Two weeks ago, the Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his country’s invasion of Ukraine. Since then, Russian forces have bombed Ukrainian cities and moved west, toward Kyiv, where the Ukrainian leadership sits. Despite the death and destruction caused by the Russian attack, Ukraine’s military has held up better than experts predicted, and Russian advances have been slower than feared. Now President Putin—who already faces sweeping financial sanctions—is confronting the prospect of an increasingly violent and lengthy campaign. What strategic errors has the Russian military made, and why?
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To help answer these questions, I recently spoke by phone with Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at the nonprofit research organization the Center for Naval Analyses and an expert on the Russian military. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed how Russia’s armed forces have changed since the end of the Cold War, whether its military missteps have hampered its political aims, and the dangers of the conflict spiralling out of control.
You recently wrote, “Taking a cursory look at Russian losses two weeks into the war, it reads less as a general failure to modernize, and more as a failure to maintain and properly support the equipment.” Can you talk about what you meant by that?
I think it is fair to say that, since about late 2008, after the Russian-Georgian war, the Russian military has been transformed by a tandem process of reform and modernization. We really have not seen them attempt an operation of this scale since the military reforms of that time period. And so, looking across the board at Russian military performance, we see that they had a lot of challenges and a lot of problems that, perhaps, many didn’t expect. It’s clear that they are struggling with a large amount of equipment that’s being abandoned. Part of that is because it’s broken down, because they can’t support it; they likely spent more on modernization and procurement capabilities and modernizing platforms than they did on maintenance and repair cycles.
The other part of it is that the Russian military is fundamentally not one that is set up for a strategic ground offensive or this type of campaign. It’s a firepower-heavy military that is extremely consuming and taxing. It doesn’t have a tremendous amount of logistical resources to support this type of war, and certainly not in the way that they are fighting it.
I want to take a step back. What was the state of the Russian military in the nineteen-nineties, before this modernization you alluded to, and what did we see during the wars in Chechnya in the nineteen-nineties, which people have talked about in comparison with Ukraine?
In the nineteen-nineties, the Russian military was really at its nadir. You had the difficult process of withdrawing Soviet forces from Warsaw Pact countries; a collapse of funding, sustainability, and morale; and conflicts that further demoralized the Russian military, such as the First Chechen War, which de facto ended in a defeat.
But, in that time period, it also underwent several piecemeal reforms. They were incomplete, but eventually stabilizing enough toward the late nineteen-nineties, and this allowed the Russian military to generate enough forces to fight the Second Chechen War. And this war was also a very troubling one, with the complete destruction of Grozny and a sustained operation in Chechnya that was marred by poor use of forces. The military also suffered from corruption and maladies that had been seen throughout Russia’s chaotic nineties and that affected the country writ large.
The Russian military got a terrible reputation, particularly in the West. Russia was seen as a declining power—a country that was fundamentally dependent on its strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal as the ultimate guarantor for sovereignty because its military was simply not in a place where it could pose a serious challenge. At the same time, the United States, together with NATO, enjoyed military dominance almost across the board. I think Russian military leaders basically looked on the NATO air campaign in Yugoslavia with dismay. It became very clear to them that the U.S. could fairly quickly establish conventional military dominance or superiority in the battle space, and that Russian forces would fundamentally have to resort to nuclear weapons, if anything, which is not a good place to be.
What changed during the Putin era?
Although Russia had decent modernization programs in the two-thousands, the first real recapitalization of its military began around 2011. Russia actually spent very heavily on procurement—when we leverage purchasing power parity, which is the right way to compare military expenditures, about a hundred and sixty billion dollars per year in those expenditures and, of that, maybe at least fifty billion dollars went toward procurement modernization. So they had leveraged the past decade to substantially recapitalize the Russian armed forces. They invested in capabilities across the board, from nuclear modernization and Russian aerospace forces to ground forces and the Navy.
What the Russian military has consistently struggled with is production of newer, more modernized equipment. There were some logjams or setbacks, which resulted from the war that they launched with Ukraine in 2014. Ukraine was actually a significant producer of components for Russia’s defense industry, and so the two countries went through a very messy divorce in terms of their military-industrial complexes. The war with Ukraine set some of Russia’s ambitious procurement goals back by quite a number of years. Ukraine produced everything from gas turbines for Russian ships to helicopter engines and the like. Western sanctions also hurt, particularly technological sanctions.
After all these reforms, what about the way the past two and a half weeks have gone has most surprised you?
The most surprising part, of course, was the campaign itself, because those of us looking at this expected that the Russian military was going to conduct a combined-arms offensive, that there would be an initial air campaign, and that they would heavily leverage some of the capabilities they had, such as electronic warfare. We saw very little of that, and there’s a clear reason why.
