By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

What bedevils Russian troops in Ukraine

Yesterday The New York Times reported that Russia moves to recruit more soldiers by eliminating its age limit for military service after a series of setbacks in Ukraine. The move comes after Russia has stumbled strategically, operationally, and tactically in Ukraine despite its sophisticated military equipment and multiple advantages on paper. It has been hampered by faulty planning assumptions, unrealistic timelines, and impractical objectives. It has suffered from inadequate supplies, bad logistics, and insufficient force protection. It has been impaired by poor leadership. These problems do not stop at technical equipment issues, poor training, or corruption. Instead, they are linked by an underlying core theme: the military’s lack of concern for the lives and well-being of its personnel. In Ukraine, the Russian military struggles to retrieve the bodies of its dead, obscures casualties and is indifferent to its worried military families. It may spend billions of dollars on new equipment, but it does not correctly treat soldiers’ injuries, and it generally does not appear to care tremendously whether troops are traumatized.

Jens Stoltenberg, NATO's secretary-general, said earlier this week that Russian efforts in the Donbas had also stalled, adding that "Russia is not achieving its strategic objectives." Whereby British military intelligence estimates that Russia has lost one-third of the ground combat forces it had gathered ahead of its invasion. Moscow’s forces have been bedeviled by their operational shortcomings and a fierce Ukrainian resistance, backed by sophisticated Western weapons. As Russia is trying to throw more forces into the fight, it sometimes brings in combat groups at less than full strength, including units that lost their failed effort to capture the capital, Kyiv.

British military intelligence estimates that Russia has lost one-third of the ground combat forces it had gathered ahead of its invasion. Moscow’s forces have been bedeviled by their operational shortcomings and a fierce Ukrainian resistance, backed by sophisticated Western weapons. As Russia is trying to throw more forces into the fight, it sometimes brings in combat groups at less than full strength, including units that lost their failed effort to capture the capital, Kyiv.

Instead of a mass mobilization campaign, which is likely to prove unpopular, Russia has cobbled together reinforcements by redeploying troops from occupied territories in Georgia, bringing in mercenaries from Syria, recruiting civilians in occupied regions in the Donbas, and coercing soldiers to stay on the battlefield by dangling extra payments to recruits. Ukrainian officials and lawmakers have also noticed Russia taking less experienced troops from more far-flung areas, such as Vladivostok’s easternmost Russian port city, instead of using elite units that suffered severe casualties at the beginning of the war. And the Pentagon believes that the paramilitary Wagner Group is active in the Donbas region. 

 

When Putin wants to Fight who will fill the Ranks?

There are also rumblings of discontent within Russia. Russian military recruitment offices across the country have been targeted with Molotov cocktails, likely to protest Russia’s backdoor efforts to mobilize troops, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War reported on Thursday. Russia’s usually patriotic military bloggers have also come to question Moscow’s execution of the war, the institute noted last week, after almost 500 troops and 80 pieces of military equipment were lost in a disastrous attempt to cross the Siverskyi Donets River. 

The current leaders of the Russian military may even have been willing to actively overlook systemic personnel maltreatment as long as it was kept quiet, rubles flowed into the defense budget, and weapons procurement continued as planned. Russia’s top commanders are not apolitical warrior scholars; they earned their positions by understanding that loyalty is more important than speaking truth to power. They approved the invasion plan despite all its clear flaws, the most obvious being that it could stretch the professional fighting force to breaking. There is no ready follow-on force to relieve the 190,000 troops Russia committed to this war, which means the troops will fight until exhaustion unless the Kremlin declares a mass mobilization.

 

The Russian military people’s problem

Of course, the Russian military understands that losing soldiers makes it harder to win wars.

Currently, Russian officials are stonewalling frightened families searching for news about their children. Some parents have been told that there is no information about their sons or that such information is secret. Others have been routed through an endless series of phone numbers as they hunt for updates, where some are accused of “hysterics.” Parents have even traveled to bases and hospitals directly for information about missing children, only rebuffed. The father of a conscript who disappeared aboard the sunken Moskva cruiser, for instance, went to the naval base in the Black Sea to ask where his son was. The local commander replied with a shrug: “Well, somewhere at sea.”

These struggles have not stopped desperate Russian parents from continuing to look, and they have gleaned information in other ways—via informal networks, social media, or even the Ukrainian government, which has offered to release some soldiers if their mothers come to take them. Other mothers, continuing a tragic tradition started in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, plan to take it upon themselves to travel to war zones to find their sons and bring them home. But these mothers’ hard work does not mean the military will correct course. Indeed, the current political climate in Russia is now perhaps even less likely to tolerate collective protests from soldiers’ families than it was in the late 1980s and 1990s. New legislation is stifling unwanted narratives about the military. The Russian authorities are working harder than ever to suppress individuals who say anything about the war that deviates from the official line—including by expressing unauthorized grief.

