II. NATO Influence on the Ukrainian Way of War.
Man Management, Mission Command, and the Indirect Approach
Despite the corrosive effects of corruption on the state of readiness of the Ukrainian armed forces after independence in 1991, and the underfunding by successive presidential administrations, a patriotic cadre of officers resisted the hollowing out of their army and attempted to push reforms from within. They endeavored to break with their Soviet past and focused outward towards the example of the Western military model. Although, it is easy to label this as the NATO influence, the two military cultures that the Ukrainian reformers aspired to emulate most were that of the United States and Great Britain.
The most practical vehicle for exposing the Ukrainian armed forces to alternative military practices was through the participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions and by contributing forces to the occupation of Iraq after its capture by the United States in 2003. Since July 1992, Ukraine has contributed military personnel to UN peacekeeping operations. For example, Ukraine was a participant in the NATO led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan and deployed troops as part of NATO's peacekeeping mission to the country. These troops were deployed as cohesive companies or battalions with their light armored vehicles. During these deployments, Ukrainian officers had the opportunity to operate under the command of Western commands, some of them from NATO member countries. Other Ukrainian forces participated in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo, Liberia and the Ivory Coast in 2005 and 2006. One of the commanders of the Ukrainian peacekeeping contingents in Liberia was lieutenant general Andriy Kovalchuk, current commander of the operational command "South."
Furthermore, approximately 5,000 Ukrainian soldiers in total served in Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation. Ukraine provided the seventh-largest number of forces in Iraq with about 1,700 soldiers from 2003-2005 – 18 of them were killed. Some of the Ukrainian officers who served in Iraq or as peacekeepers include Viktor Muzhenko, former Ukrainian commander of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) during the fighting over the Donbas from 2014-2018.[1] The 5th Separate Mechanized Brigade was the first formation of the Ukrainian armed forces that served in Iraq from August 2003 to March 2004. It was replaced by the 6th and then the 7th Separate Mechanized Brigades during the remaining term of Ukrainian participation that ended in 2008.
Lieutenant General Hennadii Vorobiov
The Ukrainian officer who was most steadfast in pressing for reform was lieutenant general Hennadii Vorobiov, commander of the ground forces of Ukraine from 2009 to January 14, 2014. This is confirmed not only by current or former Ukrainian military insiders but also by lieutenant-general Mark Hertling, commander of U.S. forces in Europe from 2011-2012.[2] Hertling personally interacted with Vorobiov during his time in command. Vorobiov endeavored to reorient the Ukrainian army towards Western standards, despite powerful headwinds from pro-Russian circles within the Ukrainian government. One of his singular achievements was to send select Ukrainian non-commissioned officers (NCOs) to an American NCO school in Germany. Furthermore, The U.S. Army started accepting Ukrainian captains and majors to attend American or British command-and-staff schools for battalion and brigade commanders. Unfortunately, Vorobiov was cashiered out of the service with many other officers because of a misguided populist initiative after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 to remove anyone associated with the administration of the disgraced president Viktor Yanukhovych. This was ironic, since Vorobiov's refusal to heed Yanukhovych's call for the Ukrainian army to leave the barracks and to intercede on the side of the government was one of the primary reasons for Yanukhovych's decision to flee to Russia. Thankfully, Vorobiov was later reinstated by president Petro Poroshenko and proceeded to head the National Defense University in Kyiv, the Ukrainian strategic level officer's course. He died unexpectedly at his desk from a heart attack on November 18, 2018. His passing was marked by a few short newspaper obituaries, but the loss was felt deeply by his many acolytes in the Ukrainian defense establishment. Hennadii Vorobiov is one of the unsung heroes of the reform movement inside of the armed forces of Ukraine. Even after Vorobiov's death, his tireless work contributed substantially to the readiness and combat effectiveness of the Ukrainian army. It is no exaggeration to argue that the seeds for Ukrainian victory in the Battle of Kyiv in February-March 2022 were sown by the vision of general Vorobiov some ten years earlier.
