By Mark Episkopos, Managing Editor, Center for Military Modernization
The Kremlin thought it could win a war without fighting one.
In the years and months leading up to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, scores of western defense experts and officials warned that Russia can be expected to swiftly overwhelm Ukrainian defenses. Many– including Harlan Ullman, who introduced the concept– drew analogies to the “Shock and Awe” campaign conducted in 2003 by U.S. forces in Iraq. Gen. Mark Milley warned in the run-up to the war that Kyiv could fall within seventy-two hours of a full-scale Russian assault. It became clear in the war’s opening act that projections of a Russian Shock and Awe campaign did not come to pass, prompting some observers to dismiss these assessments as ill-founded. This line of reasoning– namely, that the experts got it wrong because they projected an outcome that did not occur– is tempting in its linear simplicity. But the reality, as is often the case with defense and military analysis, is more nuanced.
First, a caveat: the full picture of Moscow’s game plan on February 24, 2022, is still coming together. The details, including internal Kremlin deliberations in the fateful months leading up to the invasion, will be debated by historians and defense analysts for years if not decades to come. Nevertheless, we can begin to piece together a working thesis of what the original Russian invasion plan was and why it failed.
There is little question among western officials and expert observers that Moscow’s initial objective was to effect regime change in Ukraine. If successful in toppling the Zelenskyy government, Moscow would likely have tried to create a satellite government in Kyiv with pro-Russian leaders at the helm and, given the Kremlin’s recognition of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent entities three days prior to the invasion, to partition parts of eastern Ukraine.
Key decisionmakers up to and including Vladimir Putin believed they could achieve these goals without committing to a significant or protracted fight in Ukraine, a large country with a robust standing military and extensive manpower pool. This belief was premised in part on a series of political and ideological assumptions about Kyiv’s will and ability to resist, including the unfounded expectation that Russian forces would be widely greeted as liberators by a “brotherly” Ukrainian people. These assumptions, despite not reflecting the facts on the ground, widely resonated in the context of Russian domestic politics and seeped into Russian strategic culture.
The Russian forces that entered Ukraine along three primary axes of attack–north, south, and east—were not meant to besiege major cities, engage Ukrainian troops in any substantive degree of pitched fighting, conduct meaningful combined arms operations, or necessarily even to sustain a long-term ground presence. The idea, apropos of the Shock and Awe analogy, was a kind of “thunder run” to Kyiv; a combination of rapid troop movements, airstrikes, and intelligence operations intended to paralyze and collapse the Ukrainian government. The Kremlin convinced itself of its own rhetoric that it is not waging a war against Ukraine but rather a “special military operation.”
In sum, the underlying issue is not that defense experts and officials misdiagnosed how successful a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be. Rather, it is that the Kremlin chose to wage a completely different war from the one that everyone from top Pentagon officials to Russia’s own defense commentators anticipated. Who would have expected the Kremlin to so brazenly flout decades of established Soviet and Russian military doctrine in favor of what can be described as a political regime change scheme with some accompanying military elements? What’s at stake here is more than just an abstract accounting of past mistakes. As the Ukraine war enters a new inflection point, we cannot fully assess Russia’s capabilities and intentions without drawing the right lessons from the invasion’s botched opening campaign.
Mark Episkopos is the new Managing Editor of the Center for Military Modernization. Episkopos is a journalist, researcher, and analyst writing on national security and international relations issues. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in history at American University.
