It is not hard to imagine what Russia’s plans for the war in Ukraine looked like in the ideal scenario. In fact, in the opening few hours, we saw a very clear plan play out: Helicopters ferrying Russian troops to take the international airport to the South and West of Kviv, a plan repeated elsewhere in the country as Russians moved to seize key infrastructure, and then ferry in crack troops to quickly take key objectives. Ideally, that would have included the main Ukrainian TV stations, so as to cut the Government off from its people, and the key centres of administration. In the ideal world, within 36 hours or so of the attack, you have a Russian-controlled Ukrainian national broadcaster broadcasting a speech by the captured Ukrainian President urging Ukrainians to lay down their arms.
Western outrage would bubble for a few weeks, and then we’d all forget about it and focus on the latest celebrity to have gotten themselves cancelled, or something of that nature, and eventually a western push for lower energy prices would bring an end to any short term sanction.
Obviously, that did not happen. The attempt to take the airport failed, with heavy losses for the Russians. What was perhaps intended as a lightning war is settling, two weeks later, into a slow, grinding, brutal, push by the Russians to try and take the country with brute force.
All of this poses a problem for the Russians which is heading towards the existential: What does victory even look like?
It is certainly possible – probable even – that a full-scale Russian assault could capture the Ukrainian capital, and other major cities. But doing so will likely require the kind of apartment-block-pounding artillery fire, and street to street fighting that will make a mockery of any idea that the Russians are “liberating” Ukraine or being greeted as old friends. It will likely stiffen Ukrainian hatred of the occupying force, and steel western determination to supply arms to the resistance. The more destruction and violence that there is, playing out on western TV screens, the less likely it is that there will be any relaxation of sanctions. In other words, there is a very strong argument that the best-case outcome for Russia now is a long, bloody, cripplingly expensive war in Ukraine at a time when its economy is being strangled by global sanction.
The war, as it has unfolded, has already dealt a massive blow to Russian prestige. The simple fact is that a military superpower like Russia shouldn’t be struggling to overcome the armed forces of a smaller neighbour which stands alone: The Russians entered this fight with massive advantages in air power, armour, manpower, fuel, and equipment. And despite all that, the Russian Air Force has barely been a factor, and Russian losses in terms of tanks and trucks have been severe. Some of the west’s own military analysts are now openly questioning Russian military competence:
Retweeted this but probably should have put this here. This should terrify the Russians if it means what it could mean. They are already running out of trucks. https://t.co/YaVdw406ph
— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) March 5, 2022
This from world renowned London defence think tank RUSI suggests the Russian Air Force has turned out to be pretty useless.
Is the Russian Air Force Actually Incapable of Complex Air Operations? https://t.co/AzWwwCfCEU— Andrew Neil (@afneil) March 5, 2022
There is mounting evidence that the Russian military is equipped with poorly maintained vehicles, and vastly underestimated the supply requirements of a full scale invasion. One school of thought about the infamous “40 mile long column” north of Kviv, for example, is that it is not waiting, but stuck: The vehicles at the front have run out of fuel, and the Russians lack the tankers and trucks to resupply them. The whole thing is bogged down.
All of this points to a much longer than anticipated fight for the Russians: The two weeks that they have failed to take Kviv and other cities in has given the Ukrainians time to prepare layers of defences. These cities can be taken, but the costs of taking them now will be vastly higher than they may have been had the aerial assaults worked in the first day or so.
And of course, once you take a city, holding it is a different matter altogether: Ukraine is a country the size of France. To meaningfully hold it, suppress resistance, and exercise any meaningful Government, the Russians will need an occupying force in the millions. Far more men, in fact, than they have committed to the invasion.
There are, of course, those, including some in the west, clinging to the idea of Putin as master strategist, and convinced that all of this is part of some larger plan: That he is not taking the cities because he wants to do this with “minimal bloodshed” and because he considers the Ukrainians really Russian. Or, alternatively, that the plan was always for a slow and steady invasion, pushing the Ukrainian army into a vast encirclement in the east. Neither of those explanations make much sense: Without taking the cities, the war cannot be won. And encirclements work when they are carried out quickly: Not when the enemy has two weeks to observe your movements, and your tanks and trucks are stuck in the mud and out of fuel.
The problem for Putin and Russia now is that every day that the war continues, the Ukrainian resolve grows, as does western belief that the Ukrainians can ultimately triumph: That means, in short, more supplies for Ukraine across the still open borders with Europe; more fighter jets, more anti tank weapons, more ammunition. Each day brings more Russian dead, and more Russian economic pain. And, perhaps most intolerably of all, each day that the war drags on, the weaker Putin and the Kremlin look: A lot of countries that lived in fear of the Russian Army will start to see it as a paper tiger.
It is hard to see any case, at this stage, other than that this whole thing has been a monumental strategic disaster for the Russians, from start to finish, whenever the finish might be. This was supposed to be a quick war. It is turning into a bloody cauldron.