Recently, Russian casualties climbed through the one million mark after three and a half years of Putin’s “special military operation”, originally expected to last three days. For an army of such size in manpower and equipment this seems a remarkable price to pay for less than a fifth of Ukrainian territory, fighting against an army which was minuscule in comparison on the day of the illegal invasion – 24th Feb 22.
What are the reasons for this ineptitude, and is this purely a problem of the modern Russian army – or a reflection of systemic failures across the centuries? A soldier and a historian will try to answer these questions today.
When it comes down to it, the Russian military has always relied on mass and brutality. It has aspired historically to ambitious intellectual underpinnings for its military power but this has tended to falter on first contact with reality. In the case of the Red Army of the 1920s and 30s, much radical military thinking was lost in Stalin’s purges. The only army which gained any valuable insights into the future of war from the experimental exercises conducted in the USSR during that time was the Wehrmacht. Today in the 2020s, the much vaunted “Gerasimov Doctrine” (aka “hybrid warfare”) failed when confronted with a citizen army determined to resist a war of unprovoked aggression waged against its independent sovereign state.
Over the last week or two we’ve been reconsidering the nature of the Soviet victory in World War II, but also the nature of the fighting during that conflict and, more broadly, Russia’s history of warfare since the turn of the twentieth century. It’s fair to say, the Second World War aside, Russia’s wars make for pretty sorry reading – if you’re Russian. Russia suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905, one which in large part led to the 1905 Russian revolution. Imperial Russia’s part in the subsequent First World War was a catastrophe which led to the loss of 5.5 million casualties, battlefield defeat and the overthrow of the Tsarist regime; the 1917 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk also saw Russia ceding large amounts of territory to Germany and its allies.
Recently, Russian casualties climbed through the one million mark after three and a half years of Putin’s “special military operation”, originally expected to last three days. For an army of such size in manpower and equipment this seems a remarkable price to pay for less than a fifth of Ukrainian territory, fighting against an army which was minuscule in comparison on the day of the illegal invasion – 24th Feb 22.
What are the reasons for this ineptitude, and is this purely a problem of the modern Russian army – or a reflection of systemic failures across the centuries? A soldier and a historian will try to answer these questions today.
When it comes down to it, the Russian military has always relied on mass and brutality. It has aspired historically to ambitious intellectual underpinnings for its military power but this has tended to falter on first contact with reality. In the case of the Red Army of the 1920s and 30s, much radical military thinking was lost in Stalin’s purges. The only army which gained any valuable insights into the future of war from the experimental exercises conducted in the USSR during that time was the Wehrmacht. Today in the 2020s, the much vaunted “Gerasimov Doctrine” (aka “hybrid warfare”) failed when confronted with a citizen army determined to resist a war of unprovoked aggression waged against its independent sovereign state.
Over the last week or two we’ve been reconsidering the nature of the Soviet victory in World War II, but also the nature of the fighting during that conflict and, more broadly, Russia’s history of warfare since the turn of the twentieth century. It’s fair to say, the Second World War aside, Russia’s wars make for pretty sorry reading – if you’re Russian. Russia suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905, one which in large part led to the 1905 Russian revolution. Imperial Russia’s part in the subsequent First World War was a catastrophe which led to the loss of 5.5 million casualties, battlefield defeat and the overthrow of the Tsarist regime; the 1917 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk also saw Russia ceding large amounts of territory to Germany and its allies.