In January, the head of a group of serving and retired Russian military officers declared that an invasion of Ukraine would be “pointless and extremely dangerous”. It would kill thousands, he said, make Russians and Ukrainians enemies for life, risk a war with NATO and threaten “the very existence of Russia itself as a state.”
To many Russians, that seemed like a far-fetched scenario, as few thought an invasion of Ukraine was really possible. But two months later, as Russia’s advance into Ukraine stalls, the prophecy looms large. The retired general who drafted the statement, Leonid Ivashov, was reached by phone this week and said he would stick with it, although he could not speak freely given Russia’s wartime censorship: “I do not deny what I have said.”
In Russia, the slow pace and heavy toll of President Vladimir V. Putin’s war against Ukraine raise questions about his army’s planning capacity, his confidence in his top spies and loyal defense minister, and the quality of the intelligence reach him. It also highlights the pitfalls of Mr Putin’s top-down governance, in which civil servants and military officers have little leeway to make their own decisions and adapt to developments in real time.
The failures of Mr Putin’s campaign are evident in the striking number of senior military commanders believed to have died in the fighting. Ukraine says it killed at least six Russian generals, while Russia acknowledges one of their deaths, along with that of the deputy commander of its Black Sea fleet. US officials say they cannot confirm the number of Russian troops killed, but the Russian invasion plan appears to have been thwarted by poor intelligence.
The lack of progress is so obvious that a game of blame has begun among some Russian supporters of the war – even as Russian propaganda claims the plodding is a result of the military’s concern to avoid harming civilians. Igor Girkin, a former colonel with Russia’s FSB intelligence agency and the former “defense minister” of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, said in an online video interview on Monday that Russia had made a “catastrophic misjudgment” of Ukrainian forces. made.
“The enemy was underestimated in every way,” said Mr. girkin.
The poor performance of Russia’s armed forces has also surprised analysts, who predicted early in the war that Russia’s vast, technologically advanced military would make short work of Ukraine. Mr Putin himself seems to have counted on his forces to quickly capture major cities, including the capital Kiev, behead the government and install a puppet regime under the control of the Kremlin.
“Take power into your own hands,” Mr Putin urged Ukrainian soldiers on the second day of the invasion, apparently hoping that Ukraine would go down without a fight.
Instead, Ukraine fought back. Almost a month has passed and Russian forces seem to be bogged down by the relentless attacks of a much weaker but much more agile Ukrainian army.
“There was probably hope that they wouldn’t resist so intensely,” Yevgeny Buzhinsky, a retired lieutenant general and a regular Russian state television commentator, said of Ukraine’s armed forces. “They were expected to be more reasonable.”
As if responding to criticism, Mr Putin has repeatedly said in his public comments about the war that it is “going according to plan”.
“We can definitively say that nothing is going according to plan,” objected Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst. “It has been decades since the Soviet and Russian armies suffered such great losses in such a short time.”
Russia last announced its combat losses three weeks ago – 498 killed on March 2. US officials now say a conservative estimate puts the Russian military death toll at 7,000. Russia says it has lost a total of 11,000 soldiers in nearly a decade of fighting in Chechnya.
According to Andrei Soldatov, an author and expert on Russian military and security services, the failures in Ukraine are beginning to cause rifts within the Russian leadership. The top Russian intelligence official charged with overseeing spies recruitment and diversionary operations in Ukraine has been placed under house arrest along with his deputy, Mr Soldatov said. Even Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu, who is going on vacation with Putin and who is being talked about as a potential presidential successor, has lost his footing, according to Mr. Soldatov’s sources.
“It seems that everyone is on edge,” Mr. Soldatov said.
Mr. Soldatov’s claims could not be independently verified and some independent experts have challenged them. But Mr Shoigu has not seen a face-to-face meeting with Putin since Feb. 27, when he and his top military commander, General Valery Gerasimov, sat at the end of a long table as Mr Putin, on the other side. , ordered them to place Russia’s nuclear forces on a higher level of preparedness.
“The war has shown that the army is fighting badly,” said Mr Luzin, the Russian military analyst. “The Minister of Defense is responsible for this.”
