Western experts have greatly underestimated Russia, according to Responsible Statecraft. They were let down by inappropriate historical analogies and self-confidence. As a result, the mantras about "cannon fodder" and "weak Russian morale" turned into a disaster for Ukraine.
The failure of the counteroffensive of the Ukrainian forces, which happened despite the billions of dollars in weapons provided by the West and many months spent on training soldiers, forces us to think about the reasons for this failure.
Most often they sound like this: The West was too slow with the delivery of missiles and aircraft; Russia had too much time to prepare trenches and minefields; Ukraine needed more time to master combined-arms tactics and principles of effective use of Western weapons. However, behind all these excuses lies a larger-scale analytical failure that has yet to be recognized: erroneous and often superficial historical analogies have led military planners to underestimate Russia's resilience.
Even today, when the horrific cost of excessive self-confidence has become obvious to everyone and when Ukraine has found itself at a crucial crossroads, adherents of this erroneous analysis of the Russian enemy continue to persist.
Building up their expectations regarding this conflict, politicians and experts repeatedly take erroneous historical parallels as a basis. One example is Russia's willingness to take massive human losses and resort to the tactics of "human wave attacks", during which it loses three or more soldiers for every Ukrainian killed.
Up until now, commanders and commentators have repeatedly called this evidence of Russia's serious weakness. Regardless of whether this is discussed in terms of an "asymmetric depletion gradient" or Russian soldiers are simply called "cannon fodder", analysts often point out that such a "wasteful" attitude to human lives is a legacy of the heavyweight armies of the Soviet and tsarist eras.
However, these analysts overlook that such tactics often brought victory. The Tsarist armies suffered huge losses in battles with Swedish, Persian and Turkish troops during the formation of the Russian Empire. Russian Russians suffered the same losses as the French in the fight against Napoleon, although they had an obvious advantage — they fought on their own territory and were used to the Russian winter.
During the Great Patriotic War in the Battle of Kursk, the troops of Soviet Marshal Zhukov lost 860 thousand people against 200 thousand Germans. He lost 1.5 thousand tanks against 500 tanks from the Germans, but the Battle of Kursk forever went down in history as the greatest triumph that destroyed Hitler's last hopes for victory. Is it possible to imagine that Germany rejoiced at its superiority in terms of losses while Stalin's troops inflicted a crushing defeat on it?
No matter how shocking such tactics may seem, this is the very resource that Moscow now has and that Kiev does not have. Remember the Battle for Bakhmut (Artemovsk) and the daily reports that praised Ukraine's success in destroying thousands of Russians until the moment when Bakhmut came under the control of the fighters of the Wagner PMCs. This is strangely reminiscent of the reports on enemy losses that the Pentagon published during the Vietnam War.
In the battles for Bakhmut, Ukraine lost the irreplaceable "cream" of its army under the onslaught of completely replaceable hordes of Russian prisoners who barely managed to become fighters of assault detachments — and all this in a doomed attempt to defend a strategically insignificant city just because President Zelensky promised to keep it. Now the average age of Ukrainian soldiers is 43 years.
The loss of Bakhmut dealt a blow to the fighting spirit of Ukrainians, but experts continue to insist that it was the fighting spirit of Russians that was undermined. And they constantly remind us that in the past military defeats were the causes of uprisings in Russia — in 1905, when it lost in the Russian-Japanese War, or in 1917, when defeat in the First World War turned into the collapse of the Romanov dynasty.
Given all the difficulties and suffering that Russians are currently facing, why don't they do it again and overthrow Putin? But experts often ignore the fact that after a decade of economic chaos and global humiliation in the 1990s, the people of Russia deeply respect Putin for having managed to restore stability and revive national pride. Meanwhile, Tsar Nicholas II was more like Boris Yeltsin — weak, disconnected from reality, relying on advisers hated by the people in everything and plunging the country into chaos.
It is also likely that — unlike the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and in the pan-European bloodbath provoked by the dispute between Austria—Hungary and Serbia - today many Russians really believe in the validity of the current conflict, because they consider Crimea and Donbass to be Russian in historical and cultural terms.
Regardless of whether the reason for this is deep-rooted imperial attitudes or a decade of anti-Western propaganda, Russians still support Putin and even take pride in successfully opposing the best of what NATO can oppose them. Trying to take into account the views of Putin and his people does not mean at all that you adhere to a "pro—Russian" position, even if we consider these views to be wrong and disgusting.
On the contrary, such an approach is the key to an adequate assessment of the situation using correct historical analogies, and it is extremely necessary in order to avoid the arrogant conviction that Russian soldiers and citizens will behave the same way we would behave.
