Putin Is Changing Tactics To Siege Warfare And Indiscriminate Shelling Of Civilian Populations

Putin’s initial war plans are a tactical and logistical failure. On Day 7, the Russians are now planning a siege and indiscriminately shelling civilian populations.

This is what Putin did when he met with stiff opposition from Chechnyan rebels in 1999. He ordered the complete destruction of Grozny, the capitol of Chechnya. What Putin’s destruction of Grozny in 1999 means for Ukraine now:

[A]s Ukraine resists, the Russian military could regroup. Britain’s Prime Minister said of Vladimir Putin:

“His only instinct is going to be to double down and to try and ‘Grozny-fy’ Kyiv, if you know what I mean,” Boris Johnson said.

And what does Johnson mean? In 1999, Vladimir Putin ordered the complete destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny.

The Russian military laid waste to Grozny, killing tens of thousands of civilians. In Putin’s own words, his troops “fulfilled their task to the end.”

I cannot emphasize enough how extraordinary this would be. Kiev was the first capital of the Russian State, which at that time was known as Kyiv Russ. The city is still considered a sacred place for all Orthodox Christians in Russia and Ukraine. I can’t imagine Russian military commanders carrying out Putin’s order to “Grozny-fy” Kyiv, a city of over 3 million people. Russians and Ukrainians share family relations, history, and culture. This would almost certainly lead to a coup d’état from Russia’s top military comanders or a popular uprising in Russia.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports, Russia Targets Ukrainian Civilian Areas in Shift to Demoralize Resistance:

Russian forces, frustrated in plans for a quick victory, shifted to a new strategy of pummeling civilian areas in an attempt to demoralize Ukrainian resistance and reignite their slowing military advance.

On Tuesday afternoon, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it would strike Ukrainian intelligence and communications facilities in central Kyiv that it said are being used for “information attacks” against Russia, and urged residents living nearby to leave for their own safety. Western diplomats took the warning as a signal that a massive strike on Kyiv’s residential areas was imminent. Some of the remaining staff at foreign embassies left Ukraine’s capital.

The Washington Post also reports, Russia’s invasion began with precision missiles, but weapons are changing as siege war begins:

The Russian military is branching out from relying heavily on guided missiles in its bombardment of Ukraine, firing more artillery, rockets and other weapons that can be difficult to aim precisely and cause devastating carnage in civilian areas, military experts said.

The shift comes as the Pentagon assesses that Russia is pivoting to siege warfare in the cities of Kharkiv and Chernihiv, and could do so in the capital, Kyiv. Such tactics are notoriously horrifying, trapping civilians under fire as an invading force encircles a city and prevents food, ammunition and medical supplies from entering.

Military analysts said that Russia’s initial battle plan appeared nonsensical and haphazard, with Russian soldiers launching a ground invasion after a brief bombardment that primarily struck military targets but failed to knock out all Ukrainian air defenses. Invading forces, operating with little logistical support and air cover, appeared to expect little resistance, but instead have clashed with Ukrainians in bloody fights.

Russian commanders appear to be reconsidering their approach, analysts and U.S. government officials said.

“I’m seeing reorganization,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at CNA, a Virginia-based think tank. “They’re coalescing into larger units, they’re pulling up logistics and they’re starting to use more artillery and air power.”

A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Pentagon’s current assessments, affirmed Tuesday that it does appear Russia is “regrouping.” Russian forces have begun frequent use of a multiple rocket-launch system that can employ unguided cluster munitions and thermobaric rounds, made at least one flight with a Su-34 bomber, and built a 40-mile-long column comprising hundreds of tanks and other armored vehicles north of the capital, Kyiv, Russia’s primary objective.

When Russia launched its invasion Thursday, it fired more than 100 missiles into Ukraine, primarily at airfields and other military targets. The initial salvo included a mix of cruise missiles fired from ships and Iskander ballistic missiles that are reasonably accurate, said Rob Lee, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who is now a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

As of Tuesday, the Russians had launched a total of about 400 missiles — which have guidance systems and are relatively precise, experts say. But as they have faced stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces, Russia has begun to employ rocket systems and other methods in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, around which some of the heaviest fighting has occurred. On Tuesday, an explosion appeared to a rock a government center and nearby intersection as cars sat in traffic, according to video of the attack. It wasn’t clear what caused it.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has condemned the shelling, calling it a “war crime.”

