Ukraine has not been a walkover for Russia

At the time of writing this article (Thursday), Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has entered day 14. Analysts, especially military analysts, around the world have been observing developments on the ground and writing and speaking about them. Given the fog of war — claims and counter-claims — it will be a while before a fuller picture begins to emerge and militaries can study the war in Ukraine. Yet, some assumptions can be made based on information from the ground, open-source intelligence and sifting the grain from the chaff in social media posts.

For instance, it is now clear that Russia’s initial assessment of quick gains at its main and supporting axes of advance and the quick fall of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital city, was flawed. The narrative that Ukrainians would see Russian troops as liberators is also a casualty of this war. Kyiv, despite being surrounded in the northwest and northeast (two axes of Russian advance) has held. As per reports, the city’s outskirts have seen intense and bloody battles. Antonov Airport, also called Hostomel, a northwestern suburb of Kyiv, has changed hands many times.

As of March 9, reports indicated a Russian push towards Kyiv from the city’s western outskirts, which did not succeed. Russian troops were also engaged in smaller operations “to consolidate and gradually to extend the encirclement to the southwest of the capital,” according to an assessment by the Institute for the Study of War.

According to the same assessment, operations in the eastern approaches to Kyiv, which is the second axis of Russian advance, “remain in a lull, likely because the Russians are focusing on securing the long lines of communication running to those outskirts from Russian bases around Sumy and Chernihiv.” It is now known, on the basis of evidence from multiple sources, that Ukrainian forces have been attacking and disrupting Russian lines of communication in these and other areas.

Russian forces have had more success in the south where they have control of Kherson and are trying to encircle Mykolayiv, northwest of Kherson, from the east, though, as of March 9, they had not crossed the Southern Bug river. Operations against Odesa would require a secure line for Russian troops from Crimea. Odesa, by all reports, is already preparing for a Russian attack. Observers believe it would come from the ground east and north of Odesa and also from the sea where Russian naval ships have been sighted. Odesa has immense strategic significance for both Ukraine and Russia being an historical port city on the Black Sea. If RF capture Odesa, Ukraine would be cut off from the seaside.

Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, situated on the north coast of the Sea of Azov, remains besieged and under intense shelling by RF. On March 9, Russian bombing hit a children’s hospital inviting fresh condemnation of the attack by the United Nations and other states.

In the east, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, remains surrounded from the north and east but Russian forces have not been able to enter the city because of fierce Ukrainian resistance. There is a possibility that RF would complete its encirclement but instead of trying to enter the city and taking losses, move to the rear of Ukrainian forces holding the contact line in Luhansk and Donetsk. Russian separatists and RF troops have so far not been able to push the Ukrainian forces back and advance west of the contact line.

So what does it tell us?

One, Ukraine, territorially the largest country in Europe, has not offered Russia a quick victory. As noted earlier, Russia’s assumption that it could thunder-run to Kyiv, capture the city and change the regime was mistaken. That could either be Russian intelligence failure about assessing Ukrainian resistance capacity or the Kremlin simply believed in its own narrative that Ukraine was awaiting liberation. As many analysts have noted, Russia’s original assessment of force organisation, employment and logistical requirements was based on that assumption.

The initial advances were coordinated with Russia’s employment of its rockets, cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles to degrade Ukrainian military infrastructure, command and control centres and ground air defences. In the opening phase, Russia also used small attack aircraft strike packages to destroy some ground targets and helicopter gunships for close air support to ground troops. But its main effort was the use of discriminate long-range, indirect fire power to target military facilities and avoid civilian casualties.

That changed by the end of the first week of the war. Russian bombing of and missile attacks on urban centres and infrastructure became more intense. The plans shifted from the use of minimum force with reliance on ground troops with degradation of specific targets to a combined arms operation. That also brought in much greater fire power. Result: greater and more indiscriminate destruction of urban centres, more displacements, higher number of civilian casualties. Russia also shifted to more frequent use of air power. The downside of that has been increase in aircraft and gunships losses.

This has been an interesting aspect of this war. Assessments before the war made qualitative and quantitative comparisons between Russian and Ukrainian air forces and ground air defence systems and put little faith in Ukraine’s capacity in the face of Russian air and ground assets. Until the supply to Ukraine of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft Stinger and anti-tank Javelin missiles, the country possessed Soviet-era ground defence systems which the Russians are familiar with and train against. But the number of Russian air asset losses shows the Ukrainians have employed the ground defence systems, especially the Stinger, remarkably. MANPADs continue to be a threat to gunships and low-flying aircraft avoiding radar detection.

Justin Bronk, Research Fellow for Airpower and Technology in the Military Sciences team at RUSI, wrote an assessment on February 28, titled, The Mysterious Case of the Missing Russian Air Force. Bronk wondered why after a “large salvo of cruise and ballistic missiles destroyed the main ground-based early warning radars throughout Ukraine,” Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) did not mount “large-scale strike operations to destroy the UkrAF.” The blinding of Ukraine’s early warning chain, according to Bronk, should have been exploited. That didn’t happen. Why?

Could it be that VKS was not “confident…to safely deconflict large-scale sorties with the activity of Russian ground-based SAMs operated by the Ground Forces.”? Such deconfliction is a problem, especially in the chaos of war. But Bronk went on to argue that Russia’s limited use of its air force is because VKS (Russian Aerospace Forces) lacks the capacity to plan and execute complex air operations.

Michael Kofman, Research Director at the Centre for Naval Analyses, however, does not agree with Bronk’s assessment that VKS cannot mount complex air operations. In an assessment for War on the Rocks, Kofman said it’s too early to make a final judgment on Russia’s air operations in Ukraine, though he agreed that Russian pilots would seek to avoid Ukrainian ground AD systems because “they do not train much in SEAD (suppression of enemy air defence) operations”. This is a somewhat remarkable statement, if true, for the fighter pilots of a country that produces and exports the S-400 A2-AD system, billed as the best in the world.

However, regardless of what the explanation is, we have two knowns: one, Russian losses of fighter aircraft and gunships show Ukraine retains enough ground AD capacity to attrite Russian air assets; two, the inability of Russia to take advantage of its air superiority to pummel Ukrainian ground troops, air assets and ground AD systems.

Be that as it may, where is the situation headed now? Russia’s force reorganisation and employment and the shift to combined arms operations means the juggernaut will ultimately likely prevail. But does a military victory also mean achieving the political objective? That would depend on how Ukraine reacts to the fall of Kyiv if and when that happens. So far Ukrainians’ will to fight has not subsided. Would it collapse like the French will did after the fall of Paris or get recharged remains to be seen.

The writer is a journalist with interest in foreign and security policies