February 21, 2026: Russia is having problems recruiting soldiers after four years of war in Ukraine and over 1.2 million soldiers killed, disabled or missing in combat. Russia was able to recruit 400,000 last year and expects to do the same this year. In the last two years, new recruits were often foreigners, including South Americans, Cubans, Africans and many countries in Asia. Recruiting standards have been lowered in Russia, where prisons have been emptied and alcoholics, drug addicts and the mentally ill have been induced, tricked or forced to sign a contract to join the military. Recruiters have been particularly successful in rural Russia where good jobs are scarce and alcoholism is rampant. Recruiters will sometimes visit a venue that serves alcohol and buy drinks for likely new recruits. Once these inebriated men have signed, the recruiter will often have to enlist local police to go where the new soldiers lived and tell the now sober men that they are in the army and take them away. Soldiers recruited in this way are not expected to last long in Ukraine, so their physical or mental condition is not important.

Recruiters have other problems to deal with. Twenty years ago, Russian leaders were informed that the rapidly aging Russian population was not only shrinking but was not fit for any major economic or military efforts. Some 60 percent of Russians were elderly, children, or disabled. Out of 20 million males of working age, one million were in prison, a million in the armed forces, five million were unemployed or unemployable due to poor education, health or attitude, four million were chronic alcoholics, and a million were drug addicts. Thus, there is something of a labor shortage, with plenty of jobs for women and immigrants. The birth rate is below replacement level, and a declining population means more immigrants just to keep things going. Improving medical care, and health habits, especially treating alcoholism and drug use, was a government priority, in order to raise the lifespan of Russian males. All of this made the idea of a smaller, all volunteer, military more attractive. Too many of the current troops were drunks, addicted to drugs or just unreliable. Volunteers must be paid much more, but their discipline is much higher. Russian officers are very impressed with what the British, Japanese and Americans have done with all-volunteer armed forces and want to emulate them. That never happened.

February 21, 2026: One of the many reasons why the Russian plan to conquer Ukraine in a few weeks was a misunderstanding of who they were fighting. Even before 1991, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian were known as clever and inventive. After Ukraine became independent in 1991, that cleverness, inventiveness and enterprising nature took off. In military matters that was first seen in the way Ukrainians managed to modify, upgrade and tweak the thousands of tanks, artillery and other weapons Ukraine found itself because they had been a major producer of weapons for the Soviet Union. Most of those were exported to customers around the world, mainly because the prices were low and the Ukrainians would modify these weapons in any way the customer wanted and could pay for.

When Russia began attacking Ukraine in 2014, by seizing territory, the Ukrainian applied their talents to developing weapons and tactics to foil the Russians. This annoyed the Russians and was one of the reasons Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago.

Once at war the Ukrainians put their entrepreneurial skill into overdrive. Russia believed their Shock and Awe invasion would defeat the Ukrainians quickly but were themselves shocked at how quickly Ukrainian civilians rapidly improvised and implemented defensive units, tactics and weapons. This played a major role in defeating the initial Russian advance that was meant to capture the capital Kyiv and shatter the Ukrainian resolve and force a surrender. Tens of thousands of civilians mobilized themselves and went after vulnerable Russian units. Supply convoys were a popular target because, without continuous supplies of fuel, ammunition, food and other items, the Russians could not keep advancing. The improvised Ukrainian irregulars cut those supply lines and used weapons captured from the fleeing Russian soldiers to do more damage.

This spirit of innovation and improvisation eventually led to the use of drones in warfare, something the Russians did not expect and were not prepared for. The first military drones were built by individual Ukrainians in homes, barns, or garages by individuals or small groups. The drones were sent to friends or relatives in the army who added explosives and used the drones in combat. The government saw what was happening and established factories to turn out the drones in large numbers. The amateur drone designers and builders ran many of these factories and trained new workers.

Innovation continued when the troops got these drones. One of the unique ideas was to add gaming elements to the use of drones in combat. Commanders established goals and the first individuals or units to achieve the goals, like hunting down and killing Russians with drones received points. As an individual or a unit's accumulated points they use them to obtain scarce equipment or resources. These items would eventually reach units without this competitive system, but with the competition the most effective units received these items first. The winning units also enjoyed better morale and were often acclaimed in the Ukrainian media. This encouraged more civilians to support their friends or family members in the military. This popularization of innovation and entrepreneurship has been a major asset to the Ukrainian military effort.