The rocket launcher fires rapid volleys of unguided munitions and can carry cluster munitions, which indiscriminately disperse small “bomblets” upon detonation to inflict maximum casualties. Amnesty International accused the Russian military on Monday of killing civilians, including children, with the rounds, which are condemned by the majority of the international community.

Oksana Markarova, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, told reporters Tuesday that Russia also has used a “vacuum bomb,” a colloquial name given to thermobaric weapons because of the way they suck in oxygen from the surrounding air upon detonation to produce a larger explosion.

More: What are vacuum bombs? Concerns grow about Russia’s thermobaric weapons:

Accusations that Russia may be using thermobaric weapons in Ukraine have raised fears about the potential devastation that could result from attacks with the so-called vacuum bombs.

Oksana Markarova, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, said Monday that the Russian military had used a vacuum bomb, which sucks oxygen from the air to trigger a huge explosion. Markarova did not provide additional details and NBC News has not independently verified that the weapon has been used in Ukraine, but Russian thermobaric rocket launchers have been photographed entering the country by a CNN team.

[T]he accusation adds to mounting concerns voiced by several human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, that Russia is conducting indiscriminate attacks in densely populated civilian areas that could constitute war crimes.

The potential use of vacuum bombs is of particular concern because these thermobaric munitions are designed to cause immense destruction.

“It’s just a horrible, devastating weapon,” said David Johnson, a retired U.S. Army colonel and a principal researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit policy research organization headquartered in California.

What is a vacuum bomb?

Thermobaric weapons, or vacuum bombs, are a type of two-stage munition that create enormous explosions. Launched in a rocket or artillery shell, the first explosive charge spreads an aerosol akin to vaporized gasoline over the area. A second charge then ignites the aerosol fog, creating a huge blast, flames, a large pressure wave and a vacuum as oxygen from the surrounding air is sucked up.

Johnson said thermobaric munitions are sometimes known as “a poor man’s nuclear weapon,” because they can obliterate any humans in the vicinity. Victims can be killed by the blast or the accompanying shock wave, and the subsequent vacuum can rupture people’s lungs.

The type of thermobaric weapon that has been spotted with Russian convoys inside Ukraine is known as the TOS-1A multiple rocket launcher. It has a range of around 2.5 miles and a blast radius that extends out approximately 1,000 feet, Johnson said.

“Everything inside that would be vaporized, essentially,” he said.

Have they been used before?

They were used by Russian troops in Chechnya in the 1990s, and Johnson said there was some evidence that vacuum bombs were deployed in 2016 by Syrian government forces and their Russian allies in Aleppo. U.S. forces also used thermobaric weapons in Afghanistan in 2017 to destroy cave and tunnel complexes, Johnson said.

The weapons are sometimes nicknamed “bunker busters” because they can effectively demolish defensive barriers.

“If you’re approaching from about 4 kilometers out, you can unleash not just one but dozens of them and just melt a hole through the defensive position,” Johnson said.

While they weren’t originally designed to be used in urban areas, vacuum bombs could be particularly lethal if shot into building complexes and other densely populated regions, he added.

“You can imagine if this is contained inside an enclosed space — nothing would survive inside that space,” Johnson said. “If you don’t die immediately, the pressure would rupture your internal organs. It’s really horrendous.”

Despite the horrifying destruction that thermobaric munitions can cause, there are no laws that ban their use in warfare, though they are widely condemned by nongovernmental organizations. The use of such weapons against civilians, however, is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and could constitute war crimes.

The Post continues:

Lee, with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisers will have difficult days ahead if they cause major destruction. While Russia leveled residential areas in Syria and Chechnya in earlier conflicts, it is not clear that Putin is comfortable doing so in a nation whose history is closely intertwined with Russia’s when it could have political fallout for him, he said.

“If you’re going to go into cities, you have to be prepared to destroy them, and that’s going to mean that a lot of Russians die, and a lot of civilians die,” Lee said. “I don’t know if they’re really going to be willing to massacre all these civilians.”

* * *

Kofman, with CNA, said the Russian plan so far has “not made any sense,” putting rank-and-file soldiers in combat with few resources as the Russian air force is largely “missing in action.” The senior U.S. defense official at the Pentagon said Tuesday that the United States believes rank-and-file Russian soldiers are now coping with fuel and food shortages.

