Maksym Kryvonis and his Chern [1] in Jerzy Hoffman’s movie With Fire and Sword (1999)
A people's way of war is shaped by experience. This experience is influenced by factors like access to resources, technology, internal political cohesion, and the shifting balance-of-power amongst neighbors. However, more than anything, geography influences how a people fight.
In this essay, I discuss the recurrent traits that Ukrainians have shown in previous wars and how they manifest themselves in this current Russo-Ukrainian War. Geography is at the root of these characteristics. I distill my analysis into four topics, namely:
(1) the prevalence of insurgency in Ukrainian warfare.
(2) the tradition of populism and volunteerism.
(3) the need for mobility across the country's vast open spaces; and
(4) the preference for artillery as the dominant arm on the battlefield.
I focus on insurgency in this newsletter. The issues of populism and volunteerism, mobility, and artillery shall be addressed later.
1. Insurgency
Insurgency is the war of the weak. It seeks to attack the vulnerable soft areas of a conventional army, which is otherwise too strong to be defeated in open battle. The attacks are achieved by irregular forces onto the rear or flanks of the enemy through disguise and surprise. Ukrainians had to resort to insurgency in most of their wars. Unable to form a state, they could not raise or supply regular armies. The primary cause was geography.
For centuries, geography has cursed Ukraine. Except for the Prypiat Marshes in the north and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov in the south, it has few defensible borders. The western and eastern borders have been recurring invasion routes. The Polovetsians, Pechenihs, Khazars, Mongols and Russians attacked from the east. The Poles, Lithuanians, Austrians, Hungarians, and Germans came from the west.
At the same time, Ukraine is a vast country, territorially the second largest in Europe after Russia. It is mostly flat, but bisected by rivers, the largest of which is the Dnieper. The size of the territory and bisecting rivers encourage regionalism, which impede internal political cohesion, especially in the face of repeated invasion from the outside. Thus, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine was rarely ruled by Ukrainians. Rather, it has been a colony of Poland, Russia (later the Soviet Union), and Austro-Hungary. This resulted in the absorption and gradual replacement of the Ukrainian feudal elite and urban burgher class by the ruling powers, and doomed the masses to centuries of backbreaking serfdom, well into the mid-19th century. [2] Following Stalin's collectivization of agriculture in 1932-1933, much of the population was returned to another form of serfdom, when Soviet laws were enacted forbidding Ukrainian peasants from leaving their collective farms.
Geography punished Ukraine in another way. Its strategic location at the cross-roads of Europe, Asia and the Middle East made it a frequent battleground. Invariably Ukrainians were mobilized to die in somebody else's wars or were caught in the crossfire as civilians. For instance, Ukraine was a primary battleground during both World Wars. In the First World War, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fought each other as conscripts in the opposing armies of Austro-Hungary and Russia. Furthermore, official Soviet records indicate that 3.5 million Ukrainians died fighting Hitler in the ranks of the Red Army during the Second World War - more than the dead of France, Britain and the United States combined. [3] Another 3.5 million civilian citizens of Ukraine died as collateral casualties during the fighting on the Eastern Front. In the interest of completeness and transparency, approximately 100,000 Ukrainians fought against the Soviets as members of the German Wehrmacht and the SS.
