Russia banked on Kyiv falling quickly. Here’s why it hasn’t.
On paper, a war between Russia and Ukraine is not a fair fight. On every quantifiable metric — troops, armed vehicles, aircraft, you name it — the Russians outnumber the Ukrainians by a significant margin. They have more advanced weapons, superior capacities in cyberspace, and a recent history of sophisticated deployments of military force. Yet, so far at least, the war has not gone Russia’s way. Russian troops have been kept outside Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and the focal point of their initial advance. They have failed to win control over any other major Ukrainian population center. They have yet to establish air superiority. They are failing at even basic logistical tasks like ensuring their vehicles have enough fuel. It’s less than a week into the invasion and it’s too early to make any definitive statements about how the Russian campaign will end. But the consensus among military experts is that the initial invasion was based on badly flawed strategic premises. “It’s taken me a while to figure out what they’re trying to do because it looks so ridiculous and incompetent,” Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at the CNA think tank, said on Twitter of the Russian advance. “The Russian operation is a bizarre scheme, based on terrible political assumptions, with poor relationship to their training & capabilities.” Some analysts argue that the problem goes even deeper, that the Russian military is not merely tasked with executing a bad strategy but is itself an inept organization incapable of adequately performing basic battlefield functions. On this theory, even a better plan would have still yielded subpar battlefield results. “The simplest explanation here is that the Russian military is bad! It was a paper tiger, and now the paper’s on fire,” writes Brett Friedman, a Marine Corps reserve officer and author of the book On Tactics. In the long run, Friedman and other experts caution, Russia is still favored to win the war: It is simply too large and well-equipped. The Pentagon is warning that things will soon get worse: In a Monday briefing, a senior US defense official warned that Russia may lay siege to Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, a brutal tactic that intentionally cuts civilians off from basic necessities like food. But in these first few days of the war, a rapid Ukrainian collapse is starting to look like an increasingly remote possibility — and if Russia does attain victory, it will do so at a significantly higher cost than President Vladimir Putin seems to have expected. Russia’s invasion plan was really bad With the benefit of hindsight, Russia’s strategy for the first days of the conflict has come into clearer view: take Kyiv as rapidly as possible and depose President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, ending the conflict before it really got underway. Pre-war research conducted by Russia’s FSB intelligence agency, recently leaked to British experts, suggested that Ukrainians were in general unhappy with their leadership and pessimistic about their country’s direction. It appears that the Russian invasion plan may have banked on this assessment, presuming that Ukrainian resistance would be light and a rapid march on the capital would be feasible.
