The Ukraine War One Year In: A Retrospective

Images of burning tanks, shattered streets, and the relentless pounding on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, explains why its war with Russia is seen simply as a land-air conflict rather than a maritime one. But this impression would be a mistake. The maritime side of this conflict is crucial to its outcome and has lessons for all navies everywhere. Looking at the conflict from four levels of war (Grand Strategic, Military Strategic, Operational, and Tactical- Technical) should make this clear. There is a key maritime element in all of them.

Grand Strategy

At this level essential national aims and objectives are identified.

We do not know what precisely drives Russia’s grand strategy, but the notion of Derzhavnost, which in English translates as something like ‘great power-ness’, is certainly part of it. From Peter the Great’s time, Moscow’s assumptions have often been that, as a great power, Russia must have a great Navy with access to the world ocean, and that this needs to include the warm waters of the Black Sea. Maintaining this maritime status though has always been a struggle, with periodic victories and defeats, advances and retreats. Thus, in the early 18th century, Peter the Great first succeeded then failed to control the Crimea and the south; his successor, Catherine the Great successfully recovered the area. Her successors had to hold it against the Austrians, the French, the British, and the Turks, with mixed success. Then came the Germans in 1941-45. The current conflict is redolent with the iconic names of some of the most heroic battles of the Great Patriotic War as, until now, simply the most recent of these massive and historic engagements over who controls the south.

Russia’s strategic culture adds even more to the mix. To the Russians, Ukraine is not an independent nation; it is merely one of ‘all the Russias’ over which the Tsars used to rule and which is Russian simply because Russians live there. For years what we used to call Kiev rivalled Moscow as a centre of Russian-ness. The fact that the Russians do not have a word for ‘grand strategy’ but use strategichekaya kultura instead, underlines the centrality of this kind of thinking in Russia’s way of war. Accordingly, for the Russians, the notion that Ukraine should be independent and, still less, allied to the West, is culturally offensive and strategically dangerous. There is an argument that Putin genuinely believed that NATO had agreed to accommodate Russian sensitivities about the Ukraine, but in the end reneged on an acceptable deal. If true, this can only have increased Russian bitterness about the situation.¹M. E Sarotte, Not One Inch : America, Russia, and the Making of Post-cold War Stalemate. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022) is a good exploration of this issue.

For the Ukrainians the matter is as deeply embedded, if much simpler. It is just a question of national survival against a hostile Russia. Always a restive part of the Russian Empire, Ukraine has often been the victim of unyielding control from Moscow. Because of the bitter memories of the Holodomor, the mass starvation of the Ukrainians under Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture in the 1930s, many Ukrainians welcomed the Germans in 1941 as liberators. Russian bitterness about this in their time of agony helps explain Moscow’s labelling Ukraine’s current leaders as Nazis and why it insists on the region’s ‘denazification’²The Azov battalion, the heroic defenders of the Azovstal Iron and Steel works Plant in Mariupol in the early days of the war, certainly included a number of individuals for
whom this descriptor made some sense. as part of any peace deal.

These historical assumptions also help explain why, from Moscow’s point of view, this is a ‘special military operation’ and not a war. In Russian strategic thinking the level of conflict is largely determined by the scale of the objective. Initially, at least, the requirement was merely to ‘restore’ a local problem, not a bid to change things systemically. The more the West got involved in the conflict, however, the greater the prospect of the ‘special military operation’ turning into a more dangerous, if still limited, war which could transform NATO’s relationship with Russia.³It is possible to argue that attributing defeat in Ukraine to the intervention of NATO would make it more acceptable to Russia in terms of regime-survival than defeat at the hands of Ukraine alone. Paradoxically anti-NATO rhetoric might be less alarming than it appears. But such a defeat would probably be represented as no more than a temporary set-back for Russia.

Russian warnings about the use of nuclear weapons are to be seen in this context. “We have not gone crazy,” Putin has said, “we are aware of what nuclear weapons are… we are not going to wave these around like a razor… but of course we act with the understanding that they exist.”⁴Andrew Roth, ‘Putin hints at long conflict in Ukraine’ The Guardian, 8 Dec 2022.If the survival of Russia is under threat, their use could be appropriate. But so far, Moscow has not chosen to consider either overt attacks on the four Ukrainian oblasts it has transferred to Russia, or the rather murkier assaults on airbases and powerplants on indisputably Russian territory, as such an existential threat. They must know that this restraint may incentivise further such Ukrainian attacks.

For the Ukrainians, now as then, it is a matter of getting help from the West to sustain survival and counter oppression from an over-bearing East. For this, the Ukrainians need access to the West, and the rest of the world, by land and sea. The more this is supplied, the greater the costs for Russia and the risks of escalation – the greater also the chance of Ukraine’s survival and further integration with the West.

What’s happening now is not a case of history repeating itself: Instead, it’s the same history, one that has been unfolding over the centuries, but one differently interpreted by the protagonists and their supporters.⁵Steven Kotkin, ‘The Cold War Never Ended’ Foreign Affairs May-June 2022; Serge Schemann, ‘Putin Can’t Escape His Country’s History’ New York Times 11 Nov 2022. It means that whatever the outcome of the current war, it is highly unlikely that the matter will be regarded as finally settled. For this reason, if the resources of both sides allow it, this is more likely to be a long war rather than a short conflict or surgical operation.⁶Roth, ‘Putin hints’ op cit; Isobel Koshiw, ‘Russia “poised to mobilise 500,000 more conscripts” for spring offensive.’ The Guardian, 7 Jan 2023 And typically, the longer the war the more extensive its effects.

The Military-Strategic Level

At this level of conflict, the broad outlines of a strategy to achieve the aims of policy are set, and military objectives identified.

