Russian forces could find themselves at an unpleasant disadvantage as the summer turns to fall and winter, according to U.S. and Ukrainian analysts, due to a combination of corruption and vulnerable supply lines.
“They had very bad supply last winter, and I have big doubts that they really learned their lessons,” Dr. Hanna Shelest, an Odessa-based nonresident senior fellow for the Center for European Policy Analysis, told the Washington Examiner. “Corruption in the [Russian] armed forces didn’t disappear, so I can’t imagine that they’ve been properly prepared.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has styled his invasion of Ukraine as a campaign in the tradition of Czar Peter the Great, who established the Russian Empire through a series of key victories on the territory of modern Ukraine. Yet the unexpected duration of the war, in conjunction with Russian complaints about poor equipment and inappropriate clothing, raises the possibility that the Kremlin chief is following in the frostbitten footsteps of the French and Nazi armies that tried and failed to defeat Moscow in previous wars.
“If you think about the wars of the past when Napoleon and Hitler got overextended, trying to invade Russia, and ran into the Russian winter — they were the ones who have long lines of communication and supply chains, and the Russians were fighting on their own territory,” former Ambassador Kurt Volker, who worked as the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine prior to the exposure of former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment scandal, told the Washington Examiner. “Now. it’s the opposite: Now, the Russians are the ones who are extended.”
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It’s a familiar problem for the invading Russian forces, though it might take a different form than it did in February and March. Then, Putin’s forces attacked Kyiv from Belarus, to the northwest of Ukraine. The wooded topography put Russian military vehicles at risk of getting stuck in Ukraine’s infamous rasputye, or “mud season,” while Ukrainian forces used the terrain as cover to maul the road-bound Russian military convoys. As the fighting shifts from Kyiv to eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea coast, so, too, do the seasonal dynamics.
“We want to take maximum measures to end the active part of the war by the end of autumn,” Andriy Yermak, one of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s top advisers, told Ukrainian media last week.
That time frame is driven partly by political necessity, as Zelensky’s team wants to forestall a Russian attempt to stage a putative “referendum” for any of the occupied Ukrainian territory to be annexed by Russia. Yet it also reflects the need for the Ukrainian officials to find a way to care for civilians in war-torn areas
“You have thousands of people without heating without fresh water, and … you can’t stop the proper reconstruction,” Shelest said. “So for people to be able to live in these places you have to have some kind of ceasefire. But just [any] ceasefire is not working for Ukraine because ceasefire right now will be just an opportunity for Russians to regroup but not to finish the conflict.”
Zelensky has signaled that the Ukrainian forces will try to conduct counteroffensives to reclaim at least some of the territory taken by the Russian military — both a military and a humanitarian necessity, according to Shelest, who believes that the atrocities witnessed around Kyiv are being repeated in the Russian-held territories around Kherson.
“In many, many villages, it is the repetition of what [was seen] in the north of the country,” she said. “Ceasefire will not finish these massacres.”
Ukraine’s apparent resolution to continue the fighting over the coming months could force the Russian military into a very uncomfortable position, to say the least. A series of recent explosions in the Crimean Peninsula — which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, although Kyiv has not acquiesced to the loss of territory — suggest that Ukrainian forces have a growing capacity to strike Russian supply lines, whether through the use of drone strikes or through the heavy artillery and HIMARS rocket systems that the United States and other western governments have provided.
“They have to move food and fuel over rail or over land in order to get it to forward-deployed forces who are … not living in their own buildings,” Volker said. “So this is tougher for the Russians to sustain than it will be for the Ukrainians. And that, combined with the effectiveness of the HIMARS going after those depots, their food supplies, their ammunition depots, the rail lines — it is actually going to be harder for the Russians this winter.”
Such difficulties might not present a major obstacle for Russian forces in Donbas, the region where they have controlled at least some Ukrainian territory since 2014, Volker acknowledged, due to the proximity to the Russian border. And yet, Putin’s military has suffered on account of poor supplies from the beginning of the war.
“We have to buy everything ourselves, with our own money. I’m not even talking about modern body armor and helmets: There are no warm clothes, no dry rations or first-aid kits,” a Russian soldier was quoted as saying by the Moscow Times. “All the equipment we are fighting with in Ukraine stinks of mothballs, and the weapons jam.”
Ukrainian leaders must also scramble to equip their troops for cold-weather fighting, as Shelest acknowledged, but they will have at least one important advantage over their adversaries.
“When Ukrainians are coming into the villages, you understand that locals are helping them with a lot of stuff they need to build around, like to be safe, to be warm, to have warm food, and so on,” she said. “When Russians are coming, they don’t have this welcome, and it is much more difficult for them to arrange the living structure.”
The support of the local population is a point of emphasis for Ukrainian leaders like Zelensky, who praised all “who fight for their cities and villages, including in the occupation … who oppose the occupiers in their rear, who ensure the necessary supplies for Ukraine” in an address this week.
His applause dovetails with the accounts of Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat promoted by Russian state media just months before the invasion of Ukraine. A famous Russian writer and veteran of the war, Denys Davydov, noted in his memoirs how Russian peasants attacked the French forces. The recent Russian retrospective on the war cited Sir Walter Scott to argue that Napoleon was undone not merely by winter cold but by his own logistical mistakes.
“Napoleon foresaw … that a cold would come in October. In July, he foresaw the need to collect food supplies sufficient for the food of his army,” Scott wrote in a passage quoted last October by Russia Beyond, a website funded by a Russian state news agency. “But, carried away by impatience, in neither case did he take measures to overcome either hunger or cold, which he foresaw.”
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Putin may have made a similar error in judgment. “His ego and his interpretation of history is not allowing him to have a sober mind about the events,” Shelest said.
