By Daniel DePetris
Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of staff for the Prussian army, once made the astute observation that no war plan survives “first contact” with a hostile force. If there was ever a war to validate that claim, it’s the one currently churning in Ukraine. As the conflict in Europe’s largest country marks its six-month anniversary on Wednesday, 24 August, the main protagonists have all experienced their fair share of jolted assumptions, operational mistakes, and misplaced beliefs about what is and isn’t possible. Inflated expectations have been punctured, hopes have been dashed, and strategies crafted to cause the enemy discomfort instead produced unintended consequences that are just as painful.
Take Russia as an example. Sensing Ukrainian forces would either flee or fold in matter of days, Vladimir Putin believed a military operation in Ukraine could easily dispose of the Volodymyr Zelenskiy administration with minimal resistance. Putin assumed that Russia’s security services, with assets burrowed within the Ukrainian political elite, had an accurate, sophisticated reading of Ukraine’s internal dynamics and were confident that the Ukrainian people would welcome a pro-Russian government in Kyiv.
Russia’s formidable security services, however, vastly underestimated the Ukrainian public’s will to resist and discounted the Ukrainian army as the paper tiger it once fought in 2014, when Ukrainian units were ill-trained, outgunned, understaffed and riddled with corruption. The Russian army, which hadn’t fought a large-scale land war outside of Russia proper since the Red Army’s campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s, soon encountered the difficulties associated with urban combat. The Ukrainian military made excellent use of the javelin anti-tank missiles Washington provided and took advantage of Russia’s clumsy execution of combined arms warfare. Within weeks, Russian supply lines were shattered, tanks and armored personnel carriers sat on the outskirts of Kyiv with nowhere to go, and stationary Russian armor were perfect targets for Ukrainian ambushes.
This piece was originally published in The Guardian on September 2, 2022. Read more HERE.