The Sixth Week of a Three-Day Special Op: Still Stuck in Ukraine
Putin’s War in Ukraine #3
Although the retreating Russian troops have vacated the Kyiv Oblast, the war in Ukraine is over only for the dead. The attention has shifted towards Donbas, where a large offensive is expected to give Putin a tangible victory to celebrate at the Victory Day processions on May 9, commemorating the surrender of Nazi Germany. While Ukraine is bracing itself for the second act of the Russian “anti-Nazi” invasion, it is mostly up to the West to make sure that the upcoming phase of this senseless war would be the last one.
Potemkin army, Pyrrhic victory, Putinist propaganda
Claims that Russia’s military campaign utterly failed are often baseless since no one can ascertain what Putin has been trying to achieve in Ukraine. His reasons to invade Ukraine ranged from denying the existence of the Ukrainian state or nation, preventing genocide in Donbas, denazifying the whole country, to enforcing a regime change by decapitating the political leadership in Kyiv and installing a pro-Russian puppet government. Regardless of the lack of a direct access to Putin’s head, some analysts astutely made two important observations.
First, pre-invasion intelligence and post-invasion misreporting. In autocracies it is hard to find people who would speak truth to power (and power would listen). Putin is surrounded by sycophants who have been feeding him embellished intelligence to support his mythology. Senior advisers misinformed Putin about the state of his military force and as the special operation was getting suspiciously longer, they were afraid to give him the full picture about the Russian army’s poor performance in Ukraine. Even though Ukrainian security services and agencies were compromised by highly places Russian assets, Russia did not own them. As it turned out, bribed Ukrainians and Russian infiltrators were not as reliable as the Kremlin might have believed.
The scale of resistance the Russian troops encountered once they crossed borders into Ukraine clearly confused them. Equally confused were Ukrainians who still do not understand what Russia is trying to liberate them from. Now it seems that because Ukrainians did not greet Russian troops with flowers, nor did the special military operation turn out to be like walking into Czechoslovakia in 1968, Putin has plainly decided to destroy Ukraine. His denazification discourse serves to fabricate a continuing cause for war and, even more cynically, to justify his war crimes.
Second, Putin’s confidence about “attacking Ukraine is a great idea” was a result of his seclusion and his chauvinism towards Ukrainians. In addition to a rather dire state of the Russian military (logistics, morale, extremely centralised military organization that has at least seven Russian generals killed in action), Putin thanks to his loyal but fearful entourage of praetorians miscalculated the bravery, resolve, and resilience of the Ukrainian population and armed forces who refuse to capitulate. Putin also likely choked on the unity and the speedy action of the West and the accuracy of Ukraine’s information on the Russian troop movements. As a true autocratic leader, Putin blamed and punished others (Shoigu, Beseda) for deficient intelligence.
Putin fell into the trap of believing its own propaganda. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is the second actor-president who surprised Russia (after Ron Reagan). Thanks to his media savvy team, he managed to mobilize the support for Ukraine in most of the civilized world. Except for Russia, where the government has imposed an information blackout, the information environment is dominated by the Ukrainian cause, as Zelensky has won the narrative about who is the victim and who is the aggression.
Russian tanks vs Ukrainian tractors
Optimist observers assess that Russian military offensive is failing. Russians have not taken Kyiv, Odesa or Kharkiv. They did not decapitate Ukrainian political elites, nor did they change the borders of Donetsk and Luhansk closer to Dneper. They have decreased Russian military activities in the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions. Russian troops are exhausted and overstretched on four fronts. The Kremlin has not held any press conferences about denazification or demilitarization successes in Ukraine. Instead, it remains silent about Russian losses, now estimated at some 15-17,000 troops, and hundreds of pieces of military hardware gone. That is a quarter of the original invasion force is uncapable of combat now. Even special elite groups are suffering heavy losses in Ukraine (perhaps an elite in Russia, not in Ukraine).1 Russian conventional military capability has been far less impressive than one would expect from a great power. Apparently, nukes are not everything.
To the Kremlin’s frustration with its ground troops also points the fact that Russia even showcased its hypersonic Kinzhal, presumably to impress and gain the momentum in war. It did not amount to a desired effect, as this weapon was largely debunked as a matter of propaganda. The Kremlin has thus so far been sending mixed signals: is Russia changing tactics or everything is going according to the plan? Ukrainian troops are gaining more than losing these days and no one has heard any missile warning in Kyiv since March 30.