Putin’s ‘special military operation’ was reportedly planned not by the Main Operations Directorate of the Ministry of Defence, but by the 5th Directorate of the FSB, where the strategic-cultural assumptions just described are particularly strong. Initially, Putin and the FSB no doubt hoped that the accumulation of forces along Ukraine’s borders would restore the situation and lead to a more pliant regime in Kiev. Disappointed in this Plan A, they had to fall back on Plan B – a special military operation along the lines envisaged in the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, just as had happened in Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968. In the north, elite parachute forces would seize Hostomel, the nearest convenient airport, and facilitate the quick surrounding of the capital. The FSB ‘kill list’ would be put into effect and the necessary people would accidentally fall out of windows. In short, what was envisaged was a quick decapitation of the Zelensky regime and a popular uprising, not a war.

This would explain why the war started so badly, with so many axes of advance and in some cases with the paramilitary, crowd-control forces of the Rosgvardia as the leading echelon, not the Army. Resistance proved much stronger than the Russians had expected, even though the Ukrainians were seemingly caught by surprise, the best of their Army was in the Donbass and the initial northern and southern defences were manned by second order military forces or even barely trained civilians.⁷Dan Sabbagh, ‘How the fight for the capital was won and turned the tide of war. ‘The Guardian, 29 Dec 2022; Isobel Koshiw, ‘How Sumy residents kept invaders out of their city’ The Guardian, 3 Jan 2023. Elite Russian paratroopers descending on Hostomel airport, for example, were defeated by the paramilitary forces of the National Guard.

The military forces gathered beforehand around the Ukrainian border to shape opinion, plus the forces that entered the country from the south and east, however, offered a further fall-back option to recover the situation, in effect Plan C. This was to advance to the Dnieper and consolidate the most Russian parts of the country while striking out from north-east Crimea to take Kherson, before advancing westwards, taking over the ports and shipyards of Mykolayev and Odesa, eventually linking up with the breakaway pro- Moscow sub-state of Transnystria in Moldova. Having lost its industrial area in the east, and its entire coastline, the rump state of Ukraine would be land-locked,  largely isolated, leaderless, and if it survived at all, no threat to Russia, either to its security or its identity.

For this campaign, the Army and the Navy operating in joint conjunction along the coast would be crucial. It would be just as they had famously done in exactly the same places and with such ultimate much-vaunted success in the Great Patriotic War.⁸Sergei Gorshkov, The Sea Power of the State (London: Pergamon, 1979). 141-155. For the Ukrainians, the matter was simpler: It was just to stop the Russians in their tracks, first to prevent their reaching the Dnieper, second to block any coastal advance, and third eventually to re-possess lost territory.

This would naturally include the Crimea. Ten years before, in 2014, and almost exactly to the day of the 70th anniversary of Mr. Khruschev’s giving of the Crimea to the Ukraine in 1954, the Russians took it back. This solidified Russia’s use of the Sevastopol naval base, transformed the extent of ‘Russian’ jurisdiction over the waters of the Black Sea, including its oil and gas rigs, and gave Moscow the option, soon taken, of impeding Ukrainian access in and out of the Azov Sea through the Kerch strait. This constraint on free navigation would undermine the port cities of Berdyansk, and Mariupol and the local economies of the Ukrainian controlled sectors of Zaporizhzhya and Donetsk. Recovering the Crimea also inhibited Ukrainian trade in and out of its Black Sea ports, since the periodic declaration of exercise zones also limited Ukrainian freedom of movement at sea, and affected the marine insurance of the merchant ships engaged in it.

To reverse all this, the Ukrainians needed Western help. For the United States and its Allies this was tricky. The problem was how to help Ukraine, but without ‘poking the Bear’ and providing Putin with the popular support he needed, and thus precipitating the very outcome Western policy was designed to deter. For this reason, once the war started, Ukraine’s supporters were persistently reluctant to supply Kyiv with the advanced weaponry it asked for, such as 185 mile-range ATACMS, Patriot Air Defence batteries, F-16 fighters and main battle tanks.⁹Patrick Tucker,’US Weighs Escalation Risk as Ukraine asks for longer-range missiles.’ Defense One.com 16 Sept 2022.

Considerations of how long it would take for the Ukrainians to be trained-up to use such weapons effectively, and worries about domestic stockpiles, further complicated these decisions. The Allies differed in their willingness to comply with Kyiv’s requests; France and Germany being particularly restrained. But as time went by, and Russia continued on its course, these restrictions were gradually released.

As far as naval support was concerned, the Americans and the British led the way with the construction of naval facilities in Berdyansk, Mykolayiv and Odesa, doctrinal advice and training, ship-building contracts, mining and counter-mining capabilities, and the like. There were vague promises of Ukraine’s joining the EU one day, maybe even NATO in the distant future, a red line for Russia if ever there was one.

Then there was the unexpectedly stern response to the passage of HMS Defender and HNLMS Evertsen in 2021 through and near sensitive waters off the Crimea. The writing was on the wall, but the Ukrainians could not be blamed for thinking that their Western friends were not reading it. For evidence they could point to the West’s failure to respond to the closure of the Azov Sea and to the fact that, since 2014, NATO ship-days in the Black Sea were actually declining until just before the war started. The question of whether Russia would have attacked Odesa and Mykolayiv if NATO warships happened to be visiting at the time will doubtless be a subject for discussion after the war. Meanwhile, to achieve the necessary ‘correlation of forces’ the Russian military forces were gathering along the border and the Black Sea Fleet was being reinforced from other fleet areas, not least with amphibious vessels. An unfortunate mix of strategic inattention and indecision meant opportunities for effective Western deterrence, if there were any, were lost. Some might say, though, that if they hadn’t been, the war would just have come sooner.

