Irregular Warfare Podcast - Political Warfare and the Road to Invasion: Irregular Warfare in Ukraine since 2014

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

In this episode, the second in our two-part series focused on irregular warfare in Ukraine, we're once again joined by Michael Kofman and Kent DeBenedictis. After hearing them discuss Russia’s conception and employment of irregular warfare in Ukraine in the previous episode, the conversation now turns to the Ukrainian response to Russian attacks, to include how Ukraine has utilized irregular warfare to counter Russia and built resilience in the Ukrainian population and infrastructure. Our guests also discuss the effectiveness of external assistance provided to Ukraine before and during the 2022 invasion. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

But that being what it is, I think we demonstrate effectively that in this case we could surge it. And if we build the institutional framework, we could actually integrate with an ally or partner to be much more effective in this space. And to be much more effective in also what the regular warfare can contribute to a fight either before or during. But a lot of that requires actual investment, it requires their preparatory work, and from my point of view, Ukraine probably will be seen as a tremendous success story. When we look at, again, the complete unpreparedness of Ukraine for the conflict, and even some of the senior leaders testifying that they had like less than 10% of their forces available for mobilization at the time of the conflict.

But that goes down to threat perception of not perceiving the conflict that's unfolding now and the conflict that unfolded back then as a reality. Welcome to episode 56 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Laura Jones, and today I'm joined by Kyle Atwell. Today's episode is the conclusion of our two-part series on irregular warfare in Ukraine. Previously in part one, our guests discussed Russia's conception and employment of irregular warfare in Ukraine from its annexation of Crimea in 2014 to its 2022 invasion. Today in part two, the conversation shifts to the Ukrainian response to Russian attacks, to include how Ukraine has utilized irregular warfare to counter Russia, built resilience in the Ukrainian population and infrastructure, and our guest also discussed the effectiveness of external assistance provided to Ukraine

before and during the 2022 invasion. Michael Kaufman serves as Research Program Director in the Russia Studies Program at CNA and as a fellow at the Kennan Institute Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. Previously, he served as Program Manager and Subject Matter Expert at National Defense University, advising senior military and government officials on issues in Russia and Eurasia. Kent DeBenedictus is an active duty Army officer currently on assignment in Europe. He holds a PhD in war studies from King's College, London, and is author of the book, Russian Hybrid Warfare and the Annexation of Crimea, The Modern Application of Soviet Political Warfare, which serves as the motivation for

today's conversation. You're listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern Warden Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of regular warfare professionals. Here is part two of our conversation with Michael Kaufman and Kent DeBenedictus. Gentlemen, I'd like to start where we left off. We've talked a lot about Russia's tactics, strategies, how they integrate their efforts and their use of regular warfare.

But now I'd like to switch gears and talk about the other side. So how did Ukraine respond to regular efforts in 2014? Were they able to adapt to regular pressures from 2014 to 2022? And did they gain the ability to conduct a regular warfare themselves? I might briefly chime in and say Ukraine definitely conducted its own regular warfare campaign in the two quote-unquote separatist republics of Dinar and Elinar. You saw a number of the separatist leaders killed and many others, quite a few of them were killed by Russian forces themselves. That's true. They were eliminated so they could get control and coherency over these breakaway stat lists they set up. But it was also clear that in the Dnepropetrovsk portions that were occupied,

most leaders were looking behind their backs because there was a target campaign by, you know, Ukrainian special forces or intelligence to eliminate these people, to conduct sabotage. And over time, they got pretty good at counterintelligence. It looked like SBU really picked it up. And in fact, we can see if we fast forward, at least from my view, to 2022, the Russian failure is in part caused because SBU likely rolled up a lot of the people that were involved in this plot. Ukraine invested a lot

