As the Russo-Ukrainian war grinds its way through the mud and muck of December, the number one question on the mind of observers is whether either side will be able to launch an offensive once the ground freezes sufficiently for mechanized operations. Although the Ukrainians have maintained the initiative since September, recent Russian mobilization efforts keep open the possibility of a major Russian offensive anywhere along the line of contact or from Belarus in the north. Therefore, the Ukrainian command must decide whether to maintain the initiative by making one more serious effort to recapture key territory before Spring or to conserve its strength for the repulse of an inevitable Russian onslaught later.
Meanwhile, the intensity of this artillery war is creating shortages of available artillery shells and rockets on both sides. The Russians are turning to the North Koreans to make up their shortfall while the Ukrainians have run up against the hard truth that the United States and Europe do not manufacture enough 155 mm artillery shells or High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) rockets to keep up with the voracious appetite of Ukrainian gunners. Criticism has been leveled against the alleged recent Ukrainian practice of relying on artillery fire instead of combined arms maneuver, as prescribed by NATO doctrine. Critics in the U.S. have started to recommend that the Ukrainians conserve ammunition and fight more like NATO. The Ukrainians retort with the argument that they do not have the overwhelming airpower that NATO enjoys, and that the volume of their artillery fire is dwarfed by that of Russia's. In any case, they point out that Ukrainian artillery relies on its precision to offset the numerical superiority of its Russian counterpart.
So, while waiting for a resumption of a war of movement, I take this opportunity to make my observations regarding the historical trends and cultural preferences that influence the Ukrainian style of war. Ten months of this most intense conflict afford plenty of examples from which to draw conclusions. I present my observations in four sections, as follows:
(1) the role of Russian military theory;
(2) recent NATO influence;
(3) volunteerism, improvisation and civil society; and
(4) the default preference for artillery.
This section will address the Russian influence, both negative and positive, on the manner in which Ukrainians fight. Subsequent sections will be published later.
1. The Russian Influence; Operational Art.
It may seem paradoxical to begin a discussion of the the Ukrainian way of war by focusing on Ukraine's enemy - Russia. However, this is perfectly logical. Russian political domination of Ukraine since the Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654 resulted in centuries of Ukrainian service in the Russian armed forces, both under the tsars of imperial Russia as well as the commissars of the Soviet Union.[1] Hundreds of Ukrainians attained higher rank in Russia's wars. For instance, the future Hetman of Ukraine Pavlo Skoropadsky commanded an entire Russian Army towards the end of the First World War, before agreeing to accept German support to become the hereditary sovereign of Ukraine after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1917. Several former tsarist generals served in Skoropadsky's army, to include Oleksandr Hrekov and Mykola Yunakiv. After Skropadsky's overthrow in November of 1918, Yunakiw entered the service of the Army of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) of Symon Petliura, while Hrekov commanded the Halytska Armia of the Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR). However, the vast majority of Skoropadsky's generals chose to serve in the Volunteer Army of the White Russian General Anton Denikin. In contrast, many Ukrainian enlisted and junior officers in Russian service were eventually mobilized into the Red Army. During World War II and the Cold War that followed six Ukrainians attained the exalted rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. These included Semeyon Timoshenko, Hryhoriy Kulyk, Andriy Yeryomenko, Petro Koshovyi and Pavlo Batytskyi.
Obviously, Ukrainian generals in the Russian army were exposed to the Russian way of war and its theoretical foundations. These principles were passed on through local military academies and command-and-staff colleges that transitioned to Ukrainian control when the country declared independence in 1991. The Ukrainian curriculum continued to mimic the latest developments in Russian military practice up to the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict over the Donbas in 2014. Even after the Ukrainians entered into combat with the Russians, they retained what appeared to work from the Russian example. For instance, between 2014 and February 2022, the Ukrainians duplicated the Russian practice of organizing their brigades into battalion-tactical groups (BTGs). In that vein, they generally adhered to the Russian table of organization for both manpower and weaponry at the platoon, company, and battalion level.
Most of the successful Ukrainian field commanders in this war entered service after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. These include the Ukrainian commanding general Valery Zaluzhny, lieutenant-general Serhiy Shaptala, his chief-of-staff, major-general Andriy Kovalchuk, commander of the operational command "South," and major-general Viktor Nykoliuk, commander of the operational command "North." All are alumni of either the Lviv or Odessa military academies, or the Kharkiv tank school. Moreover, most attended the National Defense University of Ukraine in Kyiv after achieving higher rank. Only colonel-general Oleksandr Syrsky, commander of the operational-strategic group Khortytsia, and lieutenant-general Serhiy Naev, commander of the Joint Forces command, began their careers in the Red Army - before 1991. In fact, both are graduates of the Moscow military academy. Nonetheless, all have absorbed the Russian principles of war and translated this legacy into the fighting that began on February 23, 2022. It is a paradox that during this war the Ukrainians adhered to these principles more so than the Russians, who ignored some of them to their detriment. So, what are these principles?