The situation was, nevertheless, very uncertain. There is much evidence that Western intelligence sources repeatedly warned the Zelensky government that the Russian threat was very real and could well be imminent.¹⁰‘As Putin prepared invasion, US struggled to convince allies – and Zelensky- of danger to
Ukraine, Post examination shows’ Washington Post, 16 Aug 2022 Used to expressions of hostility from Moscow, the Ukrainians did not take these warnings as seriously as they should have. Ukrainian reservists were only called up the day before the invasion. Fortunately for Kyiv, their inadequate forces in place in fact proved capable of dislocating the initial Russian moves.

Once the war started, the West confronted an even stronger dilemma at the military-strategic level in balancing effective deterrence against strategic safety. Deterrent pressure was applied in three ways which all had a key maritime component. The first was the conduct of large-scale naval exercises in the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and Europe’s Northern waters, to demonstrate Alliance resolve and deter horizontal or vertical escalation. Alongside this came extensive support in military equipment (which had to be delivered by land) and, thirdly, a carefully calibrated sanctions campaign. This was intended to improve the correlation of forces by weakening Russia’s war economy over time, thereby reducing the capacity of its defence industrial base to produce the weaponry its forces needed.

Russia inevitably responded with its own demonstrative exercises, which included some with China. It progressively ramped up its industrial capacity to deliver military capability and sought additional means of supply of missiles and drones from countries such as Iran and North Korea. It seems to have found China relatively unresponsive in this regard. It also imposed a counter- sanctions campaign by limiting oil and gas supplies to Europe and sought new customers at discounted prices from bystander countries such as India. By such means Russia was able largely to maintain its extensive oil revenues, and the contraction of its GDP for the first year of the war proved much smaller than expected/ hoped for, and certainly far less than Ukraine has suffered so far.¹¹Joe Wallace, ‘Russia confounds the West by recapturing its oil riches’ Wall Street Journal, 29 Aug 2022

These sanction campaigns and counter-campaigns were global in effect and at least in part maritime in nature since the world’s trade is sea-based. They required both sides to engage in extensive diplomatic activity, especially in the global south. Naval and general defence engagement remains one of the means by which the sanctions campaign is serviced and support, or at least compliance, from bystanders won or maintained. Russia, for example, was especially active in Africa where many nations abstained from the sanctions campaign either because they didn’t care about Russian aggression or, more likely, couldn’t afford to care.¹²Greg Mills, ‘Why Kyiv Needs an African Strategy’ RUSI Commentary, 4 Jan 2023.

The West’s predominance in maritime services like marine insurance have been exploited to deter shipping companies from facilitating the sale of Russian oil above a $60 per barrel ‘cap price’ determined by the West. Inevitably Russia responded with threats to nationalise foreign concerns that complied with Western policy to the supply of oil to countries that facilitated this Western stratagem. Moscow sought to buy up and commission a fleet of ghost tankers, in order to evade such restrictions by, for example, illicit trans-shipments not least in the western Mediterranean.¹³Daniel Boffey Tankers with Russia ties go
dark to avoid sanctions’ The Guardian. 7 Dec 2022. Manipulating the global oil market in order to secure an effective balance between advantage and disadvantage is a delicate and complex matter. It has global effects that need handling. Japan, in every respect part of the West, for example depends heavily on Russian oil from Sakhalin and has its own complex agenda with its northern neighbour.

Many of the same considerations apply to the Western bid to prevent the Russians, and supporters like the Iranians and North Koreans, from making use of essential Western components in their weapons systems. A Ukrainian investigation of a downed Shahed drone for example, showed it contained components made by more than 50 Western companies.¹⁴‘Drones Let Iran Flex its Muscles’ Wall Street Journal, 29-30 Oct 2022. Tracking and disrupting this complex and illicit supply chain required the close monitoring of maritime traffic and occasional interceptions at sea. The surveillance of the Lady R, a Russian merchant ship visiting the South African naval base at Simonstown, was typical of the scale, reach and demands of this often unremarked maritime pressure. The ship was owned by MG Flot LLC, a renamed Russian company previously associated with illicit arms export. Before docking in this murky transaction, it had turned off its transponders. The fact that the South African Navy was shortly scheduled to hold exercises with the Chinese and Russian Navies, was a further cause for concern.¹⁵Gabriel Steinhauser, ‘Russian Ship Secretive South African Stop Prompts US Questions’ wall street Journal, 9 Jan 2023.

The problem here is that, on their own, economic sanctions have a fairly dismal record of success, variously estimated at around 25%. However carefully targeted, they remain the ultimate in blunt instruments. They take time and have unintended consequences, inflicting collateral damage on bystanders especially in the global south. At least some of Sri Lanka’s economic tribulations for example can be attributed to the disruption this war has caused as energy prices soar and much needed imports decline. Hence the importance of securing the continued supply of at least some of Ukraine’s grain and fertiliser exports to avert starvation and stabilise prices. Under the auspices of the UN and Turkey, the belligerents agreed to the Black Sea Grain Initiative to guarantee safe passage of grain ships in and out of the Black Sea in order to alleviate the problem. The success of this essential scheme depended on the provision of often government-backed marine insurance and confidence that the menace of sea mines could be contained.

Nonetheless, few believe that the sanctions campaign will have sufficient strategic effect on its own. The Russians have been agile in seeking ways around the sanctions by leveraging the interests and vulnerabilities of bystanders. They have also imposed counter-sanctions, especially targeting Europe’s energy dependence on Russian sources. Maintaining Alliance unity, when some members are more vulnerable to this influence than others, has been difficult – hence the setting of a cap price too high to do real harm to the Russian war effort, at least according to the commentary from Kyiv.

