10 KEY EVENTS OF THE UKRAINE WAR Aleksandar Radić: 'Russian state sooner to collapse than its military on the ground!'

The key problem the Russians faced early on was an absence of a goal. The military is a means that implements the political will, and it should have been clearly defined what was to be achieved. The Russians' failures ranged from the intelligence and reconnaissance activities to the very system of command on the ground. They started overly ambitiously. Nothing that has happened on the ground points to the mythical idea, which our general public believes in, regarding war operations in which civilian lives are saved. It has been a disaster from the very start. What obviously demonstrates the superficiality and the political control of the armed forces is the fact that Russia has never had an operations command.

The Ukrainians have developed a strong national sentiment, and the history of warfare shows that, whenever you have that sort of robust determination and you are being attacked, it has a very powerful mobilization potential, which the Russians did not have. The atmosphere is very reminiscent of 1991, when many people in Serbia supported the war in principle and would become emotional when the war was the topic of discussion, but only as long as it was not at their expense.

The Russian Armed Forces executed masterfully the action of taking over the Hostomel Airport. The special forces had helmet cameras, and these recordings were meant to serve as proof of the magnificence of the Russian military victory. These fellows did a perfect job, with some losses. But then came a major halt. The Russian Army executed an operation which, had this been Czechoslovakia in 1968, would have resulted in many soldiers being decorated, and everything would have been over in several days. However, the Ukrainian Army consolidated after the initial shock, as the will to defend themselves was stronger. No one in NATO expected that the Ukrainian Army would put up such a resistance. Everyone expected that they would last hours, days, or weeks, and that the Russian Army would defeat the Ukrainian one. The majority opinion was that a huge loss of the Ukrainian territory was inevitable.

2. The sinking of the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet: The Moskva cruiser is a symbol! A few days in, the war was being waged predominantly using the artillery. Both sides suffered disproportionately big losses. In addition to well-trained crews and the command system, the efficiency of the artillery also depends on the intelligence and reconnaissance activities. NATO is Ukraine's eyes. The Ukrainians cannot develop such a capacity for using technological systems in intelligence and reconnaissance operations as NATO, primarily the United States. Every day, airplanes used for electronic actions, unmanned aerial vehicles, move along the Russian borders and provide to the Ukrainians the information they collect on the movements of the Russian troops. On the other hand, the Ukrainians have a very serious resource themselves, given that it has been a known fact that there are many people among them who are loyal to the idea of Ukraine, and that many of them in the territories under Russian control work for the Ukrainian Intelligence Services. Taken with a grain of salt, as any war is fluid, and there are many mistakes and inaccurate beliefs, it can still be said that, compared to the Russians, they are far more efficient. The Moskva cruiser, as a symbol of the Russian maritime power and the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, ended up at the bottom of the sea in the context of good intelligence preparations that Ukrainians make. In a symbolic sense, this demonstrated the difference on the ground – the Russian arrogance and underestimating their opponent. It was a shocking blow to the Russian military honour, as they believed in their superiority and were simply wrong.

3. The quick capturing of Kherson and Mariupol: In a war, neither side acts in harmony and alignment in each section of the front – there are always strong and weak points. The Ukrainians had for years been building a very strong defence line in Donbas. On the one hand, we could believe that the Russians are right and that the Ukrainians did have aggressive plans for the spring of 2022 regarding Donbas, but, on the other hand, what they were doing there was primarily fortifying their defence line, which is itself multi-layered and high-quality. There the front has shown to be very robust, and the Russians have failed to take over the suburbs of Donetsk, the capital of the region, from the start of the war until the present moment. The Kherson region is a counterexample. Furthermore, there is a discrepancy in the quality of the Russian units. The Russians sent the units from the Far East, Asian units which can show resolve, to Kyiv, but something was not working there, and they became stuck in the settlements along the way to Kyiv. With Kherson, the units from the north of the Caucasus, the Russian south, proved to be efficient. They also had a better command system, so the Ukrainians had poor results in the Kherson region. There are indications that the Russian intelligence operations had for months before the war helped the manoeuvring elements of their forces be sent to Donbas as reinforcements through deception.

Mariupol remained cut off, and it was clear that the ultra-right was not wanted by many in Kyiv either. The Azov unit was covered by the media, but the main defenders there were the members of the 36^th Marine Brigade. There are indications that Mariupol would have held on longer had it not been for the intelligence penetration into the Ukrainian Army. To be precise, however much we can criticise the overall Russian intelligence work, the fact remains that there have been intelligence penetrations. However horrible the destruction of the city may look like, I think that Mariupol would have held on longer had it not been for the Russian intelligence penetration.