Vorobiov's successor in pushing for reform towards a Western model was the controversial general Viktor Muzhenko, commander of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) against Russian-proxies in the Donbas in 2014 and Chief of the Ukrainian General Staff from 2015-2019. Muzhenko has taken much criticism for the battlefield defeats at Ilovaisk (August 2014) and Debaltseve (February 2015) during the period when the Ukrainian armed forces were still in the early stages of reorganization following Russia's surreptitious hybrid war in the Donbas in 2014. He was accused of grandstanding for the cameras, for instance during a premature assault of the strategic hill named Saur Mohyla in July 2014 or near Donetsk airport in February 2015, where he was photographed in full tactical paraphernalia, but behind the front. Muzhenko weathered the storm of criticism and stayed at his post, primarily because president Petro Poroshenko knew that Muzhenko was not afraid to fight the Russians when many of his contemporaries feared a backlash from pro-Russian centers of power within the government. Muzhenko was finally dismissed by president Volodymyr Zelensky on September 2, 2019. Regardless, he never lost the respect of the professional officer class. Muzhenko was photographed in his general's uniform peering over an operational map next to Valery Zaluzhny, the current Ukrainian commanding general of the armed forces, during the first days of this Russo-Ukrainian War.
Generals Muzhenko and Zaluzhny in command bunker after February 24, 2022
Muzhenko was a big advocate of Ukraine's transition towards a mission command style at the lower tactical level. He would repeatedly encourage Ukrainian junior commanders to exercise initiative and to strive to meet NATO standards of operating procedure. After all, he was exposed to NATO staff practices and procedures while acting as chief-of-staff of the Ukrainian 5th Separate Mechanized Brigade in Iraq in 2003. During his term as Chief of the Ukrainian General Staff, Muzhenko pushed for more training exercises of larger units on a grander scale. Furthermore, he pushed for Ukrainian participation in NATO exercises, where commanders would be exposed to interoperability with their Western counterparts. Moreover, select Ukrainian majors and lieutenant colonels with combat experience in the Donbas in 2014-2015, continued to attend professional courses at American and British command-and-staff colleges. Although, it must be said, Muzhenko's own staff practices as commander of the ATO during 2014-2015 were characterized by micro-management and a more traditional Soviet-style top-down approach. On the other hand, Muzhenko will likely retort that he had no choice, given the tactical-operational inexperience of his subordinate commanders.
As a result of the initiative of generals Vorobiov and Muzhenko, Ukrainian battalions, usually from the elite air-assault brigades, participated regularly in NATO maneuvers. Moreover, every year Ukrainians participated in Rapid Trident, an annual training exercise involving NATO and Ukrainian forces, where ground, air and naval units had the opportunity to train alongside U.S. Army and other European counterparts. During these exercises, Ukrainian commanders and staff officers were exposed to Western styled operations and staff procedures. Similarly, beginning in 2017 the Ukrainian army began to send the winning platoon from their annual tank competition to compete at the yearly Strong Europe Tank Challenge that was hosted by the U.S. 7th Army in Germany. Here they not only learned from their hosts but also reciprocated by offering practical combat wisdom from their hard-won experience in the Donbas.
Finally, beginning in 2015, NATO instructors from Britain, the United States, Canada, Poland, Netherlands and the Baltic states began conducting tactical training of entire Ukrainian battalions at the Combat Training Center at Yavoriv near Lviv in Western Ukraine. Of non-NATO members, Finland also contributed instructors. The training consisted of exercises that gradually built up the trainee unit's pool of knowledge, culminating in mock platoon and company sized attacks, including envelopments from the enemy flank. Moreover, beginning in 2015 and ending in February 2022, as part of Operation Orbital, 22,000 Ukrainian personnel were trained in the use of advanced weapons systems in England.
As a result of the above-described training and interoperability with NATO and UN forces, the two areas where the Ukrainian military has been most influenced are in man management and in the principle of mission command. The third area of influence from the West has nothing to do with training but is conceptual - the focus on the indirect approach to strategy. I discuss each below.
a. Man Management; Leadership and Troop Handling.