Lee said he has been left wondering whether the Russians are experiencing shortages of specific weapons. He cited Krasnopol laser-guided artillery rounds, which have been used in Syria in conjunction with drones to spot targets, improve accuracy and assess battle damage, he said.
The haphazard planning raises questions, too, as to whether Putin withheld his invasion plan from military staff officers for too long to effectively coordinate, Lee said. He doubted that rank-and-file Russians soldiers are ready for a more aggressive fight, citing videos in which civilians have taunted them and stopped their vehicles without being killed.

Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director‑general at RUSI, a London think tank, said that many observers thought Russia would have done better in dominating the skies, and the fact that Ukraine continues to fly jets and Turkish-made drones exposes a weakness in the Russian military.

Chalmers said Russia has an advantage with its rockets and artillery, but he predicted that plans to take large cities will prove particularly difficult.

“It takes a lot of personnel. You can bomb a city to smithereens but there are lots of place to hide, to go underground,” he said. “They will have to fight block by block if the resistance continues.”

As I have said before, Putin cannot accept defeat, and this makes him extremely dangerous. He has already threatened a nuclear response if any country intervenes in Ukraine to stop him.

But he could also use a “tactical” nuclear weapon aka a “low-yield” nuclear weapon against a Ukraine city if he continues to fail to achieve his strategic objective.

Business Insider reports, ‘Putin might do the unthinkable’: Former intelligence chief warns that the conflict in Ukraine has increased the risk of nuclear war. (excerpt):

[A]mong the specialists who study Russia’s nuclear arsenal, there has been a long-running debate about another scenario: the possibility that Russian forces might use so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which have shorter ranges and smaller explosive yields, to seize a battlefield advantage, especially in conflicts they are losing. This new doctrine, in Strangelovian fashion, is known as “escalate to deescalate” or “E2D.” It started in 2014, when an official Kremlin document raised the possibility of a nuclear reprisal to a conventional strike if “the existence of the state itself is threatened.” The following year, Putin said he had considered putting Russian nuclear weapons on alert to protect ethnic Russians in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia annexed in violation of international law. In 2018, Trump’s national security team thought E2D was a serious-enough threat to warrant mention in the Nuclear Posture Review. That document predicts a scenario in which “limited first use” of tactical nuclear weapons “could paralyze the United States and thereby end a conflict on terms favorable to Russia.”

In an interview with Insider, James Clapper, the former intelligence chief, said he agreed with the assessment that the Russian military had come to view itself as having a lower threshold for the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “The Russians were driven to this,” he told me, “because the current Russian army is, comparatively, a shadow of the Soviet army.” If your traditional military is weak, in other words, tactical nuclear weapons offer a major form of compensation.

Podvig, the Swiss analyst, said he considered even a tactical nuclear strike to have “very low probability” of happening. He notes that “it would not help the Russian military achieve any of its goals, and the political consequences would be orders of magnitude worse than what we’re seeing now.” And even if Putin orders a nuclear strike, history suggests it’s possible his own military might refuse to comply. The Soviet Union came close to launching two nuclear strikes that were halted at the 11th hour by individual officers — Vasili Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and Stanislav Petrov after a military computer falsely warned of a US strike in 1983.

But it’s hard not to take the current threat seriously when one considers the person who is making it. Putin is an increasingly isolated autocrat, a few days into a difficult war, whose own diplomats are said to be apologizing behind closed doors for his actions.

* * *

It’s too soon to say how much of the Russian public is ready to turn on Putin, but many have acknowledged the possibility that a perceived threat to his rule could cause him to overreact.

“I don’t think he’s a rational actor,” H.R. McMaster, the former US national security advisor, said on “Face the Nation.” “He’s driven by a desire to remain in power until at least 2036. I think now he knows that all of that is at risk.”

Clapper agreed that Putin appeared to be increasingly volatile. “He was always hard, cold, disciplined, almost machine-like,” Clapper told me. “Now his anger — fury — show. His meandering, incoherent rants are illogical and scary. He has no one who can push back and disagree with him.” A tactical nuclear strike, he added, could offer Putin a way out of a situation that’s starting to look increasingly untenable.

“It is a risk, or at least more of a risk than it was a week ago,” Clapper said. “The fact that we are even having such a discussion is reflective of the realization that yes, Putin might do the unthinkable.”

