The Ukrainian army has fought well, all things considered.
There are three things to say about the opening 24 hours of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
First, the Ukrainian army fought well, all things considered. Over a map or a sand table, a military analyst or a staff officer might grimace that this bridge over such and such river wasn’t dynamited to slow the Russians down or quibble with the decision to refrain from a full mobilization and call up of reservists until after the die was cast — but the Ukrainians clearly have passed the first critical test: They proved they could take a punch. They proved they would not retreat without a fight. Indeed, they proved that they could throw a punch or two of their own.
Second, by all accounts, the Russian invaders have taken more casualties and encountered fiercer resistance than they had hoped for. Their armored drives in the east of the country, near Kharkiv, encountered tough sledding. Video has emerged of Russian casualties, burning Russian tank hulks, and downed helicopters and fighter bombers. It’s clear that Western-supplied anti-tank and anti-air missiles took a toll on the Russians. If the Kremlin had hoped for a repeat of the nearly bloodless (for our side) Western victory in Desert Storm, it didn’t get it.
Likewise, the Russian helicopter-borne assault on two airports in the vicinity of Kyiv was an effort to create a dynamic of panic and collapse near the capital. This effort failed. If all had gone well and the Russian high command had found itself to be pushing on an open door, the Russians would have brought in follow-on airborne troops, closed on the capital, and forced a regime change.
Instead, the Ukrainians counterattacked. As one would expect amid the fog of war, reports are mixed and confused about how exactly the action proceeded. But it appears that the Ukrainians, even if they did not completely destroy the Russian airborne units involved, at least forced the Russians to abandon their hope for a quick toppling of the government on the first day.
Third, despite all this, Russia’s resource advantage to plod on by sheer weight of men and materiel remains. By some estimates, something like 30 percent of Russian battalion tactical groups remained unengaged as of late Thursday night. The Russians are bloodied, but they have not been stopped. And now, if they choose, the Russians can begin to grind on the Ukrainians, isolating and then enveloping Ukrainian units before reducing them in detail.
So what can we expect in the coming days?
As the sun rises on Kyiv, mechanized forces are likely to push forward towards the outskirts of the capital on both the left and right banks of the Dnieper River. There are ominous signs of a Russian or Belarusian advance in the far west near the Polish border, which, if launched, could cut off supply routes flowing from NATO territory in the west. And, pushing out of Crimea, it appears the Russians have been most successful by far in the southern sector. If not slowed, Russian mechanized units could try to break out into open country and cut Ukraine in half along the line of the Dnieper.
The Russians now face a critical choice: escalate the level of violence to try to rescue a quick and complete victory — or accept either a more-limited triumph or a slower, longer war that could grow increasingly unpopular back home.
Rob Lee, a former U.S. Marine and a student and analyst of the Russian military, has written that “the Ukrainian military cannot prevent the Russian military from pushing farther into Ukraine.”
“The question,” Lee writes, “is whether Russian troops will go into cities and how bad that could get.”
Lee is right. The Russians have, so far, acted in a somewhat restrained manner. They have, compared to the Russian army’s operations in Syria, for example, appeared to be trying to avoid civilian casualties. To that end, they have avoided a direct assault on Kharkiv, a city of more than a million people that lies close to the Russian border. And they largely bypassed the southern town of Kherson in an effort to leapfrog forward towards the city of Mykolaiv. If they want to try to end the war quickly, however, Russian troops will have to storm a city center — likely Kyiv, a city of more than 3 million souls. How will the ground troops handle this? There are already rumors of low morale in the Russian ranks. Indeed, there are reports that Russian POWs have told their Ukrainian captors that they didn’t even know they would be sent into combat to kill Ukrainians!
Ukraine’s ambassador to the US just told us that a Russian platoon from the 74th Motorized Brigade has surrendered to Ukraine’s forces. She says that the Russian troops apparently had been unaware they were being sent to kill Ukrainians.
No confirmation yet from Russia’s military— Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) February 24, 2022
As armies throughout the bloody 20th century discovered, urban combat is hell. If faced with an opponent willing to dig in and fight it out, mechanized units and infantry can get chewed up, and fast. Faced with high casualties, would Russian troops be willing to turn to sheer fire power to blast their Ukrainian cousins out of the rubble like they did the Chechen rebels in Grozny? Would they be willing to fight block by bloody block? Would they be willing to turn rocket artillery barrages and white-phosphorus shells on a people that Putin calls essentially Russian?
War is not a game of Risk. This isn’t chess. A Ukrainian “victory” in the streets of Kyiv would be a horror and a bloodbath. But victory — defined as forcing the Russian army to call it quits, perhaps aided by a growing anti-war protest movement in Russia — is not utterly impossible if the Ukrainians are willing to pay its terrible price.
Make no mistake, the weight of the evidence, and the weight of Russian arms, still points towards a Russian victory. At dawn’s light, I fully expect the Russians to escalate the level of violence and try to win a smashing victory in Kyiv, and soon.
The cruel calculus of war looks likely to crush a free Ukraine beneath Vladimir Putin’s boot. At least for one day, however, Ukrainians resisted. Tomorrow will be worse.