Ironically, Ukrainian exposure to NATO operations and training exercises did not substantively change their approach to operational art. Rather, the biggest transformation occurred in the philosophical approach to man management and leadership. Whereas the Russian tradition, going back to Peter the Great's reforms in the Great Northern War after defeat at the Battle of Narva in 1700, stresses strict authority of officers over enlisted and requires blind obedience from the ranks, post-World War II Western practice requires the junior officer to be a much more benevolent leader who maintains the morale of his subordinates, encourages team building, and cares for their welfare, much as a coach would for a sports team. Of course, the Western approach to leadership never deviates from the principle of "mission comes first" - meaning that the lieutenant is a commander first and understands that he must send his men to die, if necessary. Of course, a key role in this style of leadership is played by an experienced non-commission officer (NCO) who is the go-between the officer and the enlisted, so there is no unnecessary familiarity between the commander and his men. In contrast, the Russian army does not cloak its NCOs with the authority to perform the leadership tasks of his Western counterpart. Russian sergeants achieve rank because of their greater technical expertise in operating more complex weaponry - not because they command respect and authority within the lower ranks. Thus, the routine tasks of administration, maintenance of weapons, and training all fall on the shoulders of the Russian officer, while his NATO counterpart is left to focus more on tactical matters, while the daily routine of managing a platoon is delegated to the NCO. In practical terms, the effective management of a Russian platoon is beyond the capabilities of its inexperienced junior commander, let alone the company commander, without reverting to a strict hierarchical top-down command style, reinforced by brutal hazing of the junior ranks by the longer serving enlisted, that produces a limited capacity for complex tactics beyond frontal assault. Thus, the initiative for flanking maneuver in the Russian army rarely occurs at lower than battalion level, and even here, it is found mostly in the elite airborne vozdushno dessantnie voiska (VDV). Moreover, without the oversight of an experienced NCO who is cloaked with the requisite authority, routine maintenance in tank and artillery units is inadequate, resulting in quicker breakdowns of Russian equipment.
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
General Hertling recounts how Ukrainian general Vorobiov was fascinated with the role of the American NCO while visiting an American NCO school in Germany in 2010.[3] Vorobiov conversed with American servicemen in the mess hall, to learn of their views on their place in the chain of command. Unfortunately, Vorobiov was not able to establish a similar NCO school in Ukraine during his time as commander of the ground forces. However, he was able to launch the momentum to elevate the role of the Ukrainian NCO in the leadership dynamics of lower-level Ukrainian tactical units. His dream was eventually realized when an NCO academy was established in 2021. The school was able to graduate only a few hundred NCOs by the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Unfortunately, Ukraine's need for mass mobilization and organization of numerous territorial defense brigades after the invasion, brought over 300,000 additional men and women into the armed forces. Such a sudden increase outstripped the ability of the Ukrainian military establishment to supply the necessary number of NCOs to adequately staff the increase in fighting strength. This void of enlisted leaders has been partially offset by the thousands of mobilized enlisted personnel who fought previously in the Donbas between 2014 and 2020. These have managed to teach their uninitiated fellow soldiers the basic survival techniques that are essential during the critical first weeks at the front. The limitations of this approach, however, are discussed later.
But perhaps the most important change that was spurred by Vorobiov's leadership initiatives and Muzhenko's follow-up, was seen in the Ukrainian officer academies in Lviv and Odessa, as well as the tank school in Kharkiv. Junior commanders were introduced to Western humanist leadership principles that emphasized a new appreciation for the physical and psychological welfare of their enlisted subordinates. The experience of war amplified the utility of such leadership during the first Russian military incursion into Ukraine in 2014. Ukrainian graduates of the officer's academies, schooled in the traditional Soviet hierarchical and autocratic leadership style, did not encounter the impressionable 19-year-old conscripts they expected to command, but ran up against a mass of volunteers who were much older and wiser, some in their 40s and 50s, even those who were veterans of the Afghanistan War. The traditional autocratic approach simply did not work, and the more pragmatic lieutenants had to accept a more collective style, in effect leadership by committee. A causal factor to this new reality was that Ukraine did not have an effective system of military justice in place to enforce discipline, when fighting broke out in 2014. Violations of military discipline were subject to the Ukrainian civil criminal code, which was administered by civilian judges. Thus, this synthesis of traditional Russian autocracy and popular Ukrainian volunteerism manifests itself in the current Ukrainian leadership style at the lower tactical level today, which will be examined in a subsequent newsletter that discusses the native Ukrainian idiosyncrasies during war.
Irrespective of the reforms in junior leadership training, the sudden mass mobilization of Ukrainian men and women in February 2022 overwhelmed the capacity of the Ukrainian academies to produce enough junior officers to assume command over the hundreds of thousands of new recruits and volunteers. Older reserve officers, many without combat experience and none with the requisite training, had to fill the void. In practice, command over many platoons devolved to prior enlisted with combat experience in the fighting in the Donbas during 2014-2015. In effect, thousands of combat veterans of the previous Donbas fighting made a substantial contribution to victory in the Battle of Kyiv in February-March 2022, by acting as de-facto NCOs who guided their neophyte fellow soldiers through the deadly learning curve during the first weeks at the front.