Russian military literature considers the pursuit of war an art as well as a science. It consists of three elements, namely, strategy, tactics, and the operational art. Strategy is formulated at the highest level of government regarding the feasibility and use of military force to achieve the political objectives of foreign policy. Tactics, on the other hand, involve the realm of battle, i.e. the coordination of fires, maneuver and logistics of formations up to brigade level that are in direct contact with the enemy - which can extend in depth to the combined range of both opposing artilleries, 80 kilometers. In comparison, the operational art links tactical events with strategic objectives through the prosecution of campaigns. It involves the planning, organization, logistics, sequencing, and synchronization of the movement and supporting fires of larger formations, usually at corps level or above, in a theater of operations. The theater of operations can be hundreds of kilometers in breadth and in depth. A campaign covers a greater span of time than a battle because it may consist of consecutive battles.
Of the three elements of war, none is more admired in the Russian tradition than that of the operational art. After all, it offers the commander the greatest opportunity to exercise creativity and imagination. By comparison, strategy remains in the grips of the hard reality of the balance-of-power amongst nations, which changes ever so slowly and involves abstract thinking. Tactics, on the other hand, can be more readily reduced to scientific and objectively quantifiable methods, models and processes, like the targeting of artillery, for instance. Thus, the tactical commander may not have much discretion in how to fight an engagement.
Alexander A. Svechin
Operational art was first identified and defined in the seminal work of Russian general Alexander A. Svechin, Yevolutsia voennoho iskutstva (The Development of the Military Art) in 1927. He wrote that "...the operational art guides tactical creativity, which ties together tactical events into a campaign that achieves the strategic objective."[2] Svechin, a tsarist staff officer, rejected the prevailing view that victory depended on a decisive battle and stressed that the size of modern armies made it necessary to attrit the enemy in several battles, if not several campaigns, before victory was possible. He wrote his work based not only on his experiences in the First World War, but also the Russian Civil War and the Soviet-Polish War of 1920-1921. In the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik commanders had to plan and conduct not one, but multiple campaigns against a coalition of enemies on widely dispersed fronts along the vast expanses of Russia. In fact, their failure to coordinate two separate offensives north and south of the Prypiat Marshes during the Soviet-Polish War resulted in defeat at Warsaw in August 1920. Svechin's idea of a cumulative attritional style of warfare involving multiple fronts was incorporated into the Red Army's Field Regulations of 1929 that stressed the sequencing and synchronization of separate campaigns as prerequisites to defeating the enemy through attrition. Svechin's work regarding the operational art was later modified in essays and treatises by Vladimir Triandfillov and Georgi Issersen to focus more on maneuver in depth instead of mere attrition.[3] Their ideas were adopted by the charismatic Bolshevik commander Mykhail Tukhachevsky in drafting the 1935 Instructions for Deep Battle and then incorporating the concept of Deep Operations in the Field Regulations of 1936, where during a campaign the enemy was to be annihilated by attack through the depth of the battle zone by artillery, airpower and successive echelons of attacking ground forces.[4] Ironically, Tukhachevsky's dashing but reckless offensive towards Warsaw in 1920 contributed to Soviet defeat in the Soviet-Polish War, when a devastating Polish riposte by Jozef Pilsudsky drove into the undefended southern flank of Tukhachevsky's attacking columns. Tukhachevsky blamed Joseph Stalin, commissar of the army attacking south of the Prypiat Marshes, for deliberately failing to support his attack because of internal political squabbles. It is no surprise that Tukhachevsky failed to survive Stalin's purge of the Red Army in 1937.