The political leadership had imposed the framework, and the crux of it was that they believed the Russian military could, in a matter of days, achieve a regime change in Ukraine—that there wouldn’t be a significant amount of fighting and resistance, that they wouldn’t have to conduct a protracted war, that they could rapidly build up forces and introduce them into the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.
I always tell people that military defense analysts focus on capabilities, but military strategy and the operational concepts really matter. It’s the force employment that really matters. The initial Russian campaign represents completely irrational force employment and, in many cases, frankly, nonemployment. A host of capabilities sat on the sidelines. We started off talking about the missing case of the Russian Air Force, right? Where were they? And a host of other capabilities that simply weren’t being introduced until about a week into the war. The reasons for that are clear. First, they didn’t actually organize and prepare for war with Ukraine. They initially had sent troops to seize key roads and junction towns to isolate sectors, not expecting resistance. They lied to the troops about the fact that they were sending them to war and about the nature of the war. They didn’t psychologically or materially prepare them for a conflict with a pretty significant conventional force. They were deeply optimistic about their ability to quickly get into the capital and force Zelensky to either flee or surrender.
So the initial operation is a complete debacle. It was based entirely on political assumptions in Moscow that basically nothing had changed in Ukraine since 2014, and that they could conduct a slightly larger version of the 2014 operation. And so what their military first started doing is something along the lines of thunder runs. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that term.
I’m not.
Well, imagine if they had learned all the worst lessons from the U.S. 2003 Iraq campaign, that they had tried to push small units and detachments quickly down roads, avoid major cities and any significant engagements with Ukrainian forces, and tried to push forces as fast as they could to the Ukrainian capital itself. This proved disastrous. They got a bloody nose early on. They actually had not organized a lot of the key logistics and enablers for a real campaign.
Then you saw that, about five days in, they started to make big adjustments and tried to actually turn this into a combined-arms operation, and, of course, started to pay the price for not having set out in the first place, not having actually organized and prepared for this war, and not having readied their troops to fight a large war of this type.
So what are the big things that surprised me? First of all, when it comes to the basics, it’s clear that there are a lot of things that Russian troops, in terms of how they’re executing these missions, are getting wrong or at least don’t have experience with. You can never tell this, by the way, looking at a military. I’ve had people ask, “Hey, did we overestimate? Did we underestimate the Russian military?” What I’m trying to say is that we have early impressions that the Russian military definitely doesn’t have some of the fundamentals right. There’s no way to tell that unless we actually see the military employed in a large-scale conflict of this type. There are fairly limited things you can tell from training exercises and from force employment or use of forces in very limited contexts, like, let’s say, the campaign in Syria or the fight in Ukraine in 2014 and 2015.
The thing about military power is that it needs a context in which to express itself. It’s very hard to measure military power in the abstract. My whole community focusses military analysis on a specific kind of defense-planning scenario or contingency. So, oftentimes, if you ask the wrong questions, you’ll get the wrong answers. If the question was, How might the Russian military perform in the war against NATO, how would it organize for that, or, How might it perform in a specific context of, let’s say, a war in the Baltics, that’s not the same as, What would happen if the Russian force attempted a strategic ground defensive with the largest country in Europe.
What is Ukraine trying to do right now? It’s obviously trying to repel an invasion, but is there some way in which a stalemate for a longer period of time is going to leave Russia with really serious inabilities to keep supplying its people? Is Ukraine trying to repel an invasion, or is it trying to hold out in some way?
I think that what Ukraine has largely been doing is pursuing the right strategy, which is trading territory or space to buy time, trying to exhaust Russian forces, and trying to engage them in contexts where Ukraine has the advantage. These include fighting in urban settings where the terrain strongly favors the defender, and ambushing Russian convoys in small groups, taking advantage of extended Russian supply lines. In some ways, Russian advances pose their own challenges, because the Russian rate of advance in the early part of the war was actually quite fast. A lot of folks tried to paint it as slow, but that wasn’t the case. It was slow relative to completely unrealistic Russian expectations, but Russian forces had actually broken out substantially. This of course grossly overstretched their supplies and the material organization they had for the war, and that gave Ukrainians a lot of opportunities.
In general, I think Ukrainians have actually been fighting this war fairly smartly and as best as they can. And the bungled initial Russian operation allowed the Ukrainian military to expand that psychological shock invasion to generate reserves and to better organize defensive lines. Russia in many ways traded the weight of initiative, which was, I think, surprising to many of us observing it. That’s why, not long into the war, it became likely that Russia was not going to achieve its political objectives. I think it can achieve military victory, but it’s now resourcing what is likely to be a failed strategy over all. That’s a very common mistake.
What would be a historical example of that sort of military objective that you’re talking about? Something like America in Iraq?
