Kyiv: When the Russian President Vladimir Putin Ordered unmarked troops to Ukraine in 2014, first in Crimea and then on the eastern frontier of the Donbass, they were better equipped, trained and organized – and they crushed their opponents.
Eight years later, the roles reverse. This is due to several factors: the modern weapons and training provided to Ukraine by its allies, the improved morale of its forces, the competence of its commanders, intelligence and planning assistance from the US, as well as catastrophic tactical errors by the Kremlin and its generals.
One reason, however, stands out: The two armies with Soviet origins have learned to fight very differently.
The influence on and off the battlefield has been deepening, with Ukrainian forces able to conduct rapid, combined force operations from Kharkiv in the northeast to the Donbas region in September that, a few months earlier, proved beyond the capabilities of their Russian adversaries. Had happened. ,
In the southern Kherson region, Ukraine has added a third major front, where Russian troops are being forced to retreat, following Kharkiv and, back in April, to the capital Kyiv. A massive explosion took place on Saturday at the Putin Bridge, built to connect Crimea with the mainland.
“He’s Not Kidding,” US President Joe Biden On Thursday, Putin said about the threat to deploy strategic nuclear weapons. “Because their army is, you might say, underperforming.”
The poor Russian performance has sparked a backlash at home, with attacks on the failures of military commanders ranging from Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov to distinguished mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozin. On Saturday, Putin publicly handed over command of the entire Ukraine operation to a single general – Sergei Surovikin – for the first time. Surovikin was the head of the Russian Air Force and in charge of the southern theater of invasion.
People close to the Russian Defense Ministry said they recognized the efficiency of Ukraine’s more developed command structure from the early stages of the war. Meanwhile, Russian military bloggers have described the distracting effect of attacks from behind by small, mobile Ukrainian units, as it is difficult to know in real time how great the threat of encirclement is.
After the 2015 defeat, the regular army of Ukraine had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Hollowed out by decades of underfunding, corruption and subsequent deliberate degradation under pro-Russian former President Viktor Yanukovich, it could stand just 6,000 war-ready troops against Russia’s hybrid forces.
A group of defense ministers appointed before being forcibly removed in 2014 were prosecuted; In one case the charge was “treason in the interests of the Russian Federation”. By the time Andrey Zagorodnyuk, a civilian entrepreneur, was parachuted down to reform the ministry in 2015, it was clear to him that a Russian plan to “demilitarize” Ukraine had been underway for years.
“It was never just about the Donbass,” said Zagorodnyuk in an interview in Kyiv. “It was about controlling the whole of Ukraine from the very beginning.”
When Putin launched his offensive earlier this year, it was with an army that had been stocked for eight years with additional expenses and equipment. If the US agreed on anything with the Kremlin, it was that the defense forces of Ukraine were outnumbered and Kyiv could fall in a matter of days.
This did not happen partly because at the core of Ukraine’s military reform, according to Zagorodnyuk, was the principle of “mission task command”, in which decision-making is delegated to the lowest possible level.
“This is the exact opposite of what happened after the Soviet and Russian armed forces,” said Zagorodnyuk, who served as defense minister from 2019 to 2020. He traced the post-independence 30-year trajectory in which both nations – including their own armies – were learning from very different pasts: one authoritarian and imperial, the other rebellious and individualistic. “That’s why the war is being fought.”
The army was one of the last institutions to change in Ukraine. Nevertheless, according to Zagorodnyuk, the reforms were “transformative”. Add NATO training, the development of a new US-style corps of non-commissioned officers with decision-making powers and more respect, plus eight years of experience fighting in the Donbass, and the profile of Ukraine’s military dramatically different from that of Russia. is separated. ,
On Sunday, the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that the European Union has agreed to train a further 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers in EU countries, starting with Germany and Poland.
According to Zagorodnyuk, more than 500,000 Ukrainian men and women cycled through trenches along the 2015 Donbass ceasefire line, where fighting continued daily, despite a ceasefire, until Putin’s February 24 invasion.
After directly intervening to settle the 2014–2015 Donbass conflict, Russia sent mostly officers to coordinate the fighting in the trenches. As a result, he never had that training ground for his soldiers. While the vast majority of Russian troops that came to Ukraine in February had never gone to war, Ukraine had both a serving military and a deep bench of reserves.