in being resilient to things like cyber attacks. It actually wasn't easy, besides the SATCOM attack that Russia conducted early on. Ukraine as a country probably was, in my idea, a lot more resilient by 2022 when it came to cyber warfare and things of that nature. And now you're seeing behind Russian lines signs of irregular warfare, although it's hard to tell, obviously. You don't have great information coming out of there in regions like Kyrgyzstan and Zaporizhia. And you also see a host of sabotage attacks inside Russia, which we can only surmise what the origin of critical infrastructure sabotage that's taking place in cross-border attacks in Russia proper has been in the last two months. But I don't think it takes a lot of guesswork to assume that Ukrainians are likely the

ones doing it. I think in terms of what has Ukraine done in response from what they saw in 2014 to today, when we look at, again, the complete unpreparedness of the Ukraine for the conflict, and even some of the senior leaders testifying that they had like less than 10% of their forces available for mobilization at the time of the conflict. But that goes down to threat perception of not perceiving the conflict that's unfolding now and the conflict that unfolded back then as a reality. So I think that, first and foremost, has changed from the Ukraine mindset. Second is the support that the West has provided to Ukraine in the interim and through the training missions that were executed out West.

And it will allow Ukraine to fight the ongoing conflict in Donbass, also reform its military after several decades of neglect. Second, the way in which it was drawn out between 2021-22, and really Russia slowly telegraphed this upcoming conflict, despite the months of denials, which again is by policy, the day before they actually invaded, denied it, any plans were afoot. We're using the same practices and we can see through those denials as just a form of it. But the way in which Russia so slowly built its forces for that invasion, I think also gave Ukraine a chance to then be prepared to respond. So the ability to be caught off foot like they were in 2014 was not there because of those years of preparedness, as well as the way in which it

was pretty gradual in its unfolding at the end of the year. I do want to go back to a point that I think was a great point that Mike was bringing up about when we talked about the irregular warfare aspects of being the shaping operations. And he mentioned some points about what was done before the conflict in terms of within Ukraine to prepare for that transition. And I think what we saw, the key success in previous conflicts was having that bevy of collaborators within Ukraine to prepare for that transition. And I think what we saw the key success in previous conflicts was having that bevy of collaborators within Ukraine, and then again, and from the other countries previously before that. And that allowed for that playbook to unfold and those political dealings to occur. Mike is pointing out that there's signs that Russia was not able to achieve that, and they did not achieve the same effect. Case in point is there's been talk of

Russia attempting a referendum in Kherson, the southern district in Ukraine, to have a similar way in which become the LPR and DPR become independent republics, or even like Crimea did back in 2014. And it has failed to materialize largely due to a failed list of willing collaborators to become the new officials in the region and to stage that. We see signs of resistance from the population. So I think the second aspect of that is the hardening of the Ukrainian population against the risk that Russia could pose to them. And therefore, the idea that they were split within the country between Western-leaning and Russian-leaning, I think, is definitely trying to shift from the past several years

of conflict. What I might add is that if we look at the Russian buildup for this particular war, it's a bit of a fascinating and puzzling case. The U.S. demonstrated that we are clearly an intelligence superpower. Whatever else you may think, our sort of access and insight into Russian planning proved phenomenal. And we shared that broadly, right? But to be fair, Russia was able to deceive Ukrainian political leadership to an extent. The military intelligence apparatus has clearly planned and began planning for the prospect of Russian invasion, but much of Ukraine's political leadership in the run-up to the war, and to be

honest, within weeks or frankly days of it, still assumed that this was a coercion campaign, and they got trapped in the bias of those assumptions and did preciously little to prepare in the run-up to the war until it was fairly late in the game. So it would be wrong to say that however you perceive the Russian organization for a large conventional war in Europe, which by all accounts they did everything to telegraph it, right? It was hard to find a prepared force for an interstate war that was more visually telegraphed than this in decades. Many countries, including the political leadership of the actual target, didn't necessarily believe this war was coming and that it's going to be anything other than this,

you know, sort of future cases. And to what extent maybe we are missing you know, sort of future cases. And to what extent maybe we are missing some of the successes of Russian IW in the run-up to this. You know, that maybe we ourselves won't be fooled, but the target country will. Or at the very least, they'll be fooled long enough that they'll begin making preparations relatively late. Kent, to build off your mention of Western training and assistance, you know, security force assistance came under a lot of criticism after the withdrawal from Afghanistan and after the collapse of the Afghan National Army. Could you talk about the impact of Western security force assistance from 2014 to 2022 and how that effort built out the Ukrainian military? And is that actually a security force assistance success story?