Nevertheless, the initial input of the combat veterans on the fighting began to wane as casualties began to accumulate. The old hands from the fighting in 2014-2015 could not compensate for the lack of adequate preparation of the new recruits for modern war. The mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians overwhelmed the ability of the Ukrainians armed forces to provide even basic training. Too many troops, both in the regular army, as well as the locally raised territorial defense brigades, were sent to the front lines after only a week or two of instruction. The previous fighting in the Donbas after the Battle of Debaltseve in January-February 2015 consisted of sporadic positional warfare between small infantry units that competed for a few small villages and trench lines. Such experience, while adequate for positional warfare, where infantry occupies prepared positions and may be called upon to carry out a local counterattack over a short distance, is useless in mobile operations that require coordination of mechanized maneuver and supporting artillery fire. Here again, the Ukrainians turned to the professional training of NATO instructors to redress this need.
NATO instructors from Britain, the United States, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Canada have been training Ukrainian companies and battalions at the Combat Training Center near Yavoriv near Lviv in Western Ukraine since 2014. However, the intensity of the fighting since February 24, 2022, created an exponential need for the training of entire new brigades to enable the rotation of exhausted regular units out of the line. Beginning in July 2022, Britain agreed to accept entire Ukrainian battalions for basic infantry training at its training centers as part of Operation Interflex. Reportedly, close to 10,000 troops have finished the course of instruction and returned to Ukraine. Since information about the Ukrainian order of battle is very difficult to determine because of stringent Ukrainian operational security, it is unknown whether these have arrived at the front lines. Nevertheless, we must assume that these will enter the fighting soon or are being nurtured for a future Ukrainian offensive. There is speculation that the Ukrainian General Staff plans to incorporate the British trained infantry into heavy mechanized brigades, which when equipped with American Bradley and German Marder armored fighting vehicles and Abrams and Leopard 2 tanks, may be launched to attack prepared Russian positions in Zaporizhzhia oblast. Given that British infantry training is world class, observers of this war eagerly await anecdotal evidence of the battlefield performance of these troops. In any case, one may assume that these trainees will receive experienced officers and NCOs from established brigades to offset the lack of combat experience of the rank and file.
Additionally, since July 2022 Ukrainian troops from the artillery, rocket artillery and anti-air missile units have travelled to the U.S. training base in Grafenwoehr, Germany and the continental United States to receive specialized training in the use and maintenance of American M777 155 mm artillery pieces, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS). These have helped to redress some of the imbalances between the more numerous Russian forces and their weapons. Indirectly, these training missions further exposed Ukrainians to American methods and procedures in the use of such advanced weaponry. Furthermore, in January 2023 Ukrainian crews were flown the United States for training on the Patriot anti-air missile defense system, which the Ukrainians hope to bring online to defend their cities and key infrastructure from Russian ballistic missiles.
b. Mission Command.
Mission command is a decentralized process where a superior gives subordinates general directives regarding the primary objective, allowing the junior officers to exercise initiative to accomplish their mission. This empowers the junior officers with the flexibility to react to changing conditions at the front and to conduct lateral coordination with fellow junior officers, without waiting for permission from the top. Such a process speeds up decision-making and leaves discretion with commanders who are closest to the situation on the ground. The overall commander retains a modicum of control by delineating the main effort from mere supporting attacks, by allocating supplies where needed and by holding back a reserve. This structure links all of the subordinates conceptually, by focusing their efforts on supporting the main effort. Of course, the commander can adjust to changing circumstances by ordering a shift in main effort, which sets off an adjustment amongst the subordinates.
Western militaries encourage mission command at the tactical level; or at least pay lip service to its advantages in theory. Although, paying lip service to mission command does not automatically translate into consistent application in the field, even in the best militaries. In my time in the Marine Corps from 1979 to 1989, admittedly a relatively peaceful period, mission command was quite the rage. But when lieutenants and captains tried to exercise initiative during those rare occasions where time was allocated for regimental sized maneuvers, many an ambitious battalion commander would chase down and reign in subordinates for fear that these would run amuck; threatening the lieutenant colonel's rare opportunity to impress superiors with his firm tactical control. Regardless, generals Vorobiov and Muzhenko were impressed by the flexibility of decentralized control at the tactical level during NATO operations in Iraq or during NATO training, in stark contrast to their own cumbersome Soviet-styled practices.