At least equally important are the young officers who served in the Donbass since 2014, trained with NATO and rose to become generals – including the 49-year-old commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, Valery Zaluzny.
That difference has important implications because Putin has ordered fighting men of the same age who have served in the armed forces months after Ukraine ordered its draft. Russia’s mobilization aims to mobilize about 300,000 new recruits, but there are few qualified officers available to train them into a combat force, and no strong NCOs to advise them within units.
Nor can the rigid, top-down nature of the Russian military command structure be easily reverted to the political system Putin has created since coming to power more than 20 years ago.
While the outcome of the war is not settled and Russia’s armed forces retained advantages in key areas such as artillery, long-range missiles and massive amounts of aircraft, they have now lost initiative to Ukraine.
“I think our experience since 1991 has contributed greatly,” says Mykola Beliskov, research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank of the Ukrainian government. This includes the popular uprisings of the 2004 Orange and the 2014 Plains, as well as the Donbas conflict, when Ukrainians immediately self-organize to feed protesters, militias or crowd fund basic medical and military supplies.
Until February, when Ukraine was attacked by a much larger and better equipped Russian army, it was only the tendency to self-organize that saved cities such as Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Krivy Rih from being overwhelmed, as in many cases little or no was not. regular army to protect them.
“We needed to improvise in order to survive,” Bilyskov said. If the people had waited for Kyiv’s orders, or “we had fought like the Russians, we would have been quickly overwhelmed.”
As Ukraine has gone on the offensive, those gains have been demonstrated again. Like Russia, it has faced the challenge of breaching defensive lines without the necessary air superiority to protect its forces from an ambush or counterattack.
Relying on slow-moving artillery, Russia could only advance Ukraine’s defense and then advance slowly into the Donbass. Ukraine, in contrast, in its drive east from Kharkiv, according to Belyskov, could bring forward its heavy guns in real time to play the role of air cover.
This was partly down to the deployment of some mobile systems such as the French Caesar and Polish Krab self-propelled howitzers. But it was also because Ukrainian gunners had learned to rapidly destroy and reassemble the much more stable, US M777 howitzers.
“I think the Russians made a big mistake by giving us eight years to prepare,” Beliskov said.
Eight years later, the roles reverse. This is due to several factors: the modern weapons and training provided to Ukraine by its allies, the improved morale of its forces, the competence of its commanders, intelligence and planning assistance from the US, as well as catastrophic tactical errors by the Kremlin and its generals.
One reason, however, stands out: The two armies with Soviet origins have learned to fight very differently.
The influence on and off the battlefield has been deepening, with Ukrainian forces able to conduct rapid, combined force operations from Kharkiv in the northeast to the Donbas region in September that, a few months earlier, proved beyond the capabilities of their Russian adversaries. Had happened. ,
In the southern Kherson region, Ukraine has added a third major front, where Russian troops are being forced to retreat, following Kharkiv and, back in April, to the capital Kyiv. A massive explosion took place on Saturday at the Putin Bridge, built to connect Crimea with the mainland.
“He’s Not Kidding,” US President Joe Biden On Thursday, Putin said about the threat to deploy strategic nuclear weapons. “Because their army is, you might say, underperforming.”
The poor Russian performance has sparked a backlash at home, with attacks on the failures of military commanders ranging from Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov to distinguished mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozin. On Saturday, Putin publicly handed over command of the entire Ukraine operation to a single general – Sergei Surovikin – for the first time. Surovikin was the head of the Russian Air Force and in charge of the southern theater of invasion.
People close to the Russian Defense Ministry said they recognized the efficiency of Ukraine’s more developed command structure from the early stages of the war. Meanwhile, Russian military bloggers have described the distracting effect of attacks from behind by small, mobile Ukrainian units, as it is difficult to know in real time how great the threat of encirclement is.
After the 2015 defeat, the regular army of Ukraine had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Hollowed out by decades of underfunding, corruption and subsequent deliberate degradation under pro-Russian former President Viktor Yanukovich, it could stand just 6,000 war-ready troops against Russia’s hybrid forces.
