If Russia Intends to Win It Must Get Serious About the War in Ukraine

An Interview With Marko From Anti-Empire - Part 1

I reached out to Marko Marjanović, who is probably the most popular pessimist analyst of the war in Ukraine and asked him some questions. To my surprise, Marko invested a lot more effort than was expected of him in answering them. He didn’t need to basically write out an entire article for me, but I’m grateful for how seriously he took my request. Also, his pessimistic views are shared by many in the military analyst community in Russia and several pro-Russia commentators in the West have started to sober up about the war in recent days as well. I think Marko’s analysis is closer to the truth than most other Western commentators’.

There’s a Part 2 in the works, so stay tuned.

Me: The special operation has now morphed into a total war. While the Russians are inflicting heavy damage on the Ukrainians, it seems clear that Kiev is willing to fight to the last dead Ukrainian. This was clearly not the initial goal of the special operation. Instead of pretending that everything is going according to plan, it’s probably worth critically re-assessing the situation and not just mindlessly rah-rah-rahing for one side or the other. I share your perspective that Russia was not expecting Kiev to go full scorched earth and volkssturm in response to the special military operation. So, with that out of the way:

How can Russia right the ship?

Marko: I don’t know about righting the ship, but if Russia doesn’t want to pay a higher cost while achieving less it must fight optimally. That means actually using the tools it has created for itself rather than leaving them in the drawer and making it way more of an equal (and therefore more protracted and bloody for everyone involved) fight than it needs to be.

That would mean: 1. Admitting this is a war. 2. Explaining why it is being fought and what the aims are. 3. Destroying the Dnieper bridges starting with the railway ones. 4. Extending conscripts and actually using them. 5. Calling up some reserves to enable the military to go to full manning.

Everybody understands your team will suffer fewer bruises in a fight against 10 enemies where you are 20 than in one where you are also only 10. In fact, even the enemy will give up sooner and suffer less if there are 20 of you. Russia has the means to make it a 20 vs 10 fight but insists on fighting 10 on 10. Why?

Was the initial plan to bluff Kiev into surrendering?

I have called it a psychological operation to bluff Ukraine intro unraveling to get the point across. With the benefit of hindsight we can definitely say the initial gamble was only going to work if Kiev defeated itself. Success required the ruling class in Kiev to panic beyond what was warranted, which did not happen.

It was unrealistic and poorly prepared, but you can see the allure. On the downside, it would divide the Russian effort, taking away forces from the operation vs the Ukrainian military center of gravity in Donbass and postponing it. On the upside, it was the only course of action that could promise a chance of success that didn’t have tens of thousands of deaths already baked in.

Also, we don't know what pieces they had in place and what they expected of them. It's easy to say with hindsight that a mad dash to Kiev to cause Zelensky to flee and be overturned (as Yanukovich was after he fled to Kharkov) was always going to fail. But operating without this hindsight the Kremlin certainly wasn't alone in thinking that Ukrainian resistance lasting only a few days was a realistic possibility.

My gripe isn’t really with the Kremlin for rolling the dice on a knock-out blow, but with the people who torture reality to deny it ever happened. (Because “grandmaster” Putin trying something and it not panning out is an impossibility for the Western contrarian media.) So you end up with the bizarre tale where the early desperate Russian focus on making as speedy an appearance in Kiev as possible at the expense of abiding by even the most basic commandments of force protection was nonetheless part of a wholly conventional military operation. One in which 60% of the Russian force was thrown away to act as a “decoy” for the other 40%.

Do you think that this operation was the result of a colossal failure on the part of the intelligence organs? 

It is entirely possible that spooks oversold the assets they had in Kiev to Putin, and that this influenced how the invasion plan looked like. How non-textbook and contrary to military science it was. Actually, I would bet on it.

Reports early on of shootouts inside Kiev with Russian sleeper agents were dismissed as Ukrainian paranoia and panicky Ukrainians shooting at each other, but one thing about these skirmishes is that they ended as abruptly as they sprang up. If it really was just civilians shooting at militias, shooting at the military, wouldn't such incidents die out gradually instead of ending abruptly after the second night? In retrospect maybe there was something to these reports.

In fact, the Ukrainian SBU (admittedly not an uninterested party) was saying that Ukraine was greatly penetrated by Russian covert forces before the war ever launched.

But in the sense that intelligence organs approached the Kremlin and pitched the idea of using force in Ukraine that Putin would otherwise not have gone for, I don't think that. I think the decision to go in and to start preparing infrastructure for that came from the top.

Keep in mind that when the initial gambit failed they weren't left paralyzed but pivoted to something much more conventional quickly and hard. The withdrawal from the north was completed by April 2, but by the speed it was carried out it must have already been in preparation for at least a week before the order was given. 

This to me is an indication that regardless of what the spooks may have told Putin he never regarded the knock-out gambit as an FSB-guaranteed slam dunk but was psychologically prepared for its failure from the start. (Compare their decisiveness in cutting their losses in the Kiev push to the current dithering on declaring a state of war and introducing conscripts and reservists to the fight.) With that in mind I don’t think the decision to go into Ukraine was contingent on what promises the intelligence people could make.

Do you think that the intelligence failure (if there was one) was deliberate sabotage?

No, I think it's just a limitation of any bureaucratic system. Competing agencies with replaceable chiefs have an incentive to exaggerate what they have accomplished and there are few ways for the center to verify.

