Russia's “Special Military Operation:” Why it Went Wrong
(but not as wrong as the West's response)
On the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 24 February 2022, dozens of Russian Mi-8 helicopters carrying VDV airborne assault troops and Ka-52 attack helicopters escorting them flew up the Dnieper river to Kiev to capture the Antonov Airport in Hostomel north of Kiev to prepare the way for the landing of Il-76 transports carrying VDV armored assault units. After a months-long vast and intimidating military buildup on the western borders of Russia had failed to produce NATO compliance with Putin's December 17 ultimatum demanding a comprehensive rollback of NATO expansion on Russia's borders and US strategic deployments in Europe, Putin had seemingly pushed the button for plan B, namely the actual use of the saber that he had been rattling. Very quickly, though, that saber began to look like a cheese knife, to the consternation of military analysts and the delight of primitive Russophobes.
The VDV massacre
The VDV “blue berets” with their blue-striped t-shirts are the pride of the Russian military, a veritable flying army with its own armor and artillery, unmatched by even the US. Their presence inspires regular guards units on the battlefield and intimidates opponents, which is why they were sent to quell the unrest in Kazakhstan in January. Everybody in the ex-Soviet sphere knows you don't mess with the VDV, so for them, just showing up was practically winning the battle.
After the crushing defeat inflicted by the Russian military on the Maidan regime forces in 2014-2017, when they attempted to wipe out the Russian speakers in Donbass, the expectation in Gerasimov's general staff was that the Ukrainians wouldn't put up much of a fight if they saw the VDV coming at them, not after the total, horrifying clobbering they got.
Apparently nobody, not the foreign intelligence service SVR nor the GRU military intelligence, told them what everybody on Twitter and Telegram knew, that the nazis, and even ordinary Ukrainians had a huge butthurt over that bloody defeat, that the nazi assholes who died there, like the “cyborgs” of Donetsk airport, were national heroes, that no Ukrainian speaker was going to not throw a molotov at the Russians if he or she could get away with it, and that the US-trained and -armed nazi fanatics who had turned the anti-nazi peace candidate Zelensky into their puppet, had done the same thing with the Ukrainian conscripts who voted for him, even going so far as to chain them to their posts so they wouldn't desert. Either Russian intelligence was asleep at the wheel or the leadership — Gerasimov and/or Putin — didn't want to hear it.
Before I get into more detail about the Russian intelligence failure, let's look at what happened on the ground: After the VDV's helicopters got shot down, including many unarmored high-tech Kamov Ka-52 attack helicopters that were not designed for escort or close support and should never have been there, the survivors were hit by artillery cluster munitions and had to abandon the exposed airport to take cover inside Hostomel village. The main armored VDV force was then disembarked from the transport planes in Belarus and sent down the road to Hostomel, where they finally managed to retake the airport. Happily, the Russians decided against letting the MANPADS operators who had shot down their helicopters try their luck on Ilyushin heavy lifters landing at the airport.
The VDV then tried to reach its regime change objectives in Kiev as initially planned, despite the totally unplanned-for level of resistance, the total lack of ISR (intelligence /surveillance/reconnaissance), and the NATO-backed enemy's overwhelming advantage in both ISR and communications. The Russian military had done nothing to disable either military or civilian comms, while its own troops often used unencrypted commercial radios and evolved in a NATO BBG house, permanently surveilled by a fleet of spy planes and satellites.
In Bucha, a village just south of the Hostomel airport, the VDV made a fatal encounter with another kind of surveillance: CCTV cameras. Both traffic cams and IP security cams in Ukraine were still functioning, tracking every move of the Russians. When a VDV armored unit from Hostomel entered the deserted village of Bucha, the nazi artillery commander was watching those cams. When the unit entered his target zone, he unleashed a Smerch cluster munition volley at it. The entire column was destroyed.
The carnage continued, as the Russian military stubbornly tried to use the VDV with its thin-skinned light vehicles as a battering ram to punch through the entrenched regime defenses. Regime SOF destroyed another armored VDV unit trying to pass through Irpin, just south of Bucha.
The VDV had done good work in the south in Kherson but in Kiev, it was getting massacred. That's because Kiev needed to be reached at all costs. The “plan,” for want of a better word, was for Zelensky to be toppled as quietly as possible, with a “police operation” as it were, while leaving the citizenry undisturbed. That's why the VDV was sacrificed — to try to make a war look not like a war. “We're just the cops executing a warrant to restore this Donetsk guy Yanukovych to his rightful position. You know Donetsk, the place that seceded from Ukraine and killed thousands of Ukrainian soldiers?”
