Ukraine woke up on Thursday bombed and invaded by one of the most powerful Armed Forces in the world. Russia has some 900,000 military personnel, the largest nuclear arsenal in the world next to that of the United States, the fifth largest defense spending on a global scale in 2021 and considerable combat experience accumulated in multiple operations over the last two decades. The Ukrainian forces opposing this Goliath have an annual budget that is less than a tenth of the Russian one, suffer from inferiority in all domains — land, air, naval and cyber — and combat experience limited to scenarios different from the current one.
Vladimir Putin has aggressively pushed for the modernization of the Russian armed forces during his two decades of leadership. After the collapse of the 1990s, with a lack of funds that harmed the entire military spectrum with the relative exception of the nuclear arsenal, progress so far this century has been considerable, especially since 2008. The Russian Defense Ministry maintains that The objective of the 2011-2020 plan of having 70% of weapons and equipment with modern technology has been met. Progress has also been made in the professionalization of the workforce, with a higher share of contracted workers and a smaller share of conscripts (30%).
“After the war in Georgia, Russia understood that a complex modernization was necessary,” says Pavel Luzin, an expert on Russian Defense. “He won that war, but the cost was relatively high; there were losses, problems with the command and control system, reconnaissance and navigation systems. The campaigns in Ukraine in 2014 and in Syria put this modernization to the test and provided new clues. Now the Russian armed forces are much better than before, they solved the main problems in conventional weapons, although they still have problems with advanced command and control systems, high-precision weapons, and motivation and independent thinking among officers.
Ukraine, for its part, has also proceeded to a consistent modernization of its forces since the aggression suffered in 2014. It has received training and support from Western countries, including weapons, although not of great significance, such as Javelin anti-tank missiles. It has also acquired Turkish armed drones that proved very effective in the latest conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Kiev has a strong will to fight among its soldiers and what seems to be a feeling of willingness to resist in a large part of the population, which could prove to be a very important factor in the future.
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It is, without a doubt, a deeply unequal fight, but this does not mean that the Russian military offensive is going to be an easy operation, as the first days are showing. Here are some of the key elements of the war effort.
The missile offensive
As expected, the Russian forces have begun their attack with a salvo of missiles launched against Ukrainian military infrastructure to degrade its operational capacity. The Pentagon estimates that on the first day of the offensive, Moscow fired a hundred short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles from land, naval and air platforms. On the second day the pattern was repeated, according to the count published by Washington, bringing the total to 200, and the balance exceeded 250 this Saturday, the majority being short-range ballistics.
The technological improvement of the missile arsenal has been one of the great axes of the project to modernize the armed forces that Putin has pursued throughout his mandate with huge investments. The Russian Defense Ministry maintains that in the last six years the percentage of long-range strategic missiles with new technology has grown from 40% to 83%. There has also been improvement in the short range with the progressive replacement of the Tochka-U model with the Iskander-M. Even so, some experts believe that in short and medium range the percentage of the arsenal with high accuracy is limited, and that would partly explain why the intensity of the initial salvo was lower than many expected. “It seems that already in the early stages of the war, Russia has used a large part of its high-precision missiles,” says Luzin.
It is to be feared that, if it does not adequately advance its objectives, Russia may decide to abandon its relative containment and increase missile or artillery firepower by firing less cautiously.
the ground assault
Russian forces have penetrated Ukrainian territory in several axes from the north, east and south, with the conquest of Kiev as the main objective and another major offensive against the country’s second largest city, Kharkov. It is an attempt at a blitzkrieg that goes straight to the heart of the adversaries, like the US forces in the invasion of Iraq, instead of consolidating the gradual conquest of territory. In the attempt, they have managed to advance with some speed but have not asserted control over large cities. An intelligence report published by the UK yesterday suggested that the advance has slowed down, due to “intense Ukrainian resistance and logistical problems”. The United States estimates that just over half of the 150,000/190,000 soldiers amassed on the border had entered Ukraine yesterday., according to western calculations. On Friday the estimate was 30%.
On the ground dimension, meanwhile, the Ukrainian authorities have begun to encourage the civil resistance that is an important component in so many invasion scenarios. They have invited citizens to prepare Molotov cocktails, they have handed out submachine guns and President Zelensky announced on Saturday that they will hand out weapons to those who want to go fight for Ukraine, opening the prospect for the formation of international brigades. Urban warfare is notoriously very complex, especially difficult for the attacker, especially if he is not prepared for an indiscriminate massacre, which, in addition to the monstrous cost in civilian lives, carries international opprobrium for the perpetrator.
So far, Ukraine claims to have killed some 3,500 Russian soldiers, taken another 200 prisoner, destroyed some 100 tanks and some 500 armored vehicles. Russia denies any casualties and claims to have hit some 800 Ukrainian targets in the offensive as a whole.
air traffic control
The Pentagon said Friday that, while downgraded, Ukraine still maintained air capability, both in terms of anti-aircraft defenses and confrontation in the skies. The UK also pointed out yesterday that Russia still does not have control of the airspace, which is obviously a crucial aspect. Russia claims to have hit and disabled seven military aircraft, seven helicopters, 14 drones, 14 military airports, 24 S-3000 and Osa air defense systems, and 48 radar stations. Ukraine claims to have destroyed 14 aircraft, including an Ilyushin-76 transport loaded with soldiers and eight helicopters.
In this sector, Russia has an undoubtedly considerable quantitative and qualitative advantage. A report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London points out that in this sector many of the modernization objectives have not been met, but that the gradual replacement of the Su-27 with the Su-35 has improved capabilities.
the naval domain
The imbalance of forces in this sector is enormous. Russian naval forces lag far behind US might and will soon fall far behind China’s massive effort, but the superiority over Ukraine is absolute. Kiev denounced yesterday that Moscow has de facto closed navigation in the northwestern Black Sea, and also that it fired at two commercial ships. NATO does not have ships in that area, and Russia therefore takes advantage of its superiority both to support the military offensive and to undertake an economic-commercial suffocation of Ukraine.
the cyber war
Many experts considered that in the initial phases of the invasion there would have been a major cyberattack to make defense difficult, to cause panic. This has not happened, although a drop in the rate of Internet connection has been detected, which stands at 87% of the usual level, due to disruptions in the service but also due to changes in customs due to the conflict, according to data from the observatory NetBlocks quoted by the Reuters agency.
Russia is a particularly aggressive power in the cyber domain, it has repeatedly hit Ukrainian targets in the past, and it cannot rule out that at any moment it decides to intensely activate this lever.
Nuclear weapons
Russia has, together with the United States, the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, a legacy of the weapons development of the USSR. Part of that arsenal was precisely located in Ukraine, which renounced it after its independence, returning it to Russia in exchange for commitments on its security and territorial integrity flagrantly violated by Moscow.
western aid
Western countries are increasing their aid to Ukraine. Washington has announced another $350 million in aid, which will include more Javelin anti-strike missiles. The Netherlands will send some 200 Stinger surface-to-air missiles; Belgium, 2,000 machine guns; and Germany, in a notable change from its previous position, has authorized the delivery of 400 German-made grenade launchers from the Netherlands to Ukraine to see if this weaponry will arrive in time for the defense of regular forces. What does seem increasingly likely is that, even if it wins the main contest quickly, Russia faces the grim prospect of a protracted and irreducible guerrilla war.
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