UKRAINE CRISISHow Long Could Ukraine Hold Out Against a Russian Invasion?
A RAND report from last year and more recent military analyses have examined Russian operational tactics, but far fewer have looked at the other side of the coin: How long could Ukraine’s armed forces hold out against a bigger, more powerful military force like Russia’s?
It was a large-scale Russian military invasion of Ukraine involving around 130,000 military personnel, mainly from the 20th and 8th Combined Arms Armies.
Paratroopers from the 76th and 98th Air Assault Divisions crossed the Ukrainian border from the north, headed toward Kharkiv. From the southeast, units including the 7th and 106th Air Assault Divisions moved to seize the entirety of the already partly occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and then move as far west as the outskirts of Dnipro, another major city. Smaller special operations units — spetsnaz — were also deployed.
Railway choke points leading to the Ukrainian borders hampered full deployment, but still, the advance units were followed in rolling waves by multiple regiments with thousands of troops over the next 10 days.
The goal? “Seizure of parts of Ukraine for incorporation into the Russian state.”
The scenario, published more than 18 months ago, was part of a war-game exercise conducted by the Rand Corporation, a U.S. think tank. Though not a comprehensive analysis, it’s a snapshot of Russia’s military capabilities in eastern Ukraine, where in reality, just across the border, as many as 175,000 Russian troops may be gathered in the coming weeks.
And while the Rand report and more recent military analyses have examined Russian operational tactics, far fewer have looked at the other side of the coin: How long could Ukraine’s armed forces hold out against a bigger, more powerful military force like Russia’s?
“Russia will find them a determined, robust, and enduring army, whatever Putin chooses to do,” said Glen Grant, a retired British Army artillery officer who served as an adviser to the Ukrainian military.
“The threat has been going on for eight years. We have not ruled this out since 2014. This is war, this is Russia. Russia should be expected to exploit any situation at any moment,” General Oleksandr Pavlyuk, commander of the Joint Operation Forces fighting the separatists, said in an interview with the Donbas.Realities desk of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service.
War broke out in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region in April 2014, just a couple of months after months of street protests in Kyiv exploded in violent police clashes. That led to the ouster of the country’s Moscow-friendly president, who fled to Russia.
In the months that followed, Kyiv”s “Anti-Terrorism Operation” — a mixture of government troops and volunteer militias, often privately funded — had initial successes against Kremlin-backed separatist forces.