The VDV continued to hemorrhage men, armor, helicopters, and also commanders, specially in the Kiev sector. It was a service arm trained and equipped to parachute with light armor and artillery into the enemy's undefended rear, not to assault heavily-defended positions or venture into ATGM-infested hot zones. Yet its aura of invincibility had led to its being assigned missions it wasn't adapted for, which it got through mainly thanks to that aura. However the NATO-backed nazi fanatics in Ukraine were clearly not intimidated. If anything, they were juiced up by the idea of killing the VDV. Like Arnhem was for the British paras, Kiev was a bridge too far for the VDV.
The failures of intelligence, planning, and policy
Just before Putin gave the order to start hostilities, he publicly humiliatedthe SVR (foreign intelligence) head Sergei Naryshkin during his announcement of the recognition of the independence of the Donbass republics. Where had Naryshkin fucked up so badly as to deserve this treatment?
The answer to that also explains why this war looks so improvised. Until about February 18, Putin seemed to believe that his saber-rattling was going to exacerbate NATO's internal divisions to the point of crisis. The question always was, about the apparent French and German schisms in NATO, whether France was really having a Gaullist moment and Germany a Willy Brandt moment or whether they were just the good cop to Uncle Sam's bad cop. I'm guessing Naryshkin presented these schisms as much more real and exploitable than they really were.
When the talks with Macron and Scholz came to naught, Putin was faced with the problem of what to do with 190,000 troops in the field that he couldn't withdraw, which after presenting an ultimatum, would be a capitulation. So he went for plan B, right? Well, judging from the way plan B unfolded, it wasn't much of a plan, more like something scribbled hurriedly on the back of a napkin. It's like they literally put it together at the last minute, just looking at what they had parked on the border, and going eeny-meeny-miney-moe.
When you plan a campaign, you base it on your capabilities and on the intel you have on the enemy's capabilities and weaknesses, right? What kind of intel told Gerasimov's staff that they were going to roll into Kiev unopposed, so no need to go in as battalion tactical groups (BTGs), just send in some old tanks and BTRs, they'll be fine? How is it a surprise when they go into a Right Sector HQ and find a NATO E3 AWACS laptop there? How is it a surprise that all these NATO-armed and -trained nazis with realtime intel on the Russian order of battle and troop movements plan and execute devastating ambushes? What kind of intel told Gerasimov to send in his troops blind, with no drones, no battlefield radar, no ELINT, no thermal sights, no night vision, nothing?
So that's the second intel failure. The first was within the SVR's purview, the second the GRU's. The possibilities here are that one or both of them screwed up or one or both of them delivered the goods but Gerasimov and/or Putin screwed up by disregarding them.
My money is on the SVR and Putin. We've seen the GRU in Syria, they are highly professional patriots. The SVR has been asleep at the wheel for years. They got caught flatfooted at every color revolution and false flag black propaganda crisis concocted by NATO for decades. As for Valery Gerasimov, he's something of an enigma. He formulated a new sexy high-techy military doctrine and advocated for some sexy high-techy weapons systems but didn't see fit to apply or deploy any of all that. As the excellent military analyst Michael Kofman pointed out, it's as if the the Russian army had gone back in time to the '80s.
Tankie light
We'll probably never know what happened but seeing how the whole “special military operation” looks improvised, my guess is that Valery Gerasimov had a well-prepared plan but Putin wussed out at the last minute, crossing chunks of it out to turn it into a “tankie light” plan. Evidence is abundant that the author of the first week of the “special military operation” was a non-military dilettante. The criminally reckless “charge of the light brigade” of the VDV was just one of the many “thunder runs” by company-sized unsupported units that often ended in their ambush and destruction and more often in their running out of fuel and having to abandon their vehicles. As the maxim goes, “Amateurs think strategy, generals think logistics.”
So why did Putin fuck up? Well, he's always had this achilles heel of wanting to be a Davos dude, to be accepted as a “partner” of the West, of having his face turned more to the moribund West than to China and Asia or — God forbid — the Soviet past, so he tried to do a bloodless-as-possible “tankie light” regime change in the hope of avoiding looking like the USSR and irremediably breaking ties with the West.