It is still too soon to tell how much jeopardy the professional enlisted program is in. Still, Russian men who would have otherwise joined Russia’s professional military might stop signing up. The country still has conscripts, but if the invasion’s popularity sags as the war drags on, Russian families may return to the old ways of keeping their sons away from the draft, such as through bribes or hiding them domestically or abroad. The military may have no choice but to change its personnel culture, but it will be too late to achieve its larger aims in Ukraine. It will also be too late to save the thousands of troops being carelessly sacrificed for Russia’s attempt at conquest.

 

And then there is the new importance of NATO

In less than two months, NATO leaders will meet in Madrid to endorse the alliance’s new strategy. The key question, therefore, is whether member states will use the moment to reforge NATO’s raison d’être to meet current and future challenges—in particular, by naming Russia as a threat to the alliance itself. Given the implications of Ukraine for the European and global order, the stakes could hardly be higher.

Some take the view that Madrid should mark a reprioritization of U.S. efforts away from Europe and back toward Asia. Their logic goes that not only is European defense spending increasing, but Russia has also demonstrated ineptitude in the prosecution of its war in Ukraine. That means the longer-term need for significant U.S. forces in Europe has also therefore declined. And, after all, China is the pacing threat for Department of Defense planning.

In fact, the opposite is true. For starters, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it abundantly clear that he views NATO as a strategic threat. Recent events suggest we should take these statements at face value. In the runup to the current war, some analysts developed elaborate rationales for why the buildup of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border didn’t mean an invasion was coming, such as a strengthened negotiating position vis-à-vis Ukraine’s future political directions. Another Russian invasion of Ukraine was so obviously strategically counterproductive that there must have been another reason for the buildup. In the event, there wasn’t.

And while Russian military incompetence has been startling, planners shouldn’t leap to conclusions. Russian forces were not able to capture Kyiv, but they have been able to seize tens of thousands of square miles of territory along Ukraine’s eastern border—at least for now. Estonia, a Baltic NATO member that borders Russia, is less than 20,000 square miles in size. Militaries can also reform, especially after disaster, as Ukraine’s own army did after its failures in 2014.

The United States has good reasons to want to keep NATO vibrant: The strategic benefits of U.S. leadership are manifold. Not only does American leadership in NATO provide pathways for organizing military coalitions, but it also affords the United States privileged status on trade partnerships and access to bases. If Putin achieves his aim of discrediting NATO, this could lead to trans-Atlantic strategic insolvency: a situation whereby allies, including the United States, are unable to meet their security obligations and, relatedly, maintain favorable standards of living for their populations.

Which brings us back to Madrid. The last time that NATO agreed on a strategic concept was in 2010. It is a document that specified that, among other things, defense of allied territory remains a critical mission for the alliance, but it is silent on naming nation-state threats to NATO. For a variety of domestic and international political reasons, building formal consensus on threats among 30 allied states is extremely challenging. Indeed, in the 2010 document Russia is viewed as an aspirational partner for NATO when it comes to European security—despite the warning sign of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. In the intervening years, Russia has conducted destabilizing disinformation campaigns in NATO states and has attacked Ukraine twice. And while NATO leaders have condemned Russian aggression, the rhetoric falls short of formally declaring Russia as a long-term strategic threat to the alliance.

Durable consensus requires clarity. To prepare NATO to contend with this threat over the long term requires a frank admission of the strategic realities that Russia poses in the alliance’s new strategic concept, to be adopted in Madrid. As a practical matter, this will commit NATO members to take budgeting, force planning, acquisition, and possible troop repositioning seriously—and put teeth into the declaration. This is needed for NATO planners to determine, for example, whether spending 2 percent of GDP on defense is sufficient to meet the challenges to the alliance.

But the real value of the document is what the collective members reaffirm as to what NATO continues to stand for, what it calls out as the threats to the member territory, and what it intends to do to address, deter, and, if necessary, defend against these threats. By stating up front that Russia is a formal threat, member states—and the alliance as a whole—will find it harder to backslide from their current cohesion. It is difficult to overstate how important it is for NATO to ensure its consensus is durable; as the war grinds on and publics begin feeling the economic effects of the conflict and sanctions on Russia, the temptation to dilute support to Ukraine will undoubtedly mount. Not to mention, calling it like it is will send an important message to Putin: NATO will not be deterred.

Words matter. It is time for NATO leaders to formally accept reality: Putin is a threat to the alliance and its members, and, therefore, they should declare so in the news strategic concept. Indeed, not declaring Russia a formal threat to NATO territory would compromise NATO’s credibility and would give Putin a pass for the atrocities and violations he has committed in Ukraine. Neither NATO nor the United States can afford to allow that to happen.

 

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