January's Rifles: Any Military Options for Russia in Ukraine? - Al-Ghad newspaper

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Special Report - (The Economist) 01/22/2022 Translated by: Aladdin Abu Zina

Wars often unfold in unexpected ways. Russia has not launched a large-scale offensive involving infantry, armor, and air power since the climax of World War II.

Countries under attack can hold together just as likely to collapse. Ivan Timofeev of the Russian International Affairs Council warns of a "long and slow confrontation", which could be "fraught with risks of destabilizing ... Russia itself." Now, with the war getting closer, what are Russia's military options in Ukraine? Each of them has its drawbacks.

On January 19, the young British Defense Secretary James Hebe warned: “What stands before us, which may only be weeks away, is the first peer-to-peer war, between an industrially advanced, digitized army and the A first class, against a first class army, which has not happened on this continent for generations.”

He was referring to Russia's mobilization of more than 100,000 soldiers on the Ukrainian border. The Estonian defense minister repeated the warning, saying: “Tens of thousands of people could die. Everything is moving towards armed conflict.”

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, was scheduled to meet with Anthony Blinken, the US secretary of state, in Geneva on Jan. 21.

But observers saw the prospects for diplomacy bleak. On January 19, one of Lavrov's deputies, Sergei Ryabkov, said that even a moratorium on Ukraine's membership of NATO for 20 years would not satisfy Russia.

In recent weeks, Russia has mobilized reservists and sent troops and missiles to the border from no less than the border with North Korea.

On the other hand, Western countries are preparing for the worst. On January 17, Britain began transporting thousands of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine.

Days earlier, Sweden had driven armored vehicles to Gotland while three Russian landing ships had passed through the Baltic Sea, to an unknown destination.

On the same day, Ukraine was hit by cyber attacks that disrupted government websites and shut down official computers.

Meanwhile, the White House said it had intelligence showing that Russia was planning orchestrated acts of sabotage against its proxy forces in eastern Ukraine to provide a pretext for an attack on that country.

Such an attack can take many forms. One possibility is that Russia will simply do what it has done in secret for seven years: send troops into the “republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, breakaway regions of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, either to expand its borders westward or recognize them as independent states, as it did after sending Troops to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two Georgian regions, in 2008.

Another widely discussed scenario in recent years is that Russia may seek to establish a land bridge to Crimea; The peninsula, which it annexed in 2014.

This would require the capture of 300 kilometers (185 miles) of land along the Sea of ​​Azov, including Mariupol, Ukraine's main port, and up to the Dnieper River.

Such a limited land grab would be within the capabilities of the forces that are now amassing in western Russia.

Less clear, however, is whether that would serve the Kremlin's war aims.

If Russia's goal is to bring Ukraine to its knees and prevent it from joining NATO - or even cooperating with the alliance - it is unlikely that simply taking control of Donbass or a small piece of land in southern Ukraine will achieve that.

Achieving this will require imposing heavy costs on the government in Kiev—whether by destroying its armed forces, destroying its vital national infrastructure, or overthrowing the entire Ukrainian government.

One option for Russia might be to use "confrontational" weapons without troops on the ground, simulating NATO's air war against Serbia in 1999.

Strikes by various rocket and missile launchers will wreak havoc.

The work of these weapons can be complemented by more newer weapons, such as cyber attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure of the kind that disrupted the country's electricity grid in 2015-16.

The problem is that such punitive campaigns tend to last longer and prove more difficult than they first appear.

And if war breaks out, confrontation strikes are likely to be a precursor to, rather than a substitute for, ground warfare.

"I don't see much between them and Kyiv that could stop them," says David Shlapak of the RAND Corporation, a think-tank.

Perhaps the goal is to harm and pain Ukraine, not to occupy it. The country is as large and densely populated as Afghanistan, and since 2014, more than 300,000 Ukrainians have gained some form of military experience; Most of them have access to firearms.

US officials told their allies in Kyiv that the US Department of Defense and the CIA would support an armed insurgency in the country.

Russia might consider what the U.S. military calls a “thunder race,” says Mr. Shlapak, a swift and deep offensive over a narrow front, designed to shock and cripple the enemy rather than capture territory. Such an attack should not come only from the East.

On January 17, Russian forces, some from the Far East, began arriving in Belarus, ostensibly for military exercises scheduled for February.

Russia said it would also send 12 warplanes and two S-400 air defense systems. An attack from the north, across the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, would allow Russia to approach the Ukrainian capital from the west and encircle it.

“Once they are within missile range in downtown Kyiv, is this a situation that the Ukrainians want to live with,” Mr. Shlapak asks. Even if Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is willing to put up with the blockade, Russia may bet that his government will simply collapse — and it may use its spies, special forces and disinformation to speed up the process.

However, wars often unfold in unexpected ways. Russia has not launched a large-scale offensive involving infantry, armor, and air power since the climax of World War II.

Countries under attack can hold together just as likely to collapse. Ivan Timofeev of the Russian International Affairs Council warns of a "long and slow confrontation", which could be "fraught with risks of destabilizing ... Russia itself."

Even victory will be costly. “The Ukrainians are going to fight back and inflict heavy losses on the Russians — essentially alone,” says Peter Zwak, a retired general who was America's defense attache in Moscow during the Kremlin's first invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

Combined with the threat of heavy sanctions being prepared by America and its European allies, and the apparent absence of any domestic support for a new Russian adventure, all of this may cause Putin, even at this point, to pause for reconsideration.

*This report was published under the title: The guns of January: As war looms larger, what are Russia's military options in Ukraine?