Unending War In Ukraine

Is Russia's War in Ukraine following a script or it is lost in direction? RAVI SRIVASTAVA attempts to answer

- RAVI SRIVASTAVA

The Ukraine war which started as a special operation by Russia in February 2022 has gone past the closure timeline of even the most conservative strategists. It was expected to be short and intense like the famed German Blitzkrieg, but the way it has dragged on has been somewhat disappointing for Russian enthusiasts. The expectation from Russia was that it would wind up the operations within months if not weeks. But what manifested was severe resistance, some poor war planning, and ballooned overconfidence. The way Russian attacks from Southern Belarus came to a grinding halt and the failure to capture Kyiv in the first assault entirely derailed its momentum.

While Ukraine was rejoicing Russia was in utter disbelief over the failure of its Kyiv assault, as it turned out, the fiasco was mostly of Russia's own making. It took heavy casualties, loss of at least ten fighter planes & several helicopters, and precisely 41 days for Russia to realise it was following a beaten path and paying for its overoptimism. This must have led to deeper scrutiny of the tabletop war preparedness on which Russian Generals were relying. However, it came as a surprise for many Western observers like Michael Kofman, the Ukraine-born U.S. military analyst who remarked, that the assumptions to take Kyiv in three days were ridiculous. Russia’s outright failure in Kyiv was greatly puzzling, as it had pressed more than 70,000 troops including several hundred airborne soldiers, with Spetsnaz (Russian Special Forces) infiltrating behind enemy lines outnumbering Ukrainian forces by approximately four times over.

Flaws Exposed