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Not to mention the evidence of war crimes, the war in Ukraine was a colossal military mistake, according to a Russian armed forces expert and veteran of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And he says it confuses many like him.
It’s not that Russian soldiers lacked good equipment, food or warm clothes, as many said, according to Valery Shiryaev. There were far too few of them to do what their president wanted them to do, which Shiryaev called impossible.
The US and its coalition partners sent half a million troops into the first Gulf War in circumstances where one could argue that Saddam Hussein had less support on his side than the Ukrainian president, given his country’s existential struggle. Compare that to the fact that Russia had less than a quarter of that number – only 120,000 lined up to invade Ukraine, something Shiryaev never really thought would happen until it happened.
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Shiryaev, a veteran of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, said that war was like no other this century, with men on both sides who have a similar culture and fight in the same way, or at least come from the same experience. The Red Army may be long gone, but a certain legacy must be carried on in the republics of the former USSR.
That got Shiryaev thinking about how the Russians even thought of waging this war. “It’s a big mystery!” explained the military expert. “There was a consensus among military experts that an attack was not rational. Everyone assumed so [Russian President Vladimir] Putin as a politician acts rationally,” Shiryaev continued. “When a politician is dominated by emotions, he can make a mistake.” And Shiryaev said the war in Ukraine was “a colossal one”. He described it as a common misjudgment between them. The various agencies investigating the situation, from Russia’s security agency FSB to foreign intelligence services to military intelligence, wondered, like many others, whether these generals and spies were too shy to tell Putin the truth , and exactly how the decision to go in was made.
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He also pointed to the underestimation of Ukraine’s determination. “I do not get it. We all know the Ukrainians – they are our brothers. We know them as ourselves. They would never surrender, just as the Russians would never surrender if attacked.”
He blamed what he called essentially a one-man power structure in Russia for the miscalculations. Even under the undemocratic system of communism, there were some control mechanisms. “After Stalin’s death,” Zhiryaev continues, “there was a collective leadership in the Communist Party, and when troops entered Afghanistan, there was a vote in the Communist Party’s Politburo,” he said. Of course, there was no telling if this vote came at the end of a gun barrel. “The Chinese Communist Party also has a voting procedure, but in Russia there is one person who made a mistake. This is the tragedy of the political structure of Russia.”
Ukrainian soldiers celebrate April 3 at a checkpoint in Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
On the issue of nuclear weapons, Shiryaev was not alarming, believing Russia’s talk of reaching a higher state of readiness was aimed at ensuring NATO boots didn’t get to Ukraine. He was also convinced that the Russians would not use chemical or biological weapons. He didn’t think the Russians would use something so toxic so close to their own borders, something that could backfire directly on them.
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He saw a final on Russia’s annual Victory Day, celebrated on May 9, when Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II is marked. And maybe, Shiryaev suggested, at that point Putin will simply explain that what they’ve been taking up until then is exactly what they wanted all along — and that’s going to be the twist. But he admitted that even the battle for Donbass did not go so well. Just listen to the Russians.
“Every day, [Russian Ministry of Defense spokesman Igor] Konashenkov talks about how Ukrainian rockets and Ukrainian shells explode in Donetsk. That means the troops are where they were and nothing has changed. And a month has already passed. Konashenkov tells us every day that Russia is destroying some Ukrainian planes and some S-300 air defense equipment. But I’m sorry, those targets should have been destroyed in the first week.”