Yeah, that's a great point. And I think if you look at the joint multinational training group, Ukraine, by which the United States and its allies and other partners have been providing that assistance to Ukraine, both from a reform standpoint, increased NATO interoperability towards the more NATO model, to rebuild its defense structures, as well as to help its combat training preparation for the ongoing conflict. I think you see those deliberate steps that the Ukrainian government itself took in the years since 2014, as well as the commitment shown by its Western partners towards assisting with that. And while, of course, the West is not directly involved in the conflict now, when you

look at the material aid that we're providing them to continue the conflict and respond to the needs they're demonstrating to us, as announced by the president on regular intervals and other Western leaders of what kind of aid the military are providing them, is fueling Ukraine's ability to respond. So I think in terms of analysis and security force assistance, I think that the fact that it's an ongoing conflict and the fact that Ukraine is ultimately developing its own picture of its defense for its country, I think has been a model in which we've been able to reinforce their ability to respond to this crisis. I guess from my perspective, I would add that I think the training had a real impact, at least probably at the tactical level.

But a lot of the things that I heard in the run-up to the war were actually very much a mixed picture in terms of folks involved in training the Ukrainian military. There were a lot of improvements across the board, but there were also significant structural kind of deficits or issues or challenges the Ukrainian military had yet to advance. I think that what we can interpret from Ukrainian performance in the last three months is actually very much a success story for foreign external defense. Ukrainian performance in the last three months is actually very much a success story for foreign external defense. First, we dumped a tremendous amount of weapons into Ukraine without knowing if that would aggregate towards success or if Ukrainians would be able to distribute them, use them effectively, and they showed that they could. Operator, of course, really matters, as you find out with a lot of systems. If you look at Ukrainian performance across the board,

you see how much operators differentiate themselves with the exact same set of capabilities as militaries. Of course, there's a lot to be said for intangibles like resolve and motivation. But looking at the military as a whole and U.S. involvement, three things probably can be said. First, years of investment in training by the United States and other countries in Ukraine probably was a shaping factor in the role, although we should not take credit for Ukrainian success too much there. Second, that the weapons we provide Ukraine had a very important role. And one of Russia's biggest mistake was discounting their effectiveness and effectiveness of U.S. support, which is really puzzling because we literally told them that we would do this

in the run up to the war and that it would really shape the military outcomes of fortunes. And they were so hubristic, they didn't believe that this was going to happen. I'm just trying to interpret what you're saying. We try to say things like, we're giving them anti-tank systems and they will destroy your tanks, you should be deterred. And Russia was like, this is not an effective deterrent. So what I think the interaction was, although there was a general consensus that Ukraine was unlikely to win the conventional phase of the conflict, right? And most Ukrainians believe this, too.

It's only after the war began and Russia started doing very poorly that I've seen a lot of people emerge and sort of Monday morning explain that they always knew what the score was going to be in the Sunday game. But the truth is that, you know, our belief was, I think, that Ukraine would do very well in countering a Russian attempted occupation, and that Russia would ultimately fail in the contest of wills, just not in the conventional phase, but in the irregular phase of the war. And instead, those outcomes end up being more reversed. Fine. That's a much better story from my point of view. But we made it very clear to Russia that this is what we were going to do, that any prospect of occupation, they would be faced with tremendous losses in attrition. And we're unlikely to be successful.