With Ukrainian sovereignty fleeting over the centuries, it is no wonder that Ukraine rarely engaged in conventional war on its own. The Ukrainian victory in the Battle of Kyiv in March 2022 registers as the first clear cut victory by Ukrainian arms against Russia since a coalition commanded by Ukrainian Cossack hetman Ivan Vyhovsky defeated a Russian army near Konotop on the Sosnivka River in 1659 - a span of 338 years. [4] In the interim, Ukrainians refused to accept their lot as downtrodden serfs. They resorted to insurgency to change their fate in scores of regional insurrections against central authority of every sort, often under the leadership of marginalized former nobles and burghers. One can safely say that the Ukrainians were the most "revolting" people of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
The most famous of these revolts was the Khmelnytsky uprising against the Polish crown in 1648. Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a disaffected captain of a regular Cossack regiment in the service of the Poles, felt aggrieved by the local administration for not redressing his legal claims against a powerful Polish neighbor, who ransacked his estate, killed his son, and kidnapped his wife. He convinced the Cossacks in Southern Ukraine, who were outside the reach of Polish authority, to attack Polish outposts along the southern margins of the Dnieper River basin. Very quickly, the rebellion engulfed much of present Ukraine west of the Dnieper River and portions of the east bank, as well. It quickly drew in most of the serfs on the Polish landed estates in the area. A bloodbath ensued as the serfs took revenge on their feudal masters and were slaughtered in turn by local Polish defense detachments. The Jews of Ukraine were caught in the middle of this conflagration, as some were leaseholders or tradesmen in the feudal system of the day and viewed by the serfs as aligned with the landowners. They suffered horribly at the hands of the rebels. [5]
Painting of Maksym Kryvonis and his Chern by Mykola Samokysh
Khmelnytsky was soon engaged in both conventional as well as insurgent warfare against Polish and Lithuanian armies that were sent into Ukraine to crush the revolt. His core of 30,000 veteran regular Cossacks was augmented by reportedly over 100,000 poorly trained and ill-disciplined former serfs, commonly referred to as the chern. One of the more famous commanders of the chern was Colonel Maxym Kryvonis, who is pictured in the painting above and the photograph at the introduction to this essay. The serf irregulars were utilized in insurgent tactics onto Polish supply lines and outlying outposts, while the regular Cossack regiments fought the Poles in the open field. Moreover, due to a lack of competent cavalry (more about that later in the third section), Khmelnytsky was forced into temporary alliances with the Tatar khan in Crimea for the intermittent lease of 20,000 Tatar light cavalry. These were used to screen Khmelnytsky's flanks. Khmelnytsky fought pitched battles that were some of the largest of the age in campaigns from 1648 to 1653, during which the Tatars would periodically abandon him, in pursuit of a balance-of-power policy vis a vis Poland and the Cossacks. Although, Khmelnytsky's military acumen kept the Poles at bay, the unreliability of his Tatar partners and attrition from frequent campaigning forced him to look elsewhere for an ally. In 1654, he sought an alliance with the Russian tsar Alexei I. Unfortunately, the resulting Treaty of Pereyaslav led to the gradual absorption of the Cossack state by its powerful Russian neighbor. The last hope for Cossack statehood was extinguished in 1708 during the height of the Great Northern War with the defeat of the Swedes by tsar Peter I at the Battle of Poltava. The Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who threw in his lot with Carl XII of Sweden, had to flee the country. Meanwhile, the Cossack officer class, which sided with Peter I, attempted to assimilate into the Russian nobility, while the Ukrainian masses remained trapped in the shackles of serfdom.
The abolition of serfdom in Austro-Hungary in 1848 and in the Russian Empire in 1861 alleviated the lot of the peasantry - somewhat. But the instinct for insurgent warfare was imbedded in the Ukrainian psyche to stay. It manifested itself with a vengence following the First World War during the chaos of the Revolution and Russian Civil War during 1917-1923. Numerous local chieftains, called otamany, fought independent local insurgent campaigns against the central authority of the Austrian, German, Communist, and White Russian armies, which sought to control Ukraine during this unstable period. Some even resisted the centralizing authority of the nascent Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR). The most successful of these otamany was the anarchist Nestor Makhno and his Insurgent Army of Ukraine, who became a master of mobile insurgent warfare on the steppes of Southern Ukraine. He fought all comers until his theater of operations was whittled away by the Bolsheviks in 1923. Regardless, these local chieftains could never coordinate their actions, underlying the regionalism that is a symptom of Ukraine's vast territorial mass.
The Anarchist Nestor Makhno circa 1919-1923
Even in those rare instances when Ukrainian statehood was achieved, insurgent warfare was still practiced by its armies. During the Revolution and Civil War period between 1917-1923 the small regular army of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR), although ably led by former officers of the Russian tsarist army and more than capable of engaging in conventional battle, was invariably supported by numerous irregular units, whose several local chieftains would enter temporary military alliances with the Ukrainian state. These would operate as insurgent forces along the flanks and rear of the enemy, attacking rear echelons and supply areas. Unfortunately, these otamany were just as likely to disappear at the most inopportune moments and lead their merry band of "warriors" to rape, pillage and plunder undefended towns and landed estates along the open spaces of the Ukrainian steppe. Non-combatants, particularly the Jews, suffered grievous loss of life and property. By the end of 1919 even the regular regiments of the UNR were familiar with insurgent tactics, splitting into small sub-units when confronted by a larger enemy force.
