Specialists in the Russian military say they have been surprised by the mismanagement of the campaign, with convoy columns bogged down, hundreds of Russian armored vehicles lost and the Kremlin’s air force neutralized by Ukrainian defenses.
“When you screw everything up after two or three weeks, I can understand that,” said Scott Boston, a defense analyst at think tank Rand Corp. “But when you hit the threshold walking into the house, you have another problem.”
Pentagon and private-sector experts expected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army to rapidly wipe out Ukraine’s missile defenses and air force, crippling the 200,000-strong military command’s ability to counterattack.
But none of this happened in the first seven days of attacks. And while there is no reliable estimate of the number of Russian soldiers killed, wounded, and captured, it appears to be much higher than expected for a well-prepared invasion.
“It was a colossal failure of intelligence, which grossly underestimated the Ukrainian resistance, and the military execution was appalling,” Michael Vickers, a former US deputy secretary of defense for intelligence, said this week.
“His main attack was insufficient. It was little by little. Their reconnaissance elements have been captured, the columns have been destroyed,” he added. “It’s just a mess.”
Damage
Military experts from the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center said the Russians seized an airport near Kiev. But the intensity of the fighting damaged the facilities too much to be used, as the Kremlin wanted, in its attempt to invade the capital.
Furthermore, they added, “Russian aircraft and helicopter losses were surprisingly high and damaging,” as they were unable to destroy Ukrainian air defenses.
Another surprise was the limited and ineffective deployment of Russian electronic weaponry, which analysts expected would play a critical role in the attack on Ukrainian communications.
“If the Russians had succeeded in separating Ukrainian military leaders from those who receive their orders, the Ukrainian air and air defense forces would have been forced to fight in an uncoordinated manner, making them less lethal and more vulnerable to attack,” notes the Scowcroft Center report.
Boston notes that the Ukrainians have continued to use their Turkish Bayraktar drones to attack Russian forces. “If they get hit by Turkish drones once or twice, fine,” he says. But if they are “more than once or twice, something is wrong on the Russian side.”
Coordination
For Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, the Russians appear not to have adequately coordinated “their considerable and diverse capabilities, nor managed the logistics of the invasion.”
“We have early indications that while they have sophisticated combined arms capabilities, they are not necessarily fully integrated,” he added.
Their logistical failures are also surprising: “We see abandoned vehicles. We see support issues, not just with fuel, but with food,” Kirby said Wednesday.
Boston, which has participated in high-level war games focused on Russian forces, said there are indications that many soldiers are young, insufficiently trained for this type of conflict and probably didn’t even know they were going to war.
However, none of the experts see the Russians as offside. His army’s advance has stalled, but that could solve his logistical problems, Kirby says.
Instead, experts fear that Putin’s frustration will lead him to use the full force of his artillery, missiles and air power on the Ukrainian population, which would have a devastating effect.
“Russia continues to have the advantage of overwhelming combat power that will eventually overwhelm Ukrainian forces as the war continues,” the Scowcroft Center report warns.
AFP Agency
Source: Ambito
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