And they discounted this. This is one of our biggest mistakes. And they discounted how much Western support could aggregate if you had a sort of resilient and motivated Ukrainian force fighting back. resilient, and motivated Ukrainian force fighting back. And then the last part, which we can't get into but has been sort of splashed all over the media, but we have to comment, it's very clear that there's considerable U.S. support, direct support, for Ukraine in this war, right, and that Ukrainian performance in some part is shaped or affected by it. And the extent of it we don't know, but D.C. is not very good at keeping secrets from what I can read in New York Times and Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. So a lot of that seems to be out there. To what extent that's true, no idea. And do we think that Russia is going to continue down this conventional road that they've been struggling so far on?

Or will they abandon that in favor of a more irregular approach? Or do you think they're married to this now? First, I want to follow up on a point, and then I'll hit your question. I think the point that Mike's been pulling out about the way in which Russia changed the conflict, the nature of the conflict, I think would be a very interesting case study, probably a little further down the road. It might be too early to analyze, but for a further analysis of why Russia switched to the more conventional aspect of the conflict, what was the role, if any, changing their calculus from the ways in which Ukrainian Western leaders did expose what was going on or from their standpoint of what Russia was planning to do, and that changed the irregular warfare to a more

conventional approach that Russia implemented. I think it's very interesting to see what may have triggered that in Russian calculus once we see this war evolve a little bit more. Yeah, so there's a great point about now that Russia's gone this more conventional path, is there a way back? I think it'd be very hard-pressed because, as we discussed, the coercion of a massive military response was always a key aspect of these political warfare campaigns to allow the early warfare aspects to be successful. And now that they've exploited the conventional side, the really only option is to even go higher up in the conventional side and be more higher end. The tools that were to use or the way to scale up the conflict, to scale back down and bring it back to the more population-centric approach or information-centric approach would be much more difficult based on the current conditions it's set. So I feel like the chances to double down in this current conflict, that does not mean that the opportunity

is not there, especially if the shaping of public opinion were to change over the next months to years as this conflict continues in another conflict zone. If those public opinions were to shape, we do see a very strong global opinion in defense of Ukraine and against Russia right now. But if that opinions were to change, and therefore there'd be more of a divide in different pockets of Europe and other places, then I think it would still make conditions possible for a more irregular warfare approach for Russia. So I want to ask you, what are the implications of this conversation and irregular warfare used against Ukraine and Ukraine's counter and use of irregular warfare for policymakers, practitioners, and academics,

especially as a situation that remains fluid? Yeah, I think the lessons that we can learn from the way that this 2022 conflict has unfolded has been exactly the ways in which the, quote, playbook that we believe Russia has been following did not succeed or what they've gone off the playbook and the way that the conflict is currently unfolded. And what were the reasons for that, either from a Ukrainian standpoint or Ukrainian preparedness to respond to Ukrainian preparedness militarily or even counter narrative in which they were able to achieve in response to the Russian actions or anything that the West or the broader international community was able to play in shifting Russia off of that playbook and disrupting the flow

of those regular warfare tactics that we expected to see. I think learning the lesson of how that may have led to this can be very helpful to analyze this going forward. Because again, from my lens, we've seen the exact same steps being taken even today in some of the aspects of the regular warfare campaign that the Russians are undertaking. In terms of the way Ukraine is responding in the conventional war, I think, to your point, this is very different, the way in which we were supporting the war in Afghanistan and the way the West is currently supporting this conflict.

So I think there's lots to be learned about the different ways in which we're providing assistance. There's not a single answer to how we can support a foreign nation. But what are the different effects that can be achieved from a different approach from this standpoint? I think my takeaways are first that when you look at a conflict like this and you look at your various efforts to prepare for it and shape it, what's interesting to me is that you don't actually know what will prove critical or decisive at the end. Most of the money always goes to the conventional side of the equation. What you can find is that it is whoever foiled the irregular campaign, the intelligence orchestrate campaign, that was more decisive in the initial phase of the war than what happened

on the conventional side of the equation. And I'll take time to unpack and in the conversations that i have to find myself in when folks in the regular warfare community always advocate for the relevance in a defense establishment that's focused on great powers and great power wars they're trying to find relevance in it and try and figure out how can they explain what sort of outcomes they can shape and always trying to find strategic outcomes. And it's often very hard to get those to draw a direct, you know, connect the dot between what different parts of the community can do and strategic effects. The truth is that sometimes it's a much straighter line, as Ukraine shows. And in other cases, understanding that shaping the conditions and the environment is really

