By Marc Champion, with assistance from Daryna Krasnolutska
Six months into President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the war has upended fundamental assumptions about Russia’s military and economy.
When the US warned earlier this year of impending war, officials and analysts in Washington and Europe alike assumed Russia’s much larger and better equipped military would quickly dominate Ukraine’s forces. They also believed Putin would find himself constrained by a weak domestic economy.
In Washington, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, even warned Congress that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of an invasion being launched. President Joe Biden said he would turn the ruble to “rubble”.
Vladimir Putin massively underestimated the determination of Russia's Ukrainian neighbours to remain an independent nation. (Image: Getty)In the Kremlin, meanwhile, Putin and his closest advisers saw Ukraine as a nation divided, with incompetent leaders who would lack the will to fight.
Yet those expectations have proved drastically wrong.
What this eventually will mean as Ukraine marks a half year of war and continued independence is as uncertain as the conflict’s outcome.
What’s clear is that, rather than reassert Moscow as a global military power as Putin had hoped, his decision to invade Ukraine has launched a profound rethink of Russia’s conventional capabilities. It also prompted further expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), with hitherto neutral Finland and Sweden resolving to join the military alliance.
Russia “is not a peer military to the US” or even smaller Nato forces, said Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The war showed it “is not able to run complex operations in the way the British or French or Israelis can do, so in those terms it isn’t even a second-tier military power”.
Ukraine has suffered extensive damage to infrastructure, towns and cities and heavy military casualties, and the conflict has forced millions to flee the country. Its economy is struggling.
Volodymyr Zelensky's leadership has inspired Ukrainians and their supporters around the world. (Image: Getty)Still, President Volodymyr Zelensky has emerged as a defiant wartime leader able to rally his nation to inflict huge losses on Russia’s military, which was forced to retreat from around Kyiv, the capital, and regroup in the east.
“On February 24, we were told: You have no chance. On August 24, we say: Happy Independence Day, Ukraine!” Zelensky said on Wednesday in an address to the nation marking the 31st anniversary of its independence from the former Soviet Union.
“What is the end of the war for us? We used to say peace. Now we say victory.”
Ukraine remains supported by supplies of advanced US and European weapons, even as it is yet to show it can mount a successful large-scale counter-offensive and its allies find themselves under growing economic pressure.
Asked by the Swiss newspaper Blick this month whether she feared Russia might target Nato member Estonia next, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said she saw no threat at her borders, despite Putin name-checking the Estonian city of Narva in a June speech in which he discussed the need to recover lost Russian lands.
“The right question would be: Is it Nato’s turn next?,” Kallas told Blick. “Is Russia ready for this?”
Forecasts of Russia’s economic collapse have proved just as wide of the mark, with gross domestic product falling at a grim but less-than-catastrophic rate of 4% in the second quarter, as rising energy prices underpin budget revenue.
As recently as May, Russia’s own finance ministry forecast a 12% contraction this year for an economy weighed by a blizzard of international sanctions.
While the US and its close allies have imposed sanctions, many countries — from China to India and the Middle East — have not, continuing to trade with Moscow.
Moscow has reduced the flow of Russian gas to Europe to put pressure on Ukraine's allies. (Image: Getty)Russia has cut back on supplies of natural gas to Europe, wielding an unexpectedly potent economic weapon of its own. Though preparations have been made to mitigate the impact of further Russian supply cuts, officials from Finland to Germany in recent days warned their fellow citizens to prepare for hardship.
The next “five to 10 winters will be difficult”, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo said on Monday, as European natural gas prices rose to about 15 times their summer average.
O’Brien, the St Andrews professor, was among the few Western defence analysts to predict a quagmire for Putin in Ukraine even before the war, and events since have only deepened his scepticism of the quality of Russian equipment, training and command.
Russia failed to find a response to just 20 long-range Himars (high-mobility artillery rocket systems), a 1980s US technology that Ukrainian troops are using to destroy ammunition dumps and logistics systems deep behind Russian lines, O’Brien said. “The US has 540 of them. Russia isn’t even in the same league.”
Inside and outside the government, some Russian policymakers and advisers say they were well aware of the military’s weaknesses – and the challenges it would face in Ukraine – before Putin launched his Feb 24 “special military operation”. That’s why so many refused right to the end to believe he would pull the trigger.
One person close to the Russian defence establishment said the view was that any invasion would be like the Korean War in the 1950s, with a positional front developing. Even they, however, thought Russia would be able to take more territory east of the central Dnipro River.
One reason for Russian underperformance is that only since the war has it become clear its military was overcounting to hide its underinvestment in personnel, according to Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a Washington think tank.
Cutbacks meant Moscow may have had just 90,000 regular troops available for the invasion. (Image: Getty)As Russia gathered troops around Ukraine for the invasion, estimates for the scale of the force were based on a count of so-called battalion tactical groups, or BTGs — manoeuvrable units with their own artillery, air defence, logistics and about 50 tanks and armoured vehicles — assumed to include 700-900 troops each. That suggested an invasion force of about 150,000.
In reality, the average BTG had 600 personnel or fewer, and the total force may have included just 90,000 regular Russian troops, Kofman said in a recent podcast with the Modern War Institute at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York state.
With the bulk of personnel cuts coming to infantry, “they were essentially going to war and there was nobody in the vehicles”.
That had a huge impact on the war, explaining Russian difficulties in getting off roads, engaging effectively in urban warfare and taking territory, according to Kofman. Still, he remains cautious about drawing conclusions, recalling the difficulties encountered by the US against vastly inferior militaries in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Underperformance of the Russian air force and air defences has also led to questions over the quality of the equipment itself, as well as the training of Russian pilots and soldiers that operate them.
Russia’s ability to produce technologically advanced weapons is likely to be further eroded as sanctions hamper imports. A study of Russian equipment captured or destroyed on Ukraine’s battlefields found 450 foreign-made components in 27 Russian critical arms systems, including drones, missiles and communications equipment.
The majority of those parts were made by US companies, with the remainder coming mainly from Ukraine’s supporters.
While smuggling and espionage can fill some of the void, “Russia and its armed forces remain highly vulnerable to multilateral efforts to choke off these component flows and raise the costs of its aggression in Ukraine”, said the Aug 8 report by the Royal United Services Institute in the UK.
Kyiv’s forces have stunned defence analysts with their military performance, and the vast majority of Ukrainians now believe their country can defeat the Russians. (Image: Getty)At the same time, the motivation and ability of Ukrainian forces to innovate, out-think Russian commanders in the field and deploy unfamiliar Nato standard weaponry have surprised many, with some analysts – and, according to one August opinion poll, 98% of Ukrainians – now convinced they can win the war.
Russia may not even be able to sustain its nuclear arsenal over the long term, so long as it remains sanctioned, according to Pavel Luzin, a defence analyst at Riddle, a think tank devoted to Russia, and a former adviser to jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
“The lack of industrial equipment, technologies and human capital will make the current numbers of ICBMs, SLBMs and heavy bombers just impossible,” Luzin said, referring to Russia’s land-, submarine- and air-launched nuclear missiles.
For all that, Russia remains a nuclear superpower with a fearsome capability to escalate the conflict that may yet prove decisive. The Soviet Union managed to develop its arsenal without access to Western (or modern Chinese) technology, obtaining it through espionage networks where necessary.
“The West underestimates the degree of elasticity of the Russian system – because it is poor and incompetent, but also quite explosive because it is global,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin political adviser during Putin’s first decade in power.
“And at some point it will explode, but how it will explode is another question.”
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