COMMUNICATION FAILURECommunication Breakdown: How Russia's Invasion of Ukraine Bogged Down
Military fortunes can swing quickly, in even major offensives like the one launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24 to “demilitarize” and subdue Ukraine, but many Western military experts suggest that the Kremlin and its planners botched key aspects of the early weeks of the invasion: communication.
“We have no communication. We have no walkie-talkies. Nothing,” a bedraggled Russian soldier tells his interrogators in a video published by Ukrainian defenders this month and posted to YouTube.
A mere [month] into the war, such statements, along with intercepted chatter, captured equipment, and images of cheap, handheld transceivers, suggest that an inability to communicate — up and down the chain of command and across branches of the Russian military — is impeding Moscow’s war plans.
And while military fortunes can swing quickly, in even major offensives like the one launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24 to “demilitarize” and subdue Ukraine, many Western military experts suggest that the Kremlin and its planners botched key aspects of the early weeks of the invasion.
In Russia’s case, the predicament has been on display over the first 24 days of this war through statements by captive troops, tapped conversations, and other clues posted by Ukrainian intelligence or others eager to highlight perceived weaknesses in the much larger invading forces, and reports suggesting an unsecured call might have aided Ukrainian forces in targeting at least one of four Russian generals who have reportedly been killed in the conflict.
Evidence suggests that some of the roots of the Russian communication lapses lie in mismanaged development and procurement processes for things like tactical military radios, undertrained and under-deployed specialists, and the challenges of operating on foreign soil, where the enemy controls not only cellular networks but also wired communications that frequently serve as a reliable backup channel.
One of the results has been varying complexity among the systems used by troops for voice and data communications, multiplying challenges particularly because they involve mixed air, land, and naval forces. In such cases, all troops are forced to use a system that’s common to the least advanced among them.
“If you’re forming a mixed formation and part of the formation is comprised of older vehicles like the 90th [Guards Tank] Division approach into Kyiv we saw recently,” Stanimir Dobrev, an independent military expert who specializes in telecommunications, told RFE/RL’s Russian Service, “you have to resort to the lowest common denominator.”
In other words, mixing so-called open and encrypted systems makes them only as strong as their weakest link.
