QUICK TAKES // BY BEN FRANKELFour Comments on the Situation in Ukraine

Published 9 March 2022

After two weeks of costly fighting and widespread destruction, it is clear that Russia has launched its invasion of Ukraine with several flawed assumptions, which led to a flawed operational approach. The response of the West has been unified and impressive – and one of the likely lasting changes which has been brought about by the war, has been the sea change in the German approach to European politics and security, and the role of Germany in both.

1) Flawed Assumptions
The Times reports that Vladimir Putin is furious with his intelligence services for the low quality of the information they gave him in the run-up to the invasion. That low-quality intelligence has led to an embarrassing, and debilitating, number of flawed assumptions which informed the Russian military’s strategy in Ukraine.

Here are a few of these flawed assumptions:

A. Small, Spread-Out Forces
Russia assumed the invasion would a blitzkrieg campaign: fast, relying on small mobile units spreading out to capture as many targets as possible in the first forty-eight hours of the war. Russia tried to take some small towns with forces no larger than two battalions.

The large number of small forces meant that in most places, Russia could not bring its overall numerical superiority to bear.

B. Logistical Difficulties
If you spread forces to many places, you have to send supplies – food, ammunition, fuel — to many places. This means that you add many “soft” targets – the supply convoys – to the list of targets the Ukrainians resistance can choose from. Moreover, most roads in Ukraine are 2-lane rural roads with cultivated fields right next to them. In this time of year, these fields are too soggy and muddy to allow heavy military vehicles to bypass a disabled truck on the narrow roads, causing many convoys to stall, allowing Ukrainians even more targets to hit.

C. Russia’s Air Force: AWOL
One of the mysteries of the first two weeks of the invasion is the near-total absence of the Russian Air Force. The Economist notes that Russia has invested billions of dollars in its Air Force over the last decade, acquiring around 440 new fixed-wing aircraft, as well as thousands of drones.

Military analysts were convinced that Russia would quickly destroy Ukraine’s small and aging Air Force and then roam freely over Ukraine, using its air superiority to pick off Ukrainian forces at will.

This has not happened so far. Russia has already lost 39 fixed-wing planes and 40 helicopters.

The air defense systems Ukraine has been receiving from the West have proven effective, and the absence of Russian planes in the sky means that they cannot provide close ground support to the army and cannot fly reconnaissance flights to gather intelligence about Ukrainian movements.