Putin’s Initial War Plan For Ukraine Was A Tactical And Logistical Failure

Vladimir Putin “really believed he would be received in Ukraine with flowers” and as a liberator when he launched the biggest war in Europe since 1945.

Did Putin somehow confuse Ukraine with the CPAC and America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida? Ukrainians, even Russian-speaking Ukrainians, are not “Rootin’ for Putin” Republicans. They are defending their young democracy even as Trump Republicans are actively trying to destroy the world’s oldest democracy here at home.

The Daily Mail (London), reports ‘Putin believed he’d be received in Ukraine with flowers’: Exiled oligarch suggests deluded Russian leader will be forced to WITHDRAW from his invasion to suppress uprisings at home as sanctions hammer his own citizens:

Vladimir Putin ‘really believed he would be received in Ukraine with flowers’ when he launched the biggest war in Europe since 1945, an exiled Russian oligarch has declared.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky claimed the Russian tyrant ‘nowadays lives in his own world’ and insisted that ‘in the world he has created around him over the last 20 years he really believed he would’ be welcomed by people in the former Soviet republic as a liberator’.

Rubbishing allegations that Putin has gone ‘mad’, the former oil tycoon told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘Everything that is happening today, is totally unexpected [to him].’

Khodorkovsky, who was jailed after falling foul of Putin and fled to London in 2013, also predicted that the Russian warmonger would be forced to withdraw his forces to suppress anti-war uprisings and a general public panic as his economy goes into meltdown.

He called on the West to impose further stringent sanctions on Moscow’s central bank to stop Putin’s aggression and force Russian troops out of Ukraine ‘by any available means.’

He added: ‘I would never have said this before, but now, when people close to me are being killed, in Kharkiv for example, I say that Putin’s troops should be forced out of Ukraine by any available means.

‘In Ukraine he is using the same troops that he uses to suppress people in Russia. If a situation arises where currency resources in Russia are limited and people will not be able to hold out until the end of the month for their salary, and people go out into the streets, Putin will have to withdraw the troops.

But there is this report that Putin’s initial war plan included more than Ukraine. An image of Putin’s puppet dictator of Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko, shows him standing in front of a battle map that appears to show a planned invasion of Moldova, along with Ukraine. Belarus president stands in front of map indicating Moldova invasion plans:

Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was reportedly addressing his security council Tuesday while standing in front of a battle map of Ukraine.

The map appeared to show troop movement plans and infrastructure targets in Ukraine, as well as targets in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria.

Some of the Russian lines of attack in the map have already taken place, while others are yet to occur, including an incursion into Moldova — a former Soviet country and Ukraine’s neighbor to the south — from the port city of Odessa.

Russia has already used Belarus as a location from which to send its troops quickly across the border into Ukraine, after insisting the large number of forces assembled there were for joint military drills.

Reports have emerged this week that Belarus is preparing to send troops into Ukraine in support of the Russian invasion.

The country’s close ties to Moscow in the attack prompted the U.S. State Department to suspend operations Monday at its embassy in Belarus.

The European Union also announced plans on Monday to impose new sanctions on Belarus over its role in the war, including measures against exports, oligarchs and banks in the country.

Putin apparenlty believed that Ukraine would topple within days of his version of “shock and awe” – precision missile and rocket barrages on military facilities and infrastructure. For reasons no one can explain, Russia has yet to establish air superiority over Ukraine with its far superior air force. Russia instead is relying on a conventional World War II era mechanized land invasion. (Even in Wold War II, establishing air superiority was critical to ground combat operations).

I am amazed to see a 40 mile long mechanized convoy bumper-to-bumper along a narrow highway not being strafed by fighter jets and pounded by artillery fire from the Ukrainians. Where are the Javelin missiles we sent them? Even less sophisticated weapons could get the job done if the Ukrainians can get close enough.

The New York Times reported Tuesday, Some Russian troops are surrendering or sabotaging vehicles rather than fighting, a Pentagon official says.

Plagued by poor morale as well as fuel and food shortages, some Russian troops in Ukraine have surrendered en masse or sabotaged their own vehicles to avoid fighting, a senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday.

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” – an adage attributed to Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.

Some entire Russian units have laid down their arms without a fight after confronting a surprisingly stiff Ukrainian defense, the official said. A significant number of the Russian troops are young conscripts who are poorly trained and ill-prepared for the all-out assault. And in some cases, Russian troops have deliberately punched holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks, presumably to avoid combat, the official said.

The Pentagon official declined to say how the military made these assessments — presumably a mosaic of intelligence including statements from captured Russian soldiers and communications intercepts — or how widespread these setbacks may be across the sprawling battlefield. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational developments.

But taken together, these factors may help explain why Russian forces, including an ominous 40-mile convoy of tanks and armored vehicles near Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, have come to a near crawl in the past day or two, U.S. officials said.

“You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Besides dealing with shortages of fuel, food and spare parts, the Pentagon official said, Russian commanders leading that armored column toward Kyiv may also be “regrouping and rethinking” their battle plans, making adjustments on the fly to gain momentum for what U.S. intelligence and military officials say is an inevitable push in the next several days to encircle and ultimately capture the capital.

So instead of a Blitzkrieg, the Russians are now planning a siege and indiscriminately shelling civilian populations. (next post).

“They have a lot of power available to them,” said the Pentagon official, adding that 80 percent of the more than 150,000 Russian troops amassed on Ukraine’s borders have now joined the fight.

But U.S. analysts have been struck by the “risk-averse behavior” of such a large force, the Pentagon official said. Russia launched an amphibious landing to seize Mariupol, a pivotal port city on the Sea of Azov, but landed forces around 40 miles from the city. That allowed the Russians extra time and space to mount an invasion, but also gave the city’s defenders time to prepare.