Such considerations explain why the historical track record of sanctions campaigns is discouraging, and why resolution of the problem by force remains a necessary option. But here too, the Ukrainians have complained that the West’s desire to contain the prospect of escalation has meant their getting less and/or later military support than they need and have asked for. This refocuses attention on battlefield consequences and on how maritime power has helped in this regard.

After nearly a year of conflict, neither protagonist could claim it had won. The Russians had been pushed back from around Kharkhiv in the north and contained in the Donbass and Luhansk oblasts in the east. In the south the Ukrainians successfully retook the vital port city of Kherson which at least temporarily dislocated the projected Russian coastal push and even posed a potential threat to the Kinburn peninsula, the Western-most edge of occupied/ re-possessed Crimea. With all this, the war entered a new phase and the Russians, under their then new and ruthless commander General Sergei Surovikin, launched what was in effect a new two-fold plan of campaign – in effect Plan D.

One element of this was a society-based style of war centred on an assault on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and means of production.¹⁶For the concept of society-based strategy see Ariel Levite and Jonathan Shimshoni, ‘The Strategic Challenge of Society-Centric Warfare’, Global Politics and Strategy, 20 Nov 2018. This was designed to undermine popular support for the continuation of such a costly war, as well as to damage the Ukrainian war economy’s ability to produce weapons of war and the necessities of life.

The other aspect of this Plan D was to prepare for a long, grinding attritional campaign leveraging Russia’s potential for superior numbers of soldiers, missiles, drones and artillery tubes, as exemplified by the long gruelling struggle for Bakhmut. This challenged Ukraine’s past ability to succeed through manoeuvre rather than direct frontal attack. An approximately equal kill-rate would give the more numerous Russians the operational advantage. In such contests of resilience, the Ukrainians may well find future battles harder to win.¹⁷Seth Crospey, ‘Ukraine’s war Outlook in 2023: Harder Fighting against a Tougher Russian Army’ The Hill, 2 Jan 2023

Resilience of a different kind is also demanded of Ukraine’s supporters, especially if Kyiv has fewer spectacular victories to show as a strategic return on investment. Given very difficult times, maintaining, or if necessary increasing, the level of Western support could prove quite a challenge.

The Operational Level

At this level, campaigns are conducted at sea and on land in order to secure the military objectives set at the military-strategic level.

Sea Control: At sea, the all-important battle for control that allows everything else hardly looked like a battle at all, such was the initial numerical and operational dominance of the Russian Black Sea Fleet operating out of Sevastopol and Novorossiysk. This gave the Russians the capacity initially to determine the rules of the game. The unexpectedly successful defiance of the Ukrainians has, however, cumulatively chipped away at the extent to which Russia can determine outcomes from the sea. Starting with the now famous response of the defenders of Snake Island, a string of asymmetrical successes, including the sinking of the Slava-class cruiser Moskva – the Black Sea Fleet flagship, and the Saratov LST at Berdyansk in missile and drone attacks had this effect. Long-range Ukrainian attacks on the Crimean naval air base at Saky and Sevastopol itself in September 2022 have forced the Russians to behave with much more circumspection and to pull many of their forces back to Novorossiysk.

Suspicious Russian naval activity in the vicinity of the undersea cables that carry the bulk of the world’s digital traffic has for many years been a cause for concern in Western navies. The mysterious attack on the Nordstream II pipeline of 26 September 2022, and the recent construction of coastal facilities that are part of Europe’s attempt to wean itself off excessive dependence on Russian oil and gas, have also focused attention on the need to monitor, protect and, if necessary, rapidly repair, such facilities on the sea-bed and ashore. Sea-bed control and these murky forms of underwater conflict require specialist approaches, the need to cooperate closely with commercial firms, Allies and partners, and the capacity to operate at all depths with unmanned systems. The major European navies are now investing in this relatively novel form of sea control quite heavily.¹⁸Margharita Stancati, ‘Fearing Sabotage, Europe patrols pipelines with Mine Humters and Unmanned Subs’ Wall Street Journal 25 Nov 2022; ‘Europeans wade into Fighting seabed Threats with Drones and Sensors’, DefenseNews 9 Jan 2023

Sea-based Strike: The Russian Navy’s greater vulnerability in the coastal zone has reduced, but not eliminated, the value of its contributions to success in the land battle, employing what the Russians call ‘operations against the shore’. The sea is still a sanctuary of sorts, if not to the extent of bases in Russia itself, from which missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure can be launched. Coming as they do from multiple axes, they complicate the Ukrainians’ defensive task and of course supplement Russia’s diminishing stock of land-based missiles. The Kalibr missile fired from light frigates, corvettes, and submarines has once again proved its worth, particularly in the early days when it destroyed much of Ukraine’s air defence system, giving the Russian Air Force a larger and more successful role for the first few days of the war than was generally recognised at the time. The 1,000 nm range of these missiles means that the Ukrainians will be in need of more sophisticated means of anti-missile defence and will perhaps be looking for innovative means, in the longer term, of taking active defence in the shape of anti-ship (and anti-submarine?) defences further out to sea.

Amphibious Operations: The most familiar form of operations against the shore have been a significant factor in this conflict, though not to the extent the Russians probably expected. Although Russia’s amphibious capacity in the Black Sea had been reinforced from other fleet areas before the war, its capacity for large- scale operations was limited. The potential scale of the effort was never going to be more than the ‘desant’ operations characteristic of the Great Patriotic War, not least in this very area. Relatively small scale, operating in direct support of the advancing land-forces and poised very close to shore, there were some reasonably successful ‘desant’ operations in the Azov campaign to secure Berdyansk and the land-bridge to the Crimea.

