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RUSSIA'S STALLED WAR IN UKRAINE
The conflict's transformation into a drone war has turned the tide
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The war in Ukraine, which began with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022, has gone on longer than the Soviet war against Nazi Germany. With its huge army and population, Russia seemed in the early years to be on the verge of winning only to have Putin, behaving like the irrational czars of the past, reject peace plans that gave him control of some of the territory his troops had taken inside eastern Ukraine. And now, I have been told, a war that Russia seemed to be winning has turned in the last year into an economic and military nightmare for Putin and the Russian army led by General Valery Gerasimov, the battle-tested commander who is one of three men in Russia with access to the nation’s nuclear codes.
The war is now a war of drones, in the view of one military expert who has toured the front under cover, with Ukraine holding a distinct edge. Bedraggled Russian soldiers at the front find themselves under deadly drone attack the moment they crawl out of their bunkers. “Ukraine has a vast drone surveillance network that is picking off Russians as soon as they appear,” the expert told me. He added that he was repelled by the horrid living conditions for all the soldiers on both sides of the front lines.
One fix to the growing Russian battlefield losses was to offer potential recruits a bonus of hundreds of thousands or millions of rubles to sign up. The bonus is not fully paid out in most cases, I was told, until the recruits finish their basic training and get to the front. Once there, the corruption reaches new heights because officers demand payments to keep the new recruits from being sent to combat zones at the front, where death by drone awaits.
The result of the corruption and the intense Ukrainian drone surveillance, the expert told me, is that the Russian army “is no further along in its invasion than it was two years earlier. They can’t move—have no offensive capability. This is the same army that went from Moscow to Berlin in World War II. Now the army has gone only one hundred kilometers into Ukraine. No real progress at all.”
Another sign of Russia’s, and Putin’s, fall from military and political dominance in the region, the expert added, was the decision of Finland, which shares a 830-mile border with Russia, and Sweden, which shares a maritime border, to join NATO. In general, the official noted, the losing war, the rise of NATO, and the nation’s economic downturn—as measured by economists around the world—has undone Russia’s long held strategy of maintaining regional dominance and diminishing the import of NATO. “This was an incredible defeat for the Russians,” the official told me. It has also freed up Putin’s critics to become more outspoken.
One person who has been more vocal in his private conversations about Russia’s demise is General Gerasimov, who as chief of staff has had repeated contacts with his peers in the US and British armed forces about theater-wide military issues. He is kept up to date on various peace talks involving Americans and other nations eager for a political settlement to the Russian war with Ukraine.
The expert told me that Gerasimov has always seen the Russian army as the people’s army, and not that of the czars—an obvious reference to Putin. The general, the expert said, “wants to end the Ukraine war with honor—to save Russia. Only the poor with no money and no education stay” to fight.
The expert said that in speaking out about the corruption and the lack of the best available Russian soldiers being in the war Gerasimov is being true to his oath of office and to the army. “And the army respects him for it,” the expert told me.
Meanwhile, the much criticized Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president since his election in 2019, widely thought to participate in the corruption that has tarnished Ukraine for decades, has emerged from the war as a respected leader who never lost faith, even in the worst of days, in the ability of Ukraine’s army to defeat Russia. By contrast, Putin has destroyed any reputation he had as a sagacious world leader by irrationally resisting any settlement of the war as his army and his economy crumbles.
A few questions remain.
Will Putin ever allow Gerasimov to tell the truth to the Russian people about the costs to the Russian army and Russia’s standing in the world of their president’s decision to attack Ukraine?
And is there any senior officer in the US military willing to do the same about the leadership in the White House and Pentagon in the aftermath of the vital decisions about the Middle East that are now being made in Washington and Tel Aviv?
Will it happen in Russia and not in America? If so, what does that tell us?