The battlefield deaths of senior Russian commanders also poorly reflect the Kremlin’s war planning. Captain Andrei Paliy, the deputy commander of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, was killed in fighting over the port city of Mariupol, Russian officials said Sunday.
After Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky, the deputy commander of the 41st Combined Arms Army, was killed four days after the war, the city of Novorossiysk, where he was previously stationed, issued a statement remembering him as “a loyal comrade, a valiant warrior, a wise commander and a selfless defender of the fatherland.”
“Epaulettes do not protect terrorists,” Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said in its statement announcing the death of General Sukhovetsky.
There was also Major General Oleg Mityaev, one of the most experienced commanders of the Russian army. He had commanded Russia’s largest foreign military base in Tajikistan and was the second-in-command of Russian forces in Syria. When Mr. Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine, General Mityayev was tapped to lead the legendary 150th Motorized Rifle Division, whose soldiers helped take the Reichstag building in Berlin, hastening the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
War between Russia and Ukraine: important developments
Russia’s shrinking power. The Pentagon said Russia’s “combat force” in Ukraine has fallen below 90 percent of its original strength. The assessment reflects the significant losses suffered by Russian troops at the hands of Ukrainian soldiers.
According to Kiev, he lasted less than three weeks in Ukraine. After he was killed in battle, Russian troops either left his body behind or it was captured by the far-right Azov battalion, which posted a photo of the bloody corpse on Telegram with the caption: “Glory to Ukraine.”
Russian officials have not confirmed his death — or that of another four generals Ukraine claims to have killed. But even if we factor in the fog of war, experts say Russia has suffered a damaging death toll from its military leaders on the ground in Ukraine, which could soon erode Russia’s military effectiveness.
The deaths reflect both operational security concerns and the challenges of the Russian military’s top-heavy chain of command against a much more agile Ukrainian force.
“In modern warfare, not many generals are taken out,” said Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the former commander of the US military in Europe. “But this is a very deadly battlefield.”
General Joseph L. Votel, the former commander of the US Central Command, said the deaths may reflect Russia’s challenges on the ground – and reports that some Russian units misunderstood the mission and even left equipment behind. As a result, he said, military leaders appeared to be operating closer to the front to “keep and keep their troops in the battle, through personal example or intimidation.”
“It’s not good to keep losing senior leaders,” he said in an email. “Ultimately, the loss of leadership affects morale, strength and effectiveness.”
For the Russian generals, part of the problem is that many of them have been fighting in a different kind of war for the past few decades. In Chechnya in the early 2000s, Russia managed to calm a separatist uprising in a small area by resorting to the destruction of entire cities on the scorched earth. More recently, Russia’s operations in Syria have been fueled by air strikes against a population that lacks advanced weapons or even a regular military.
Ukraine, though militarily much weaker, has learned from its eight-year war against Russian-backed separatist forces in the east of the country — a war similar, in miniature, to the one currently being waged. Ukraine has its own air force, which remains largely intact, and modern anti-aircraft systems. As convoys of Russian armor trudge along Ukraine’s highways, Ukrainian forces have deployed drones and highly maneuverable infantry units to devastating effect, leaving abandoned and burning vehicles behind.
Across Ukraine, Russian forces are now largely at a standstill. But analysts warn that the military setbacks won’t deter Mr Putin – who has labeled the war at home as an existential war for Russia, increasingly signaling the Russian public to prepare for a long battle.
The question is whether heavy losses and the pain of Western sanctions could force Mr Putin to accept some kind of compromise to end the war — and whether Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky would be willing to make concessions to satisfy him. On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov rejected any hopes of an impending ceasefire, describing talks with Ukraine as “going much slower and less substantive than we’d like”.
“The Russian leadership cannot lose,” said Andrei Kortunov, director-general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government. “Whatever happens, they’re going to have to end this whole story with some kind of win.”
Anton Trojanovskic reported from Istanbul, and Michael Schwirtz from Odessa, Ukraine. Oleg Matsneva and Ivan Nechepurenko reporting contributed.