THE GUNS OF JANUARY: AS WAR LOOMS LARGER, WHAT ARE RUSSIA´S MILITARY OPTIONS IN UKRAINE? / THE ECONOMIST

The guns of January

As war looms larger, what are Russia’s military options in Ukraine?

The Kremlin’s aim would probably be to shatter Ukrainian military power and dictate terms

VISBY, A PORT on the Swedish island of Gotland, was patrolled by soldiers on foot—and one dog—on the morning of January 14th, noted Aftonbladet, a Swedish newspaper. 

Then, shortly after lunch, a dozen armoured vehicles “thundered into the harbour on rattling caterpillar tracks”. 

The same day a transport plane landed with 100 troops. 

“An attack against Sweden cannot be ruled out,” warned Peter Hultqvist, Sweden’s defence minister, on January 15th, pointing out that Russian landing ships had entered the Baltic Sea. 

“Sweden will not be caught napping if something happens.”

Sweden’s decision to fortify the Baltic island, which lies close to Russia’s European exclave of Kaliningrad, reflects wider fears that war is looming. 

Russia has gathered over 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders, with more streaming in from the far east, and declared that talks with America and NATO held last week were a bust. 

It has also started training and mobilising reserve forces.

Digital skirmishing seems to have begun already. 

On the same day that Sweden rushed forces into Gotland, Ukraine was hit by cyber-attacks which defaced government websites, and may have locked some official computers. 

The White House claimed it had intelligence showing that Russia was planning staged acts of sabotage against its own proxy forces in eastern Ukraine to provide a pretext for attacking the country.

Western officials and experts remain unsure whether Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has yet made up his mind. 

Some think that Mr Putin still hopes to wring concessions from the West by rattling his sabre, rather than using it. 

There are reasons to hope that the many negative consequences for Mr Putin, including Western sanctions, a lack of enthusiasm for a fight at home and the risk of a bloody nose might yet hold him back. 

In contrast to 2014, when state propaganda was busy whipping up anti-Ukrainian hysteria in preparation for a military offensive, this time Ukraine is all but absent from the Russian news. 

Whatever decision Mr Putin makes in the coming weeks, he is faced with uncertainty about the public response.

Still, alarm bells are ringing. 

“The odds have now increased that there will be some kind of dramatic but limited military operation in Ukraine,” says James Sherr of the International Centre for Defence and Security, a think-tank in Tallinn, and formerly a long-standing Russia-watcher for Britain’s defence ministry. 

What such an operation would look like is the question occupying intelligence analysts across Europe.

One possibility is that Russia would simply do openly what it has done furtively for seven years: send troops into the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics”, breakaway territories in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, either to expand their boundaries westward or to recognise them as independent states, as it did after sending forces into Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two Georgian regions, in 2008 (see map).

Another scenario, widely discussed in recent years, is that Russia might seek to establish a land bridge to Crimea, the peninsula it annexed in 2014. 

That would require seizing 300km (185 miles) of territory along the Sea of Azov, including the key Ukrainian port of Mariupol, up to the Dnieper river. 

That would expand Russian control in an area known as Novorossiya, or New Russia, a historical part of the Russian empire along the Black Sea. 

It would have the more tangible advantage of alleviating Crimea’s water shortage.

Such limited land-grabs would be well within the capabilities of the forces currently mustering in western Russia. 

What is less clear is whether they would serve the Kremlin’s war aims. 

If Russia’s objective is to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO or co-operating with the alliance, simply consolidating control over the Donbas or a small swathe of land in southern Ukraine is unlikely to bring the government in Kyiv to its knees.

That leaves three broad strategies. 

One is to change the government in Kyiv by force, as America did in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Another is to impose massive costs on Ukraine—whether by decimating its armed forces, destroying its critical national infrastructure or occupying territory—until its leaders agree to sever their ties to the West. 

The third is to address that demand to America and NATO—this time from a commanding military position. 

All three routes would necessitate a big war.

A tempting solution would be for Russia to use “stand-off” weapons without troops on the ground, emulating NATO’s air war against Serbia in 1999. 

Strikes by rocket launchers and missiles would wreak havoc. 

These could be supplemented by more novel weapons, such as cyber-attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure like the ones which disrupted the country’s power grid in 2015 and 2016. 

Punishing Ukraine from afar, without committing ground troops, would keep casualties down. 

Russia could dial the pressure up and down over time, “punctuated by pauses to repeat or escalate demands”, notes Keir Giles of Chatham House, a think-tank in London.

The problem is that such bombing campaigns tend to last longer and prove harder than they first appear. 

If war comes, stand-off strikes are more likely to be a prelude and accompaniment to a ground war rather than a substitute for it. 

Russia undoubtedly has the raw numbers for this. A study by the RAND Corporation in 2016 noted that Russia could seize two out of three Baltic states with around 30 battalion tactical groups (BTGs), a Russian formation made up of around 1,000 troops plus equipment. 

Russia now has about twice that number poised on Ukraine’s borders (though not all fully manned) plus supporting units, and more incoming.

“I don’t see a lot between them and Kyiv that could stop them,” says David Shlapak, the co-author of the RAND report. 

He says that Russia might consider what America’s army calls a “thunder run”, a swift and deep assault on a narrow front, intended to shock and paralyse the enemy rather than occupy territory—the quintessential example is America’s raid on Baghdad in April 2003.

If Belarus allowed Russia to attack from its soil, Kyiv could even be approached from the west and encircled; Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s leader, announced on January 17th that his country would hold joint exercises with Russia on its southern and western borders in February and Russian troops have begun arriving in the country. 

Ukrainian soldiers are good fighters, says Mr Sherr, but despite years of Western training their armed forces lack Russia’s level of proficiency in combined arms manoeuvre warfare—the use of ground forces, special forces, attack helicopters and paratroopers both on the frontlines and far to the rear of enemy forces.

Even with these advantages, Russia would struggle to occupy the capital, let alone the entirety of Ukraine, a country about as large and populous as Afghanistan. 

Since 2014 over 300,000 Ukrainians have gained some form of military experience and most have access to firearms. 

American officials have told allies that the Pentagon and CIA would both support an armed insurgency. 

Yet Russia probably wants to avoid a long occupation, and it may not prove necessary. 

“Once they’re within rocket range of downtown Kyiv,” asks Mr Shlapak, “is that a situation the Ukrainians want to live with?” 

Even if Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is willing to tolerate a siege, Russia may gamble that his government will simply collapse—and it may use spies, special forces and disinformation to hasten that process.

Wars, though, are rarely as quick or easy as their planners envisage. 

Russia has not fought a large-scale offensive involving infantry, armour and air power since the climactic battles of the second world war. 

Countries under attack can just as easily stand firm as fall apart. 

And installing a puppet regime and then leaving is easier said than done, as the Kremlin itself discovered after its own invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. 

Ivan Timofeev of the Russian International Affairs Council warns of a “long and sluggish confrontation” that would be prolonged by Western military aid and “fraught with destabilisation of…Russia itself”.

Even victory would be costly. 

“The Ukrainians will fight and inflict major losses on the Russians,” says Peter Zwack, a retired general who was America’s defence attaché in Moscow during the Kremlin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. 

“This is going to be hard for Russia—and they are basically alone.” 

All this might, even now, be giving Mr Putin pause for thought.