A “Potemkin army”: Moscow’s troubled campaign
“When it comes to war, generals say that ‘mass matters’,” said Helene Cooper in The New York Times. But the lesson of Ukraine, where Russia is struggling to defeat a far smaller army, is that military muscle only counts for so much. Russia’s force has been beset by poor morale, and fuel and food shortages. Some troops have surrendered or sabotaged their vehicles to avoid fighting. Russia has the power “to reduce Ukraine to rubble”, but as a fighting force it is sclerotic. “The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernise its military,” Russia’s former foreign minister Andrei V. Kozyrev noted on Twitter. “Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military adviser you cannot report that to the president. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military.”
Russia’s logistical failures are summed up by the famous 40-mile convoy that stalled on its way to Kyiv, said Phillips O’Brien in The Times. Vehicles have been stuck for days, “almost certainly out of fuel” and with dead batteries. Russia’s relative weakness is evident in other areas, too, said Daniel Gros on Project Syndicate. Many feared it would accompany its invasion with “devastating” cyberattacks, but these either never materialised or were thwarted. And it still hasn’t won control of the skies, despite having ten times more aircraft than Ukraine, owing to the poor quality of its pilots.
Russia’s forces are performing badly, agreed Justin Bronk in The Spectator, but they’re still very likely to win “the conventional combat phase” of this war. At that point, however, they could find themselves “trapped in a country unified against them, at the end of vulnerable supply lines” and under continuing attack from Ukrainian resistance forces armed with modern weapons by the West. The Russian army’s problems are likely only to get worse.