In the years that followed, the Kremlin undertook a major military commitment: an expeditionary operation in Syria. There, experts say, it gained valuable experience in things like coordinated air strikes: when soldiers on the ground coordinate directly with pilots in the air to strike specific targets.
Before Ukraine, the last time Russia completely invaded another sovereign country was Georgia. Moscow emerged victorious after the 16-day conflict in 2008, but it was messy and showed that the Russian armed forces needed a major overhaul. Four years ago, a half-reformed Russian army was put to the test again when hundreds of thousands of troops were sent to Ukraine. Judging by the staggering losses – more than 1.2 million killed and wounded – this war looks significantly harder. And Moscow has not yet won.
But the Russian Armed Forces are learning. The question is how much they have learned since February 24, 2022. “They are adapting to the conditions of the battlefield, but the more permanent changes to the force in terms of strategy and operations will come later,” Dara Massicot, a longtime expert on the Russian Armed Forces and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL). “I would characterize what the Russian military has been through more as an adaptation than a reform, given that a lot of it seems to be driven by immediate pressures,” said Nick Reynolds, a researcher on land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “It is not building the ideal force that will be effective in fighting in the future. It is solving operational problems and trying to put together a force that is good enough, by its own standards, to solve the problems in front of it,” he added. “There has been no ‘reform’ in the Russian sense of the word; the logic of war makes it impossible,” said Lieutenant Colonel Juha Kukkola, a professor in the Russia Research Group at the National Defence University of Finland.
The Russian military “is learning from failures… simultaneously losing experienced troops and equipment, while learning to survive the next phase of the war,” he told REL. The lessons learned are “suitable for the needs of this war, but perhaps not for the next war,” he added.
BETWEEN GEORGIA AND UKRAINE
After the victory in Georgia, then-Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov was appointed to oversee major changes in the military, including a move away from the old Soviet mindset. He sought to reduce the overall size of the army, reorganize military education, prioritize non-commissioned officers like sergeants, and try to move from large, slow divisions to smaller, more mobile battalion-sized tactical groups. Huge investments were made in new tanks, new armored personnel carriers, new missiles, not to mention new communications systems, which had failed in Georgia.
However, in 2012 Serdyukov was dismissed by Vladimir Putin, accompanied by a shadow of scandal. His replacement, a longtime Putin loyalist, Sergei Shoigu, ignored veteran officers who demanded a full restoration of the previous structures, but did little to modernize further. “Serdyukov’s reforms were really about improving Russia’s ability to fight a local war,” said Katri Pynnoniemi, a professor at the Finnish Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Helsinki. “Then, around 2012, there was a shift. The emphasis was on preparing for a larger war…. In reality, there was nothing major, but there was this perception of the threat from the Russian regime that changed. That stopped the reforms,” she added.
In the years that followed, the Kremlin undertook a major military commitment: an expeditionary operation in Syria. There, experts say, it gained valuable experience in things like coordinated air strikes: when soldiers on the ground coordinate directly with pilots in the air to strike specific targets. When Russia invaded Ukraine, outside observers expected the larger, better-armed Russian army to enter Kiev within days. That didn’t happen, partly because of Ukrainian resistance but also because of weak Russian operations. Within a year, Ukrainian forces launched two counteroffensives, pushing back Russian positions in the southern Kherson Region and the northeastern Kharkiv Region.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin has been changing commanders, trying to regain momentum. Until he was embroiled in a brief June 2023 rebellion by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, General Sergei Surovikin managed to stabilize the Russian lines in part by building extensive, multi-layered defenses that became known as the Surovikin Lines. Russian commanders have also turned to old, unmodernized Soviet tactics: sending waves of infantry to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses. This usually involved poorly trained and lightly armed men, sometimes prisoners, and became known as a “meat machine” because of the incredible casualties. More recently, officers have resorted to methods such as sending lightly armed men trying to speed past Ukrainian defenses, using motorcycles or other vehicles to move quickly — and hopefully evade drones.
The result? Russia has suffered more casualties than in all the wars it has fought since World War II combined. “They’ve lost most of their armored vehicles and they’re not putting them on the front lines in the same way or in the same numbers as before,” Reynolds told REL. “They’re going to be infantry attacks to capture and hold positions. They’re taking very high casualties. The ground forces, the infantry, the armored vehicles, they’re not very capable.” Frontline units, Massicot said, are also plagued by “widespread and terrible disciplinary problems.” “That’s why I have a hard time using the word reform for what’s coming for the Russian military, because reform requires an admission of the problems and a willingness to do something about them,” she said. “And I think there’s no willingness at this time to acknowledge those problems on the front lines.”
ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONT
Among the improvements experts have noted are Russian artillery tactics and its ability to use electronic warfare to jam drones or aircraft radar. And then there are the drones. For both Russia and Ukraine, the entire war has been transformed by drones, experts said: Shahed suicide drones, heavy supply drones and drones guided by fiber-optic cables. Initially lagging behind in its drone capabilities, Russia bought thousands of units and technology from Iran and then developed domestic production.
Russia’s Rubicon unit has inflicted significant damage on Ukrainian forces. A hybrid unit that develops and acquires new technologies while testing new tactics and fighting alongside regular units, the Rubicon Center for Advanced Unmanned Technologies is seen as the most successful new initiative Russia has deployed since 2022. “As a model, the Russian military leadership likes it very much,” Massicot said. “With an appropriate level of state resources, it has moved from a research organization to an operational organization and is now taking on more training roles. This is something they want to replicate in other areas.” The decisive factor for Russia is simply the fact that it is bigger, Kukkola said. “In this kind of war, you don’t have to be ‘better’ than the adversary, you just have more resources, human and material, and time — if nothing else — that changes the strategic situation,” he said.
But Russia does not have enough resources to start developing its future forces based on what it has learned in Ukraine, Kukkola added, because it is losing too many people. “Armies that survive a war sometimes emerge stronger and sometimes fail completely when put to the test again,” he said.
WHAT WERE THE FIRST DAYS OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE?
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022. Fear had already been present for months.
On February 18, the United States warned that between 169 and 190 Russian troops had gathered on Ukraine’s borders.
On February 21, Moscow officially declared two Regions of eastern Ukraine – Donetsk and Luhansk – as independent states. Russian troops were already stationed there, with Vladimir Putin describing them as “peacekeeping purposes.”
In the early hours of February 24, Putin announced a “military operation” in Donbas. In a television appearance, he called on the Ukrainian military to lay down its arms.
Russian forces then launched a major ground, air, and naval assault on Ukraine, initially attacking Ukrainian military infrastructure and border units.
Ukrainian forces later announced that they had crossed the border into Kharkiv, Luhansk, and entered from Crimea, as well as from Belarus. Explosions occurred in dozens of cities, including Kiev and Kharkiv.
On February 25, Russian tanks were filmed entering Kiev for the first time, as the city came under sustained shelling that injured civilians. By this point, tens of thousands of Ukrainians had already fled to several states in western Ukraine. The number had reached half a million by February 28. (RFE)