Without a top commander across the theater of operations on the ground in or near Ukraine, units from different Russian military districts operating in different parts of Ukraine appear to be competing for resources rather than coordinating their efforts, according to two US defense officials.
Units participating in various Russian offensives across Ukraine have failed to link up, these sources say, and actually appear to be acting independently, with no overarching operational design.
The Russian armed forces also appear to have significant communication problems. Soldiers and commanders have at times used commercial cell phones and other unsecured channels to communicate with each other, making their communications easier to intercept and helping Ukraine develop targets for its own counterattacks.
It all resulted in what these sources say was a disjointed — and sometimes chaotic — operation that has caught US and Western officials by surprise.
“One of the principles of war is ‘unity of command,'” said CNN military analyst, retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, a former US Army Europe commander. “That means someone has to take overall responsibility – to coordinate the fires, direct logistics, deploy reserve forces, measure the success (and failures) of various “wings” of the operation, and adjust responses based thereon.
There have been cases in the past of Russia releasing this type of information, but the Defense Ministry did not refer to a commander-in-chief of operations in Ukraine and did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on the matter.
And while it’s possible that Russia has tacitly designated a commander in chief to oversee the invasion — even if the US has been unable to identify that person — the state of combat operations would indicate “he’s incompetent,” Hertling said.
The Russian invasion was also marked by an inordinate number of casualties among senior Russian officers. Ukrainians say they killed five Russian generals in the first three weeks of the war, a claim CNN has not independently confirmed. Still, it’s a rare occurrence for a military general to be killed in combat, retired US Army General David Petraeus told CNN’s Jake Tapper during Sunday’s State of the Union.
Colonel Sergei Sukharev, the commander of an elite Russian airborne unit, was also killed in combat in Ukraine, Russia’s regional state TV channel GTRK Kostroma reported Thursday.
“The bottom line is that their command and control has collapsed,” Petraeus said.
The sheer size of the invasion only made things worse. Coordinating operations along a front stretching 1,000 miles requires “extensive communications capabilities and command, control and intelligence resources that the Russians simply don’t have,” Hertling added.
“I don’t see anything the Navy doing being coordinated with anything the Air Force is doing or anything the Land Forces are doing,” said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, another former US Army Europe commander. who warned that he had no inside knowledge of the US understanding of the Russian command structure.
“The Russians faced tremendous leadership and control difficulties at all levels during this operation,” reiterated a US source familiar with the situation on the ground. “Part of it may be due to actions by the Ukrainians themselves.”
On the ground, Russian troops in the field were often cut off from their senior commanders, sources said.
“The guys in the field go out and have their aim, but they have no way of radioing back [if something goes wrong]’ said another source familiar with the intelligence community, adding that Western officials believe this is one of the reasons some Russian troops have been spotted leaving their own tanks and armored personnel carriers in the field and simply walking away.
A stalled campaign
Since Russia launched its attack on Ukraine on February 24, it has bombarded Ukrainian cities with rockets and artillery, destroying homes, hospitals and schools and killing scores of civilians. But its ground invasion has largely stalled due to fierce resistance from Ukrainians and what senior defense officials have called tactical blunders.
Airspace over Ukraine remains disputed and Russia has failed to take control of major cities, including Kyiv.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told CNN’s Don Lemon on Friday that the US had seen “a series of missteps” by Russia. Moscow was “struggling with logistics,” he said, adding that he had seen no evidence of “good use of tactical intelligence” or “integrating air capabilities into a ground maneuver.”
Both current officials and outside analysts point out that while Russia has used its military in other recent conflicts, including Syria and Crimea in 2014, nothing remotely as ambitious as an all-out invasion of a major nation like that Ukraine has attempted This would require air and ground integration and coordinated efforts by units from several different regional military districts.
Russia rotates its annual military drills between its regional military districts, Hodges said — rather than conducting the sort of so-called “joint” drills the United States routinely employs to ensure smooth coordination between different parts of its sprawling military.
“They have no experience with it, not on this scale,” he said. “It’s been decades since they did anything of this magnitude. What they did in Syria and Crimea in 2014 is nothing compared to that.”
And he added: “It doesn’t seem to me that they actually exercised this in a way that would have shown that they would need a joint task force commander.”
Putin’s Confidence in Secrecy
Some officials have also suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin planned the entire operation so closely in the Kremlin that many of his own military commanders on the ground didn’t fully understand the mission until the last minute — likely to prevent various weapons from Russia’s military from interfering to coordinate effectively in advance of the invasion.
“In the assessments we can clearly see that some people are on the track [Russian] Defense side doesn’t really understand what the game plan is,” a senior European official said in early February, just weeks before the invasion. The official added that the assessments suggest defense personnel think “it’s a very difficult game plan to get up .”
The lack of a central organization also affects Russia’s efforts to increase its armed forces. Moscow is struggling to provide troops on the ground with adequate food, fuel and ammunition — and as casualties have mounted, officials say there are indications that Russia is trying to cover its casualties with both foreign fighters and existing Russian ones Replenish troops stationed elsewhere.
Without a theater commander, strategically allocating limited resources could prove difficult, Hodges said.
“That’s the job of the Joint Force Commander: assigning priorities,” he said. “Who gets priority for fuel, ammo, or specific skills.”