Russia and Ukraine

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I think the Ukrainian operation was primarily a conventional military operation.  

special forces was deployed to support it, such as by capturing key road junctions, bridges, unprotected headquarters and depots, unprotected air fields, etc.  possibly the special forces were also slated to assault Ukrainian government centers had russian conventional forces manage to come up close enough to kyiv to link up with the special force after the special forces had secured government centers. 

But the conventional ground force has to break through defenses,  engage large regular enemy formations, take and hold grounds, establish and protect supply lines.

special forces can’t bail out conventional forces in large mobile field maneuvers such as these.    special forces can sort of bail out conventional forces in stationary fire fights such as in assaulting built up areas, but that waste special forces by reducing them to mere elite infantry.

the failure of the russian invasion seems primarily a failure of the field army.    failure of infantry, failure of armor, failure of organization, failure of reconnaissance, failure or interdiction of enemy communication and supply, failure of coordination and logistics, and failure of strategic planning.

i think some aspects of how the russians conducted this operation, such as the infamous 40 mile long truck convoy aimed to revive the offensive towards kyiv,  is echoed in past russian military operations under superficially similar circumstances.   such the logistic effort organized by Georgy Zhukov to successfully salvage the stalled soviet counterattack against the japanese at Nomenhan in 1939.    The multi-prone attack also echo many of the successful battles the soviets conducted by Zhukov amongst others against the germans in 1943-1945.

it seems vaguely to me like the russian operation was run by a command staff that read some military history about successful russian campaigns of the past, but didn’t fundamentally understand the conditions that made them successful, and just tried to replicate their outcomes by copying their key features.

This also vaguely recall the abysmal performance of soviet high command during the winter war with Finland in 1939-1940, and during the early years of Russo-german war in 1941 to mid 1942, both in the aftermath of stalin’s purge of the soviet military officer corp in 1936-1938.   The stench may not be be quite as strong, but the smell seems to be similar.

And now that the Russians are repositioning to concentrate on eastern Ukraine, is there anything that makes you think that they won’t re-employ the same failed playbook of ‘Well, this strategy strategy worked 80 years ago…let’s do it again!!’ ?

Boru