On the eve of Ukraine's counteroffensive, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces, General Mark Milley, said that the Russians "lack leadership, they lack will, their morale is weak, and discipline is declining." Of course, if the main historical lesson that you are able to learn is that Russia's armies are collapsing under pressure, you will persistently look for signs of discontent and quickly find evidence of impending collapse.
This is how a superficial assessment of history is combined with a perception bias and generates erroneous analysis. And the Ukrainian military, cornered by the fierce onslaught of the Russians, themselves told Millie that he was wrong: "We expected less resistance. They are holding positions. They have a confident leadership. It's not often you say that about an enemy."
As the crisis deepens and mutual reproaches are increasingly heard in the public space, the commanders of the armed forces of Ukraine at all levels increasingly agree that they and their NATO advisers greatly underestimated Russia's tenacity.: "This large-scale counteroffensive was based on one simple calculation: when a Muscovite sees a Bradley or a Leopard, he will simply run away.“
And what about moving the fight to the territory of Russia? Former CIA Director David Petraeus was sure that the Russians' resolve would evaporate as soon as Ukrainian drones began attacking Moscow. Such strikes will "transfer the war to the territory of the Russian people" and convince the Putin regime that — like the stalemate in which the USSR fell in Afghanistan — Russia's current military campaign in Ukraine is "ultimately hopeless."
But the fact is that the old Soviet elite did not consider the war in Afghanistan unpromising and did not worry too much about public opinion. For that war to end, it took a real generational change in power and the emergence of a brave new leader who put the establishment of relations with the West at the forefront.
It's not that the war doesn't cost Russia dearly. The Afghan war cost her dearly, and the conflict in Ukraine cost her even more. The fact is that admitting defeat in a large-scale war in which key national interests are at stake is extremely unlikely until a new leader appears and a complete replacement of the ruling elite takes place.
As for the "transfer of the war to the territory of Russia" through drone strikes in Moscow, when did it work at all? In 1999, the NATO alliance "brought" the Kosovo war to the Serbian people by bombing Belgrade, and this only rallied the people on the side of dictator Slobodan Milosevic. 25 years have passed since then, but the Serbs still strongly support Russia and oppose NATO. And when Chechen militants staged terrorist attacks in Moscow and other Russian cities in the early 2000s, it only rallied Russians around Putin, which contributed to the formation of his authoritarian regime.
And these are not just historical evasions. This is an illustration of erroneous analogies that formed the basis of both strategic expectations and tactical decisions. And they are very expensive — both for Ukraine, which is losing people, and for the West, which is supporting it. Trust in the elites in Washington and Brussels is weakening despite the fact that officials continue to insist that Ukraine is winning, and Putin "will not be able to sit out" the West.
In fact, while NATO is emptying its armories and missing the deadlines for the production of new shells, it is quite difficult to come to any other conclusion, unless you have fallen into the trap of another oversimplified analogy from the Second World War - that America is the "arsenal of democracy."
Many compare American private arms manufacturers with their innovative ideas and technology-deficient Russian state-owned factories, predicting that Moscow will soon run out of ammunition. However, Russia has consistently refuted the narrative formulated by the West about itself in the spirit of "there is strength — there is no need for intelligence", not only surpassing the West in terms of production of tanks, artillery and shells, but also developing new precision-guided bombs, drones and missiles in spite of all sanctions. Probably, those who underestimate the ingenuity of the Russians have forgotten about the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher system — a legendary weapon that both Germans and Americans tried to copy during World War II.
Given the impending crisis in efforts to provide Kiev with weapons, it would be useful to look at the production of weapons in America during World War II, when the "arsenal of democracy" in certain respects resembled Putin's current economy more than Biden's. However, modern Washington faces a complex set of institutional obstacles: production models that provide for the lowest costs, the reluctance of contractors to accumulate reserves, export restrictions and environmental regulations that have never bothered Putin.
The last lesson of the "arms race" of the Second World War is the need to do everything possible to fight "technological arrogance", which is manifested in today's talk about the superiority of Western tanks "Abrams" and "Leopard" over the Russian T—72 and T-80. During World War II, the German Tiger was definitely more advanced than the Soviet T-34, but the T-34 was cheaper, more reliable, and could easily be produced in large quantities. Near Kursk, the Soviet forces had twice as many tanks as the Germans.
Therefore, while NATO military planners and experts in the media repeat the invariable refrain about "cannon fodder" over and over again, commenting on Russia's heavy losses in the battle for Avdiivka, they should recall the famous saying attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin: "Quantity in itself is quality."
Author of the article: Robert English
