Military slog a ‘dreadful mess’ for Putin

WASHINGTON — The signs are abundant of how Ukraine frustrated Vladimir Putin’s hopes for a swift victory and how Russia’s military proved far from ready for the fight.

A truck carrying Russian troops crashes, its doors blown open by a rocket-propelled grenade. Foreignsupplied drones target Russian command posts. Orthodox priests in trailing vestments parade Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag in defiance of their Russian captors in the occupied city of Berdyansk.

Russia has lost hundreds of tanks, many left charred or abandoned along the roads, and its death toll is on a pace to outstrip that of the country’s previous military campaigns in recent years.

Yet more than three weeks into the war, with Putin’s initial aim of an easy change in government in Kyiv long gone, Russia’s military still has a strong hand. With their greater might and stockpile of city-flattening munitions, Russian forces can fight on for whatever the Russian president may plan next, military analysts say.

Despite all the determination of Ukraine’s people, all the losses among Russia’s

forces and all the errors of Kremlin leaders, there is no sign that the war will soon be over. Even if Putin fails to take control of his neighbor, he can keep up the punishing attacks on its cities and people. Ukraine’s president said Russia is trying to starve Ukraine’s cities into submission and that Putin is deliberately creating “a humanitarian catastrophe.”

“His instinct will be always to double down because he’s got himself into a dreadful mess, a huge strategic

blunder,” said Michael Clarke, former head of the British-based Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank.

“And I don’t think it’s in his character to try to retrieve that, except by carrying on, going forward,” he said.

Fatefully, Putin underestimated the national pride and battlefield skills that Ukrainians have built up over the past eight years of battling Russian-backed separatists in the country’s

east.

At the start, Russians thought “they would install, you know, some pro-Russian government and call it a day and declare victory,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, a researcher on Russia’s security at the Virginia-based CNA think tank. “That was sort of Plan A, and as near as we can tell, they didn’t really have a Plan B.”

Overall, Russians appear to be fighting with three objectives now: to surround Kyiv, to encircle spread-out

Ukrainian fighters in the east and to break through to the major port city of Odesa in the west, said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and program director at CNA.

A senior U.S. defense official on Friday said the Russians have launched more than 1,080 missiles since the start of the war and that they retain about 90 percent of the combat power they had arrayed around Ukraine at the beginning of the invasion.

The math of military conquests and occupation may be against Putin in Ukraine.

Russia’s number of dead and wounded in Ukraine is nearing the 10 percent benchmark of diminished combat effectiveness, Gorenburg said. The reported battlefield deaths of four Russian generals — out of an estimated 20 in the fight — signal impaired command, he said.

Researchers tracking only those Russian equipment losses that were photographed or recorded on video say Russia has lost more than 1,500 tanks, trucks, mounted equipment and other heavy gear.

Meanwhile, Russia needs to limit its use of smart, longrange missiles in case they’re needed in any larger war with NATO, military analysts say.

When it comes to ruling a restive territory in the face of armed opposition, the formula is 20 fighters for every 1,000 people — or 800,000 Russian troops for Ukraine’s more than 40 million people, Clarke notes. That’s almost as many as Russia’s entire active-duty military of 900,000.

That means controlling any substantial chunk of Ukrainian territory long term would take more resources than Russia could foreseeably commit.

Other options remain possible, including a negotiated settlement. Moscow is demanding that Ukraine formally embrace neutrality, swearing off any alliance with NATO, and recognize the independence of the separatist regions in the east and Russian sovereignty over Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Russia’s other options include an unrelenting air campaign in which it bombs and depopulates cities as it did in Chechnya and Syria.

“Unless the Russians intend to be completely genocidal — they could flatten all the major cities, and Ukrainians will rise up against Russian occupation — there will be just constant guerrilla war” if Russian troops remain, Clarke said.

Bernat Armangue / Associated Press A funeral is held Tuesday in Lviv for four of the Ukrainian service members killed in a Russian missile strike on a military base in Yavoriv.