Plans for the use of amphibious operations against Odesa were based on close cooperation with the Army and assumed that the city would be invested from the land-side. A modest force of perhaps 2,000 troops could not be expected to open up a new front, Normandy-style (as much of the Western press seemed to expect). Instead, it would complete the encirclement of the city in close conjunction with the Army. The Army, however, had proven unable to advance beyond Kherson. Moreover, experience at Berdyansk (with the sinking of the Alligator-class Saratov landing ship and damage to two Ropuchka-class amphibious ships in March 2022), has already underlined how vulnerable the close-in style of Russian amphibious operations were to missiles, drones, mines and coastal artillery. For the moment, the prohibitive dangers of inshore operations has rendered this capability strategically irrelevant. Instead, marines, generally regarded by the Russians as an elite and specialist force, have been wastefully thrown into a land battle in the Kherson oblast for which, to judge by their performance so far, they have not been specifically trained or equipped. The fate of the 155th Brigade of Russian Pacific Fleet marines at Pavilika in November outraged opinion in Russia.¹⁹Mary Ayushina, Heavy Russian casualties spur outcry, rare Official reply,’ The Washington Post 8 Nov 2022.

SLOC Defence: This is the most obvious maritime part of the defence of an inter-modal supply chain that links the weapons supplier at one end with the user at the other. At the time, the Russian media made much of the initial seizure of Berdyansk, partly for reasons of cultural sentiment and partly because of the logistical benefits it offered. The war so far has seen an extremely high usage rate of ammunition, missiles, and other military materiel. In some respects the conflict will be determined by who gets this most reliably and/or runs out of it first. Success requires not only the manufacture or acquisition of these supplies but their delivery to the user. This underlines the critical importance of defending the whole logistical chain and makes the delivery component of the system a compelling target for both sides. The Russian use of captured ports like Berdyansk provided a means of funnelling logistical support to their land-forces that seemed much faster, simpler and safer than doing so by land. From the start, Ukrainian forces had made a point of targeting the lumbering and inefficient logistical system of the Russian Army, by attacking depots and ambushing supply trucks. Seaborne supply should help alleviate that risk (especially in the coastal zone) but again depends on sufficient ‘combat stability’ in local waters.

Given the legal imitations of the Montreux convention, which effectively bans NATO resupply shipping from the Black Sea in time of war, the Ukrainians have no such option and do not have access to Western supplies by sea. (Although this was the means by which much of this reached Europe from elsewhere of course). Accordingly, Ukraine suffers from the permanent disadvantage of having to rely purely on land-based logistics that remain vulnerable to attack. It has surprised many that the Russians have not yet made more of this potential source of Ukrainian weakness.

These sea-based logistical points are of course but part of the much wider issue of material support that is especially important in long wars of endurance and attrition. An industrial campaign to ramp up the production and supply of weaponry by the protagonists and their supporters will be crucial to the outcome. Alongside it, however, diplomatic campaigns to sustain and increase the defence-industrial help offered by supporters, while attempting to restrain any such support for the adversary, will likewise be important. Hence the varying but intense influence campaigns conducted by the Russians in Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and in particular China, and the countervailing efforts of the West in the same places and the global south.

The Tactical-Technical Level

At this basic level of conflict, the protagonists are in direct touch with each other and battle to achieve the military objectives previously set at the operational level.

A multitude of points emerge at the tactical-technical level of this conflict. Firstly, the absolute importance of high degrees of training, preparedness and motivation stand out. This is as true for naval forces as it is in the other domains. The Moskva should have been able to survive the attack that sank it. Unconfirmed and largely anecdotal evidence suggests a low state of readiness and battle-awareness in the ship and indeed in the Black Sea Fleet as a whole. The shock of the Moskva attack and the long-range Ukrainian assault on the naval air base at Saky led the Black Sea Fleet to fall back on its Sevastopol naval base, but even here defences against Ukrainian air and sea based drones had reportedly not been implemented. This led to a further retreat to Novorossiysk, its base indisputably, and therefore somewhat more safely, in Russian territory. The range of its Kalibr missiles, however, means that the Black Sea Fleet still remains a potent threat.

Many of these tactical-technical deficiencies also apply, and to a greater extent, to the Russian army. These things are very hard to measure, especially when much of the evidence is supplied by Ukraine and a Western media uniformly sympathetic to it. The general impression, however, is that Ukrainian forces are much better motivated, trained and supplied than their adversaries and have proved more agile and creative in  response. The apparent success of enthusiastic but essentially untrained forces in keeping the Russians at bay in places such as the north-eastern city of Sumy, about 20 miles from the Russian border, suggests that motivation is an especially important part of these human qualities.²⁰Isobel Koshiw, ‘How Sumy residents kept invaders ouit of their city’ The Guardian, 3 Jan 2023.

The Russian Army appears to suffer from low morale, unreliable sources of supply, and inadequate training. Care for its manpower has never been a strong point in Russian military culture, where until quite recent times nominal records of ordinary soldiers were not kept and corruption of the sort satirised in Gogol’s Dead Souls was commonplace. Persistent reports that the Russians simply burn the bodies of their dead suggest that an absence of care still prevails.²¹Julian Borger, ‘Machine-gun fire heralds an
ingtensive fight in the south’ the Guardian, 9 Dec 2022. Motivation and military discipline is likely to suffer. This may well have contributed to the banned use of cell-phones which the soldiers used for New Year’s Eve messages home that led to the devastating Ukrainian strike on Makiivka in the last hours of 2022.²²‘Moscow admits scores of its troops killed in missile attack on Russian-held city’ The Guardian, 3 Jan 2023.