Russia’s vaunted air force has yet to gain air superiority over Ukraine, with Russian warplanes thwarted by Ukrainian fighter jets and a surprisingly resilient and potent array of air defenses, from shoulder-fired Stinger antiaircraft missiles to much larger surface-to-air weapons, the Pentagon official said.

For Russian forces coming out of Belarus, logistics problems have proved stubborn, a European official said on Tuesday.

[T]he logistics failures may help explain the presence of the long, slow-moving convoy of military equipment that is coming toward Kyiv, a tactical failure that is presenting a key target for the Ukrainian military, the European official said.

The Ukrainians could turn this convoy into its own version of the highway of death (Kuwait) and effectively cripple the Russian Army if they had the capability.

Russian officials, the European official said, expected to have secured air supremacy, at least around Kyiv. But the fact that Ukrainian air defense systems were still operating has put both Russian aircraft and the convoy of equipment in danger.

The Times also reports, Russian Troop Deaths Expose a Potential Weakness of Putin’s Strategy:

[T]he mounting toll for Russian troops exposes a potential weakness for the Russian president at a time when he is still claiming, publicly, that he is engaged only in a limited military operation in Ukraine’s separatist east.

No one can say with certainty just how many Russian troops have died since last Thursday, when they began what is turning into a long march to Kyiv, the capital.

American officials had expected the northeastern city of Kharkiv to fall in a day, for example, but Ukrainian troops there have fought back and regained control despite furious rocket fire. The bodies of Russian soldiers have been left in areas surrounding Kharkiv. Videos and photos on social media show charred remains of tanks and armored vehicles, their crews dead or wounded.

The Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, acknowledged on Sunday for the first time that “there are dead and wounded” Russian troops but offered no numbers. He insisted Ukrainian losses were “many times” higher. Ukraine has said its forces have killed more than 5,300 Russian troops.

Neither side’s claims have been independently verified, and Biden administration officials have refused to discuss casualty figures publicly. But one American official put the Russian losses as of Monday at 2,000, an estimate with which two European officials concurred.

Senior Pentagon officials told lawmakers in closed briefings on Monday that Russian and Ukrainian military deaths appeared to be the same, at around 1,500 on each side in the first five days, congressional officials said. But they cautioned that the figures — based on satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and on-the-ground media reports — were estimates.

For a comparison, nearly 2,500 American troops were killed in Afghanistan over 20 years of war.

For Mr. Putin, the rising death toll could damage any remaining domestic support for his Ukrainian endeavors. Russian memories are long — and mothers of soldiers, in particular, American officials say, could easily hark back to the 15,000 troops killed when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan, or the thousands killed in Chechnya.

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“Given the many reports of over 4,000 Russians killed in action, it is clear that something dramatic is happening,” said Adm. James G. Stavridis, who was NATO’s supreme allied commander before his retirement. “If Russian losses are this significant, Vladimir Putin is going to have some difficult explaining to do on his home front.”

[In] particular, Pentagon officials and military analysts said it was surprising that Russian soldiers had left behind the bodies of their comrades.

The U.S. military has made a sacred commitment to leave no one behind on the battlefield.

“It’s been shocking to see that they’re leaving their fallen brethren behind on the battlefield,” said Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration. “Eventually the moms will be like, ‘Where’s Yuri? Where’s Maksim?’”

Already, the Ukrainian government has begun answering that question. On Sunday, authorities launched a website that they said was meant to help Russian families track down information about soldiers who may have been killed or captured. The site, which states it was created by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, says it is providing videos of captured Russian soldiers, some of them injured. The pictures and videos change throughout the day.

“If your relatives or friends are in Ukraine and participate in the war against our people — here you can get information about their fate,” the site says.

The name of the site, 200rf.com, is a grim reference to Cargo 200, a military code word that was used by the Soviet Union to refer to the bodies of soldiers put in zinc-lined coffins for transport away from the battlefield; it is a euphemism for troops killed in war.

The website is part of a campaign launched by Ukraine and the West to counter what American officials characterize as Russian disinformation, which includes Russia’s insistence before the invasion that the troops surrounding Ukraine were simply there for military exercises. Information and the battle for public opinion around the world have come to play an outsize part in a war that has come to seem like a David vs. Goliath contest.

On Monday, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, read out before the General Assembly what he said were the final text messages from a Russian soldier to his mother. They were obtained, he said, by Ukrainian forces after the soldier was killed. “We were told that they would welcome us and they are falling under our armored vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass,” he wrote, according to Mr. Kyslytsya. “They call us fascists. Mama, this is so hard.”

The decision to read those texts, Russia experts and Pentagon officials said, was a not-so-veiled reminder to Mr. Putin of the role Russian mothers have had in bringing attention to military losses that the government tried to keep secret. In fact, a group now called the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia played a pivotal part in opening up the military to public scrutiny and in influencing perceptions of military service, Julie Elkner, a Russia historian, wrote in The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies.

[I]mages of body bags or coffins, or soldiers killed and left on the battlefield, a Biden administration official said, would prove the most damaging to Mr. Putin at home.

Ukrainian officials are using the reports and images on social media of Russian casualties to try to undercut the morale of the invading Russian forces.

On Monday, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, offered Russian soldiers cash and amnesty if they surrendered.

“Russian soldier! You were brought to our land to kill and die,” he said. “Do not follow criminal orders. We guarantee you a full amnesty and 5 million rubles [now worthless] if you lay down your arms. For those who continue to behave like an occupier, there will be no mercy.”