Paul Goble
Staunton, April 3 – Many Russians and some in the West believe that the Russian military could overrun Ukraine because of its superiority over Ukrainian forces, but such views ignore both the enormous challenges that any occupier of Ukraine would face and the reality that the Ukrainian military is in fact a far more serious opponent than many believe.
Last week, Rashit Akhmetov, the editor of “Zvezd Povolzhya,” pointed out that the Russian military may have enough forces on the border of Ukraine to seize the southeastern portions of Ukraine and perhaps more, but these forces are far from sufficient to allow Moscow to hold and pacify that enormous territory (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/03/window-on-eurasia-russia-can-seize.html).
According to Akhmetov, the experience of World War II strongly suggests that the Russian Federation would need at least 500,000 troops to pacify that portion of Ukraine, a number that is at least 12 times as large as the number of soldiers now on the Russian-Ukrainian border (no. 11 (691) March 27-April 2, 2014, p. 1).
Indeed, Moscow might need far more
troops than that, the Kazan editor suggests, because any such invasion would
isolate Russia, spark a partisan war against Russian forces, and place new
burdens on the Russian economy at home while creating a situation in which “China could use the opportunity to seize
two million square kilometers of territory in Siberia.”
This week, Aleksey Roshchin, a Moscow
commentator, argues the other half of this equation and says that the
prevailing view in Russia that the Ukrainian army is so weak relative to the
Russian one that a victory over it would be both quick and easy is at the very
least problematic and quite possibly dangerously wrong (politcom.ru/17414.html).
Russian attitudes about the
potential for a quick victory over Ukraine resemble “the unrestrained” but
ultimately unjustified optimism Russians had about a quick victory over Germany
in 1914, an immediate triumph over Hitler in 1941, and a painless and quick
defeat of Chechnya in 1994, Roshchin says.
Indeed, Russian popular enthusiasm
for such a cakewalk now over Ukraine has grown to the point that people are
asking why Putin has been so slow in acting. “What is he waiting for?” they are
inquiring. Now, “the most moderate” say
that Moscow can stop after it takes Kyiv, while the “boldest” talk about
extending Russian control to Lviv and Uzhgorod.
Anyone who tries to suggest that the
Russian army might face resistance from the Ukrainian one is dismissed with the
query “What army” are you talking about because among Russians it is “well
known” that there are “no more than 6,000” Ukrainian soldiers and that they “will
not fight but immediately come over to the side of Russia!”
None of those expressing such
optimism, of course, expect that they or their family members will have to
fight. “People are certain,” Roshchin
says, “that the victorious Russian army will win ‘on its own’” because it is
fired by patriotism, well-armed and well-led, and faces an entirely inadequate
opponent who “lacks any will for resistance.”
The “most surprising” thing about
such views, of course, is that those who are now praising the Russian army to the
skies and dismissing the Ukrainian military are “the very same people who just
three months ago were angrily shaking their fists and expressing enormous anger
at” the Russian defense minister for supposedly destroying the Russian army.
How can people think both of these
things at the same time, Roshchin asks. Could it be that the Russian army of
three months ago has been transformed? Not likely, he suggests. And if the
Russian military was as degraded as many said then, “what is the basis for thinking
that it will have a victorious march through a humbled Ukraine?”
It
is striking, the commentator says, how rapidly and radically public opinion in
Russia “can shift from one side to the other.”
What is taking place just now, Roshchin
suggests, is what Freud called “displacement.” Russians are ascribing to the Ukrainian
army all the problems they had been talking about in their own national
military but are forgetting what that means for any adequate assessment of how
any conflict between the two would play out.
It is almost certain that the
problems Russians saw in their own army are also present in the Ukrainian one: weak
commanders, poorly equipped soldiers, and widespread shortages. Indeed, “it is
completely possible that all post-Soviet militaries” have these problems and
that “the Ukrainian and Russian armies must be similar because we are after all
fraternal peoples.”
But
if this is the case, then “it in no way follows that the Russian army in a
conflict with the Ukrainian one will have a cakewalk. In such circumstances, everything else being
equal, the outcome will be decided by the level of motivation of the soldiers
and of junior commanders,” Roshchin says.
Because
he apparently believes that at least some in the Kremlin understand this, the Moscow
analyst says that he “strongly doubts” that the Russian army will intervene in
Ukraine. “No one of us is ready for a
real war.” They’d be happy with “a
victory march,” but that is not the most likely outcome Moscow and the Russians
would face.
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