A road to war paved with mistakes
Russia’s optimistic battle plan swamped by entrenched woes
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war was never supposed to be like the debacle that is unfolding for the Kremlin’s forces in Ukraine.
When Bill Burns, the director of the CIA, traveled to Moscow last year to warn against invading Ukraine, he found a supremely confident Kremlin, with Putin’s national security adviser boasting that Russia’s cutting-edge armed forces were strong enough to stand up even to the Americans.
Russian invasion plans show that the military expected to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine and triumph within days. Officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of military parades in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
But instead of that resounding victory, with tens of thousands of his troops killed and parts of his army in shambles after nearly 10 months of war, Putin faces something else entirely: his nation’s greatest human and strategic calamity since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
How could one of the world’s most powerful militaries, led by a celebrated tactician like Putin, have faltered so badly against its much smaller, weaker rival?
A New York Times investigation found a stunning cascade of mistakes that started with Putin — profoundly isolated in the pandemic, obsessed with his legacy and convinced of his own brilliance.
The story — based on secret battle plans, intercepts and interviews with Russian soldiers and Kremlin confidants who have known Putin for decades — offers new insights into Putin’s state of mind, the stunning failures of his military and U.S. efforts to prevent a direct war with Russia.
The primary takeaway from Russia’s setbacks is that they have roots that were in place before the first shot was fired.
Materials recovered from battlefields point to the military’s overall lack of preparation: a map from the 1960s, a Wikipedia printout on how to operate a sniper rifle and a wildly optimistic timetable for Russia’s invasion.
Reached by phone inside Russian hospitals, wounded soldiers described being sent to war with little food, training, bullets or equipment — and watching about two-thirds of their platoons get killed. One soldier recalled asking how to use his rifle just before heading off to battle.
Inside the Kremlin, Putin planned the invasion in such secrecy that even Dmitry Peskov, his spokesperson, said in an interview that he learned of it only once it had begun. Anton Vaino, Putin’s chief of staff, and Alexei Gromov, Putin’s powerful media adviser, also said they did not know in advance, according to people who spoke to them about it.
The Russian military, despite Western assumptions about its prowess, was severely compromised, gutted by years of theft. Hundreds of billions of dollars had been devoted to modernizing the armed forces under Putin, but corruption scandals ensnared thousands of officers, leaving the leadership ranks thin.
Once the invasion began in late February, Russia squandered its dominance over Ukraine through a parade of blunders. It relied on old maps and bad intelligence to fire its missiles, leaving Ukrainian air defenses surprisingly intact, ready to defend the country. Russia’s vaunted hacking squads tried, and failed, to win in what some officials call the first big test of cyberweapons in actual warfare.
As a whole, Russia’s armed forces were so stodgy and sclerotic that they did not adapt, even after enduring huge losses on the battlefield. While their planes were being shot down, many Russian pilots flew as if they faced no danger, almost like they were at an air show. Likewise, Russian soldiers, many shocked they were going to war, used their cellphones to call home, allowing the Ukrainians to track them and pick them off in large numbers.
Even battlefield gains proved problematic for Putin’s military.
Stretched thin by its grand ambitions, Russia seized more territory than it could defend, leaving thousands of square miles in the hands of skeleton crews of underfed, undertrained and poorly equipped fighters. Many were conscripts or ragtag separatists from Ukraine’s divided east, a large number with gear from the 1940s.
Their Ukrainian opponents, however, with new weapons from the West in hand, were able to beat them back. Yet, Russian commanders kept sending waves of ground troops into pointless assaults again and again.
As the multipronged crisis has unfolded for Moscow, one consistent thread remains: the man at the top.
Putin divided his war into fiefs, leaving no one powerful enough to challenge him. As the initial invasion failed, the atomized approach only deepened, chipping away at an already disjointed war effort. Now Putin’s fractured armies often function like rivals, competing for weapons and, at times, viciously turning on one another.