essential and actually can prove decisive for what happens later on in conventional operations. And one of the challenges is that you don't know what will prove to be the most effective or determining aspect of your actions and your operations. Ukraine is a great case. We actually have to throw a lot at the board. And from the standpoint of foreign external defense, my other point, well, obviously it helps to pick the right partners. And maybe that's a lot of that. So case selection probably drives outcomes. But that being what it is, I think we demonstrate effectively that in this

case, we could surge it. And if we build the institutional framework, we could actually integrate with an ally or partner to be much more effective in this space and to be much more effective. And also what the regular warfare can contribute to a fight either before or during. But a lot of requires actual investment. It requires their preparatory work. And from my point of view, Ukraine probably will be seen as a tremendous success story. And from my point of view, Ukraine probably will be seen as a tremendous success story. And since you principally assume that most of your conflicts with great power adversaries are going to be over allies, right, or allies and partners, there are lessons to be learned here.

But as always, cautionary note, specific context. Don't overgeneralize lessons from the specific context. Have to understand what was key in this case versus what can be drawn from this as a lesson and used in others. Folks hungry for lessons always want to grab them and immediately run away and apply them to Taiwan or whatever their situation is. And I have no doubt that in this coming year, I will read at least a thousand articles of how this informs U.S. foreign external defense for Taiwan. So in this regard, I urge a lot of caution. But other than that, I think there's a tremendous amount we have to learn. And remember, probably the most interesting aspects of this conflict were early on, and we know the least about those early days. I will add to what Mike said about the ability to generalize this to other

theaters or other potential conflicts and absolutely to double down on the nuances between the individual states or the individual situations that we're going to be talking about. I do think with Russia, and especially with the Russian regime that we see today, there is a lot of consistency. And it's fair to assume that another consistent approach to this Russian conflict, as long as we see the current Russian regime, those same dynamics, though, aren't necessarily applied to another country or another country's approach in another conflict. I mean, the most difficult thing when you study warfare, as you've highlighted, is it's very context-specific. It makes it very hard to come up with generalizations. But I will say, when you look at the context of Russia's activities here in Ukraine in 2022, in 2014, in Georgia, and

previous historical examples, but specifically with Ukraine recently, are there any informational, diplomatic, or military tools or approaches that the U.S. or its partners should specifically adjust that we can say, these are things that we fell short on and we should adjust these moving forward when working in the context of a potential Russian threat to our partners and allies? I think one thing in which the West has been extremely strong since this conflict occurred is a consistency of messaging and a consolidation of messaging across. I think when we were equally taken aback in 2014 to the conflict, and it did take a while to come to a more consolidated response or decision on response. As Mike

pointed out, there was some dissension within Western allies about the threat perceived by Russia in the beginning of 2022. But I think you've rapidly seen in the post of that, obviously not wholesale consolidation, but a very strong consolidated response. And I think that has been very effective in the ability for us to influence from the outside, of course, Ukraine is driving the train here in this conflict. Michael Kaufman, Kenta Benedictus, thank you so much for being with the Irregular Warfare podcast today. This was a great conversation and I think very enlightening for our audience. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks a lot. Wonderful conversation and thanks for having me on your program.

a lot. Wonderful conversation. And thanks for having me on your program. Thank you again for joining us for episode 56 of the Irregular Warfare podcast and part two of our two-part series on irregular warfare in Ukraine. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Laura and Shana discuss the book Blood Money, How Criminals, Militias, Rebels, and Warlords Finance Violence, with Dr. Margaret Senke and retired Special Agent John Kassara. Following that, Laura and a new member of the team, Jeff Faneuf, will discuss the book, The Bin Laden Papers, with General David Petraeus and the book's author, Dr. Nellie LaHood. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode.

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