It all happened so quickly. On February
24th, 2022, just after 2:00 AM Ukraine time, Vladimir Putin, the autocrat of Russia,
announced, in a pre-recorded TV address, a “special military operation” in Ukraine. To the rest of the world, that meant war.
Within minutes, the shelling started, the skies lit up, and the Russian
invasion of Ukraine had begun. To many Ukranians, though, this was perceived not
as a beginning, but a continuation–a continuation of the conflict that began some eight years prior
in the spring of 2014. Ever since Russia and the rebels it backed overtook Crimea and swaths of
Eastern Ukraine, the country has maintained an enlarged and active military presence along
Ukraine’s borders. In 2017, for example, Russia reestablished the famed-but-disbanded
8th Combined Arms Army here, in Novocherkassk. Revived under the pretense that it was a
defensive decision, the 8th Combined Army has since grown–adding artillery; missile sub-units;
and even, some analysts believe, incorporating separatists into its own ranks. This is hardly
an isolated development. From Sevastopol on the southern tip of Crimea, to Klintsy along Ukraine’s
Northern border, Russian bases, staging points, and general military infrastructure have grown
to increasingly surround Ukraine since 2014. This extension of military might was made possible by
the physical seizure of the land and, in the eyes of Russian leadership, justified by the threat
that Ukraine could retaliate or try to seize back occupied territories. This extension has also, in
turn, quite literally paved the path for Russia to amass an extraordinary 75% of their principal
combat units within striking distance of Ukraine. On Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021, The Ukrainian
Defense Ministry announced that 90,000 Russian troops had encircled the country’s borders and
occupied territories–the Russian forces that were in the region for supposed exercises simply
weren’t leaving. Not only were they not going away but, as the next few months would reveal, their
numbers were growing. This is a satellite image from outside the western Russian town of Yelnya
in September, and this is the exact same spot on November 1st. From an empty field and a dirt
road, to the staging area for the Russian 41st Combined Army, normally headquartered
some 2,000 miles or 3,000 kilometers away, suddenly sat north of 1,200 tanks, howitzers,
towed artillery, and support vehicles. And November only marked the beginning. Satellite
images and social media posts tracked soldiers and supplies pouring into Southwest Russia
across December. But what alarmed analysts most was the fact that along with the soldiers and
supplies there were medical units, hospital tents, and fuel reserves–the Russians were amassing the
infrastructure for war. The likelihood that this was a simulation plummeted. In January, Russian
forces rolled into Belarus for joint exercises. Weeks later, it was announced that the soldiers
would stay. Established staging areas like Yelnya further expanded while new ones popped up, forming
an increasingly foreboding arc around Ukraine. Now, behind the scenes, what made this
massive domestic mobilization of troops, weapons, and supplies possible was Russia’s
vast rail network. This rail network’s extent, earning its status as third largest in the world,
is a byproduct of the country’s size, sparsity, and the suspect nature of its road network.
Meanwhile, the degree of state control, with the government owning some 20,000 of the country’s
21,000 locomotives, is a legacy of the Soviet era. This control and extensiveness combined means
that Russia’s military is able to rely heavily on the rail network. It was trains that moved
the troops, tanks, and trucks to and from Yelnya, into Kursk, and across the Bryansk and Smolensk
oblasts. Digital forensics have shown that it was also trains that moved supplies from Eastern
Russia all the way to Belarus. And it was largely thanks to these trains, or Russia’s reliance on
them, that outsiders were able to so precisely document the military buildup as dash cams
filmed transiting-tanks at rail crossing–videos which then ended up on TikTok and circulated
the world over. Trains set the stage. But then, in the first weeks of February, under a
curtain of clouds, Yelnya emptied out–its troops and supplies tracked south. As these Russian
forces pushed ever nearer to the Ukrainian border, tanks appeared in Kursk, just a 140-mile or
220-kilometer drive from Kharkiv, while additional troops and trucks amassed near Gomel, Belarus–20
miles or 32 kilometers away from the border. Across three-and-a-half months, 175,000 Russian
troops had stacked up all along Ukraine’s border, ready to unleash death and destruction in the
country they believed they were there to liberate. In the opening hours of Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, the invading force worked to cripple Ukraine’s military infrastructure. Some of the
first volleys of the conflict involved airstrikes on Ukrainian air bases, in an effort to help
Russia quickly gain air superiority without strong resistance. Eleven were destroyed across the first
day of hostilities. By noon, focus shifted from anticipatory defense to offense as dozens of
Russian helicopters landed troops at Hostomel Airport, mere miles from Kyiv. This was seemingly
in an effort to create an air bridge–seizing control of the airport to allow planes to bring
in more troops who would push out into Kyiv. An air-based supply line could assure a certain level
of logistical support regardless of conditions on the ground between the border and Kyiv.
