Ukraine, Russia: Wrong advice, disastrous results

Before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his military misadventure in Ukraine his intelligence officers did not give him a full and fair appraisal of the actual strength and preparedness of the country’s armed forces.

Western analysts argue that they were afraid to reveal to him the truth about the situation. He should have been well briefed and up to date.

He would, however, have known how the system works and understood its limitations and should have hesitated to put the Russian military to the test.

Nevertheless, he dispatched between 100,000-130,000 troops to Ukraine’s borders with Russia and Belarus. For weeks the Russians claimed they had no plans to invade and it is not clear whether invasion was inevitable.

If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had, early on, stated his willingness to meet Moscow’s demand for a guarantee that Ukraine would not join Nato and agree to negotiate over Donbas and Crimea, war might have been avoided. He did not, unfortunately, avail himself of the opportunity which would have saved his country, Russia and the world a lot of grief.

He was, instead, encouraged to resist Russian politico-military pressure by US President Joe Biden who was determined to become a war leader at a time his rating was falling in opinion polls.

Facing calls to resign over partying during COVID lockdown, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson fell into lockstep with Biden. Zelensky warned against provocative rhetoric but was ignored.

In response to verbal provocation, Putin clearly thought Russia could settle the situation in Russia’s favour with military means.

With one million active personnel, Russia has, in theory, the largest army in the region and fifth largest in the world. However, only 40 per cent of the troops are “contractors” who are deployed in front line positions. The rest are one-year conscripts, many of whom are serving because they have no choice, are often abused, demoralised, and not thrown into battle.

To make matters worse, reports from Ukraine suggest that tanks and armoured vehicles have not been well maintained and broke down, fuel was not provided to those deployed deep in Ukraine, and ammunition for personal weapons was insufficient for urban fighting so troops relied on artillery, mortars, and aerial bombing.

Despite these deficiencies, Putin’s generals gambled on an early, easy victory which would enable Putin to secure his political objectives. However, the generals did not observe the iron-clad rule which holds that attacking forces should outnumber defenders by a ratio of three-to-one or the Napoleonic dictum which says that the “spiritual [morale] is to the materiel as three-to- one.”

The generals, clearly, did not calculate the size of the mobilisation of Ukraine’s armed forces and the country’s will to fight. Ukraine has 245,000 active servicemen and 220,000 rese- vists, plus 45,000 in the National Guard and additional armed men in territorial defence battalions.

Even if its forces were under strength, this means that Ukraine could muster around half a million troops to defend against the invading Russians.

Since Ukraine is vast, Russia could never hope to occupy the interior of the country and has had to restrict its offensive to its northern and south-eastern edges while maintaining crack contingents in the Donbas region and Crimea.

While the Russians have probably been outnumbered and perhaps outgunned, this did not prevent them from wreaking devastation from afar with mortars, artillery, medium-range ballistic missiles, and aerial bombs. The mistaken Ukrainian practice of placing legitimate military targets in urban areas partly explains why the damage and devastation of cities, towns and villages has been pervasive.

Authoritarian heads like Putin are not the only leaders to be misled by generals. Democrats face the same problem. During April and May last year, US military intelligence reported the Afghan Taliban would isolate Kabul in 30-60 days and the city would fall in 90 days. The administration pulled out non-essential embassy staff but did not arrange for full-scale evacuations of US military personnel and Afghan employees. Senior commanders, apparently, did not take this warning seriously – not even in the days ahead of the deadline set by President Joe Biden for US troop withdrawal.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby stated on August 13th, “No potential outcome has to be inevitable, including the fall of Kabul, which everybody seems to be reporting about.” Although this was not true, he insisted that the UN-trained and armed Afghan military remained ready to fight the Taliban. “The narrative that in every place, in every way, the Afghan forces are simply folding up and walking away is not accurate,” he stated. It is interesting to note that he has not lost his job.

An anonymous intelligence official told ABC News on the 16th, “(US) leaders were told by the military it would take no time at all for the Taliban to take everything. No one listened.”

Senior generals clearly told Biden what he wanted to hear while the Taliban advanced.

This made it inevitable that the 1975 panicked US evacuation of Saigon as the Viet Cong entered the city would be repeated in Kabul. Blinded to the truth, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken refused to comment on the administration’s misbegotten policy on Afghanistan and said “this is manifestly not Saigon” at the very time US military helicopters were flying US officials from the embassy to Kabul’s airport.

Biden was prepared to be fooled as he was determined to complete the US withdrawal by September 11th, 2021, two decades after Afghanistan-based, Taliban-hosted Al Qaeda carried out its attacks on New York and Washington. Biden took the decision to carry out a wrong-headed and ignorant deal concluded by Donald Trump with the notoriously untrustworthy Taliban although there was every reason to expect a US rout rather than an orderly pullout.

While Putin has been driven by the threat that Ukraine could become a base for Nato on Russia’s border, Biden was motivated by personal and party political reasons rather than military realities. He wanted to be the president to end the failed 20-year US involvement in Afghanistan and “bring the boys home.” Putin has devastated Ukraine to force Zelensky to abandon his country’s Nato ambitions while Biden has left a devastated Afghanistan to the brutal and reactionary Taliban and, by pro- voking Putin, has contributed to the destruction of Ukraine and the negative global repercussions of the war.