In an investigative report released this weekend, The New York Times (NYT) dissected what went wrong with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, given that Russian troops were meant to invade and capture Ukraine in a matter of hours. Through hundreds of Russian government emails, documents, invasion plans, military ledgers, propaganda directives, listening to Russian phone calls from the battlefield, and interviews with dozens of soldiers, senior officials, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s confidants who have known him for decades, the NYT details how the war has become Russia’s “greatest human and strategic calamity since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Below are some of the biggest revelations from the report:
Blunders
On 24 February, just before 6 am Moscow time, Putin announced his “special military operation” in Ukraine in a televised address. It began with an aerial bombardment of Kyiv’s air defences, communications, and radar installations with over 150 missiles from bombers, submarines, and ships. In fact, about 75 Russian aircraft, which is the size of Ukraine’s entire working air force, were used.
However, Ukrainian air force troops were asked to move to a backup base in central Ukraine where the majority of its force and planes were intact. They flew to new bases every day, waiting for the Russian Air Force to strike back. However, it took four days for Russia to strike, by which time Ukrainian units had already relocated to other commands.
Ukraine had already moved its defences—like Buk and S-300 missile launchers, along with its primary radio intelligence command and control centre—to new locations before the invasion began, but Russian missiles kept targeting the old sites, with nearly 60% missing their intended targets.
"Putin's War. The inside story of a catastrophe."
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 18, 2022
Outstanding and almost surreal — in a good way — journalism from the New York Times. https://t.co/uDH4Ds7qel Some of the details here are just astounding.
I wish it came with a "how we did this story" companion. [Free link]
“The failure to destroy Ukraine’s modest air defenses was one of the most significant blunders of the war, foiling Russia’s mighty air force early on,” the report said.
The document noted that part of Russia’s problem is agility; American officials pointed out that the Russian military is so rigid and centralised that it typically needed 48 to 72 hours to update its intelligence and get approval to for new targets, by which point Ukrainian targets have moved.
The same inflexibility has made the Russians an easy target with Ukrainian Stingers supplied by the United States (US), as they were hit while flying low to avoid being detected by Ukrainian radars.
Russian troops on the ground struggled as a result of insufficient air cover as they marched towards Kyiv and other large cities. One Russian soldier who was deployed from Belarus said he was given orders to follow armoured vehicles and reach Kyiv within 18 hours. In a reflection of how poorly-planned the operation was, however, he was given these orders just one hour before the invasion began. As a result, it took his unit well over a day just to cross the border.
Similarly, the 26th Tank Regiment was confident enough to believe that it would reach the Dnipro river within a day and block the roads leading to Kyiv. “And no matter how fierce the enemy was, the unit was expected to complete the mission on its own,” the report noted; the unit lost 16 vehicles in less than three weeks as per Russian documents seized and published by Ukraine.
Another column of over 30,000 troops that was pushing south toward the city of Chernihiv was destroyed by a group of Ukrainian defenders with anti-tank weapons, despite outnumbering them five-to-one.
Russia’s cyber warfare strategy, too, has had middling returns in its efforts to target Ukraine’s power stations, government computers, and communication systems.
More than 30 reporters, researchers and producers worked on this report, outlining the calamity of Putin’s war in Ukraine. We scoured the battlefields to recover battle plans, maps, and diaries, and spoke w Russian soldiers and Putin confidants. https://t.co/uQE1czUkrm
— Michael Schwirtz (@mschwirtz) December 18, 2022
With their plans for a speedy victory thwarted, Russian forces were suddenly confronted with the most basic of problems—insufficient food, water, and other supplies for a protracted campaign. Soldiers have resorted to looting grocery stores, hospitals, and homes.
As per a Pentagon intelligence report, Russian military drivers have poked holes in their gas tanks in order to disable their own vehicles to avoid going into battle.
As far back as January, a retired Russian general, Leonid Ivashov, saw disaster on the horizon, warning that using force against Ukraine would threaten “the very existence of Russia as a state.” He revealed that commanders he had spoken to had said they were told the war would be a “walk in the park.”
In this regard, Russia has blamed the West’s military assistance to Ukraine, for Russia’s unexpected difficulties in the war. “This is a big burden for us. […] It was just very hard to believe in such cynicism and in such bloodthirstiness on the part of the collective West,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov.
Before the invasion, US intelligence agencies identified Oleg Tsaryov as a puppet leader the Kremlin could install once it took over Ukraine. “I was there. I participated” in the invasion, he told NYT, but noted that he was never told the final details. “We’re losing Ukraine,” Tsaryov said, before adding, “We’ve already lost it.”
Hubris
According to the report, Putin has always considered Ukraine to be “an artificial nation used by the West to weaken Russia,” and returning Ukraine to Russia was his “biggest unfinished mission.” This was further propelled by the successful annexation of Crimea in 2014. “I took responsibility for everything,” Putin said after taking Crimea, according to a confidant.
“I will be gone sooner or later, but Crimea will have been returned to Russia forever,” the Russian leader allegedly said.
By the summer of 2021, during a meeting that was supposed to be about the economy, Putin condemned the West, saying, “We tried to partner with the West for many years, but the partnership was not accepted, it didn’t work.”
Moreover, though Putin saw Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “sincerely willing” to compromise with Russia, his hopes were dashed after Zelensky cracked down on pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. In fact, Putin called him “an enabler of Nazism” during a meeting with then-Israeli Prime Minister (PM) Naftali Bennett.
Furthermore, Putin’s allies were not aware of Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine until the last day. In fact, Peskov insisted that he found out about the invasion only once it had begun. This was echoed by Anton Vaino, Putin’s chief of staff, and Aleksei Gromov, his media adviser.
Businessmen have also blamed Putin for putting them in the firing line of Western sanctions.