However, the tactical-technical advantage the Ukrainians may gain from this has to be offset by Russia’s ability to mobilise larger numbers of soldiers and to rely, as so often in the past, on the fact that quantity has a quality all of its own. A problem for the Russians here is that their training base is poor and so much of it has to be done by the already strained units to which the conscripts report. The incremental advances made at Bakhmut and Soledar by poor quality Wagner mercenaries (often ex-prisoners) engaged in unintelligent frontal assaults suggests that progress can be made even so.²³Alex Vershinin ‘What’s Ahead in the War in Ukraine’ Russia Matters Project Harvard University Kennedy School of Government 22 Dec 2023. Additionally, Russia’s equally traditional reliance on firepower rather than manoeuvre, especially in the shape of concentrated heavy artillery, offers them the option of a slow ruthless attritional style of war seen in the long struggle for those two towns that in the past has led to victory if at very high cost.

An equally ruthless and uninhibited air assault on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and, again as in the past, the weaponisation of ‘General Winter’ can only reinforce the attritional effect on Ukrainian resilience. The Black Sea Fleet, as hand-maiden to the Army, will no doubt continue to contribute to such a campaign, so long as its missile stocks allow. Much improved Ukrainian air defences may shoot down the great majority of these missiles and drones and so mitigate the effect of these strikes. However, they will not be effective against the ballistic missiles that Russia is seeking from Iran. Also, according to some estimates, shooting down a missile costs seven times that of firing one in the first place and thus this adverse rate of resource attrition benefits the attacker rather than the defender.²⁴Ian Lovett, ‘Ukraine Repels Russian Drone Attacks with Help from Western supplied Air Defences,’ Wall Street Journal 4 Jan
2023; Natasha Frost, ‘The Costs of Ukrainian Defence’ New York Times, 4 Jan 2023.

Secondly, at this tactical-technical level, the key role of drones used in conjunction with missiles in coastal operations so far seems likely to reinforce the arguments of those who maintain that the increasing effectiveness of such instruments of sea denial means that the fleets of the future will need to comprise diffused concentrations of power and distributed operations by smaller, faster, forces networked together. This comes as no surprise. The USN and other western navies are well used to operating in the presence of Iranian drones and remain acutely aware of the need to invest in counter-drone systems. “For the first time since the Korean War,” said General Kenneth Mckenzie, Commander of CENTCOM in 2021, “we are operating without complete air superiority… Until we are able to develop and field a networked capability to detect and defeat UAS [unmanned aerial systems], the advantage will remain with the attacker.”²⁵General Kenneth Mckenzie Commander of CENTCOM Mckenzie, quoted in Martin, Peter and Capaccio, Tonio, 2021, ‘Iran Is a Daily Threat as U.S. Dominance Wanes, General
Says’ Bloomberg News, 20 April 2021. Since much of this technology is being developed in the civilian and commercial sectors of national economies, the advantage of effective ‘civil-military fusion’ (as the Chinese would put it) seems obvious. The Ukrainians appear to have benefitted from this at the tactical-technical level more than the Russians, in part through the build-up of their own capabilities but mainly through their open access to Western commercial concerns.²⁶‘How Elon Musk’s Satellites have saved Ukraine and Changed warfare’ The Economist, 5 Jan 2023.

Thirdly, and connectedly, the military benefits to be had from a supportive and engaged civilian socioeconomy are considerable, and of special military significance for Ukraine. Although popular support extends across a wide spectrum of weaponry and support, it is especially noticeable in the information domain. On and near land, it allows the accurate targeting of Russian forces and depots. Civilians with cell phones act informally as the eyes and ears for the Ukrainian military. While this blurring of the distinctions between combatant and non-combatant has increased the level of savagery in the war, it has proved a significant benefit, especially given the relatively lax info-security standards of their Russian adversaries. Ukrainian forces seem less hierarchical than the Russians and this facilitates faster and better unit-to-unit sideways information transfer.²⁷Julian Borger, ‘Ukraine’s coders are winning the battle of data’ The Guardian, 19 Dec 2022. Civilians from the IT world seem to have joined Ukrainian Army units in significant numbers and this also can only help in the crucial battle for information superiority. Finally, there seems little doubt that Ukraine also derives significant real-time space-based military and other intelligence from the United States and its Allies.

As a result of all this, the much vaunted Russian expertise in cyber and information warfare seems to have been noticeable chiefly by its effective absence. In the light of the impact of the NotPetya attack on Odesa of 2017 and other such cyber-attacks, much was expected of the Russians in this respect but so far they have signally failed to unravel Ukraine’s defences. It would be dangerous, though, to assume this to be the final conclusion. At every level we should expect the Russians to learn the lessons of these early reverses.

Emerging Conclusions

The conflict is not over yet, and at the time of writing there seems little indication of an early halt in the current stage of a conflict that in one form or another has lasted for centuries. Moreover, the longer a conflict lasts the worse it often gets in extent and effect.²⁸Andrew Roth ‘Russian airbases hit as Kyiv targets Kremlin’s long range bombers’ The Guardian 6 Dec 2022; Gareth Jennings ‘Russia relocates bombers to Far East region as Ukraine targets western bases’ Jane’s Defence Weekly , 11 Jan 2023. In consequence, some issues currently obscure may become clearer. Nonetheless some overall conclusions are beginning to emerge.

