The Pentagon figures that Russian President Vladimir Putin has about two more weeks until the fertile flat farmlands of eastern Ukraine freeze enough to support the weight of an invasion force of battle tanks and heavy artillery.
And during that window, while diplomacy runs its course, think-tankers in Washington have been furiously war-gaming what military moves Putin might make to force the former Soviet republic back into Russia’s orbit and to abandon its dreams of NATO membership.
Whatever Putin does, the price will be high.
A full-scale land invasion risks heavy casualties on both sides as Russia will get met by a highly motivated, battle-tested Ukrainian military that, while not a match on paper, is far superior to what Russia faced in 2014 when Putin sent troops in unmarked uniforms dubbed “little green men” to seize Crimea before anyone realized what happened.
This time, with a monthslong buildup of more than 130,000 Russian forces massed on three sides of Ukraine’s border with Russia, the implications are obvious and ominous.
“The ground maneuver forces, the artillery, the ballistic missiles, the air forces — all of it packaged together, if that were unleashed on Ukraine, it would be significant,” warned Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month. “It would be horrific.”
Tellingly, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War predicts Putin will not conduct a “full mechanized invasion to conquer all of Ukraine,” but it says it’s increasingly likely that by midmonth, Russia will move forces into the eastern Donbas region, which is primarily controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
“Russia may launch an air and missile campaign throughout unoccupied Ukraine in conjunction with an overt deployment into occupied Donbas,” the Institute for the Study of War analysts wrote in an updated report, but they added that Putin is likely smart enough not to seize Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv or other major cities, which would effectively end his political leverage.
“Putin may offer a ceasefire after the initial air, missile, and ground operations with more limited demands but conditions that he can easily accuse Ukraine of violating and thereby justify the resumption of military operations,” the report’s authors concluded. “Holding back from the conquest of Kyiv and major Ukrainian cities allows Putin to continue to demand concessions from the West that transcend Ukrainian issues, such as blanket commitments not to expand NATO further.”
But while a “shock and awe” campaign limited to missile barrages and airstrikes could limit Russian casualties, it would still trigger crippling economic sanctions, disrupting energy supplies that hurt not just Putin’s cash flow but also the United States’s European allies, who rely on cheap Russian natural gas to heat their homes.
A separate analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies said Putin has arrayed his forces to give him a wide range of options, from taking all or part of Ukraine to seizing a belt of land to connect Russia with Trans-Dniester, a landlocked sliver of terrain between Ukraine and Moldova that would cut off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea, and on the low end, conducting extensive cyber operations, subversion, and sabotage.
A former member of the European Parliament outlined a version of the land corridor strategy in a recent article in Project Syndicate, suggesting Putin might use his forces to establish a line of control from the Donbas region to the large city of Dnipro on the Dnieper River, a distance of roughly 190 miles.
“Controlling that line would enable Russia to cut off all of southern and eastern Ukraine, completely encircle the Ukrainian armed forces currently facing Donbas, and quickly compel them to surrender,” wrote Charles Tannock. “The immediate military rewards would be significant: complete control of the Sea of Azov, and secure defense of the land corridor to annexed Crimea.”
“If Russia takes the kinetic option, getting the land bridge to Crimea is the most likely,” said Bill Schneider, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
But Schneider added that an aggressive Ukraine response “would be to drop the Kerch Strait bridge to recover their access through the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea.”
Russia has been using the new 12-mile bridge that connects Southern Russia to Crimea to control access to the narrow strait by parking ships underneath it.
There are still experts who are not convinced Putin will not pull the trigger, among them Harlan Ullman, one of the architects of the U.S. “shock and awe” strategy that produced a quick victory followed by a protracted insurgency in Iraq 19 years ago.
“We got the Baghdad with absolutely no difficulty in 2003 with 150,000 troops. Things did not go well after that,” Ullman said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“Putin understands better,” added Ullman, who is now a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council.
“If you’re gonna go into Ukraine to occupy it, you probably need a force of 400,000 or 500,000 to occupy it. That’s half the size of the entire Russian military. And don’t forget over a third of the Russian military are conscripts, draftees,” he said.
As Putin well knows, what can start as a cakewalk can quickly devolve into a quagmire.
“For 10 years, the Soviets got killed in Afghanistan. So the Russians have no intention of occupying the country. That’s too expensive, and they just don’t have a wherewithal to do that,” Ullman said.
Ullman believes what Putin is doing now is employing the classic Russian tactic of “maskirovka,” or deception.
“Putin’s main target is [Ukranian President Volodymyr] Zelensky,” he said. “And I think what he’s doing by all this maneuvering is to cajole convince, coerce, bribe Zelensky to come to the conclusion that if certain concessions are made, then Zelensky will voluntarily forgo NATO membership for some period of time.”
At this point, all Putin needs to move is a pretext, something that can be easily manufactured.
On the last day of January, Ukrainian security forces arrested three men they accused of plotting to stage violent protests in the capital, just the sort of thing Putin used to justify the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“So the first word we might get in the West is there’s some big demonstration in Kyiv, and they’ve stormed the parliament, and then everybody says, ‘Well, who was that?'” said retired Gen. Wes Clark, the former supreme allied commander for NATO, on CNN.
“And then the Russians would be saying, ‘The Ukrainian people, they don’t like the idea of joining NATO.’ So it would get all bollocksed up and confused in the public’s mind,” Clark said.
“That’s the way Putin would prefer to do it.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
