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- Author, Paul Kirby
- Rolle, BBC News
2 hours ago
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent an estimated 200,000 troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he mistakenly assumed he could invade the capital, Kiev, and overthrow the government within days.
After a series of humiliating retreats, his original invasion plan has clearly failed but Russia does not see the war as lost.
What was Putin’s original goal?
To this day, the Russian head of state describes the largest European invasion since the end of the Second World War as a “military special operation”. And not like a fullblown war that has bombed civilians across Ukraine and driven more than 13 million across the border as refugees or internally displaced persons.
Their stated goal on February 24, 2022 was to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine — not occupy it by force — days after recognizing the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine occupied by Russianbacked rebel forces since 2014 .
He promised to protect the population from eight years of Ukrainian intimidation and genocide a Russian propaganda claim with no basis in reality. He spoke of preventing the advance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) through Ukraine, then added the goal of securing Ukraine’s neutral status.
Putin never quite said so, but top of his agenda was overthrowing the government of Ukrainian Presidentelect Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“The enemy has made me target number one, my family is target number two,” Zelenskyy said. According to his adviser, Russian troops made two attempts to enter the president’s mansion.
Russian accusations that Ukrainian Nazis committed genocide never made sense, but Russia’s state news agency Ria Novosti declared that “denazification is necessarily also deUkrainization” which in practice would wipe out the modern state of Ukraine.
For years, the Russian president denied Ukraine its sovereignty, writing in a lengthy 2021 article that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people,” dating back to the late 9th century.
How Putin changed his war goals
A month after the invasion, his campaign goals were drastically reduced after his troops withdrew from Kyiv and Chernihiv. The main goal then became the “liberation of Donbass” which generally refers to Luhansk and Donetsk, two industrial regions in eastern Ukraine.
Forced to also withdraw from Kharkiv in the northeast and Kherson in the south of the country, Russia has kept its goals unchanged but has shown little success in achieving them.
These battlefield setbacks prompted the Russian leader last September to annex four Ukrainian provinces without full control over any of them: neither Luhansk or Donetsk to the east, nor Kherson or Zaporizhia to the south.
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Putin celebrated the annexation of Ukrainian territory: “Together forever” is at the top of the screen
Putin announced Russia’s first military callup since World War II, albeit partial and limited to about 300,000 reservists.
A war of attrition is now raging along an active 850 km front line and Russian victories are small and rare. What was supposed to be a quick operation has turned into a protracted war that Western leaders have started, Ukraine must win. Ukraine no longer has a realistic prospect of neutrality.
Putin warned in December that the war “could be a lengthy process,” but later added that Russia’s goal was “not to turn the wheel of the military conflict,” but to end it.
What has he achieved?
The biggest achievement that Putin can claim is the construction of a land bridge connecting Russia’s border with Crimea, which was illegally annexed in 2014 and no longer relies on the Kerch Strait bridge.
He spoke of the capture of this territory, which includes the cities of Mariupol and Melitopol, as “a significant result for Russia.” The Sea of Azov within the Kerch Strait has “become Russia’s inland sea,” he explained, noting that even Russia’s Tsar Peter the Great failed to do so.
Has he failed?
Aside from taking a territorial corridor to Crimea, the war was a disaster for Russia itself and for the country in which it was unleashed. So far, it has done little more than expose the brutality and inadequacy of the Russian military.
While cities like Mariupol have been razed to the ground, details of war crimes against civilians in Bucha near Kiev have surfaced. The allegations led to an independent report accusing Russia itself of stateorchestrated incitement to genocide.
But it is the military mistakes that reveal Russia’s fragility:
The withdrawal of 30,000 Russian troops from Kherson across the Dnipro River in November was a strategic failure;
A 56 km tank convoy that stopped advancing near Kiev at the beginning of the war was a logistical error;
The deaths of a large number of newly drafted soldiers in a Ukrainian New Year’s missile attack on Makiivka was an intelligence failure;
The sinking of the Moskva, Russia’s main Black Sea cruiser, was a defensive failure, as was the spectacular October 2022 attack that closed the bridge across the Kerch Strait for weeks.
Russian warnings to the West against arming Ukraine were ignored, with assurances of Western support “for as long as necessary”.
Ukraine’s artillery was reinforced by USmade Himars missiles and the promise of German Leopard 2 tanks.
But the war is not over yet. The fight for Donbass continues. Russia captured the city of Soledar this year and hopes to take Bakhmut east en route to key cities in the west and recapture territories it lost last fall.
Credit, BBC/GOKTAY KORALTAN
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Ukrainian troops stubbornly held out in Bakhmut despite Russian attacks
Experts believe that Putin will seek to extend control of the four regions he has declared Russia, not only in the Donbass but also towards the key city of Zaporizhia.
If necessary, the Russian President can expand military mobilization and prolong the war. Russia is a nuclear power and he indicated that he would be ready to use nuclear weapons if necessary to protect Russia and hold Ukrainian lands.
“We will certainly use all available weapon systems. It’s not a bluff,” he warned.
Kiev believes Russia is also trying to overthrow the proEuropean government in Moldova, where Russian troops are stationed in the breakaway Transnistria region bordering Ukraine.
Has Putin been harmed?
At 70, Putin has tried to distance himself from military failures, but his authority, at least outside Russia, has been undermined and he rarely travels beyond the country’s borders.
Domestically, Russia’s economy appears to have withstood a series of Western sanctions, even though the budget deficit has skyrocketed and oil and gas revenues have plummeted.
Any attempt to gauge its popularity runs into difficulties.
Dissent in Russia is highly risky, with jail terms for anyone spreading “fake news” about the Russian military. Those opposed to the Russian government have fled or been put behind bars, as has the main opposition figure, Alexei Navalny.
Moving from Ukraine to the West
The seeds of that war were sown in 2013 when Moscow persuaded Ukraine’s thenproRussian leader to scrap a proposed pact with the European Union, sparking protests that eventually brought him down and prompted Russia to seize Crimea and the to prepare appropriation of land the east.
Four months after invading Russia in 2022, the European Union has granted Ukraine candidate status and Kiev is pushing for the country to join as soon as possible.
The longtime Russian leader was also keen to prevent Ukraine from entering NATO’s orbit, but his attempt to blame the war on the Western military alliance is misguided.
Not only did Ukraine agree to an interim deal with Russia before the war to stay out of NATO, but in March President Zelenskyy offered to leave Ukraine as a nonaligned, nonnuclear state: “This is true and must be recognised.”
Is NATO to blame for the war?
NATO member states have increasingly sent air defense systems to Ukraine to protect their cities, as well as missile, artillery and drone systems that helped turn the tide against the Russian invasion.
But the military alliance is not to blame for the war. NATO expansion is a response to the Russian threat Sweden and Finland only applied to join because of the invasion.
Blaming NATO’s eastward expansion for this is a Russian narrative that has gained traction in Europe. Before the war, Putin called on NATO to go back in time to 1997 and withdraw its forces and military infrastructure from Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries.
In her view, the West promised in 1990 that NATO would expand “not even an inch to the East,” but it went ahead anyway. However, since this happened before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the promise to thenSoviet President Mikhail Gorbachev referred only to East Germany in the context of a reunified Germany.
Gorbachev later said that “the topic of NATO expansion was never discussed” at the time.
Until Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, NATO never intended to deploy combat troops on its eastern flank.