However, also recognizing this, Ukraine tasked its 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade to retake the
airport, which it successfully did by 8:00 pm. Across the same day, as fighting reached the
Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and troops poured in from every direction, work continued behind the
frontlines to support the continued invasion. In Brest, Belarus, Russian forces could be
seen unloading supplies from railcars and assembling into a convoy configuration facing
south, towards the warzone. In Chojniki, near Belarus’ closest point to Kyiv, satellite
imagery captured a road that the Russians converted into a helicopter base, with an
“X” marking each landing zone. To the east, in Russia itself, a field hospital could be seen
ready to treat early casualties, while nearby, another makeshift facility home to artillery
and rocket launchers used in the opening hours of the conflict stood ready for more. However,
despite all the well-planned war infrastructure constructed around Ukraine, things inside the
warzone were seemingly going less to plan. As the sun rose from a bloody night onto the
second day of battle, Russian forces set their sights on Kyiv–the country’s capital, home to its
government and lauded leader, Volodymyr Zelensky. Under the assumption that Russia’s ultimate
ambition was to install a puppet government, Kyiv was the grand prize for the invading force,
and yet they only made it to the city’s suburbs. Still there, they met fierce resistance,
and made little progress–turning the night that many feared would mark
the capital’s fall into but a night. As day two became three, photos and videos emerged
that started to paint a more cohesive picture. Russian tanks were running out of fuel and
left abandoned, strewn across the country; the invading troops were seen looting stores for
food, potentially due to a lack of their own; stories emerged of Russian forces asking Ukrainian
civilians for supplies and directions, seemingly unaware of the average person’s opinion on them
in the country they were attempting to conquer. Across the board, as they approached the urban
areas that could only be taken with the most tactful coordination, the Russian military
was looking disorganized and disconnected–just a few disparate forces tasked with going in, guns
blazing, to induce a quick and easy surrender. Of course, that is not what came to fruition.
The Ukrainian defense included a recognition of what the Russian offense seemingly
missed: the importance of logistics. In the famous words of General John J. Pershing,
“Infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars.” So, Ukraine went for Russia’s logistics. On
social-media platforms adapted to organize the country’s guerilla-style defense, posts circulated
stressing the value of destroying fuel trucks. Of course, if you stop the fuel trucks, you stop the
tanks, and unlike tanks, fuel trucks are typically unarmored and can be destroyed with cheap,
accessible bullets or molotov cocktails. When the Russians started disguising their fuel trucks
to look like more traditional transport trucks, posts and messages quickly followed
making the updated target profile clear. Ukrainian forces also destroyed two key bridges
into Kyiv, allowing them to focus on defending a smaller number of choke-points, and similar
tactics were used elsewhere in the country. The Ukrainian military also destroyed all
connections between the Russian and Ukrainian rail networks to prevent the invading force from
taking hold of them to ramp up their supply lines. Elsewhere, across the country, towns and cities
dismantled their street signs or, in some cases, painted over them to read “welcome to hell,”
making it harder for Russian troops, many of which relied solely on paper maps, to navigate around
the country. Meanwhile, with the Russian military relying nearly entirely on analogue, unsecured
radio communications, amateur radio enthusiasts and hacktivist organizations like Anonymous worked
to block and surveil enemy radio frequencies–some even went further to broadcast pig sounds,
thematic music, or written messages that would appear when analyzed on a spectrogram. Russia
countered this with strategic disinformation, purportedly spreading this post listing fake
frequencies across social media, but the Ukrainian side quickly caught on and spread the corrected
frequencies across their means of communication. Now, to experts, the Russian military’s logistics
difficulties were hardly surprising. In fact, they represented a historical throughline.
