Is the Russian army ready for a bloody war?

Tank for tank, missile for missile, Russia is so far ahead of neighbour Ukraine in terms of long-range firepower and combat manoeuvrability that a Kremlin-ordered invasion could end up being a mad dash to Kiev. Not unlike the rapid advance by the US 3rd Infantry Division and the Marine Corps’ 1st Marine Division, equipped with M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles which stormed through southern Iraq to reach Baghdad in April 2003. The Russian army today is far better organised and equipped for a combat operation than it has been for a decade, with a motivated and more disciplined officer class and a high-readiness structure based around multiple battalion tactical groups (BTGs). However, is this new army waiting on Ukraine’s borders for the go ahead from President Putin ready for a long bloody war with a neighbour now also better armed, Nato-trained and combat-experienced from nearly eight years of fighting Russians and separatists in the east of the country? “After the end of the Cold War, Russia saw the embarrassing operations in Chechnya [1994-1996 and 1999 to 2009] . Things began improving when the military showed its ability to employ cyber weapons against Estonia in 2007, and again against Georgia along with some conventional forces a year later [when Russia sent troops to back two self-proclaimed republics],” said Andrew Krepinevich, 20 years in the US Army and a former senior Pentagon official. “But both were small operations. More impressive were the operations of the so-called Ukrainian separatists in the past few years aided by the Russian military,” he said. “However I do not think today’s Russian military is highly capable of dealing effectively with a broad spectrum insurgency which could spring up if Putin attempted to conquer the country,” he said. He also cast doubt on whether the Russian army was capable of conducting large, sustained conventional operations if Ukrainian resistance proved resilient. “Its logistics are not that good,” he said. Twenty years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’ s military had become a hollowed-out shell. No greater evidence of the transformation from superpower status to crumpled third rateness was the graveyard of rusty submarines abandoned in polluted bays along the Kola Peninsula. When Putin came to power as Russian president on May 7, 2000, his first ambition was to revive and rebuild the military. He made it clear he wanted Russia once again to be a force to be reckoned with. While the United States gained all-arms combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and became engrossed in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, Putin launched a military modernisation programme. He converted the Russian army from an organisation that was reliant on underpaid, badly equipped and often bullied conscripts into a largely professional volunteer force of 400,000 soldiers, on much-improved wages. Absenteeism , the bane of the old conscript Russian army, was eliminated. The average Russian army lieutenant now gets the equivalent of $1,000 a month, better than their civilian counterparts. All Russian ground troop commanders also now have combat experience, according to Sergei Shoigu, defence minister. Putin had a dream of resuscitating even a small part of what used to be the mighty Soviet empire, and to achieve that he needed a military behind him which his perceived adversaries would be forced to respect. Today, Pentagon chiefs and US combat commanders who have seen the way the Russian military have made their presence felt in different parts of the world, especially in Syria, openly acknowledge that Russia is back. “The compliment that we have to pay to Russia is that they are a learning and adaptive force,” General Philip Breedlove, former supreme allied commander Europe (Saceur from 2013-2016), told The New York Times. “Every time we see them in conflict, they get a little better and a little better,” he said. Putin’s boasting in 2018 of Russia’s new exotic weapons, notably a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide-vehicle missile with unlimited range and a nuclear cruise missile was in some ways a side issue. It was a demonstration of his increasing confidence that Russia was seemingly taking the lead in developing and deploying the next generation of weapons. However, the improved status of Russia’s conventional forces is now the real focus. The putative invasion force on Ukraine’s borders is equipped, for example, with at least three dozen Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles which could hit Kiev and other critical military targets without even crossing the frontier. Russian forces deployed in Syria to support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad proved beyond question that they could carry out multi-faceted operations, launching precision-guided missiles both from land and from the sea. In 2017 a Russian frigate fired three Kalibr cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea and hit Isis targets in eastern Syria. US commanders in Syria were taken by surprise. It turned out they didn’t even know the Russian navy had such weapons operating in the region.