Landscape of Uncertainty
Piercing the fog that envelops the field of battle in Ukraine
I’ve written quite a bit about the Russo-Ukrainian War since it broke out in February 2022. And though no one who knows me would say that I lack confidence in my opinions and analysis, a disquieting thought has occasionally occurred to me: Tom, do you actually know what you’re talking about?
Pertinent question! The field of battle is a landscape of uncertainty, shrouded in Clausewitz’s fog of war. It’s also a maze of logical and emotional contradictions. A staff officer moves a pin on the situation map, and an infantryman crawls forward on hands and knees. This is the trap that war sets for the military analyst, whether he’s bloviating on CNN or opining on Substack: The farther away you are from the firing line, the clearer it all seems. One antidote to that false sense of omniscience is to study a few maps in a military atlas, visualizing as best one can what all those symbols and arrows signify in human terms.
But most of my nagging doubts have been resolved by Fred Kagan’s guest appearance on the May 25 Commentary podcast. Kagan, military historian at the American Enterprise Institute and an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, offered his assessment of the situation on the ground in Ukraine at the present moment, which in most respects tracks with my own analysis.
In “Tannenberg Revisited” (September 2022) I wrote that the poor performance of the Russian Army was a reflection of the regime it served. And I compared that regime, not to the Stalinist Soviet Union, but to its predecessor. “V. Putin may aspire to emulate Peter the Great and Stalin,” I argued, “but his regime most resembles that presided over by the last tsar.”
Kagan’s analysis was similar. He noted that though Putin is indeed a dictator, the corruption, incompetence, and weakness of the regime over which he presides places severe limitations on his power: The techniques of cohesion and terror so well exploited by Stalin are unavailable to him. And Putin realizes this, Kagan added, which explains his reluctance to escalate the “special military operation” against Ukraine by ordering full mobilization and waging total war. The despot is not a risk taker by nature: When he launched his invasion of Ukraine, Putin was counting on a quick victory. And he no doubt calculated—with the spectacle of Joe Biden’s Afghanistan bugout fresh in his mind— that the US and NATO, confronted with a fiat accompli, would merely protest and bluster, as they did after his seizure of Crimea in 2014.
But that proved to be a gross miscalculation. Instead of scoring a quick and tidy victory, the Russian Army was humiliatingly defeated in the battles north of Kyiv. Then things went from bad to worse, as the US and NATO rallied to the support of Ukraine. So now Putin is being squeezed between his doubts about the Russian people’s staying power and the competence of the Russian Army on the one hand, and the urgent need for some sort of resolution that could be passed off as a victory on the other. Meanwhile several factions within Russia—call them the hawks—are agitating for all-out war, including against NATO.
Of course, if his army could deliver a victory all of Putin’s difficulties would disappear. But as Kagan pointed out, this seems unlikely. The recent Russian attacks in Donbas, probably intended to preempt the expected Ukrainian offensive, came to nothing. It’s true that after a long and bloody battle the mercenary Wagner Group managed to capture the city of Bakhmut, but this was a Pyrrhic victory, coming too late to help the Russians elsewhere. So now the initiative has switched sides—and the Russian Army’s ability to withstand the coming Ukrainian offensive is questionable at best.
It's true that the Russians have covered much of their front in the Donbas with an extensive network of entrenched positions, antitank obstacles, and minefields. But fortifications are only effective if they’re adequately manned—and manpower is in short supply. The Institute for the Study of War estimates that the Russian Army has some 200,000 troops in the Donbas, of whom perhaps a third are infantry—insufficient to mount a strong defense all along the line. Moreover, these forces appear to be deployed in front of the fortified zone. Presumably, the Russian plan is to blunt or at least delay Ukrainian attacks before breaking contact and withdrawing into the fortified positions.