An exception to the rule is the experience of the army of the Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR), the Halytska Armia (UHA). Consisting of 35,000 front line fighters and commanded by veterans of the Austro-Hungarian army, it waged a tough but ultimately unsuccessful struggle for control of Western Ukraine against the army of the newly formed Second Polish Republic. This conflict was waged from November 1918 to July 1919 as mostly a conventional campaign. When forced to retreat from Western Ukraine, the UHA agreed to join the army of the UNR in battle against the Bolsheviks and later the White Russians. Despite its better discipline, excellent artillery, and superior experience in conventional war, the UHA never fully adjusted to insurgent warfare along the open steppe. There were a few exceptions, like the 6th Brigade under the command of Major Yulian Holovinsky or the mounted machine gun detachment of the 4th Brigade under 1st Lieutenant Saul "Saltso" Rothenberg, who adopted insurgent tactics. However, most of the army, particularly the elite 1st Brigade USS (Ukraiinski Sitchovi Striltsi) and its commander, Major Osyp Bukshovany, were rooted in their Austro-Hungarian habit of set-piece battle and, generally, ineffective.
The legacy of insurgency manifested itself even in the most extreme circumstances. In the face of severe repression during Stalin's rule, Ukrainian peasants found ways to resist the campaign of the Communist regime to impose forced collectivization. In 1930, the widespread women’s revolts (babski bunty) thwarted Stalin's first effort to drive the Ukrainian peasant onto the collective farm.[6] It was not until the Communists resorted to hunger as a weapon in 1932-1933, was the will of the peasantry temporarily broken. Moreover, beginning in World War Two, the disciplined and uncompromising insurgent campaign of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) resisted both Nazi and then Communist control of Western Ukraine into the mid-1950s.
Fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the Carpathian Mountains (1947)
The current Russo-Ukrainian War is the largest conventional war that Ukraine has waged in its history; larger in numbers and scope than even the wars of the Khmelnytsky period in the 17th century. In many respects, the underlying conditions of this war are different from previous wars. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Ukraine was primarily urban and industrialized, compared to the vast agricultural country that experienced the previous era of Ukrainian warfare in 1917-1923. Not surprisingly, the new Ukrainian state that formed in 1991 was weak and, like all post-Soviet states, quickly became rife with corruption. Nonetheless, Ukraine enjoyed over twenty years of relative stability during which it had the opportunity to build a semblance of governmental institutions and vestiges of civil society. For the first time in its history the vast size of modern Ukraine turned out to be a positive influence, rather than a detriment. The regionalism that is imposed by the sheer size of the country, together with the weak central state, made it conducive to democracy - violent on occasion and even bordering on anarchy, but democracy, nonetheless. This democracy developed staying power and strengthened the bonds between the different constituencies when attacked from outside. Beginning with Putin's hybrid war in 2014 and especially after Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, Ukrainians were forced to put aside their regional differences and to close ranks. With each region realizing that it is too weak to sustain itself on its own against the Russian hegemon, or surrounding neighbors like Poland and Hungary, Ukrainians realized they needed to cooperate to survive, despite their animosities.
There is historical precedent for such military cooperation. In 1919 the army of the UNR fought side-by-side with their Western Ukrainian brethren from the ZUNR against the Poles, Bolsheviks, and the White Russians. The central government of the UNR realized that it could not withstand Bolshevik invasion from the east without the help of the Western Ukrainian army, the Halytska Armia. At the same time in March-May 1919 the Western Ukrainians enjoyed intermittent support of the UNR in both weapons and troops during their war against the Poles. Unfortunately, the alliance fell apart by November 1919 when both armies and their governments disagreed over the war against the White Russian Volunteer Army. Each party became more focused on the differences with their respective Polish or Russian enemy rather than cooperation with their fellow Ukrainians. Nevertheless, the example for future cooperation was set.
Notwithstanding the scope and intensity of this present conventional war, the Ukrainian instinct for insurgency manifested itself rather starkly during the first weeks following invasion. It is becoming apparent that although the Ukrainian General Staff expected the Russians to invade from Belarus in the north and was aware of the Russian plan to seize Hostamel airport near Kyiv with paratroopers, it never imagined that Putin's plan envisioned an attack through the marshy wooded terrain to the west of the Dnieper River through the Chornobyl nuclear exclusion zone. Thus, most of the regular brigades of the Ukrainian army were concentrated in the north at Chernihiv, the northeast at Sumy, east at Kharkiv and southeast in the Donbas. Only a few brigades were located west of the Dnieper or south near Crimea. Nonetheless, recovering quickly from their initial surprise, newly organized battalions of the Territorial Defense Force were thrown hastily together without any training and sent forward into the dense woods to the west and northwest of Kyiv to counterattack the advancing Russians. Veterans of the fighting in the Donbas in 2014 acted as de facto non-commissioned officers and guided their inexperienced fellow-volunteers in attacks onto the flanks and rear of isolated Russian units, which were strung out along narrow roads through the forest. Applying insurgent tactics, the Ukrainian volunteers disrupted the Russian regulars that were caught further back in the attacking columns. [7] Meanwhile, the Ukrainian 26th and 43d Artillery Brigades kept firing their guns non-stop at the Russian spearheads consisting of elite airborne vozdushno dessantnie voiska (VDV), causing frightful casualties. The irregular tactics of the mostly untrained Ukrainian territorials bought the Ukrainian regular army time to bring up reinforcements, including two battalion tactical groups (BTGs) of the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, to seal off any chance of further Russian penetration. Concurrently, a wide Russian flanking maneuver to cut off Ukrainian supply lines from the west along the Zhytomyr-Kyiv highway was thwarted by a counterattack by two BTGs from the 14th Mechanized and 95th Air-Assault Brigades. By late March, the Russians decided to cut their losses and retreated from Kyiv toward the Belarussian border.
