Plain English with Derek Thompson - Five Reasons Putin’s War Was Doomed From the Start

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Russia’s military isn’t just a little bit bigger than Ukraine's—it has three times more armored vehicles; four times more ground forces; five times more tanks; and 10 times more aircraft. But for now, David is holding up against Goliath. How is this happening? And how long can Ukraine hold out? Russia military analyst Rob Lee and diplomacy expert Max Bergmann explain how Ukraine is shocking Russia—and the world. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Rob Lee and Max Bergmann Producer: Troy Farkas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today we're going to talk about Vladimir Putin's failure in Ukraine so far, and how Ukraine's military has shocked the world in the first three weeks of this war. Now, make no mistake, Russia poses an extraordinary threat to all Ukrainians. But Putin had a plan to seize Ukraine's capital, Kiev, in the first two days of Russia's invasion. He's clearly failed. Russia had a plan on paper to quickly conquer Ukraine, easily incorporated into an expanding Russian Empire. That's not happening. Putin thought he could roll his tanks down Ukrainian roads and the people of Ukraine would essentially give up, roll over, let it happen. Nope.

So to break down five key reasons why Ukraine is held up so well against Russia, I asked the military experts to help me make it all simple. My first guest is Rob Lee, a leading expert in Russian military affairs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Max Bergman, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Now, before we start, I want to provide a quick overview of where this war stands right now. Russia is intensifying its aerial assault on Ukraine and its capital, demolishing the city of Kharkiv in the northeast, and firing missiles into the capital of Kiev, which Putin is still trying to siege. Russian forces are advancing relatively quickly in the South as well, and they have responded to early setbacks by engaging in the horrifying bombing of

residential areas, knocking out homes, stores, and hospitals. But it is all coming at a terrible price for Russia as well. According to U.S. estimates, 10% of Russia's military assets have been destroyed, lost, or abandoned. That is an astonishing number. According to U.S. estimates, up to 4,000 or 5,000 Russian service members are now dead, including several major generals. That means in two weeks, Russia has lost almost as many people as the U.S. military lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. There are now widespread reports of morale problems in the Russian military, coordination problems, and communication problems. Ukraine has shocked the world. It is putting up a fight almost nobody expected, not Putin, certainly, but also not even American military experts.

Russia's military is not just a little bit bigger than Ukraine. It has three times more armored vehicles, four times more ground forces, five times more tanks, and ten times more aircraft. But for now, David is still holding up against Goliath. The rest of this episode is about why. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. There are five reasons why the Ukrainian army has shocked Russia and the world. so far, five key reasons why Putin's war has gotten bogged down so quickly. The first,

according to military analyst Rob Lee, is that Putin's initial goal in this war was catastrophically misguided. Basically, the political goals they're trying to achieve were just very difficult to achieve the military force. This is a topic we've touched on before in this podcast. Putin's initial goal was to invade and conquer Ukraine, to annex all of Ukraine, to use Ukraine as the first step in a new project to build a new Russian empire. But to do that, you kind of need Ukraine to want to be a part of the new Russian empire. And Ukraine definitely doesn't want that. So a very fundamental point is just basically, if you invade a country and the people don't want you to be there, right, on a popular level, there's really not that much you can do.

Unless you want to, you know, if you want to exterminate people, if you want to move them out of their forceably, which I don't think Russia's, you know, overall goal is do that. But ultimately, Ukraine is clear, even in the kind of Russian-speaking areas, right? Even the south of these cities are taken in Harsan, in Lutuple and other areas, we're seeing huge protests. And it's, you know, very quickly. And we're seeing sustained protests, right, on a daily basis. There are clearly lots of people in these areas who don't want to be part of Russia. They're Russian speaking and they say, you know, we don't want this. And ultimately, you know, Zolensky, he's not giving.

He's not backing down. He's not giving in. And ultimately, Ukraine's have rallied around that. And so as long as that's the case, right, as wrong as the will to fight. is with Ukraine, it makes it very difficult for Russia. Because clearly they were hoping that either there would be no resistance, that Ukraine's military was so ineffective, they could move the key very quickly. And also, I think they underestimated Zelensky.

They thought he'd probably surrender quickly. He wouldn't be able to stand up against us. And that Ukraine's, you know, would be, if not welcoming Russian invasion, it wouldn't be necessarily, you know, resisting that much. So reason number one for why this war has gone awry is that the overall strategy was hopeless from the start. Putin aimed to conquer a country that would roll over for him, led by a comedian president he thought would run and hide.

And instead, Putin got the fight of his life. That leads to the second reason why Russia has struggled more than anticipated. An unrealistic political objective led to an early strategy failure. The way they started this war was a very kind of odd way. I expected they're going to use a lot of force right away, a lot of fires, more artillery, all those kind of stuff. And they're going to focus on maximally defamation. defeating the Ukraine military in the first day or two, right? And they have the capability to do this,

and much greater greater since they did. But they didn't do that. So they're very restraint initially, that the Air Force really restrained initially. Typically, Rob says, he'd expect a war like this to begin very, very differently. Russia would blitz Ukraine, use missiles to knock out its air defense systems. In the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, he told me, Azerbaijan knocked out about half of Armenia's air defense and air force, not in the first four days, but in the first 40 minutes. That's not happening here. Instead, it appears that deliberately didn't use as much force as possible with the purpose of, you know, not trying to kill to be Ukrainians so that you can have some kind of long-term political solution that would be easier to achieve. And that was obviously based on very unrealistic, kind of optimistic kind of goals of what would happen, the amount of resistance they'd face.