When analyzing the disastrous Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, poor logistics performance is
an oft-cited reason for the USSR’s failure to achieve its objectives. According to tacticians,
their logistics support forces were inflexible and under equipped, which left the fighting forces
too under equipped to perform their jobs. Of course, thanks to their vast railway network,
which nearly entirely falls under state control, Russia’s military has that incredible
domestic mobilization capability. In fact, some 30,000 of their personnel
serve in the Russian Railway Troops, whose task involves the defense, use, and construction
of railways for military purposes. This force, larger than that of most countries, is indicative
of just how crucial this one infrastructure asset is to their military machine. However, this
domestic advantage, this reliance on the rails, simultaneously represents an achilles heel when
conflicts take place beyond their borders. When war stretches past their furthest railyards,
Russian military logistics capabilities are, at best, mediocre. In the case of this invasion,
the primary advanced railyards being used are in Belarus and Russia itself, so for any further
supply lines, especially any stretching into Ukraine, Russia had to resort to trucks. And
simply put: Russia doesn’t have enough trucks. Each of Russia’s combined arms armies, the largest
organizational unit of their ground forces, is typically supported by one material-technical
support brigade–essentially, their logistics support forces. Each of these brigades is
composed of around a thousand personnel operating 408 transport vehicles
capable of hauling 1,870 tons of cargo. This, it turns out, is rather inadequate.
According to retired US Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vershinin, a conflict modeling and
simulations expert, Russia’s forces, under their current configuration, are simply
incapable of properly supporting a fight more than 90 miles or 145 kilometers from supply dumps–in
this case, railyards. And these assumptions were based on a 45 mile or 70 kilometer per hour
average transport speed, which is likely only attained when territory is firmly within Russian
control–something that proved elusive in the opening days of this invasion. A highly-active
conflict relient on rocket artillery fire, which accurately describes this war, is even more
resource-intensive on the logistics support forces as each individual rocket requires a
dedicated truck for transport to the launcher. With the frequency of artillery
fire in the early days of the invasion, a large chunk of Russia’s material-technical
support brigade’s capability was certainly tied up in supplying ammunition to launch-sites. This general incapability seemingly reflects
in Russia’s strategy in Ukraine. Currently, the predominant characterization is that Russia
believed that through a combination of dramatic airborne and land-based attacks in the
opening hours and days of the invasion, the Ukranians would quickly capitulate. They’d
either surrender or Russian forces would quickly reach Kyiv, topple the government, and install
a puppet government–a belief that was supported by nearly all independent analysts prior to the
conflict’s start. Analysis suggests that when invading, Russia’s forces can operate largely
self-sufficiently, without logistics support, for about three to five days. So, when the
conflict did not conclude within that time frame, the Russians found themselves
scrambling to regroup and resupply. Now, most western forces, which are generally
much better equipped from a logistics standpoint, operate on a pull-based system where
fighting forces request resupplies as needed, based on what actually occurs. Meanwhile, the
Russian military operates predominantly on a push-based system, where forces are resupplied
on a more predictable basis, as determined by leadership. This means that, in practice, there is
more strategic decision-making and prioritization on which forces most need or warrant resupply, and
which materials are most important to resupply. So, in Ukraine, it’s likely that ammunition was
prioritized ahead of, say, fuel for tanks on less strategically important fronts. In the
context of perpetual logistics limitations, as is the case for Russia’s military, this
is likely the more effective approach, but in the grand scheme of things it’s certainly
less effective than the western pull approach, which focuses on flexible logistics that
adapt to real-world conditions. In short, western forces let strategy lead logistics, while
Russian forces let logistics lead strategy. The single factor that can best address
these issues, however, is time. The Russian military does have the capabilities to set
a warzone up for a more prolonged conflict. Its material-technical support brigades include
tactical pipeline battalions, for example, that can quickly construct networks in Ukraine to
bring fuel and water closer to the active fronts, without the need for burdensome supply convoys.
Russia’s Railway Troops can do the same with rail infrastructure–mending or constructing networks
to support a long-term conflict or occupation. And the country can take a page out of the Soviet
playbook, leveraging the full might of the public and private sectors to support the military’s
operations. What the opening days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have done, however, is exposed
a weak-point in the nation’s military might–or perhaps, demonstrated that the weak-points of
the Soviet military are still present. Logistics capabilities are arguably one major strategic
advantage of many western militaries–especially the US’, whose global network of military
bases and massive sea and airlift capabilities allow it to properly supply a conflict truly
anywhere on earth. For Russia to have failed so visibly mere miles from its border exposes
its Achilles Heel to any future adversary. Tragically, however, these early struggles
appeared to make the Russian military only more desperate. As the conflict prolonged, the invaders
resorted to looting, to shelling civilian areas, to increasingly destructive weaponry, and to
more deadly techniques to compensate for their lack of strategic tact. Therefore,
the true cost for Russia’s failure is borne on the innocent casualties of war:
Ukrainian defenders; Russian conscripts; and perhaps most tragically, the Ukrainian
civilians who were displaced, injured, or killed simply for staying in the place they called home.
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