It is easy to argue that, given the lethal nature of today’s transparent conventional battlefield, dispersion of forces should also reflect command structures which are decentralized, with initiative delegated to junior officers to adroitly respond to changing conditions. In fact, military pundits in the West have given the Ukrainian commanders at the junior and company level high marks for the decentralized style of command that they exhibited during the early defensive battles against advancing Russian columns during the defense of Kyiv.
Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in their article “Ukraine at War. Paving the Road from Survival to Victory,” describe their observations of the Ukrainian army during the early phase of the war.[4] They found that the general mobilization of Ukrainian reserves for war brought together people from diverse social strata with a wide range of technical expertise and management skills. This phenomenon optimally democratized the army for effective mission command at the lower level. For example, they describe a platoon planning a hasty counterattack through a “council of war” between the regular army junior lieutenant and platoon sergeant, on the one hand, and several respected enlisted with technical and management experience in civilian life, on the other. Such an approach resulted in a creative tactical solution that was highly effective because it was unconventional.
Officer cadets on parade at the Lviv Academy of the Ground Forces of Ukraine
Nevertheless, these traits are hard to duplicate after eleven months of brutal fighting where the Ukrainian army has expanded from a front-line strength of 150,000 combatants to over 300,000 personnel, while losing over one thousand junior officers in battle. Even if on abbreviated course schedules, the officer's academies cannot make up the shortfall. Moreover, inexperienced reserve officers without the latest tactical training have had to take the place of the fallen, resulting in a drop-off in performance. Efforts should be under way to grant battlefield commissions to proven enlisted and send them to junior officer's courses. But the intensity of the fighting makes it difficult to pull valuable fighters out of the line.
Moreover, Watling and Reynolds have their doubts whether these tactical tendencies can prove equally effective on offense. Such an approach may be effective in organizing quick local counterattacks up to company level while on defense. It may even pay dividends in planning a break-through of enemy positions at the forward edge of the battle area in positional war, where a local company commander is given the leeway to plan a breach of forward defenses based on a collaborative approach with his subordinates. But decentralized control detracts from an attack in depth that depends on the coordination of multiple layers of follow-on forces, logistics and supporting arms that are expected to gain the opponent’s rear. As a point of reference, Melitopil is located 100 kilometers south of the front lines in Zaporizhzhia oblast. Thus, the timetable and movement of follow-on forces, their logistics and long-range artillery and tactical air support for a deep offensive need to be arranged in advance from above.
A free-wheeling attack that is dependent on the whim of a junior commander after the initial breakthrough of the enemy positions that goes off-script makes it very difficult to support with artillery and supplies and eventually results in friction that brings the offensive to a halt. This is the domain of an experienced and smooth functioning staff, which knows how to synchronize the movement and support of units in the attack. According to Watling and Reynolds, such staff work will have to impose its will at battalion level and above. Unfortunately, only a few of the better Ukrainian brigades possess such experience. Watling and Reynolds had the opportunity to observe the brigade staff of the 95th air assault brigade in action during defensive operations west of Kyiv, where not only regular battalions but newly raised battalions of the territorial defense were subordinated to its command. Furthermore, the spectacular Ukrainian breakthrough at Balaklia and subsequent deep offensive to Kupiansk and Izyum in September 2022 was carried out by the mobile staffs of the 92nd Mechanized and 25th Airborne and 80th Air Assault brigades, all elite. Alas, only a handful of Ukrainian brigade staffs meet this standard of excellence. More such staffs will have to be trained at command-and-staff courses for experienced captains and majors, if a large Ukrainian offensive is to exploit the initial breakthrough of the forward edge of the battle area in the heavily defended Zaporizhzhia oblast.