Clapper’s concerns are shared by the U.S. Intelligence Community. In Putin, intelligence analysts see an isolated leader who underestimated the West but could lash out if cornered:

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second week, U.S. and European intelligence officials say that Russian President Vladimir Putin appears isolated and reliant on a small coterie of advisers who have not told him the truth about how difficult and costly conquering Ukraine is turning out to be.

In Putin, analysts see a leader on edge, fueled by paranoia after underestimating the unified resolve of the West, and at risk of lashing out when he feels cornered. Those concerns have led some policymakers to repeatedly note that NATO will not intervene in the war lest there be any doubt in Putin’s mind.

Putin’s military campaign, which has killed civilians, as well as his order to place Russian nuclear forces on a higher level of alert, has prompted fresh requests from U.S. policymakers in recent days to the intelligence agencies for insights on his thinking, according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Understanding what’s in a leader’s head is one of the most difficult tasks intelligence analysts face. But in Putin’s case, it’s crucial for decision-makers to understand how he might act so they can calibrate their responses and to try to find some way to end the war in Ukraine.

* * *

Before the invasion, U.S. and British intelligence analysts had warned that Putin was being misinformed by his advisers, who gave him an overly rosy picture of how easily the invasion was likely to go. Those concerns have been heightened now as the Russian military prepares for what may be a long and bloody battle for the capital city, Kyiv.

“Their circles tend to be insular,” a second administration official said of autocratic regimes like Russia’s.

“We’ve all seen the images of Putin and the physical distance between him and those around him,” the official said, remarking on photos of Putin sitting several feet from his advisers at a long table. “In some ways that could be a metaphor of what’s taking place.”

The West’s uncertainty about Putin’s access to credible information is particularly concerning, said U.S. and European officials, who worry how he might interpret comments in the Western media about theEuropean Union sending fighter jets to Ukraine or enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Note: A no-fly zone over Ukraine, with NATO aircraft shooting down Russian aircraft is how this Russo-Ukraine war escalates into World War III. This is why President Biden has been clear that there is no plan to to intervene in Ukraine.

U.S. and European leaders are unlikely to approve such measures, but talk of them may already be factored into Russia’s next steps, officials fear.

“We need to manage the escalatory risk,” said one European official. “Putin is not doing well. He’s shouting at staff. His war is behind schedule. This is a dangerous time for Putin.”

“If the Russians hear that Western leaders are thinking of a no-fly zone, his mind goes back to Libya in 2011, where NATO intervenes, and months later [Moammar] Gaddafi is pulled out of a hole and killed,” the official said.

Some leaders have already taken steps to try to avoid triggering a disproportionate response from Russia by ruling out unlikely policies, such as a no-fly zone.

“We have no intention of entering Ukraine by land or air,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday, noting his responsibility to make sure the conflict “did not spiral out of control, escalate or turn into a full-scale war in Europe with NATO allies.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki also said there were reasons a no-fly zone, which would involve U.S. planes patrolling the skies and potentially shooting down Russian aircraft, was “not a good idea.”

Some European intelligence officials also expressed concerns that the harder Putin is pushed on sanctions, the more he may be compelled to “set an example” by striking at more civilian targets in Ukraine.

Understanding Putin is made more challenging by the intelligence community’s lack of human sources with close access to the Russian leader.

* * *

“We underestimate Putin’s words at our own peril,” a U.S. official familiar with Russia said. “And I think he has been extraordinarily consistent in what he said about what he wanted and what he wants.”

To that end, Putin’s order to put his nuclear forces on higher alert should be seen as a serious indication of how committed he is to extract guarantees about Ukraine’s future and NATO, the official said, adding that he could imagine Putin detonating a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere over an unpopulated area as a warning to the West.

“He believes that we do not take him seriously. He thinks that we have always seen him as weak, and that ultimately he will back down,” the official said.

There does not appear to be any “off ramp” for Putin to exit his decision to invade Ukraine. In his mind, he cannot accept defeat or failing to achieve his strategic objective of bringing Ukraine back under Russian control.

It would seem the best case scenario for this war to end is with a coup d’état from Russia’s top military comanders, or a popular uprising of the Russian people to remove Putin. Instead of just protesting this war in the streets of Moscow, thousands of Muskovites could overwhelm the defenses of the Kremlin. They know where they can find Putin.