What an account of how Russia started this war! MUST READ. How Putin’s War in Ukraine Became a Catastrophe for Russia - The New York Times https://t.co/IAcUnC8YeZ
— Han ten Broeke (@HanTenBroeke) December 18, 2022
A business tycoon revealed that Putin called a meeting on 24 February to discuss the regulation of cryptocurrency but instead paraded in front of television cameras, for all the world to see, to “tar everyone there... to get everyone sanctioned.”
“If everyone around you is telling you for 22 years that you are a super-genius, then you will start to believe that this is who you are,” said Oleg Tinkov, a former Russian banking tycoon who turned against Putin this year. “Russian businesspeople, Russian officials, the Russian people — they saw a czar in him. He just went nuts,” he disclosed.
Internal Rot
The report noted that only Russia’s propaganda machine appeared to run smoothly amid the chaos, with the Russian security service (FSB) feeding false information about the country’s alleged success in the Ukraine war.
However, Putin has privately acknowledged that his military is struggling. During a meeting with Bennett in March, the Russian leader admitted that the Ukrainians were tougher “than I was told,” according to two people familiar with the exchange. “This will probably be much more difficult than we thought. But the war is on their territory, not ours. We are a big country and we have patience,” he conceded.
Following the messy invasion of Georgia in 2008, the West believed that the Russian military was significantly modernised. US officials were led to believe by the Russians that they could wage a war and destroy Ukraine, as their military was on par with the US.
“Russia drew a lot of lessons from the Georgia war and started to rebuild their armed forces, but they built a new Potemkin village,” said Gintaras Bagdonas, a former head of Lithuania’s military intelligence. Much of the modernisation was just window-dressing, he remarked.
In this regard, the government recruited former army captain Sergei Khrabrykh for $1.2 million to transform the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division, which was hailed as a unit that would defend the country in case of a NATO invasion, within just one month. “Just about everything was destroyed,” Khrabrykh revealed, adding that he had to hang enormous patriotic banners to hide the startling decay.
American officials have thus revised their intelligence to note that much of Russia’s equipment is poorly manufactured or in short supply. Moreover, it has become clear that Russian forces were and are not ready to invade a country but merely to defend against NATO or the US. Russia has not trained its infantry, air and artillery forces to work in concert. Furthermore, it had no clear Plan B after the march on Kyiv failed, and commanders were afraid to report bad news to their bosses.
Collapsing Front
According to NYT, Russia seized more territory than it could defend, leaving thousands of square miles in the hands of skeleton crews of underfed, undertrained, and poorly equipped fighters. Many were conscripts with gear from the 1940s or little more than printouts from the internet describing how to use a sniper rifle, suggesting that several soldiers are learning how to fight on the fly.
Poorly-trained Russian troops have repeatedly fallen to Ukrainian attacks and many have disobeyed direct commands as a result.
“Nobody is going to stay alive,” one Russian soldier said he realised after being ordered into a fifth march directly in the sights of Ukrainian artillery. Finally, he and his demoralised comrades refused to go.
The U.S. tried to stop Ukraine from killing a top Russian general, Valery Gerasimov, when American officials learned he was going to the frontlines. Dozens of Russian soldiers were said to be killed. General Gerasimov wasn’t one of them. https://t.co/yJsKkqIUIB
— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) December 19, 2022
Ukraine has also killed a number of Russian generals visiting the frontlines. In April, when American officials found out that Russian chief of general staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov planned to visit, they warned Ukrainian commanders to back off, as killing Gerasimov could sharply escalate the conflict. However, it was too late to call off the attack and dozens of Russians were killed in the strike, but not Gerasimov.
Divided Ranks
The report said that Putin had divided his war into fiefdoms, and many of his fighters are being commanded by people who are not even part of the military, like his former bodyguard Ramzan Kadyrov and Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin. These armies often function like rivals, competing for weapons and at times viciously turning on one another. In fact, one Russian soldier recounted how the clashes became violent, with a Russian tank commander deliberately charging at his supposed allies and blowing up their checkpoint.
Nevertheless, Wagner, which has 8,000 troops fighting in Ukraine, receives glowing coverage on Russian state television. In addition, Peskov has denied that Russia’s separate fighting forces are causing confusion or division, insisting they all report to Russian military commanders.
Cannon Fodder
The report points out that Putin compared himself to Peter the Great in June as a leader “returning” and “strengthening” Russian lands.
In late November, he met with mothers of Russian soldiers and showed no remorse for sending Russians to their deaths. In fact, he told one woman whose son was killed in Ukraine that tens of thousands of Russians die each year from car accidents and alcohol abuse, “but your son lived, you understand? He reached his goal.”
He told another that her son was fighting “neo Nazis” in Ukraine and correcting the mistakes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Russia “enthusiastically indulged in the fact” that the West was “trying to control us.”
“He’s not crazy and he’s not sick,” said one person who has known Putin since the 1990s, adding, “He’s an absolute dictator who made a wrong decision — a smart dictator who made a wrong decision.”
Lots of interesting and very relevant content in this New York Times special project. But the war is not over yet… https://t.co/CnPZZmdKif
— Samuel Bendett (@SamBendett) December 17, 2022
In a rare face-to-face meeting with the Americans last month in Ankara, Turkey the Russians seemed unapologetic and claimed that Russia will not give up. One NATO member is warning allies that Putin is ready to accept the deaths or injuries of as many as 300,000 Russian troops, roughly three times his estimated losses so far.
The report says that despite the failures in the war, Russian elites are not talking about it publicly.
“To say anything at gunpoint, even if you want to say it — it’s better not to,” opined oligarch Andrey Melnichenko, who says he has been unfairly sanctioned for the war and forced to leave Switzerland for Dubai.