The tide is not turning, the tactic and goals are
Pessimist observers warn that heavy fighting continues in Donbas. While before the 02/24 invasion Russian-backed separatists controlled one third of the Donbas territory, since the invasion the Russian troops are slowly spreading across all Luhansk and Donetsk.
The Kremlin insists it is withdrawing Russian troops from the area around Kyiv and Chernihiv and moving them south to help consolidate the southern front. This advancing back towards the southern front may indicate not so much that Russia wants to “increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations”, but that the reinforcement from Belarus would not arrive. This is likely because Belarussian soldiers are not reliable and would not join the Russian offensive against Ukraine (mutiny expected).
Russia is not scaling down the operations or retreating from Kyiv, it is merely vacating the area. This is another of Putin’s newspeak expressions for regrouping forces in a preparation for a major offensive in Donbas. Mariupol is extremely important not only as a strategic port city, but also for connecting Crimea with Russia through land. Russian generals will not mind losses, as they need to deliver this presumably low-hanging fruit to Putin right on time for May 9.
Yet this offensive had to be scaled down because the forces pulled from the north and northeastern parts are worn off. Instead of encircling Ukrainian forces in Donbas by closing them off through the Kharkiv-Dnipro corridor and down to Melitopol-Mariupol, Russian troops seem to focus on taking full control of and advancing from Izyum and Mariupol, trapping any Ukrainian soldiers east of that line. Although it would take until summer to train new conscripts and mobilise properly its reservists, Russia has already deployed into Ukraine pro-Putin Chechen irregulars, private military mercenaries, and has even taken some Russian troops from South Ossetia.
What Russia cannot gain in quality, it can compensate with quantity to wear off Ukrainian forces in Donbas in a war of attrition. This means making time Russia’s ally and squeeze Ukrainians out. Yet Ukraine has more allies than Russia, hasn’t it?
Expect more Western sanctions (yawn)
... and humanitarian aid with bags for dead bodies. While Putin has got the West and Ukraine wrong, the West has not been getting Putin either. From a broader geopolitical perspective, Putin is not at war with Ukraine but with the West. By showing the West’s helplessness in this conflict, he wants to humiliate the western democratic countries he thinks despise Russia. Putin does not care anymore about the money. The Western sanctions do not bother him, nor do his impoverished oligarchs. Putin has a mission to leave a legacy, to show his greatness.
The vacated Kyiv oblast provides the latest example of how far Putin intends to go. The Russian army has left behind massacred civilians, looted houses, raped women, and set booby traps underneath the dead civilian bodies. In Bucha, Russian troops were executing civilians in a similar way to zachistka in a suburb of Grozny 22 years ago. In Russia, every generation needs its own war: the Great Patriotic War, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and now Ukraine. Violence and military heroism are viewed as the foundation of masculinity in Russia, which needs to be proven in combat. Add a flavour of patriotic mobilization, ideally against the evil Nazism, and a pattern emerges: most Russian men are formed by war-experienced fathers and grandfathers, only waiting for their turn to come.
That face-saving strategy of taking over the whole Donbas region does not exclude further denazification of Ukraine, read intentional killing of civilians only because they identify as Ukrainians. Russians have said it themselves that they want the destruction of Ukraine as a state and as a nation.2
This war is not about occupying Ukraine. It is an act of hatred with the aim to exterminate a whole nation. The carpet bombardment of Mariupol and other Russian-speaking areas Putin claimed to care about (and protect from genocide) make it plain that this is no longer a land grab. Traumatise Ukrainians, crush civilian resolve, demolish infrastructure, flatten cities and villages, send the whole country back to the pre-industrialised era. Given the lack of respect of any limits posed by international legal fiction, Russian troops may be leaving Kyiv just to make space for the use of you-know-what. The idea that Putin can nuke the area does not seem that far-fetched any more. Yet why rambling about nukes, when the effect of terror can be achieved effectively by a simple shot in the head of a civilian with tied hands.
Russia’s state authorities claim that atrocities in Bucha are another act of the Western propaganda. This is the testimony to the mental world the Kremlin lives in: that for propaganda purposes one would be willing to harm own population. Western sanctions will not stop Putin’s war crimes. They will not stop “the lying about death that enables the killing for a lie”.3
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Mark Urban, “The heavy losses of an elite Russian regiment in Ukraine,” BBC News, 3 Apr 2022.
“Что Россия должна сделать с Украиной”, RIA Novosti, 3 Apr 2022 (updated 5 Apr).
Timothy Snyder, “The lying and the truth”, Thinking about…, 3 Apr 2022.