An Analytical View of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict and the Changing Ways of War

From the last decade of the twentieth century, military-strategic pundits throughout the world declared that conventional war is passe and the age of insurgency and counterinsurgency has dawned. The ongoing Russian-Ukrainian War, which is still continuing, proves that the predictions of experts about the future of war is wrong. In the volume under review, the retired Major-General John S. Harrel of the United States’ Marine Corps details the second year of the Moscow-Kiev conflict. Besides being a warrior-scholar, Harrel has firsthand experience with the Ukrainian troops. He had trained them in the 1990s and 2006, and also commanded the Ukrainian troops as part of the NATO peacekeeping force at Kosovo in 2005. This book, which is a sequel of Harrel’s monograph dealing with the first year of Russian-Ukrainian War, focuses on the operational aspects rather than the origins and consequences of the ongoing conflict.

In early 2022, Russia initiated the invasion of Ukraine on three planes: air, land, and sea. This trend continued in the next year. The character of Russian-Ukrainian War like any war, as Clausewitz had noted, changed with time as a chameleon changes its colour. With the passage of time, the scope, intensity, and frequency of the use of reconnaissance and killer drones rose. In the first year of war, as Russian tank armies neared Kiev, the outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian troops hit back with drones. These unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) dropped bombs at the soft upper side of the tracked armoured vehicles. The release of Leopard tanks by Germany in limited numbers in 2023 somewhat eased Ukraine’s inferiority in armour vis-à-vis Russia. The ever –increasing presence of kamikaze drones will further reduce Russian armoured superiority in the coming days.

At the beginning of the war, both the Russian and the Ukrainian air forces had similar weapons. Quantitative superiority of the Russian Air Force resulted in the sky belonging to ‘Ivan.’ Thanks to supply of anti-aircraft batteries from Europe, the Ukrainian air defence (AD) made a comeback in 2023. The mobile Ukrainian AD batteries took a heavy toll on the Russian aircraft. The Russian Air Force took a defensive stance and relied on launching glide bombs from behind the Forward Edge of the Battle Area to remain outside the reach of Ukrainian AD missiles. Both sides have now taken recourse to large scale use of reconnaissance drones to search the target area and use loitering munitions for hitting hostile targets. If anything, the induction of US Patriot missiles by Ukraine would make the aerial environment more dangerous for the Russian pilots.

Drones especially changed the character of combat in the Black Sea. In 2022, the Russian capital ships almost wiped out the Ukrainian naval presence in the Black Sea. However, in 2023, Kiev counterattacked with a ‘mosquito fleet.’ The sea drones were used for the first time in the history of conflict in large numbers. Moreover, they proved to be deadly. The cheap, small but lethal Ukrainian sea drones were able to neutralise several big ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. So much so, the Russian Fleet had to beat a retreat to the eastern part of the Black Sea. Thus, Ukraine regained control over the western part of the Black Sea which is vital for Kiev’s economy as the grain route passes along this area. Further, Ukrainian armed forces registered a high learning curve. The Ukrainians learnt to integrate land-based missiles with sea drones while launching attacks on the Russian ships cooped up in Novorossiysk.

Alongside the use of drones and high technology missiles, traditional close quarter combat by the infantry armed with rifles, submachine guns, and grenades occurred in the Ukrainian towns like Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Vuhledar, etc. Infantry riding in infantry fighting vehicles with mine clearing armoured vehicles supported by tanks and self-propelled artillery occupied the suburbs and then the ‘boots on the ground’ fought it out in the urban environment. Urban combat in Ukraine proved to be as costly as trench combat in the Flanders fields during 1914-1918. In fact, the Russian Army, suffering from manpower crunch, was now abducting Ukrainian boys and inducting them in Moscow’s legions. Ukrainian refugees were given the option of getting Russian citizenship in case they agree to become Putin’s foot soldiers. For avoiding grievous losses, the Russian generals used Wagner Group’s mercenaries for launching frontal attacks on Ukrainian strongholds. After Prigozhin’s revolt in June 2023, the Wagner mercenaries were removed from the crucial sectors of the battlefield. Their place in many sectors were now taken over by the Muslim volunteers from Central Asia.

What was absent in urban combat at Saint-Quentin (1918), Stalingrad (1942), and Berlin (1945) but present in the conflict ridden Ukrainian urbanscape is the continuous presence of UAVs/drones. They provided video feeds and also directed artillery fire on the hostile forces. Worse, small drones were even targeting and killing individual soldiers sheltering inside dugouts and shell holes. The Soviet doctrine stated that artillery is the god of war. The Russian Army inherited this tenet. However, Russian numerical superiority in artillery (tube, missile, and rocket) at Donbas was being neutralized by the US truck mounted High Mobility Artillery Rocket System and mobile Multiple Rocket System. The Western precision guided rockets, and precision guided artillery rounds directed by drones, gave a qualitative advantage to the Ukrainian Army.

At present, we only have some illustrated coffee table books about the conduct of Russian-Ukrainian War. Harrel’s The Russian-Ukrainian War 2023 significantly fills this gap. Credit is due to Harrel for giving a solid and analytical three dimensional view of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Harrel details the change-continuity in the war. While in 2022, Putin launched massive tank armies in the Second World War style, in 2023 Russia mainly conducted a sort of non-contact war by launching barrages of missiles. However, both in 2022 and 2023, the Russian infantry officers failed to display a mission-oriented command system. Infantry assaults supported by armoured fighting vehicles occurred both in the first and second years of war. Nevertheless, 2023 saw the massive use of drones both on land and at sea for reconnaissance and strike missions. Overall, this work is especially strong in the tactical-technical aspects but rather weak as regards the non-kinetic aspects (like use of artificial intelligence in command, control, communications and intelligence, electronic warfare, cyberwarfare, political aspects of hybrid warfare, etc.). To sum up, it is still the best work on the second year of Russian-Ukrainian War in the market. Let us hope that Harrel, in the near future, will write a similar volume about the third year of Moscow-Kiev War, which does not seem to be closing down.

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Our Reviewer: Dr. Kaushik Roy is Guru Nanak Chair Professor, Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He is the author of numerous works in military history, such as Battle for Malaya: The Indian Army in Defeat, 1941–1942, The Army in British India: From Colonial Warfare to Total War 1857 - 1947, The Indian Army in the Two World Wars, Sepoys against the Rising Sun: The Indian Army in Far East and South-East Asia, 1941–45, and many more. He previously reviewed Civil War Infantry Tactics, The Clausewitz Myth, and General George S. Patton and the Art of Leadership.

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Note: The Russian-Ukrainian War, 2023is also available in e-editions.

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