Destroyed Russian personnel carrier on a road through the forest northwest of Kyiv.
Similarly, Russian attacks from Sumy towards Kyiv from the northeast were disrupted by insurgent tactics. Small teams from both the regular 58th Motorized Brigade and local territorial defense forces attacked Russian supply lines in wooded or built-up areas, which became elongated after the Russian spearheads were purposely allowed to penetrate too far from their base of supplies in Russia.
Moreover, an active insurgency is fighting the Russian invaders in the occupied areas of Ukraine. For instance, prior to the Russian retreat from Kherson in November 2022, local insurgents were regularly assassinating collaborators and Russian government officials. They were actively supported by Ukraine's security service, the SBU, and special forces, who infiltrated behind enemy lines to coordinate raids with the locals. A similar campaign is ongoing east of the Dnieper River in occupied areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, particularly in attacking the railroad system and bridges, which supply Russian forces south of Zaporizhzhia and along the eastern bank of the Dnieper. One may assume that this insurgency will acquire more importance if the Ukrainian army launches a major offensive in Southern Ukraine towards the Black Sea and Azov coasts.
In the final analysis, the insurgent tactics of the Ukrainian ad hoc territorial defense brigades in attacking Russian supply lines, in conjunction with the massed artillery fire of the regular Ukrainian ground forces, and the anti-air defense denial of Ukrainian airspace to Russian airpower, were instrumental in thwarting the Russian attempt to seize Kyiv through the Chornobyl nuclear exclusion zone in February-March 2022.
The history of insurgency in the Ukrainian military tradition is tied closely to populism and volunteerism. My discussion of the effects of populism and volunteerism on the Ukrainian way of war will be published shortly.
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[1] Chern is the Ukrainian term for unruly mob, particularly associated with the mass of serfs who mobilized during the insurrections of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries to change their social and economic status.
[2] Hrushevsky, Mykhailo. History of Ukraine - Rus. Vol. 6. Translated by Leonid Heretz. (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press: Edmonton - Toronto, 2012), 185-230.
[3] Timothy Snyder. "Germany's Historical Responsibility for Ukraine." Tyzhden, (Kyiv) 05/07/2022. http://tyzhden.ua/timothy-snyder-germany-s-historical-responsibility-for-ukraine/
[4] Ukrainian Cossacks were members of paramilitary communities who settled in Southern Ukraine between the 15th and 17th centuries in territory outside of the control of Polish and Russian central authority. Composed primarily of runaway serfs and adventurers, they were hired by the Polish crown as mercenaries during its frequent wars against Turkey and Russia, where they were used primarily as pikemen and arquebusiers (early form of musketeers), as well as siege troops. Beginning in 1582, a limited number of Cossacks were allowed to register with the Polish state and to form regiments on Polish-controlled territory. A hetman was the democratically elected chieftain of the Cossacks. A coalition commanded by Ukrainian Cossack hetman Ivan Vyhovsky defeated a Russian army commanded by princes Grigory Romodanovsky, Aleksey Trubetskoy, and Semyon Pozharsky near Konotop on the Sosnivka River during the Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667.
[5] Subtelny, Orest. Ukraine a History. (University of Toronto Press: Toronto - Buffalo - London, 1988) 125-134.
[6] Stalin, Joseph. "Dizziness from Success." Pravda (Moscow), 03/02/1930.
[7] Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds. “Ukraine at War: Paving the Road from Survival to Victory.” Special Report, pp. 15-17. RUSI, 07/04/2022.
Should be required reading in Ukie School.