On this week’s episode of The Brief, hosts Markos Moulitsas and Daily Kos staff writer Mark Sumner dove into all things related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine—in particular, why the Russian advance has appeared to stall, and why, one month into the war, they have yet to take even one border city. Moulitsas and Sumner have each been respectively writing about the conflict, providing updates and analysis of the situation as it unfolds.
Moulitsas set the scene by contextualizing the manpower Russia sent into Ukraine, noting that it is far less than it seems—even without taking into account its shoddy structure:
Russia doesn’t have a magical formula where they are immune to the needs of logistics, and we even see that in their mechanized infantry and armored groups. It’s 600-800 men in one of their BTG (battalion tactical groups), that’s their unit of maneuver: 600-800 men, 100 of them are mounted infantry that can engage in action … [of the 190,000 troops Russia sent into Ukraine], you’re looking at about 25,000 combat troops. That’s what Russia pulled into a country of 40 million people. Then they split them into four different axes—you know, from the South, from the North, from the Northeast, and from the East. And then, even those are split into over a dozen lines of attack. So you’re talking about literally a couple hundred people.
He also added that the Russians have taken Kherson, which helps them get to Odessa, a critically important Black Sea port city of about a million people, but that their path to Odessa has been anything but straightforward:
[Odessa] is not just important from an economic standpoint, but also culturally. It’s a grand city, right? I mean, Putin definitely thinks this is vintage Russia. But they have to get through this river ... and there’s only two crossings within about 50-60 miles ... one of them is Mykolaiv … which is about a half a million people. And yesterday, Ukrainian intelligence actually leaked battle documents from Russian troops in the area that were two weeks old. And so, nothing that gave away the game, except that it told us which Russian units were in that area. And it turns out they had seven battalion tactical groups supposedly going to attack Mykolaiv. Seven battalion groups—that’s 700 mounted infantry for a city of half a million, right? And you see this everywhere … I’m ready to posit that even if Russia had perfect supply lines and logistics—which they don’t—even if they did, we’d be in the same place today.
The Russian army structure lacks sergeants; they only have an officer corps, and then they have basically what are conscripts, Moulitsas explained. With no real investment in the conscripts or their training, it’s not considered to be an honorable profession, and they are not paid well. So many of them turn to grifting: “Basically, their life is one big grift—it’s, what can they grift out of the supply closets, out of their equipment, what fuel they can pilfer and sell for vodka, so there’s this sort of graft … And the way grift works is … it goes up the chain. Somebody is always grifting from somebody, to the point where you have oligarchs shipping nonfunctional weapons—sometimes probably even nonexistent weapons … None of them expect actual, real combat. So you only need to keep a few units combat ready, and the rest of them you can just pilfer.”
From a top-to-bottom overview of their tactics, from the way that the army is designed for grift, they don’t have professional soldiers like an NCO [non-commissioned officer] or a sergeant class that can lead competently and has battlefield initiative, Moulitsas noted. This creates issues for Putin, but benefits the Ukrainians, because the Russians appear to be repeatedly carrying out failing strategies: “They have an order, they’re going to keep doing that order even if it’s not working, over and over and over again. We’ve seen Ukrainians kind of going like, ‘Man, we are so lucky they’re so bad at this because they keep making the same mistakes over and over again—because there’s no initiative; it’s not allowed.’”
“You can see evidence of that grift even in their hardware. I mean, it’s not just that they’re driving 272 tanks that are literally [out of] the Vietnam era, but when we get pictures of the soldiers on the ground, they’re not even carrying Kalishnikovs. What is it that they’re carrying? They’re carrying, you know, rifles that are not quite WWII-surplus, but not long after that,” Sumner added.
In Moulitsas’ view, all of this incompetence has added up to a steep price, blocking Russian forces from making meaningful progress even in some of the areas they might be expected to take most easily: “Mariupol is a Russian-speaking city right on the Russian border. I mean, these are not the parts of Ukraine that were supposed to hold out, for linguistic, cultural reasons. These were supposed to be [Russia’s] allies. And it is notable at this time, one month into the war, not a single border city has fallen to Russia.”
With the Russian army continuing to make the same mistakes, Ukrainians are learning and adjusting their own strategy accordingly. But one of the biggest things that has been hindering their progress, as Sumner lays out, is Russians’ lack of control over the Ukrainian airspace:
Russia switched to the tactics that they’ve used in Chechnya and Georgia and Syria, which was bring in the artillery and start reducing the towns and rack up those civilian casualties until people cry uncle. But the one thing that’s made it possible for Ukraine to fight back against that … to be able to move around in daylight … to do some at least medium-sized unit tactics and to be able to unleash their own artillery and to be able to go on the offensive—the thing that’s made all of it possible is that Russia doesn’t have air superiority. How is that possible? How can we be this far into a conflict like this and Russia hasn’t established air superiority over a country that has a few dozen planes in their air force?
