Jeffrey Edmonds writes:

Many of us who analyze the Russian military for a living have been shocked to see Russian forces fumble the way they have in Ukraine. There are already some heated calls for analytical accountability, most prominently from Eliot Cohen and Phillips Payson O’Brien, into how the body of Russian military analysts could have gotten the Russian military so wrong. There is no doubt that the Russian military has performed much more poorly than most anticipated and it is important to understand why. However, observers should beware of drawing simplistic, overarching conclusions about Russian military power writ large.

One can lump Russian military failure into two large categories: those that are contingent to the current conflict and set of circumstances surrounding the invasion, and those that are inherent to the Russian military. Based on my experience as an analyst of the Russian military and former member of the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration, I focus here on the former: those contingent political factors that have contributed to the Russian military’s poor performance. I plan to follow this up with another article on those failures inherent to the Russian armed forces.

The stage was set by Moscow’s inaccurate and chauvinistic assumptions about Ukraine, its leaders, its military, and its people. When these assumptions were paired with a desire to keep the invasion plans secret from those tactical echelons that were ordered to execute it, we can start to understand the disastrous Russian military operations during the opening days.

In the days leading up until the invasion, the Kremlin signaled limited intentions towards Ukraine while surrounding the country with troops from three directions all the while Putin was disparaging the notion that Ukraine was a legitimate and sovereign country. When the order was finally given to proceed along multiple axes entailing an invasion of half of Europe’s largest country, Russian military staff had little time to prepare. False assumptions from the Russian political and military leadership about the ease of invading Ukraine, coupled with a desire to keep the invasion secret, denied the Russian military the ability to prepare for war in the way that it had trained for countless times before.

The fundamental mistake made at the leadership level, that carried down to the lowest ranks, was an underestimation of the lengths Ukraine’s leadership, military, and people would go to defend it. Putin’s speech about the nature of Ukraine and its current leadership, purportedly consisting of drug addicts and neo-Nazis, was apparently not just propaganda. It betrayed at least some of his real thoughts: that the Ukrainian state was little more than an aberration that could not stand up to Russian power. [Continue reading…]