In contrast the Russian use of imagination often backfired. An example of that was the failure of their BTG/Battalion Task Group concept. Russia had expanded the use of BTGs since the 1980s because BTGs had consistently proved successful in many small wars, including the rather large operation in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Systems like the BTG began to appear during World War II when it was found that forming temporary task forces containing tank and infantry units were more effective. The Germans did the same thing, calling them battle groups or Kampfgruppen and the Americans adopted the practice after World War II. There was an important difference between the Western battle groups and the current BTGs. The Western battle groups were kept simple, mainly using combinations of infantry and tank companies, with the addition of combat engineers or artillery as needed. American infantry officers got lots of realistic training using these battle groups. Western armies had many career NCOs to make sure the troops performed well.

Russia expanded their BTGs after 2000 and added more support units so that each BTG had most of the support capabilities usually found in a division. These support units were smaller in the BTG, often a dozen or so specialists riding in a few trucks. The BTG commander put an officer in charge of all these non-combat support troops and the dozens of trucks they traveled in. The combat element of a BTG always consisted of a few hundred infantry and ten or twenty tanks. But now there were small platoon sized detachments of specialists. The only ones that were always present were a dozen or so self-propelled 152mm guns and somewhat more 82mm and 120mm mortars. There was also a medical detachment. In the last decade a detachment of fire control troops was added to coordinate all that firepower with some UAVs to scout for targets. There were also a small number of self-propelled anti-aircraft weapons in addition to the portable anti-aircraft missiles carried by individual soldiers. There were several other specialist units that could be added as needed. Total strength of a BTG varied depending on how it was assembled. Official personnel strength varied from 600 to 800 personnel but was more like 300-500 in peacetime.

These new BTGs became the standard for Russian divisions, which now consisted of two or three brigades. Each of these usually had just two BTGs. The division had fewer support units because most of these troops were now assigned to BTGs or brigades. By 2021 there were 170 BTGs. The combat elements usually consisted of one tank company, two or three infantry companies and one or two batteries of artillery. While BTGs had some contract volunteer troops, most of the rest of the BTG personnel were conscripts. The conscripts had several shortcomings. They could not be used in a combat zone; their term of service was only one year, and they were not as well trained as the contract troops. By law conscripts were not allowed in a combat zone unless it was wartime, and they were defending Russia.

This massive adoption of BTGs was a mistake that became obvious when nearly half the available BTGs were sent into Ukraine in early 2022. Many newly formed BTGs were sent to the Ukrainian border in late 2021 to threaten Ukraine and if that did not work, to invade.

The flaw in the BTGs was not obvious until they encountered well-armed and motivated opponents. That happened soon after they crossed the border into Ukraine. The leadership in these BTGs simply could not handle the complex composition of BTGs. Senior Russian leaders knew this from the performance of BTG leaders during military exercises. This was not a surprise as the quality of officers had declined in the last decade and there were still not enough experienced NCOs.

The lack of competent leadership meant the troops in the BTGs were poorly used during combat, and increasingly abandoned their vehicles and fled if they encountered Ukrainian troops, who concentrated on hitting the very vulnerable tanks and light armored vehicles, like BMPs or wheeled armored infantry carriers. BTG commanders failed to order effective reconnaissance or even get the infantry out of their armored vehicles to protect their tanks from Ukrainian infantry armed with modern Western anti-tank weapons. Worse, the Ukrainians concentrated on attacking the BTG trucks carrying supplies and maintenance personnel. The trucks were the last to enter Ukraine because there were a lot of conscripts driving the trucks and these conscripts were not told they were driving into Ukraine. Instead, many were told they were on another training exercise.

Most of these vehicles were destroyed or abandoned because of Ukrainian artillery fire and ground troops using whatever weapons they had. In one case a retired Ukrainian soldier was given a single-shot RPG/Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher by some passing Ukrainian troops. The elderly veteran used that one RPG to destroy a whole Russian truck convoy by waiting for the fuel trucks and hitting one of them. The fiery explosion ignited other trucks including some carrying fuel. Soon the entire truck column was in flames, and the surviving drivers were walking back to the border.