There are a few reasons for this, though other geographic features are also creating notable issues, Moulitsas said:
“They’re not using planes to hit civilian targets. [From] what little I’ve seen of planes that they’ve used actually have been trying to support—particularly out in that eastern Donbas front. It’s tough terrain to defend because it’s wide open farmland. So that’s where we see more of them. But pretty much everywhere the war is now, it’s pretty easy. I mean, air power should have a field day; it’s flat. There are no hills. The geographic features that are hindering Russians are rivers. It’s not like they’re hiding in crevices and overlooking some mountain range or something. This should be easy territory to invade.”
Sumner added a few observations about Russian losses, and wondered if the situation appeared as dire as it actually was: “We see a lot of losses that Russia’s having when we look on Twitter, when we look on YouTube, you know. There’s new video every day—lines of Russian tanks that are captured, destroyed, damaged. Are their losses as big as they seem? Because they seem tremendous. And then the other thing is, everybody is seems to be assuming, ‘Well, when are the real Russians going to show up?’ People keep making this assumption like, ‘Well, they must have looked around the corners and dusted these guys together somewhere, but there’s got to be a real Russian army out there somewhere. Those guys have got to be coming.’ So, is it as bad as it seems for the Russians?”
Moulitsas thinks so:
Yeah, I definitely think it’s as bad [as it seems]. I mean, they’ve deployed the VDV, which is their airborne units. They’re the ones that are right now in the process of getting encircled and trapped in northwest Kiev as we speak. They have their marines in the south against Mariupol. I guess those guys have been doing okay, except that again, they’ve had Mariupol surrounded for four weeks and they still can’t take it. There’s really nothing else. There was a little bit of a kerfuffle because it somehow got out in Russia that conscripts were in Ukraine, and that’s not allowed by Russian law. So Putin made a big show of, ‘Heads are going to roll.’ But nothing happened. What they’re doing is basically putting a gun to these conscripts’ heads and saying, ‘Sign a contract; now you’re a professional soldier.’
And we have now seen confirmed that those political commissars of old are back in Ukraine—the ones that will shoot you if you turn back and run. And so these poor soldiers, they don’t have a say in the matter. They can’t go back. My hope is ... that they’ll surrender for bounty. Ukraine is offering a bounty if you surrender, and even more money if you turn in equipment … and you get to have Ukrainian citizenship. But remember that these kids, they also have family back home. The Russian FSB, the new KGB, they’re not going to be kind … they’re in a difficult place where they’ve got to face forward, they’re not being used in any way that is tactically effective, they’re just being thrown into a woodchipper. If they just turn around and run, they’re going to be shot by their own Russians, by their own political commissars, and so it’s a really shitty place.
There seems to be a lot of anger and even a desire among many for Ukraine to receive Crimea and the Donbas region back from Russia, as an ideal outcome to this military conflict. However, Moulitsas talked about even in a best case scenario for Ukraine, this might not come to fruition—and would possible sensibly cost more lives and economic devastation:
Russia is not going to win this thing, but neither is Ukraine if the definition of victory is that Ukraine has territorial integrity—it wins back Crimea and the separatist Donbas region. If that’s their definition of victory, it’s not going to happen. They just do not have the offensive military capability to push Russia off Crimea. And do they really want to turn around and hit the trenches? I mean right now, separatists in Donbas can’t get through the Ukrainian trenches on that frontline. Now, does Ukraine want to hit the trenches on the Donbas side of that line? The cost would be horrific in lives—not to mention the economic damage of a continuing war, the inability to plant their fields and rebuild, and all those things.
People get really angry, because of course we want justice. We’re seeing war crimes carried out on a minute by minute basis in Ukraine, and it’s overwhelming, and you want somebody to pay for it. And the thought that Russia can just walk out with Crimea, actually having won some sort of thing, much less not having been punished is so much to bear. I just want to remind people that it’s really easy to be outraged when you’re not the one that has bombs falling over your head. It’s easy to tell other people to die and to lose their family members and their fathers and mothers and children and babies to the ravages of war. There’s no realistic scenario I can see where Crimea ends up in Ukraine’s hands. And the only realistic scenario I see where Donbas ends up in Ukrainian hands is that they’re given their autonomy, and twenty years down the road, they pull an East Germany and say ... ‘Yeah, let’s reunify.’
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