One of the most obvious is the reminder of how difficult it is to predict future events. While how the war will end is currently a subject of much uncertainty, the same was true of its beginning. Many were surprised that it started at all, and many more at how well the Ukrainians have resisted and the West rallied in their support. The poor performance of the Russian Army so far likewise suggests that its military efficiency was greatly over-estimated in the past, but in the rebound may well be under-estimated in the present and future. This experience reinforces the common sense conclusion that defence planners need to prepare for as many contingencies as they can, and to maintain high levels of readiness and sustainability.

Secondly the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has ranged widely across all the domains of war. The need for the close integration of naval, land and air forces in multi-domain operations is totally clear. Equally the Ukrainians have demonstrated the manifest strategic advantages to be gained from the military effort being closely coordinated with the wider diplomatic, economic, political, legal ²⁹The importance of the legal dimension of this conflict should not be overlooked. The Montreux Convention has helped shaped the conflict in its restrictions on access to and exit from the Black Sea. Similarly the determined Ukrainian campaign to punish the perpetrators of numerous war crimes is an effective means of rallying international support but seems likely to make a resolution of the conflict more difficult. and informational lines of the national effort. While there is little in this that is inherently ‘new’, its extent and its importance especially for Ukraine, given its high degree of reliance on the support of others, underlines the importance of the concept of ‘integrated deterrence’ now being pursued on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite early efforts to shield its population from the consequences of the conflict, Russia has likewise increasingly sought to buttress its military effort by leveraging all aspects of its national power.

Thirdly, the conflict has had truly global effects, underlining the point that strategically the world is shrinking. ‘The West’, as loosely used in this article, extends not just to NATO countries (a group which, with the imminent inclusion of Sweden and Finland, is expanding in direct consequence of this war) but also to sympathetic countries in the wider world such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and Singapore. It may well presage an international order that is slowly coalescing into competitive blocs, where ‘if you are not with us you’re against us’. The most obvious dividing line between the blocs is between liberal and authoritarian conceptions of the world order.

The war indeed seems at something of a Zeitenwende, a systemic change of course, which affects economic as well as political relationships. Concerns about the security of supply chains has led to the notion of ‘friend-shoring’ – the proposal that for what they need from others, countries should rely on allies and partners rather than the free market sources characteristic of globalisation.³⁰‘The Friend Sharing of Supply Chains’ IISS Commentary Vol 28 Comment 35, 2022 Likewise, the world oil market is dissolving into different groupings with differing agendas, divided especially between those who buy Russian oil and those who don’t.³¹David Unberti, ‘Oil Market Was Splintered in
2022 by Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine’ Wall Street Journal 29 Dec 2022 In both cases, political considerations seem to be trumping economic ones and the more the great powers regard ‘peace’ as the conduct of war by other means, the more true this is likely to be.

Fourthly, ‘big war’ is back, even assuming it ever went away. Forces around the world, not least navies, will have noted that they are not, after all, sailing into a glorious sunrise agenda of multinational cooperation against lesser or less imminent threats such as maritime crime, climate change and humanitarian disaster. Many fleet planners will conclude that while these urgent requirements still exist and have to be resourced, sustained operations of real high intensity war have to be catered for as a higher priority and that it would be as well to prepare for them properly. The question much debated in Russian military discourse – of how big is big, and when does it become so – is of commanding significance, and needs to be closely watched.

Moreover ‘big’ war now seems likely to mean ‘long’ war. Both the Iraq and the Afghanistan conflicts were long wars by historical standards, but the same could now apply to great power conflicts, even proxy ones, fought out in the main theatre of strategic concern. Moreover the consumption of artillery shells and missile stocks has proved startlingly high, threatening to drain the stocks of both protagonists and their supporters. The consequent demand for continuing and high levels of support and a major uplift in production for the apparently limitless demands of war makes national resilience a key issue. The capacity to maintain military capability has often proved more of a challenge than delivering it in the first place and so it is now. Inadequate stockpiles means hollowed-out forces.³²Chris Laudati, ‘The precarious State of US Defense Stockpiles’ National Defense Magazine, 17 Nov 2022. National resilience in itself therefore becomes a target for economic, military and political-informational attack, in effect another theatre of war.³³Polina Nikolskaya et al., ‘How pro-Putin operations in Germany work to turn Berlin against Ukraine’ Reuters, Japan Times, 4 Jan 2023 Defending against it will be especially difficult in situations where there is no clear and agreed conception of the required end-game.

Fifthly, the dramatic emergence of drones has tended to focus attention on the impact of new technology on modern military operations. Ukraine’s constant requests for more recent and more capable military systems underlines the perceived advantage of enhanced technological performance in established systems, and the potentially ground-breaking and transformative effects of new ones. Nonetheless, the technology that provides new capabilities and challenges also tends to produce answers to them. The increasing Ukrainian success in shooting down Russian missiles and drones underlines the point and suggests that the capacity to harness the various human factors in naval operations efficiently is ultimately more important.

Finally, for all the preoccupations about the potential decisiveness of the ‘next big thing’ in transformational military technology, much of the present experience of war, perhaps especially on land, where the mud, blood, sacrifice and sheer destructiveness of war is most obvious, remains depressingly familiar. The Ukrainian war can be seen as a necessary reminder of how terrible major war is. It highlights the advantage of preventing such conflicts through a combination of effective deterrence and, where possible, constructive accommodation.