They didn't think they needed this. Several years ago, Putin took Crimea, a peninsula in the south of Ukraine, basically without a fight. He apparently thought he could do the same thing here. So initially, he held back his missiles and sent the ground troops instead, as if they could just roll through the country right into the capital city. A part of it, too, is just the first day or two. The focus was, we're going to get to keep as fast as possible. We have an optimistic view of the amount of resistance we're going to face. And so instead of killing too many Ukrainian civilians or soldiers,

and I think that was one of the weird things, they deliberately tried to not inflict too many cattle in the Ukrainian military because I think they wanted to take Zelensky, half him to surrender to the country, and they thought it would be easier to be a long-term political solution, maybe regime change or something else, if he didn't kill that many Ukrainians than if you did. This strategy is changing now.

Russian missiles are falling on civilians, neighborhoods, and hospitals. Putin is shifting, as one past guest of this podcast said, from the Crimea model, roll into town without objection and just take over the place, toward the Chechnya model, bombed the local population into submission. But why did Russia have such a disastrous initial strategy anyway? This leads us to Rob's third point. Russian military leaders apparently convinced themselves that much Much of Ukraine actually wanted to be conquered.

They got drunk on their own disinformation. They certainly didn't expect you'd see large number of civilians taking up arms. They certainly didn't expect these cities would kind of barricade themselves, prepared to kind of fight block by block. And I think they still didn't expect that Zelensky would basically say, I'm going to stay here, I'm not leaving. You're going to have to come and kill me to end this war, right? That's at least what you're signaling.

I don't do this any way that the Russia expected that. maybe that's them kind of buying into their own kind of propaganda about this. Maybe it's the Italian services, you know, making mistakes, failing. Or maybe this is President Putin. You know, he's secluded in his own kind of kind of bubble. You know, how much is he, how much real information is he getting? Is he only kind of, you know, taking information that confirms his bias? It's hard to say.

But ultimately, that underpins the problem for Russia. Whereas in this kind of war, as long as Ukrainians resist, right? There's no way Russia can really achieve a satisfactory, is war. That's because you can't occupy a country that doesn't want to be occupied unless you're prepared to engage in permanent urban warfare against the local population. And that's the road Russia seems to be on. Even in cities that have technically fallen to the Russian military, we're seeing street protests almost every day. That's why more people are saying Putin has no path to victory here. Only off-ramps to bad outcomes, terrible outcomes, and catastrophic ones. To review, we've named

three reasons why Putin's war has failed so far. First, the original political objective was incredibly unrealistic. Second, that led to a failed initial strategy. And third, both the political objective and the initial strategy were fed by an information failure, a disinformation failure, the blowback of propaganda. Putin thought Ukrainians would give up, and instead they're killing thousands of his troops every week. The fourth key, Rob says, is a shocking lack of discipline and planning among the Russian troops,

which strongly suggests that until about two weeks ago, most of this military had no idea they were invading Ukraine. One is pretty clear a lot of people didn't know exactly you know weren't aware of this was going to happen i mean it was surprise morale is a problem um it also appears that i think also even higher ranking level guys it doesn't seem as though the planning was done that well and so if you know you're going to war right you're going to take the steps to make sure you're ready if it's if it's just a training exercise right you might just you know pin till it in and do whatever and not be that ready and so it's pretty clear that not just

junior soldiers though that's have an effect on morale and guys giving up but even higher ranking guys that their coordination issues that should have been done by, you know, staff officers, right? That crew wasn't done either, and that's another effect of just different units are kind of fighting in their war, not clear it's a really cohesive kind of fight. If your military doesn't know what's going on, from the junior soldiers to the generals,

it probably means they're not fighting in a very coherent way. And lo and behold, Russia's military is not fighting in a very coherent way. One of the big problems we've seen, and this is the real thing in the first week or something, So there was a really kind of disjointed effort, right? They weren't fighting in a joint manner. It wasn't very well combined arms.

Units were kind of doing their own things. It didn't appear as though that they were taking, you know, basic security precautions. So when a battalion moves, you have an advanced guard, right, so you can't have the entire battalion get, you know, any boys together. They weren't necessarily doing that. You had kind of small elements moving on their own. Supply convoys were not prepared for an environment where they might have, you know, uncertainty kind of happening, right?