His stupid SVR was incapable of staging a color revolution in Ukraine even after all these years of watching Soros do it — twice in Ukraine alone — so he was forced to send in the tanks, but he wanted to do it without ruffling too many feathers and ending up doing exactly what the previous communist regime that he disliked had done over and over.
Putin is fundamentally a czarist. He revels in Russia's czarist glories and dislikes the USSR. His models are Peter and Catherine the Great, the two monarchs who established Europeanization as the engine of Russian expansion and power, and definitely not the oriental lower-class Georgian who made the USSR a superpower but ticked off the Europeans while doing it. If he had gone full tankie against “European” Ukraine (unlike “Oriental” Georgia in 2008) it would have been a betrayal of his dream for the European future of Russia. Fortunately, he has now snapped out of that toxic dream.
I'm aware that some people are saying Putin didn't want to make Ukraine ungovernable and that's why he pulled his punches, going so far as to forbid his troops from hurting civilians even if it put them in danger. Putin is anything but naive. How could he imagine after what his army did to Ukrainian conscripts in 2014-17 that the Ukrainian-speaking population would ever accept being ruled by Russia? It doesn't matter that the Maidan regime was trying to ethnically cleanse Donbass back then; the fact is that the Ukrainian-speaking part of the country suffered a huge trauma when their army got wiped out and it's not a tank that avoids running over people blocking its path that's going to heal that.
No, it wasn't any concern for not alienating the Ukrainian-speaking population but rather the optics that bothered Putin. He trashed the VDV for optics.
Occam's razor dictates that we find the lowest common denominator for all the intelligence and planning failures. Which is more plausible, that the SVR, the GRU, the FSB, and the general staff of the armed forces all failed, or that Putin failed?
Possible outcomes
There's no doubt that the Russian army will muddle through and prevail, but as they always say about China, at what cost? The VDV is badly damaged, Russian deterrence is dangerously weakened, and as Michael Kofman rightly pointed out, there could be a reckoning at the top after this is over. Putin is apparently already pre-empting that reckoning by finding scapegoats. He has reportedly put the head and the deputy head of the FSB's 5th service under house arrest for failing to predict that Ukraine would resist the Russian invasion.
That said, to Russia's advantage, the economic blowback of the imbecilic sanctions are already devastating the West, provoking defections, and dooming the governments that signed up to them. Credit Suisse analyst and former Fed official Zoltan Poszar, in a 4-page report entitled “Bretton Woods III”, which provoked such an uproar in the financial community that his employer had to take it offline and add a page-long disclaimer, predicted that the Western embargo on the commodities of the world's top commodity producer Russia would have the effect of redirecting those commodities to the Asian market, to be traded in Yuan, thus automatically making the Yuan the world's top reserve currency instead of the US dollar, which until the over-the-top Ukraine war sanctions, was what most of the world used for commodities trading.
Poszar called the new world monetary order that will rapidly emerge from Western commodities embargo, which is in fact a self-inflicted commodities blockade causing shortages and inflation, by the same name as the two previous dollar-dominated ones, i.e. Bretton Woods. It is of course highly unlikely that any eventual conference for a multilateral agreement enshrining the Yuan as the new global reserve currency would be held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
Aside from the economic debacle awaiting the already fragile economies of the EU and US, the autocratic censorship and propaganda that they have suddenly imposed under a de facto emergency rule is also taking its toll on whatever moral high ground the West still has left, undermining its soft power and further infuriating its rebellious right-wing populists.
On the military front, the imminent defeat of the Ukraine nazis despite limitless Western military aid will shake NATO much more violently than the military buildup that preceded it. The totally unexpected and completely annihilating Russian missile strike on the barracks in the Lviv region of the Western mercenaries, which included many intelligence operatives in their number, has already caused total consternation in the West. It was the signal, as it were, of the return of the Russian military, freed from Putin's timid hand on its reins, and as such heralded much worse to come for the West.
All in all, Putin will probably come out of this ahead, with real defections from NATO this time to add to his trophies. NATO's 2nd largest military force Turkey steadfastly refuses to impose any sanctions on Russia alongside the US's top non-NATO ally Israel and its “Quad” partner India.
With the US's financial hegemony seriously undermined, and both the US and EU mired in economic recession coupled with uncontrollable inflation, Russia, having pivoted to the Yuan bloc, could emerge from this war not only militarily victorious but economically relatively unscathed.
https://vk.com/@agitpapa-russias-special-military-operation-why-it-went-wrong
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