4. Ukraine abandoning the negotiations in Istanbul: In every war, the political mechanism is the principal thing. What matters most is what politics wants. There is no honesty on any side or centre of power. Or the idea that there should be negotiations. The most dangerous construction of this entire war is the definition of the war goal. What is the war goal? As for the Russian Army, the absence of a clearly defined war goal has removed its potential. A military's morale is built on defining the goal. All of us here, in the region of the former Yugoslavia, know what happened 30 years ago – everyone who was in the Yugoslavian National Army back then is aware of what the lack of a clearly defined goal means. The war goal must be clear. The Soviet tanks headed west with signs saying, "To Berlin". The message was clear. Two words – "To Berlin". Period. That criterion has not been met by the Russian side in this war because right up until today, an ordinary Russian soldier is not sure why combat operations are being executed. Negotiations before realizing the goal are an obstacle. You cannot end a war in which you cannot proclaim victory. Secondly, the Ukrainian side has a radical goal. Protecting the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Period. Is this realistic? At any rate, 2022 was only the first year of the war, and it is evident that every topic of the negotiations was just the margin of the margin of the true political circumstances and events on the ground.

5. Russian annexation of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk: In essence, Russian politics lost the game in the summer months. Over the summer, Russia had the time to impose a sustainable picture on the ground. But Moscow wanted to keep up the pressure and achieve its goals without involving the general public and by engaging only the professional military personnel. The position at the time was – no recruits, no mobilization, the war is being waged only using the professional forces. In such a climate, the armed forces were required to achieve a maximalist idea with limited resources. This is reminiscent of 1998 in this country. First it was demanded that all of Ukraine be taken. When this turned out to be impossible, the very same units, which had not been rotated for months, were requested to produce a miracle. The Russians were supposed to take all of Donbas by the end of September. It was understandable for Moscow to say in September, "We have captured the territory we intended to capture, and this will be the basis for negotiations." The aim of the referendum was to find the war goal and to present to the nation something like a realistic, sustainable victory after so much time.

6. The Ukrainian counteroffensive and the partial mobilization in Russia: Counteroffensive sounds better because it implies fighting back, but those were in fact attack actions. The Ukrainians accepted the fact that, in order to achieve political goals, they were to suffer huge losses in the Kherson region, because after the initial successes, they became stuck in the steppe. It is a flat terrain with rivers running across it, which makes it very difficult to maintain the dynamic of attack actions. It is a fact that the Russian forces on the right side of the Dnipro River were small in number. Last spring, NATO conducted an analysis and established that the Ukrainians could keep the frontline stable, and that now artillery was key. That is when Ukraine received M-177 155-mm howitzers, which resulted in a balance of power between Russia and Ukraine. HIMARS has demonstrated what the intelligence and reconnaissance work on the ground really means. The Ukrainians identified the Antonivka Road Bridge as a target, and used up 200 expensive missiles on it, but they did achieve a strategic gain. The goal was to prevent supplying the Russian troops on the right bank of the Dnipro River.

To the north, in the Kherson area, the Russian had a strategic surprise. While Kherson demonstrates the importance of artillery operations, the Kharkov area reveals the main shortcoming of the Russian Army in the entire war – the lack of men. Since 2014, the Ukrainian Army had slowly been adopting the NATO standards. People in this country get irritated at the mention of NATO, but it is very important to acknowledge the element of quality and stability of the tactical units of the Ukrainian Army. The big problem the Russian Army is facing is lack of non-commissioned officers and leadership at the tactical level. For a Russian battalion tactical group to work, it must be filled, because 200 men cannot play the same role as 800. The Russian Army tried to wage a war without men. This idea finally collapsed in the Kharkov area, when panic started to spread. The Russians left behind huge quantities of military equipment. They waged the war in three phases. In the first phase, they used professional soldiers; in the second, they started a campaign to mobilize volunteers over the summer, offering very high salaries and focusing on poor regions; on 21 September, partial mobilization was announced, which was a forced move because otherwise they would have been left without an army in early 2023.

