Is Putin planning a Christmas push into Ukraine?
As his legions line up opposite the borders of Ukraine, could Vladimir Putin and his commanders be preparing a nasty surprise for the festive season, and a sudden attack sometime around Christmas and the New Year celebration? The Russian Orthodox Christmas falls on Thursday 7 January.
Satellite photos copiously supplied to the Washington Post by US intelligence agencies show Russian ground forces massing in four main areas – Forward Concentration Areas – FCAs – in Nato jargon. These are in the Yelnya military exercise area opposite the Belarus border, the Boyevo district which has received two main influxes of manoeuvre formations, and the Persianovka district opposite the Donbas enclaves of Ukraine and now stuffed with artillery and tanks. Finally new battle groups have been exercising in Crimea – just a short march away from the Dnieper river barrier, which splits Ukraine in half.
Latest reports from the CIA and other agencies estimate that the three main concentration areas, Yelnya, Boyevo and Persianovka have been so crowded that units have already been sent forward to positions closer to the actual Ukraine border. These may be new launch positions from which an invasion attack can be launched. Latest imagery has shown some of the frontline units being supplemented by casualty clearing station teams and equipment, and field hospitals.
The Russian has form for Christmas attacks. On Christmas Eve 1979 Leonid Brezhnev ordered the 40th field army of the Soviet forces into Afghanistan to shore up the collapsing communist regime in Kabul. The force numbered around 100,000 in all. The Russians stayed in Afghanistan for just under ten years, at the cost of 14,500 dead and 53,750 wounded. Up to two million Afghans are thought to have died from the effects of the conflict. The Afghan episode was a catalyst to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The dead and wounded from Afghanistan are still powerful memories, especially as the air in Moscow and Kyiv is filled with rumours about a future Russian invasion operation – this time in Europe.
This week Nato and the EU have told Putin to pull his forces back and stop threatening Ukraine. In turn Putin and his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov have said it is Russia that is being threatened, and Nato has broken its word in sending troops and equipment to back the regime in Kyiv.
The meeting of the EU council of ministers in Brussels on Thursday warned Russia of “massive consequences,” and “severe cost,” if Russia uses force. This was taken to be code for even more sanctions, and the suspension of the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline bringing gas under the Baltic directly from Russia into Germany.
The North Atlantic Council of Nato demanded that Russia withdraw its force now in offensive positions on the Ukraine border. President Biden said that the US would help President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev in what ways it could. But he ruled out sending American forces to fight in Ukraine.
In his statement on Wednesday, Lavrov laid out his country’s beef with the Western alliance over Ukraine and what Moscow sees as generally threatening behaviour towards Russia’s frontier lands, not least in the Baltic states as well as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. Russia wants the deal known as “Minsk 2” agreed in February to be honoured. The pact, brokered by France and Germany with Russia, has 13 points, starting with a general ceasefire to be overseen by the Organisation for Cooperation and Security Europe – the OSCE. The two pockets with Russian speaking populations, Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbas, are to be given local autonomy, to be included in the Ukraine constitution, and suitably to be monitored by the parties to the Minsk accord, Russia especially.
This has been taken by Moscow to mean that it has a right to intervene, and very likely interfere, with the affairs of Kiev on behalf of their fellow-Russian speakers, kinsmen and friends in the Donbas. Furthermore, the Lavrov statement demanded that Ukraine desist in trying to join Nato or the EU at any time. All Nato advisory forces and their equipment should be withdrawn from “threatening” Russia from Ukraine. Nato should cancel any notion that Ukraine and Georgia could join their club.
This harks back to what is known as the Bucharest decision of 2008. At the Nato summit in the Romanian capital in April 2008 the alliance decided that Ukraine and Georgia might become members of the alliance at an unspecified future date. Germany and the UK opposed the move, fearing it might be seen as unduly provocative for Moscow. In August that year Russian troops attacked into Georgia, after a pre-emptive move by the regime in Tbilisi over the region of South Ossetia. It must be said that despite the huge advantage in military muscle, things did not go all that well for the Russians. Their troops had been receiving rough treatment for some years in Chechnya. Vladimir Putin ordered a review of Russia’s defence forces immediately on account of the near-debacle in Georgia.