Marshal Mykhail Tukhachevsky
It is noteworthy that the ideas of Svechin, Tukhachevsky, Triandfillov and Isserson regarding the operational art received a revival during the height of the Cold War when they inspired the U.S. Army to formulate its AirLand Battle Doctrine in the 1980s when preparing to defend against an expected Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Therefore, NATO's concept of operational art traces its roots to the Russian tradition.[5]
In recent years, the body of work regarding the Russian view of operational art has been augmented by lectures and essays in the professional literature by Valery Gerasimov, current Chief of the Russian General Staff. In lectures to fellow officers Gerasimov noted that recent scientific advances in long-range missile fire, satellite surveillance and communications have simultaneously expanded the depth of the battlefield yet constricted response time, to blur the conceptual boundary between strategy and tactics. In the West, greater attention has been placed on Gerasimov's articulation of "New Generation Warfare" in his 2013 article titled "The Value of Science in Prediction," commonly referred to as "hybrid warfare," where war is conducted across the spectrum of kinetic and non-kinetic means, i.e. information, cyber, irregular and/or regular conventional warfare.[6] Nonetheless, Gerasimov’s implication regarding the contraction of time and space, as well as the commensurate obfuscation of the operational art, is mentioned as well. An example of both ideas in practice is the temporary incursion of regular Russian forces into the Donbas in August-September 2014. The Russian regulars, disguised as "little green men," were ordered to surreptitiously intercede in Ukraine when the Ukrainian armed forces were on the verge of crushing the irregular Russian-supported forces of the Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples' Republics (DNR/LNR). Each commander of the eight-or-so Russian BTGs that slipped across the border in 2014, typically a lieutenant-colonel, had authority to call in not only self-propelled artillery and MLRS rocket fire, but also long-range tactical missiles, like the Tochka-2, that had a range of over 100 kilometers. The net effect of this command arrangement was to fuse tactical events and operational art into a single process.
It is ironic that Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian General Staff, was blamed for the failure to capture Kyiv during the initial stage of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February-March 2022. Truth be told, the invasion was planned by Putin's cronies in the security services. Consequently, there was no overall commander of the Russian invasion, as the commanders in each separate sector fought without coordinating with their counterparts. Nevertheless, to the casual observer or dilettante commentator Gerasimov botched the invasion of Ukraine and irreversibly tarnished his pre-war reputation as a military theorist. Apparently, that is not the case when it comes to the opinion of Ukraine's senior military professionals. In an illuminating interview in the renown news magazine The Economist on December 3, 2022, Valery Zaluzhny, Ukrainian commander, declared his continued admiration for Gerasimov's ideas.[8] The paradox is palpable, in that the beleaguered Gerasimov, assailed by critics on all sides within Russia, finds an admirer in the person of his direct counterpart - Zaluzhny.
General Valery Gerasimov
Historically, the Russians have been rather crude at the tactical level, relying on mass and artillery to outnumber and then batter their opponents into submission through attrition. While awkward in their tactical approach, the Russians remain tough to beat on the battlefield. Just ask Napoleon about his experiences at the Battles of Eylau in 1807 or Borodino in 1812, where the Russians refused to relinquish the field and kept feeding a seemingly endless supply of reserves into the fray, despite horrendous losses. These characteristics have been evident in 2022 during the Russian offensives to seize Severdonetsk and Lysychansk in May and June, and more recently in the assault on Bakhmut. Where the Russians have failed to live up to their reputation in the current war was in the force structure that they introduced in 2008. Through a conscious decision to fund technologically superior weapons at the expense of infantry, they denied themselves their historical advantage - mass. Consequently, the Russian Army did not have enough manpower to properly prosecute the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Furthermore, they were unable to replace the heavy losses they suffered during the initial assault on Kyiv. What was left of the infantry was pilfered away in the battles of Severdonetsk and Lysychansk, as well as as in the defense of Kherson. As a result, the Russian command did not leave enough troops to cover the vulnerable Kharkiv front, which the Ukrainians exploited to launch their lightning offensive towards Kupiansk and Izyum in September. With Putin's recent mobilization order, the Russians have begun to revert to form by trying to accumulate mass. Time will tell whether the mobilization of poorly trained recruits permits them to recapture the initiative from the Ukrainians. So far, the Russian army has been throwing numbers forward at Bakhmut with reckless abandon. After all, the Ukrainians mobilized more manpower in the early stage of the war and are still able to match the Russians in infantry.