c. Sir Basil Liddell Hart and the Indirect Approach
The last area of Western influence on Ukrainian warfighting concerns the strategic level. One of the initial reasons for the attraction of a Western model of warfighting to Ukrainian reformers had nothing to do with joint exercises or operations with NATO forces. Instead, it was the work of one Sir Basil Liddell Hart, English military historian, news correspondent and theorist, who died in 1970. Liddell Hart served as a junior infantry officer in France during the First-World War. He was badly gassed during the Battle of the Somme and was sidelined to teach recruits in England. After the war he turned to writing and journalism about military topics. During a career that spanned over fifty years, he made many enemies within the British military establishment, for what he deemed to be an unimaginative approach to strategy in the Great War and later in World War II. Nonetheless, he won over thousands of military officers the world over with his interpretation of military campaigns, both ancient and modern, in which he claimed to have found a common thread to victory - the indirect approach. Liddell Hart understood the "indirect approach" to mean an attack from an unexpected direction or paradigm to psychologically unbalance an adversary, preferably by placing him on the horns of a dilemma with undesirable options. Reportedly, his writings influenced no less than German general Heinz Guderian, the "father" of blitzkrieg, as well as the commanders of the Israeli Defense Force, who applied Liddell Hart's tenets during the 1947-1949 War of Independence. Liddell Hart's books were translated into multiple languages and copies could be found in the personal effects of direct adversaries in the same war. A famous example is from the Israeli War of Independence, when an Israeli commander captured his Egyptian opponent's earmarked copy - a unique war trophy, indeed.[5]
The first of Liddell Hart's books that was introduced to Soviet military professionals was his "History of World War II," which was translated into Russian in the late 1970s. However, the work that created the greatest stir was the revised second edition of his classic Strategy - an update of his 1929 Decisive Wars of History - which was translated into Russian under the title Strategia nepriamykh deystviy in 2008.[6] This translation was available to Ukrainian officers, who no doubt devoured it as part of their professional reading. The work is not a detailed methodical tract, like those of the Russian theorists Alexander Svechin, Vladimir Triofillov and Georgi Isserson, or a philosophical treatise, like Clausewitz's On War. [6] On the contrary, it is easier reading, which focuses on the decisive factors in each campaign in an entertaining style. Liddell Hart has been accused of being selective in his choice of campaigns or for glossing over problematic facts within a campaign to support his underlying thesis by no less than John Mearsheimer, the "realist" political scientist at the University of Chicago, who has been outspoken in his criticism of US support for Ukraine.[7] Nevertheless, Liddell Hart's book about the strategy of the indirect approach continues to attract readers amongst military professionals for the simple reason that it encourages the use of creativity and imagination in crafting unique solutions to strategic problems. Liddell Hart places great emphasis on attacking an adversary's line of communication and logistics as a precondition to victory. Therefore, it is no surprise that commentators saw Liddell Hart's influence in the Ukrainian strategy to use the American supplied HIMARS rocket artillery to "corrode"[8] Russia's cumbersome logistics system in the prelude to the Russian retreat from Kherson and the west bank of the Dnieper River. The political pundit Max Boot aptly called Ukraine's approach the ‘thousand bee sting’ strategy and directly attributed its inspiration to Liddell Hart's classic work.[9]
Thus, an entertaining and intellectually stimulating book like Strategy of the Indirect Approach, inspired reformers in the Ukrainian armed forces to explore the Anglo-American approach to war as a possible alternative to their top-down methodical Soviet style. This was the catalyst that led to the development of ties between the Ukrainian military and Anglo-American armies that, in turn, led to a transformation more along Western lines - to a degree. The Ukrainians retained characteristics that are unique to their historical experience, which I hope to discuss in my next newsletter, barring any dramatic developments in this war.
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[1] The Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) was launched in May 2014 by then president Petro Poroshenko under the auspices of Ukraine's security service (SBU) as a response to the illegal takeover of portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts by Russian separatist proxies. It contained both anti-terrorist and military components. In May 2018 the ATO was renamed the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) and responsibility was transferred to the military.
[2] Mark Hertling. "I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here's What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies." The Bulwark. Retrieved January 26, 2022. https://www.thebulwark.com/i-commanded-u-s-army-europe-heres-what-i-saw-in-the-russian-and-ukrainian-armies/
[3] Hertling, ibid.
[4] Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds. "Ukraine at War: Paving the Road from Survival to Victory." Special Report, pp. 15-17. RUSI, 4 July 2022.
[5] Basil H. Liddell Hart. “Strategy.” 2d. rev. ed. (Meridian: London, 1991)
[6] Лиддел Гарт Б. Стратегия непрямых действий / Б. Лиддел Гарт. – (М.: ЭКСМО, 2008).
[7] John J. Mearsheimer, "Liddell Hart and the Weight of History." (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988)
[8] Mick Ryan, 1 August 2022,
[9] Max Boot. "Why Kyiv’s ‘thousand bee sting’ strategy is costing Russia dearly." Washington Post. August 17, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/ukraine-indirect-approach-hitting-russians-war/