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Russian President Vladimir Putin estimated that his invasion of Ukraine would last 72 hours at most. He believed that in a electric attack he would succeed in installing a puppet government like the one in Belarus in kyiv. However, ten months After the start of the war, its forces have suffered serious human losses and weapons. Not to mention the continuous military setbacks that have forced Kremlin troops to retreat on virtually all fronts and abandon miles and miles of territory.
So one wonders how he could one of the most powerful armies in the world, led by a renowned strategist like Putin, having failed against a much smaller rival. Because it is estimated that the Russian fighters outnumbered the Ukrainian ones in a ratio of 15 to 1 at the start of the conflict.
The New York Times has tried to provide an answer through an extensive investigation based on interviews, intercepted calls and documents collected on the battlefield, which concludes that “a chain of errors” started by the Russian president before February 24 led to Russia to humanitarian and strategic disaster.
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The little capacity of the Kremlin to analyze risks It is perhaps one of the first and most obvious failures. From the outset, the Kremlin assumed that Russian troops would take control of the Ukrainian capital in a few hours, so the military was deployed to the front.”with little food, few bullets and with instructions taken from Wikipedia on how to use weapons”, maintains the American newspaper. As an example, the NYT presents a manual taken from the Internet on how to use a VSK-94 rifle It was found among the belongings of a Russian soldier.
In addition to being poorly equipped and poorly trained, the Russian military has received confusing and chaotic instructions for months. Sometimes they even move aimlessly, having only outdated maps at their disposal –some 1960’s-, according to the investigation.
Outdated 1960 map of Ukraine used by Russian troops.
For this reason, the Russian forces took wrong directions and launched their missiles at targets that no longer existed during the first days of the invasion. In fact, it is estimated that up to 60% of Russian cruise missiles They failed to achieve their goals. On some occasions, Russian troops opened fire on their own forces, according to a parallel study by the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies.
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On the front line there have also been found target schedules to conquer Ukrainian territories which, a prioriThey seem unrealistic. One of them, for example, shows how the convoys that left Belarus on February 24 were to reach the outskirts of kyiv at 2:55 p.m. they didn’t get it: the vehicles were so heavy that they tore up the roads as they tried to move forward and it took a day longer than expected. From there everything got worse, as can be seen in the logbook that records days and days of delays collected by the NYT.
Russian conscripts called up for military service line up before boarding a train
intercepted calls
The demotivation and lack of discipline of the fighters have also had a lot to do with Russia’s military failures in Ukraine. Even before the mobilization of 300,000 reservists announced in September, many of the soldiers had no resources or training. They unconsciously used their mobile phones personal information to call their relatives or to make decisions about their future movements, revealing their positions and allowing Ukrainian forces to track them.
And not only that: thanks to their conversations it has been possible to know what the state of mind of the recruits is. “Our artillery is shooting at our own men. Idiots, we are killing each other,” laments a soldier in a phone call. “What news from Putin? What does that bastard scum say?”asks another, furious, after the withdrawal of the army from the city of Kherson.
“Putin fell into a spiral of self-aggrandizement and anti-Western zeal that led him to make the fateful decision to invade Ukraine”
This series of failures allowed the Ukrainian Armed Forces not only to prevent the enemy from invading the entire country in a matter of hours, but to recover more than 50% of the lost territory. However, it seems that these are only the tip of the iceberg: at the base is Putin himself.
According to the investigation, “the cascade of errors it was started by Putin who found himself deeply isolated during the pandemic, haunted by his legacy and convinced of his genius.” That led him, according to people in his inner circle interviewed by the NYT“to fall into a spiral of self-aggrandizement and anti-Western zeal that led him to make the fateful decision to invade Ukraine” without consulting experts.