In contrast to the tactical level, Russian operations have often been nuanced; even elegant. An early application of Russian operational art can be found in the scorched-earth policy of marshal Mykhail Kutuzov during Napoleon's Russian campaign in 1812, where the Russian army declined battle while retreating towards Moscow, thereby stretching Bonoparte's logistics for thousand of kilometers, making the French army vulnerable to collapse with the onset of Winter. However, one of the finest examples of Russian operational art is Operation Uranus, the Soviet counter-offensive at the Battle of Stalingrad in November 1942. While bleeding the Wehrmacht white through crude and brutal street fighting tactics inside of Stalingrad, Marshal Georgy Zhukov broke through north and south of the city in sectors that were occupied by weaker Romanian and Italian forces and proceeded to envelop the 6th German Army from the rear. (See map at beginning of article)
The current Russo-Ukrainian war also reveals instances of Russian styled operational art. Ironically, it is the Ukrainians and not the Russians who are applying theory into practice. At the onset of the invasion, the Russians actually attempted a coup de main, akin to the US invasion of Panama in 1989, but at a larger scale and without sufficient troops.[7] Conversely, General Zaluzhny's plan during the initial phase of the war of luring Russian attack columns towards Kyiv in order to stretch their logistics to the breaking point, is similar to Kutuzov’s plan in 1812 of forcing Napoleon to attack towards Moscow while elongating and exposing the logistics train of the French army. Bereft of sufficient artillery in their assaults toward Kyiv, the Russian army, and their elite airborne vozdushno dessantni viiska (VDV) troops in particular, suffered horrendous casualties. Stymied by more numerous and accurate Ukrainian artillery and assailed on their flanks by light infantry with anti-tank missiles, the Russians had to retreat from Kyiv.
General Valery Zaluzhny
However, the best application of the Russian theory of operational art can be found in the spectacular Ukrainian counter-offensive in Kharkiv oblast in early September. Relying on attrition and misdirection on the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk fronts to strip Russian reserves away from the Kharkiv front, Ukrainian general Oleksandr Syrsky launched a devastating breakthrough from Balaklia towards Kupiansk and Izyum - 90 kilometers away. The theoretical foundations of Svechin's idea of sequenced and synchronized operations on multiple fronts to attrit the enemy along with Tukhachevsky's concepts of the Deep Battle and Deep Operations are clearly evident.
Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrsky
This is not to say that the Russian military influence has been beneficial to Ukraine in every respect. The chronic corruption that has plagued the Soviet and then Russian armed forces was even more prevalent in the Ukrainian army during the run-up to the conflict over the Donbas in 2014. Reckless and wanton fiscal neglect between 1995 and 2014 during the Kuchma, Yushchenko and Yanukhovych presidential administrations encouraged a hollowing out of the Ukrainian armed forces, to Russia’s delight. A bloated and underpaid Ukrainian senior officer corps, often pro-Russian in orientation, sold off sophisticated equipment to black market arms dealers to supplement their income. Consequently, the Ukrainian army was barely able to field three brigades with the required equipment when Russian supported separatists seized Donetsk and Luhansk in May 2014. It was only the patriotism and professionalism of a handful of junior and mid-level officers who took command of thousands of unruly and inexperienced civilian volunteers who arrived to oppose Russian aggression in the Donbas that resulted in a modicum of resistance. These officers had to undergo an unforgiving ordeal by combat during 2014-2016 against pro-Russian separatists and Russian regular forces before they learned to fight competently. It was from this pool of officers that President Volodymyr Zelensky selected the commanders that currently lead the Ukrainian army. Some of these individuals were exposed to new practices and principles when training with NATO forces or while serving with UN peacekeeping missions during the Poroshenko presidential administration.
I will explore how NATO influenced the Ukrainian way of war in my next section, to be published soon.
I take this opportunity to wish everyone all the best in 2023, especially my friends in Ukraine. Enjoy tonight's festivities.
Happy New Year!
[1] The Treaty of Pereyaslav of 1654 was signed between Cossack Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky and Russian Tsar Alexei I to obtain Russian protection against Polish invasion.
[2] Sviechin, Alexander, A. Yevolutsia voennoho iskutsttva. S drevneyshykh vremen do nashykh dney. (The Evolution of the Military Art). V. I. (Moscow, 1927), p. 13.
[3] Kane, Nicholas J. From Tukhachevski to Gerasimov. The Evolution of the Russian Way of Warfare into the Information age. School of Advanced Military Studies. (Fort Leavenworth, KS: US Army and Staff College, 2019), 3-4.
[4] Glantz, David M. Soviet Military Operational Art: In Pursuit of Deep Battle. (New York: Frank Cass, 1991), 25.
[5] Blythe, Jr., Wilson C. A History of Operational Art. Military Review. http://www.army press. army. mil
[6] Gerasimov, Valery V. The Value of Science in Prediction. Military-Industrial Kurier, 02/27/2013; Gerasimov, Valery V. Modern Wars and Real Questions in Regard to the Country’s Defense,(Sovremennie voiny i aktualnie voprosy oborony strany) Vestnik AVN, No. 2 (2017).
[7] A French 17th century military term-of-art for an overwhelming surprise attack from all directions, traditionally without a preparatory bombardment.
[8] "An interview with General Valery Zaluzhny, head of Ukraine's armed forces." The Economist, 12/15/2022.