What is likelier to have played a part is a Russian feeling of cultural supremacy. Old nations always assume that new nations are stunted. That they can't possibly take the same pride in their shorter histories and be bound and animated by their "ahistorical" identities as strongly.

But just because "Ukrainian" is a relatively new identity whose spread was greatly aided by concerted state action, doesn't mean that Ukrainians experience it any differently or are any less capable of banding together. Most people alive don't know any history beyond a simplistic anecdote or two anyway.

It was naive to feel the suggested historic artificiality of Ukraine a hundred years ago was going to affect how they reacted to a Russian regime-change invasion in 2022. Had they bothered to ask people in Ukraine sympathetic to them they would have heard as much.

What was the plan for taking the cities if they didn't expect them to surrender/switch sides?

Who knows. Probably they planned to figure it out on the go. Ad hoc improvisation has been their MO in Ukraine since at least February 2014. But without full manning the question of cities is becoming more and more of a moot point. Early on the Ukrainians couldn't resist out in the field and had to beat a hasty retreat into Chernigov, Sumy, and Kiev. However they're doing okay outside cities in Donbass and they're winning time to set up similar field fortifications elsewhere.

With the Russian unwillingness to tap into their conscript manpower, the return to the previous situation with the Russians as a Mongol horde that could have free reign of the countryside but would struggle with stone cities is slipping away. Now even traversing the countryside is a big challenge.

At present manning levels, they will struggle to blockade more than a city or two at a time anway. They have already abandoned the close grips they had on Nikolayev and Kharkov. (That's in addition of abandoning their embrace of Sumy, Chernigov, and Kiev.) At the current 1:1 force ratios they simply aren't able to do more than a few things at once.

How much of the aid and money sent to Ukraine is actually making it to the frontlines/making a difference?

Most of it makes it. The Russian halfway war to disrupt Ukrainian railways is not effective. Not nearly enough is being taken out in transit to matter either. That would require persistent real-time surveillance over long ranges which does not exist, and would be shot down if it did. Even if there was such a capability (if Russia had America's drone fleet and Ukraine didn't have air defenses) that might suffice to take out the aid moved by rail, but not by road.

Probably the bigger slow-down in getting Western aid to the front is Ukrainian corruption. Some of the equipment is skimmed off the top and sold to conscripts and their civilian backers on online auctions. But I don't imagine that is the typical fate of a piece of Western gear, and Russia has its own corruption problems that slow down supplies, most recently in the form of the Rostov FSB.

[NOTE: the FSB has been accused of not allowing material to cross the borders with DNR and LNR and arresting volunteers as well as soliciting bribes. These accusations have gone as far back as the start of the rebellion in the Donbass and are credible.]

It makes a lot of difference. Right now there are 75,000 Ukrainian soldiers on the front or in training with modern American kevlar who would have otherwise had some old Soviet plate from the 1980s or maybe none at all. That’s a very big difference.

Another effect is in how it forces the Russians to change tactics and dampens many of their advantages. You have seen that Russian aircraft fly at tree-top level from where they are nowhere near as effective. The bulk of that is in reaction to SAMs but what forces them even lower is that they are now operating on the assumption that Ukrainian infantry has an abundance of MANPADs. In all likelihood, Ukraine's saturation with anti-tank missiles has similarly resulted in the Russian armor operating less aggressively as well. So these things can have far-reaching impact just by their presence.

The main thing Western aid does is it denies Russia the chance of winning through strategic action. It means the Russians can not wipe out Ukrainian defense plants and then watch as the enemy gradually runs into ammo shortages and becomes increasingly de-mechanized. As long as the Americans are here the Ukrainians will have shells by the planeload — at least on the right bank.

On the other hand, so far there isn't an indication that the US is willing to take the financial hit of taking it to the next level and ramping up its production capacities just for this war.

Will Russia expand the fight beyond Ukraine in some way to inflict damage on the West? 

Russia isn’t interested in damaging the West or taking it on. Russia is interested in finding ways to manage and limit Western interference in its war. Problem is how to achieve that.

Russia has that sort of leverage with Israel and Turkey because the two have their own bleeding ulcers that Russia could aggravate and because the two are capable of recognizing and acting in their national interest. Thus Turkey, despite greatly lamenting Russia’s expansion on the Black Sea, unlike the rest of NATO, isn't shipping caches of arms to eastern Poland and — I would bet — sought payment for new Bayraktars in full. Israel has sent symbolic quantities of non-lethal aid to appease DC, but won't even sell weapons to Ukraine and shot down a direct US request to allow the transfer of its excellent anti-tank missiles from Germany and Estonia. 

How can Russia replicate that with the West? At exactly the wrong time for Russia the West is finally not embroiled in any quagmires itself. Even if it was, would the West be able to understand the Russian message? Russia can fire off a warning shot against Israel in Syria, and Israel being a classical self-interested power like Russia will know what that is about. But indicate a willingness to aggravate Western concerns and agendas and it can just as easily be seized on by the media and the hardliners to pave the way for even more interference in Ukraine.

Honestly, I don’t think Russia has good options or leverage here. But on the other hand, DC has been respectful of Russian power at least in the sense of eschewing getting involved directly. It is holding itself to a stricter boundary than the Soviet Union did in North Vietnam, so that’s something. 

The US does recognize Ukraine is de facto in the Russian sphere of influence — if Russia is able to swallow it. It will try to cause Russia maximum indigestion but isn't invested in any outcome. That's quite the luxury that other powers the US intervenes against do not enjoy.