As Kagan noted, this would be a perilous course of action. To conduct an orderly withdrawal while in contact with the enemy requires leadership, tactical skill and unit cohesion of a high order. To put it no more pointedly, these are not qualities that the Russian Army has demonstrated thus far, and there’s more than sufficient reason to doubt that it could sustain the shock of a fast-moving armored assault. Yet for reasons not easily explicable, the Russians are running the risk of being precipitated into a disorderly skedaddle, if not a complete collapse of resistance at the point of attack.
And with that Kagan passed on to a consideration of the intangibles: those factors that Clausewitz termed the moral (psychological) aspects of war. Nowadays we group them under the heading of morale. To define it briefly, morale is the soldier’s confidence in his leadership, his comrades, his weapons, and his own military skills. In a sense, morale is the antidote to fear, the soldier’s ever-present companion in combat.
There seems not much doubt that the morale of the Russian soldier is low. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he won’t fight. It does mean that Russian units, from squads to brigades, are brittle. A relevant historical example is the Austro-Hungarian Army in the Great War. Austrian soldiers could fight, and indeed they fought well on some occasions. But the army as a whole was brittle: When hit too hard, it was apt to collapse. Like tsarist Russia, the Habsburg Monarchy was a despotic state in the last stages of a decline that was faithfully reproduced in the ranks of its army.
In addition to these problems, the Institute for the Study of War has detected what it describes as confusion among the Russian military’s senior leadership. The most visible sign of this is the tension between Putin’s mercenary legion, the Wagner Group, and the regular military high command. Unity of command is the sine qua non of effective warfighting, and there are growing indications that it no longer exists at the top level of the Russian military.
Also telling was the response to a minor incursion into Russian territory by a small group of Russian dissidents. Somehow this force, estimated to have consisted of half a dozen armored vehicles and fifty or so troops, was able to pass through the Russian fortified zone and cross the border into the Belgorod region. The Institute noted that the Russian command was taken by surprise by the Belgorod incursion and that Russian bloggers and pundits reacted to it with a “degree of panic, factionalism, and incoherency as it tends to display when it experiences significant informational shocks.”
For Ukraine, then, the field of battle is a landscape of opportunity. If the Ukrainians can organize and mount an offensive of sufficient weight and velocity, they may be able to score a decisive victory and bring this war to a definitive end. That’s certainly a possibility, though not one to be counted upon. For the Ukrainian Army has problems and challenges of its own: finding and training replacements, refitting and reorganizing units, integrating new weapons and equipment into its force structure, creating the logistical infrastructure necessary to support offensive operations, etc.
Even so, Ukraine can reasonably be expected to recapture a fair amount of territory while giving the Russians a hard knock. A victory on that more modest scale might be enough to induce Putin to cut his losses and negotiate a face-saving settlement, though I have my doubts. After all his chest thumping, vows to vanquish Ukrainian “Nazis,” and comparisons of the “special military operation” to the Great Patriotic War for the Motherland, Putin will find it difficult to pass off as a glorious Russian victory some compromise that splits the difference in the Donbas.
What seems to me more likely is an armed truce, neither side conceding anything, both sides biding their time. We may, indeed, be on the threshold of a “peace process,” similar to the exercise in futility of that name that lent a special air of unreality to the long-running war between the Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. For unless one side or the other can deliver a knockout blow, this conflict will smolder on, and may well flare up again.
Kagan is the husband of Victoria Nuland, the neoconservative architect of the Ukraine policies of Obama and Biden. She is almost certainly responsible for goading Biden to do everything possible to instigate an attack by Putin. This doesn’t mean Kagan is wrong. It does mean he’s not objective and his analysis should be viewed with some skepticism.
As for the defeat of the Ukrainian army by the Wagner Group, while the captured territory may or may not be strategically important, the Ukrainian defeat is telling. Everyone acknowledges that at Zelensky’s direction, Ukraine expended major resources to emerge victorious in that battle. Not only did Ukraine fail, it succumbed to a group of mercenaries recruited in large part from the dregs of Russian society including Russian prisoners.
If anything this suggests that like the Russian army and the American army (defeated by the Taliban), the Ukrainian combatants have serious problems of their own.