Nato’s open, albeit vague, invitation may be the background. So too is Putin’s romantic belief that Russia, Belorus and Ukraine are of one “historic people,” Kyiv being the centre of the great medieval empire of Kievan Rus. He laid his views forth in a rambling essay of 12 July this year. It may appeal to a fanciful exegesis on Russia’s medieval past, but it is a classic piece of 19th century irredentism – the need to redeem or recover a nation or people’s birthright. Think the Serbs and the battle of Kosovo Polje, the proto-Fascist D’Annuzio marching on Fiume in Istria in 1924 – and the mystical streak in many late Romantic nationalist movements.
Even so, to demand a sovereign nation such as Ukraine renounce any set of choices in its foreign and economic policies and international affairs under a veiled – or not-so-veiled – threat of military force and invasion is a clear act of diplomatic aggression. It impugns Kyiv’s sovereignty. It is, however, a huge gamble by Putin, based on his bet that Biden won’t fight, and risk American soldiers, to defend Ukraine and its independence.
It is a huge gamble because only 18% of Russians believe in Russian rights over Ukraine according to polls from Moscow, and only 14% of Ukrainians, including Russian speakers in Donbas, believe in a Russian claim over Ukraine, according to polls in Kyiv.
It is a huge gamble, too, because of the kinds of forces Putin now has arrayed around his country’s western borders. By the end of November there were some 50 Battalion Tactical Groups – BTG – of something over 75,000 according to the Washington Post photos. These are anticipated to double to 100 BTGS and up to 175,000 troops with deep-fire rocket batteries. A force of 100,000 reserves is on standby.
What for? The forces seem to have a huge arsenal of heavy equipment, tanks, tracked howitzers and rocket batteries, including the infamous Buk lorry-mounted missile batteries like the one that downed the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, killing all 298 aboard in the summer of 2014. The Russian ground formations need a lot of maintenance – particularly in the winter. They are relatively old-fashioned, with a lot of indiscriminate firepower. Impressive as they appear in the satellite images, they would barely be enough to attack up to the Dnieper river system, which bisects Ukraine. They are certainly not big or agile enough to sustain a long-term occupation of the great plains towards Kyiv.
The images of the destruction of civilian homes and lives from the indiscriminate firepower of the big guns, bombs and rockets, would make Russia a pariah in world opinion. Very likely this in turn would invite serious charges of war crimes at The Hague.
But Putin may have miscalculated the Ukrainian population itself. War has been running continuously across the Donbas region since 2014, with over 10,000 killed and 24,000 injured. Somewhat embarrassingly, a district court in Rostov-on-Don, at the eastern tip of the Azov sea in southern Russia, has just handed down a judgment which included the statement that Russian forces are now actually operating inside Ukraine in the Luhansk and Donetsk pockets. Putin vehemently denies this.
Roughly 500,000 Ukrainians have served as frontline troops or reservist volunteers during the eight years of fighting in Donbas. They are now experienced and trained in battle. Ukrainian forces are better equipped than in 2014, when the fighting began after the annexation of Crimea. Though outgunned by the Russian battalions, they have state of the art anti-air and anti-tank missiles supplied by the US and Nato allies. They have been mentored by a number of Nato training teams, including some from the UK. Recently they have been equipped with drones from Turkey, such as the Bayraktar Tb2. These proved highly effective against the Russian Wagner Group mercenaries in Libya last year. They were also a key part of the victory of Azerbaijan’s forces against the Armenian military in Nagorno Karabakh last winter. There they were coordinated with cutting-edge guidance and communication systems, suicide drones and loitering munitions from Israel. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Ukraine could now have its hands on the same lethal mix of Israeli and Turkish remote controlled, pilotless and autonomous munitions.
The size and shape of Putin’s legions present a conundrum. They cannot be kept in a state of readiness for too long – especially with the snow, slush and mud of winter coming on. The troops need to be fed and kept fit. Supply and maintenance chains for fuel, food, spares, ammunition and medicine will be a growing burden once the troops and tanks start to advance.
Covid is rampant in Russia now and causing Putin a major headache, according to underground media from Moscow. The vaccination programme has faltered, and medical services in clinics and hospitals are challenged and stretched – especially in the eastern parts of the Russian federation.
In addition there is the risk of Covid-19 in its new mutations spreading through the 100 or so battalion Task Groups now in purportedly offensive posture in the Ukraine borderlands.
Putin’s big Christmas surprise for Ukraine, could turn out to be a very big, and bad, surprise for him.