They're just completely not ready for that. And so, you know, Russia's chief surprise, not that effective against Ukraine, but instead against their own soldiers, who clearly didn't know this was happening. One way Rob Lee sees this ongoing disorganization is in the mass deployment of tank units. The units they deployed, they deployed a lot of tank units more than they needed to do so. And so tank units are great for fighting other enemy armor, but they're very heavy in terms of logistics, fuel, spare parts, all that kind of support size is very difficult. And so we've seen a lot of, you know, Russian armed vehicles and tanks abandoned outside the roads,

clearly because they weren't, you know, prepared to logistically support them. Poor planning leads to abandon equipment. Abandoned equipment leads to frustrated soldiers. And frustration leads to fading morale. So this is our fourth explanation for Russia's surprisingly poor performance. By playing things close to the vest, Putin might have thought he was hoodwinking Ukraine, tricking Ukraine. But he wound up confusing his own troops instead. The fifth factor isn't about Russia.

It's about America. We have spent a billion dollars in the past year alone on surging tangible, practical, usable small arms and other munitions that are getting directly to the Ukrainian forces. That's Max Bergman. He's a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he studies Europe, Russia, and security affairs. This is going to provide lots of javelin missiles that are anti-tank weapons.

It's going to provide anti-air weaponry for when helicopters and planes are flying low to the ground. But then also just things like body armor and meals ready to eat so that soldiers have calories and can fight. These sort of basic things that are very practical, which are urgent in any sort of military conflict, are the things that we are right now bending backwards to get to Ukraine. Eight years ago, in 2014, Max was serving in the State Department under Obama when there was a revolution in Ukraine. That revolution sparked Russia's invasion of Crimea in southern Ukraine. America felt like it had to respond. So in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine, we have to remember the U.S. basically had no security relationship with Ukraine.

It was like $2 million a year for peacekeeping. And the Ukrainian military was basically this old Soviet military just sort of branched off. So they had to rely on Russian cell phones, for instance, on the front lines to coordinate their movements, which meant that the Russian forces that they were up against in 2014 could pinpoint where they were, and then fire artillery and destroy Ukrainian positions. So over the past eight years, the U.S. has stepped up in support of the Ukrainian military. Every year, we've sent hundreds of millions of dollars to, Ukraine in arms and resources, which has beefed up the Ukrainian military.

And that's what we're seeing now. There's a force that is far different than what Vladimir Putin faced when he fought Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 when he sent in Russian tanks. This is a different military and one that has been very focused on what the fight was going to be at hand, fighting Russia, and got eight years of U.S. military support in terms of training and then in terms of equipment. It sounds to me like Putin thought he was invading the Ukraine of 2014, but then he invaded the Ukraine that had in the last seven, eight years, received more than a billion dollars' worth of military equipment, more than a billion dollars worth of resources from the United States military,

and he was surprised by the resistance that he faced. Do you think that's a major element of Ukrainians, quote-unquote, surprising success in these early weeks. Look, I think it has to be seen as a significant factor and why Russia has stumbled here. That this is just a different military. And part of the reason that it's a different military is through the support that the United States and others have provided Ukraine over the last eight years. And working with Ukraine to reform its military, the training that's been provided. And then the basic systems to how to control and move forces, that was a lot of focus of initial U.S. efforts to give Ukraine situational awareness of a battlefield.

And now we're surging in weapons that are really giving Ukraine the ability to engage Russian forces with advanced weaponry. They're not using the kind of Soviet-era RPGs. They're using javelin missiles and laws, which are another European form of the same thing. And that is that are proving themselves on the battlefield as being incredibly impactful. So there it is. Your five-part explanation for Ukraine's shocking performance so far in this war. One, Putin's piss-poor political objective, two, his failed initial salvo, three, awful early

information, four, the discombobulation of the Russian military, and five, this eight-year story of the U.S. reinforcing the Ukrainian military. But there's one last thing I want to shout out, and it might be the single most important factor of all. It's the bravery of Ukrainians. When we look at the effectiveness of U.S. security systems, it has to start with the Ukrainians and their bravery and their willingness to stand on the battlefield to risk their lives, to stand up for their country. And that's the X factor that no one knew before the war, whether that would be there. And Vladimir Putin clearly underestimated. And I think no one could actually predict whether that was,

going to pan out. But the Ukrainians have stood and fought, they've stood and fought with incredible bravery. And that's making the United States over the last eight years look good for what it's done and providing security assistance to them. So I think it basically, in some ways, it starts and ends with the bravery of the Ukrainian people. On this last point, Rob Lee agrees. Ukrainians are showing that they're willing to fight, that they're willing to, you know, they're not willing to have their sovereignty infringe war. They're rallying together. One of the overall arguments from Putin is that Ukraine isn't a real country, right? It's just kind of this artificial construct. Well, Ukrainians certainly don't believe that because they're fighting and

dying for this construct they think is, you know, something serious. That's worth, you know, giving their life for. So they're really, I mean, again, one of the big takeaways of this war is that Ukraine has demonstrated a remarkable resilience and a remarkable ability to fight and adaptivity and creativity. All those things extremely impressive. And, you know, it's, that, that is the one, again, the reason Russia is not winning this war is because Ukrainians don't want them to. And that, that's the overall reason. That's why it's going to be hard for Russia to actually achieve anything long term.