straightforward. Official Russian footage of exercises always show scenes of the sort of lightning armoured thrusts and all-arms coordination that would have warmed the heart of Marshal Zhukov, the great Soviet commander of the Second World War. Therein lies the problem. The political goals set by Putin are simply not achievable by an army whose mindset and doctrine has seemingly not altered since those sweeping battles of manoeuvre on the Eastern Front. There is a direct continuum emerging here: from the battles of encirclement and by-pass of the 1940s, through Soviet forces poised for blitzkrieg across Europe during the Cold War, to the cankered version of the same that we have seen snarled, out of fuel, on the Chernihiv highway.
For there to have been any chance of achieving Putin’s strategic goals, the Russian military would have had to have unleashed a campaign of shock and awe from minute one of crossing the border. Thankfully, we did not see the rapid destruction of Ukrainian command, control and communications (President Zelensky’s ability to communicate effectively and impactfully with his people and the world has been resolute), the establishment of air supremacy - or, at least, air superiority over the key areas of advance – the dislocation of Ukrainian ground forces by rapid and overwhelming armoured thrusts along multiple axes and avoiding the delaying and attritional effects of fighting in built-up areas; in other words, the style of warfare perfected eighty years ago by Zhukov. None of this was possible, for two reasons.
First and foremost, what seems to have been Putin’s preferred approach of replicating the tactics that saw Crimea fall into his lap eight years ago called for the use of light forces operating in relative isolation to seize key points and ‘ink-spot’ out from there. This worked in Crimea because a significant proportion of the population welcomed or, at least, were indifferent to the intervention, the West was asleep, and Ukrainian forces were not as prepared for resistance as they are now. The landing of Russian airborne troops on Kyiv’s airport on night one and their rapid ejection from the same meant that ‘Crimea heavy’ was dead in the water from the outset. More critically, it also meant that strategic surprise was lost and the ensuing reversion to traditional shock and awe went off half-cock, with Ukrainian forces on full alert and ready in their battle positions.
Secondly, Putin’s desired end-state of a decapitated Ukrainian democracy requires the capture of Kyiv, a very different sort of military operation to that shown in those dashing official V/Ts. It is true that the Red Army commanded by Zhukov, and indeed the Russian army that subjugated Grozny in 1999, had a formula for urban warfare: pulverise and pulverise until there is not a building left standing, then feed as many troops into the meat-grinder as it takes to finish the job. Leaving aside for one second the horrific implications for the civilian population, to be successful at this takes military mass on the grand scale.
The Red Army’s casualties in its defence of Stalingrad are thought to have numbered over a million; its offensive to capture Berlin in the last days of the war saw 70,000 of its troops die in the rubble – not far off the size of the entire British army of today, in four days. Concerningly, the Russians in Ukraine may be able to do the first part, the pummelling, if their ammunition stocks hold up (a big ‘if’) and if the Ukrainian military gets to have no say (a massive ‘if’). But with a total of 190,000 in the Ukraine theatre of operations, they haven’t a hope of doing the second – and that’s without factoring in the reaction in this age of the smart-phone to such huge casualty figures when they reach the ears of families back home.
On casualties, it is also worth considering the current attrition rate to Russian forces committed on the ground – currently around 170,000 of the 190,000, best guess - and the effect on morale of that. Estimates of Russian dead vary considerably, but if we err toward the higher Ukrainian figure of 10,000 - not inconceivable - a reasonable extrapolation would add another 30-40,000 wounded. You’re a Russian conscript sitting in the back of your armoured vehicle. When you crossed the border a fortnight ago there were four of you. Now there’s only three, and it’s the same in the vehicle in front of you, and the one behind you.
What next? I don’t have a crystal ball, but the world will be watching to see how effectively and rapidly – or not - Russian forces around Kyiv are able to gear up offensive action when - or if - their current, extended ‘operational pause’ comes to an end.
Slava Ukraini!
By Jamie Lowther Pinkerton