A group of defense ministers appointed before being forcibly removed in 2014 were prosecuted; In one case the charge was “treason in the interests of the Russian Federation”. By the time Andrey Zagorodnyuk, a civilian entrepreneur, was parachuted down to reform the ministry in 2015, it was clear to him that a Russian plan to “demilitarize” Ukraine had been underway for years.
“It was never just about the Donbass,” said Zagorodnyuk in an interview in Kyiv. “It was about controlling the whole of Ukraine from the very beginning.”
When Putin launched his offensive earlier this year, it was with an army that had been stocked for eight years with additional expenses and equipment. If the US agreed on anything with the Kremlin, it was that the defense forces of Ukraine were outnumbered and Kyiv could fall in a matter of days.
This did not happen partly because at the core of Ukraine’s military reform, according to Zagorodnyuk, was the principle of “mission task command”, in which decision-making is delegated to the lowest possible level.
“This is the exact opposite of what happened after the Soviet and Russian armed forces,” said Zagorodnyuk, who served as defense minister from 2019 to 2020. He traced the post-independence 30-year trajectory in which both nations – including their own armies – were learning from very different pasts: one authoritarian and imperial, the other rebellious and individualistic. “That’s why the war is being fought.”
The army was one of the last institutions to change in Ukraine. Nevertheless, according to Zagorodnyuk, the reforms were “transformative”. Add NATO training, the development of a new US-style corps of non-commissioned officers with decision-making powers and more respect, plus eight years of experience fighting in the Donbass, and the profile of Ukraine’s military dramatically different from that of Russia. is separated. ,
On Sunday, the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that the European Union has agreed to train a further 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers in EU countries, starting with Germany and Poland.
According to Zagorodnyuk, more than 500,000 Ukrainian men and women cycled through trenches along the 2015 Donbass ceasefire line, where fighting continued daily, despite a ceasefire, until Putin’s February 24 invasion.
After directly intervening to settle the 2014–2015 Donbass conflict, Russia sent mostly officers to coordinate the fighting in the trenches. As a result, he never had that training ground for his soldiers. While the vast majority of Russian troops that came to Ukraine in February had never gone to war, Ukraine had both a serving military and a deep bench of reserves.
At least equally important are the young officers who served in the Donbass since 2014, trained with NATO and rose to become generals – including the 49-year-old commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, Valery Zaluzny.
That difference has important implications because Putin has ordered fighting men of the same age who have served in the armed forces months after Ukraine ordered its draft. Russia’s mobilization aims to mobilize about 300,000 new recruits, but there are few qualified officers available to train them into a combat force, and no strong NCOs to advise them within units.
Nor can the rigid, top-down nature of the Russian military command structure be easily reverted to the political system Putin has created since coming to power more than 20 years ago.
While the outcome of the war is not settled and Russia’s armed forces retained advantages in key areas such as artillery, long-range missiles and massive amounts of aircraft, they have now lost initiative to Ukraine.
“I think our experience since 1991 has contributed greatly,” says Mykola Beliskov, research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank of the Ukrainian government. This includes the popular uprisings of the 2004 Orange and the 2014 Plains, as well as the Donbas conflict, when Ukrainians immediately self-organize to feed protesters, militias or crowd fund basic medical and military supplies.
Until February, when Ukraine was attacked by a much larger and better equipped Russian army, it was only the tendency to self-organize that saved cities such as Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Krivy Rih from being overwhelmed, as in many cases little or no was not. regular army to protect them.
“We needed to improvise in order to survive,” Bilyskov said. If the people had waited for Kyiv’s orders, or “we had fought like the Russians, we would have been quickly overwhelmed.”
As Ukraine has gone on the offensive, those gains have been demonstrated again. Like Russia, it has faced the challenge of breaching defensive lines without the necessary air superiority to protect its forces from an ambush or counterattack.
Relying on slow-moving artillery, Russia could only advance Ukraine’s defense and then advance slowly into the Donbass. Ukraine, in contrast, in its drive east from Kharkiv, according to Belyskov, could bring forward its heavy guns in real time to play the role of air cover.
This was partly down to the deployment of some mobile systems such as the French Caesar and Polish Krab self-propelled howitzers. But it was also because Ukrainian gunners had learned to rapidly destroy and reassemble the much more stable, US M777 howitzers.
“I think the Russians made a big mistake by giving us eight years to prepare,” Beliskov said.