Oh, yeah, we just had two wars that were like that. Afghanistan’s a great example. We just had twenty years in Afghanistan, and good luck finding a battle we lost in Afghanistan. Just not the war. Right? Or the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
Was this always likely to be the case because the Ukrainian population did not want to submit to Russian rule, or have there been specific military mistakes in the first few weeks of the war that you think are going to make it impossible for Russia to achieve its political objectives in the long run?
This was debated extensively in the run-up to the conflict, and people had different opinions. The problem with a campaign like this is a bit of a Schrödinger’s-cat scenario, where you have no idea what will happen or how society will respond to an invasion. But in the first weeks it is already very clear that they made profound mistakes that, I think, seriously infringed on any political success in this effort. The premise of the war was that they could achieve victory quickly and fairly bloodlessly. If they didn’t, it would have strategic implications.
You are not going to be able to sustain an occupation in a country where you’ve bombed cities and towns that turn part of the population against you. Also, Zelensky didn’t flee, he didn’t surrender, and as the fight has gone on Ukrainian morale and resistance have only improved. So they have made this a national patriotic effort for Ukraine, and resistance is only going to increase. The third thing is that Russia tried to keep the war secret from its own population and, by doing that, it ceded the information environment that allowed Ukraine to basically galvanize Western support in its own population. And only now is the Russian leadership mobilizing its public in support of the war. But guess what? A lot of folks in Russia are going to realize that they were lied to, and, as the casualties become clear, the public could move against the regime really quickly. That will infringe on the sustainability of this war effort, too.
So, in many ways, whether or not you believe this war would’ve been doomed to fail at the outset, Russia has now dramatically compromised its own likelihood of success. And I think if we measure success as achieving political aims––leaders use force to achieve political aims; they don’t use force for the sake of using force––I don’t see how Russia can achieve its political objectives now. That part is highly contingent.
Has Ukraine done anything clearly wrong militarily? We’ve read so much about Ukraine doing better than expected and Russia worse.
Yeah. I don’t think they took the threat of this cataclysmic event or this Russian invasion seriously enough, early enough. I think they started final preparations for this war very late into the game. I think that, if the Ukrainian political leadership had given up the narrative that this is a case of economic coercion and took much more seriously the American warnings that Russia really did intend to follow through on this war, they would have been in a much better position earlier on.
I think that the bungled initial operation by the Russian military has given Ukraine some breathing space and definitely needed time, but, if the Russian invasion had actually turned out to be a planned, structured operation that really leveraged the bulk of Russian military power, Ukraine would be much worse off today. And that’s in part because I think they made major mistakes in that they were rather late in taking the preparations that they should have taken in the run-up to this war.
Putin recently raised the alert level on Russian nuclear-deterrent forces. What did you make of that?
Russian nuclear signalling is highly effective, and it gets them a lot without necessarily requiring them to carry out any major changes in nuclear-force posture. Russian nuclear command and control communications are very robust. I see the likelihood of nuclear escalation as very low, especially in the case of Ukraine. But what we’re contesting more is sort of the trajectory of the relations between the U.S. and Russia and the direction this is all going to take. That’s the more problematic issue. But, yeah, at the end of the day, I think we have to acknowledge that these crises play out, and force plays out under a nuclear shadow. And both the United States and Russia have to be very cautious about escalation. To the extent that Russian leadership––that Putin himself––feels pressed against the wall, it might start to engage in more risky forms of what we call nuclear signalling, in part because it works and it gets people’s attention.
Was there anything you meant specifically when you said you worry about long-term U.S.-Russia relations and how the two nuclear powers are dealing with each other?
Absolutely. American sanctions, together with those imposed by Europeans and other countries, have profound effects. What Putin has done is an economic catastrophe for Russia. He directly infringed on the stability and future of his regime. I’ve worked in this field now for quite some time and, for the first time, I’m really questioning the longevity of his regime. I think it’s the beginning of the end. And I’m equally worried about the implications. Aren’t you?
You’re implying that, if his regime is coming to an end, he’s potentially more dangerous?
We have to ask what asymmetric forms of retaliation he’s going to pursue in response to these sanctions against the United States and European countries, especially if the crisis worsens and the situation of Russia’s economy and domestic political situation worsen as well. How’s that going to color Putin’s thinking and his choices? These are important considerations.
One of the profound problems I’ve encountered in this field is that we often don’t do well with nuance. I spent years talking about how the Russian military wasn’t twelve feet tall, right? This war right now—Russia’s poor performance in the early part of the war—has interesting similarities, or at least some parallels, with the winter war of 1939-40, and the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Soviets’ rather poor performance back then. And one of the big concerns I have with additional impressions of the problematic Russian performance is, first, that it’s already clear to me that I’m going to spend the coming years talking about how the Russian military is not four feet tall, either, because the pendulum in terms of military assessments is going to swing very, very sharply to the other side. I hope we don’t take some of the wrong impressions that Germany, for example, took looking at the Soviets’ performance in that particular conflict.