7. Appointing General Sergey Surovikin as the Commander of the Russian Troops in Ukraine: It is a fact that Russia has failed in commanding its army. That is a political responsibility, specifically that of Sergei Shoigu, the minister of defence, because a war was started without an operations command centre. The Ukrainians were at an advantage there. They removed all the generals and high-ranking officers who had received their education during the time of the USSR. They left the old times behind and educated new military officers relying on NATO. Whether these officers were assessed as good, very good, or adequate is irrelevant. They were taught and they accepted that the armed forces are separate from politics, and that they had to do their job. It has turned out that the Ukrainian Army is not run from President Zelenskyy's Office. It's the opposite with the Russians. It was the politicians who wanted to wage the war. In the first phase, the commands of the western and southern military districts ran combat tactical groups, which resulted in huge losses of high-ranking officer personnel. It was only in April that a joint operations command was formed, but it never became functional. Another specific phenomenon occurred during the summer – Wagner. A private company got its portion of the front. That also shows the magnitude of the political crisis. The Russians made the mother of all precedents and, as a result, the monopoly of the state over the armed forces has been seriously dented. A privately-owned organization received its own, key portion of the front. General Surovikin is a very controversial figure. His CV has many unclear elements – from the murder of three civilians in 1991 to the engagement in Tajikistan. Surovikin is a political figure, and the general public has respect for him, but the problem lies in the politics that is turning him into a legend before he has done anything in the war zone. A cult of his personality is already being formed, with documentaries made featuring the statements of his fellow military academy students, as if it was Zhukov after Berlin. But, one needs to get to Berlin, i.e. Kyiv, first.

8. The withdrawal of the Russian troops from Kherson: The first big decision that Surovikin made was the withdrawal from Kherson. Several weeks after Russian general Teplinskiy said that remaining on the right bank of the Dnipro River was not sustainable, Surovikin and Minister Shoigu appeared in front of the TV cameras and tried to create an impression that they had made a great contribution by saving Russian soldiers' lives. But why had those same soldiers been dying up until then? They were ground into the mud. But if we are talking about the political goal, i.e. the essence of the war, the withdrawal from Kherson is Russia's biggest political defeat. But not a military one. The Russian Army acted rationally for the first time, with commanding officers executing the withdrawal operation on the ground with no losses. It was completed in front of the Ukrainians and the NATO intelligence and reconnaissance system. Elegantly, imperceptibly, and leaving behind a minimal amount of equipment. It was a political defeat because the Kherson area had been annexed to the Russian Federation, but the capital of the area was abandoned. Politics is Russia's principal weakness. Soldiers had been dying for months, and then came the withdrawal. Those were powerful blows against the Russian morale.

9. The attack on the Crimean Bridge, strikes against the Ukrainian energy sector: The Ukrainian attack against the Crimean Bridge and the Russian actions targeting the energy infrastructure being hours apart indicates that it was just an excuse. Too much was expected from the Russian Air Force at the start of the war. It had only one successful attack against Zhytomyr, located deep in the Ukrainian territory, where it executed an operation modelled after the Americans and NATO in the past 30 years. Electronic interference created a window in the anti-aircraft defence system, the combat forces stormed in and did their job. The Russians used strategic bombers for strikes against stationary energy targets, as well as ground and coastal launchers. A question that has been asked since the start of the war – whether the Russians have enough missiles – has a twofold answer. They do, but the question is – until when? The operation targets are chosen politically, with the decision made in the Kremlin. It is evident that the Russian Army has no say in it because it would have chosen the military infrastructure. It is a political decision aimed at breaking the will of the Ukrainians to defend themselves. From a critical standpoint, it would be better to improve the Russian fighting morale.

10. The Ukrainian strikes against the Russian bases housing the strategic nuclear bombers: That was a humiliation, not a radical move on the part of the Ukrainians. They showed how agile they could be. The Ukrainians are resourceful – when you are defending yourself and have no resources, you come up with a model of striking the opponent where they don't expect it. The sinking of the Moskva cruiser and the attack against the Crimean Bridge were symbols. It was the Ukrainians saying to the Russians, "We can execute military operations." The attacks against the bases have not resulted in radical changes because the Russian airplanes took off from these bases on the same day. The Russian right has used these attacks to say that they justify the use of nuclear weaponry. Nothing like that is the case. This was a humiliation that has shown that the Russians must come to grips with their own arrogance and laziness.

What can we expect in 2023: There are no indications that negotiations will be held. Politics has its own course, but the way things stand now, the tabled options indicate that the war will be a long-term one. The following year will be a war year, and neither side has produced anything to convince us that a radical solution can be found. The West stands firms by Ukraine. NATO has drawn up a ten-year plan of the reform of the Ukrainian Army, which testifies to their confidence regarding the outcome. Movements in the front may take place, but the essence of the war will remain the same. Russia has a strong motive to end the war, but there is no one willing to talk to them on this topic. The West's position is the support for Ukraine's territorial integrity, but this position has another aspect to it - how realistic is it? The reason to ask this is that the Russian Army taking over Ukraine and subjugating the Ukrainians is equally unrealistic as expecting a full collapse of the Russian Army. It is more likely that the Russian state would collapse than the army on the ground.

Kurir.rs/Aleksandar Petrović