Footnotes

• 1
  M. E Sarotte, Not One Inch : America, Russia, and the Making of Post-cold War Stalemate. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022) is a good exploration of this issue.
• 2
  The Azov battalion, the heroic defenders of the Azovstal Iron and Steel works Plant in Mariupol in the early days of the war, certainly included a number of individuals for
  whom this descriptor made some sense.
• 3
  It is possible to argue that attributing defeat in Ukraine to the intervention of NATO would make it more acceptable to Russia in terms of regime-survival than defeat at the hands of Ukraine alone. Paradoxically anti-NATO rhetoric might be less alarming than it appears. But such a defeat would probably be represented as no more than a temporary set-back for Russia.
• 4
  Andrew Roth, ‘Putin hints at long conflict in Ukraine’ The Guardian, 8 Dec 2022.
• 5
  Steven Kotkin, ‘The Cold War Never Ended’ Foreign Affairs May-June 2022; Serge Schemann, ‘Putin Can’t Escape His Country’s History’ New York Times 11 Nov 2022.
• 6
  Roth, ‘Putin hints’ op cit; Isobel Koshiw, ‘Russia “poised to mobilise 500,000 more conscripts” for spring offensive.’ The Guardian, 7 Jan 2023
• 7
  Dan Sabbagh, ‘How the fight for the capital was won and turned the tide of war. ‘The Guardian, 29 Dec 2022; Isobel Koshiw, ‘How Sumy residents kept invaders out of their city’ The Guardian, 3 Jan 2023.
• 8
  Sergei Gorshkov, The Sea Power of the State (London: Pergamon, 1979). 141-155.
• 9
  Patrick Tucker,’US Weighs Escalation Risk as Ukraine asks for longer-range missiles.’ Defense One.com 16 Sept 2022.
• 10
  ‘As Putin prepared invasion, US struggled to convince allies – and Zelensky- of danger to
  Ukraine, Post examination shows’ Washington Post, 16 Aug 2022
• 11
  Joe Wallace, ‘Russia confounds the West by recapturing its oil riches’ Wall Street Journal, 29 Aug 2022
• 12
  Greg Mills, ‘Why Kyiv Needs an African Strategy’ RUSI Commentary, 4 Jan 2023.
• 13
  Daniel Boffey Tankers with Russia ties go
  dark to avoid sanctions’ The Guardian. 7 Dec 2022.
• 14
  ‘Drones Let Iran Flex its Muscles’ Wall Street Journal, 29-30 Oct 2022.
• 15
  Gabriel Steinhauser, ‘Russian Ship Secretive South African Stop Prompts US Questions’ wall street Journal, 9 Jan 2023.
• 16
  For the concept of society-based strategy see Ariel Levite and Jonathan Shimshoni, ‘The Strategic Challenge of Society-Centric Warfare’, Global Politics and Strategy, 20 Nov 2018.
• 17
  Seth Crospey, ‘Ukraine’s war Outlook in 2023: Harder Fighting against a Tougher Russian Army’ The Hill, 2 Jan 2023
• 18
  Margharita Stancati, ‘Fearing Sabotage, Europe patrols pipelines with Mine Humters and Unmanned Subs’ Wall Street Journal 25 Nov 2022; ‘Europeans wade into Fighting seabed Threats with Drones and Sensors’, DefenseNews 9 Jan 2023
• 19
  Mary Ayushina, Heavy Russian casualties spur outcry, rare Official reply,’ The Washington Post 8 Nov 2022.
• 20
  Isobel Koshiw, ‘How Sumy residents kept invaders ouit of their city’ The Guardian, 3 Jan 2023.
• 21
  Julian Borger, ‘Machine-gun fire heralds an
  ingtensive fight in the south’ the Guardian, 9 Dec 2022.
• 22
  ‘Moscow admits scores of its troops killed in missile attack on Russian-held city’ The Guardian, 3 Jan 2023.
• 23
  Alex Vershinin ‘What’s Ahead in the War in Ukraine’ Russia Matters Project Harvard University Kennedy School of Government 22 Dec 2023.
• 24
  Ian Lovett, ‘Ukraine Repels Russian Drone Attacks with Help from Western supplied Air Defences,’ Wall Street Journal 4 Jan
  2023; Natasha Frost, ‘The Costs of Ukrainian Defence’ New York Times, 4 Jan 2023.
• 25
  General Kenneth Mckenzie Commander of CENTCOM Mckenzie, quoted in Martin, Peter and Capaccio, Tonio, 2021, ‘Iran Is a Daily Threat as U.S. Dominance Wanes, General
  Says’ Bloomberg News, 20 April 2021.
• 26
  ‘How Elon Musk’s Satellites have saved Ukraine and Changed warfare’ The Economist, 5 Jan 2023.
• 27
  Julian Borger, ‘Ukraine’s coders are winning the battle of data’ The Guardian, 19 Dec 2022.
• 28
  Andrew Roth ‘Russian airbases hit as Kyiv targets Kremlin’s long range bombers’ The Guardian 6 Dec 2022; Gareth Jennings ‘Russia relocates bombers to Far East region as Ukraine targets western bases’ Jane’s Defence Weekly , 11 Jan 2023.
• 29
  The importance of the legal dimension of this conflict should not be overlooked. The Montreux Convention has helped shaped the conflict in its restrictions on access to and exit from the Black Sea. Similarly the determined Ukrainian campaign to punish the perpetrators of numerous war crimes is an effective means of rallying international support but seems likely to make a resolution of the conflict more difficult.
• 30
  ‘The Friend Sharing of Supply Chains’ IISS Commentary Vol 28 Comment 35, 2022
• 31
  David Unberti, ‘Oil Market Was Splintered in
  2022 by Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine’ Wall Street Journal 29 Dec 2022
• 32
  Chris Laudati, ‘The precarious State of US Defense Stockpiles’ National Defense Magazine, 17 Nov 2022.
• 33
  Polina Nikolskaya et al., ‘How pro-Putin operations in Germany work to turn Berlin against Ukraine’ Reuters, Japan Times, 4 Jan 2023