The Daily - A Tactical Disaster for Russia’s Military

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Three months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one of the biggest surprises has been the inability of the Russian military to achieve some of its basic goals. One clear example: A failed attempt to cross the Donets river in eastern Ukraine earlier this month left hundreds of Russian soldiers dead. Its aftermath is raising doubts in Russia, even among the military’s most ardent supporters.Guest: Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The disastrous Russian attempt to cross the Donets river resonated with some pro-Russian war bloggers who did not appear to hold back in their criticism of what they said was incompetent leadership.It appears that much of the military culture and learned behavior of the Soviet era has repeated itself in the war in Ukraine, including corruption in military spending and the longstanding practice of telling government leaders what they want to hear.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. Three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the biggest surprises has been the inability of the Russian military to turn the tide of the war. military to turn the tide of the war. Today, my colleague Anton Trinovsky on a clash that left hundreds of Russian soldiers dead and how its aftermath is raising doubts inside Russia, even among the military's most ardent supporters. It's Monday, May 23rd. So Anton, tell me about this most recent development you've been reporting on. So it's a Russian attempt to cross a river gone terribly wrong. The Russians earlier in May tried to cross the Donetsk River in eastern Ukraine in an effort to encircle Ukrainian troops that were stationed in that area.

This is part of the battle for the Donbass, that eastern Ukrainian region you've been hearing so much about that the Russians are trying to take control of. So the Russian military sent hundreds of troops, dozens and dozens of tanks and other armored vehicles to the river to try to get across using these temporary pontoon bridges that the military is trained to set up. The problem was they were doing this in an area that was very much vulnerable to Ukrainian artillery fire. And so as these forces showed up at the river and paused to try to set up that temporary crossing, they became sitting ducks bunched up there along the water for the Ukrainian attack. And what the satellite images show us is that dozens of these Russian military vehicles there were hit, were destroyed by the artillery fire. You can see tanks and other vehicles partially submerged in the river, burnt out and abandoned in the woods.

This was really one of the most disastrous Russian tactical efforts that we know of in this whole war. What Western analysts are saying now is that more than 400 Russian troops were killed or injured in this failed crossing. More than 80 military vehicles were lost. It really shows us the kind of tactical miscues that this Russian offensive continues to suffer from. Right. We've seen a lot of this throughout the course of the war. I mean, I'm thinking of the Moskva, the Russian warship that the Ukrainians sank in the Black Sea, and that huge Russian convoy coming down toward Kiev that took such heavy losses.

And all of this, you know, from an army that we all thought before the war was just incredibly formidable. What was the explanation for what went so wrong in this case? So we're now almost three months into the war, and the Russians have still not accomplished one of Putin's seemingly basic objectives here, which is to take control of the Donbass. And what a lot of Western officials and analysts are saying is that this disastrous river crossing shows how much pressure the Russian military command is under to make progress in that effort. You wouldn't do something this risky if you weren't under immense pressure from the top to show progress. And it's risky because you're inherently vulnerable when you're crossing a river? Exactly, exactly. And then maybe even more interestingly, actually, to me, watching all this unfold has been the reaction from the Russian supporters of the war.

In particular, from this stable of military bloggers, these reporters, many call them propagandists, who are embedded with the troops, typically posting videos of Russian heroism and how horrible the Ukrainians are, they very rarely will criticize something that the Russians are doing. But after this river crossing failed so miserably, several of them came out and really started venting their frustration about the many different problems the Russian campaign has faced. And what did they say about this battle, Anton? So they said that it was a total disaster and also that it shows the incompetence of

the Russian forces. So I would say that's the biggest difference in the analysis here, sort of for Westerners looking at this, you see generals being under a lot of pressure. These Russians look at this and just see sheer incompetence. You know, for example, one of these guys who goes by Starsha Eddy on Telegram, the social messaging app, wrote, how much of an idiot do you have to be to do this kind of thing after three months into the war to drive a big column of armored vehicles and then concentrate it at a point that's vulnerable to artillery fire? And then he goes on to write that actually this isn't idiocy, this is direct sabotage.

These bloggers you're describing, do they work for the Russian military? Not officially, but they are pretty what you read from these quasi-independent bloggers on Telegram, where they have hundreds of thousands, in some cases, several million followers, posting several times a day, vividly describing the battle, but obviously in a very filtered kind of way. They're sort of pro-government Russian influencers in the military sphere. That's a, yes, a very good way to put it, very much influencers. And what were other influencers saying? Another one who goes by Vladlen Tatarsky wrote that until we get the last name of the military

genius who did this and he answers for this publicly, no reforms in the army will actually Здравствуйте, мои уважаемые зрители. о его сомнении с этим пропуском речи и о том, что он говорит о состоянии военной войны в России. Здравствуйте, мои уважаемые зрители! На дворе у нас 13 мая, и сегодня мой первый материал... Его имя Юрий Подоляка. Он начал его видео, говоря... Вы знаете, я долго молчал, я долго пытался достучаться до разных... Вы знаете, я был тихим на долгое время, он говорит,

я пытался разобраться с разными людьми на долгое время, You know, I've been silent for a long time, he says, I've been trying to reach out to different people for a long time, but I see that some people can only be reached by going public. This failed crossing of the Donets River was the last straw for him that caused him to now want to go public about all these problems that he's seeing in the Russian military. He's saying that... Even as Russian officials say publicly that everything is going according to plan in what the Kremlin calls its special military operation in Ukraine, he says that in fact there are lots and lots of problems that it feels like to him the leaders of the Russian military are ignoring. He says there's a catastrophic lack of drones and night vision equipment on the battlefield that are making Russian soldiers essentially blind to what the Ukrainians are doing.

And with the drones, you know, he says that there's actually been money raised to buy more drones, but that they can't import them from abroad right now. So they're stuck with what they have and they don't have drones. Absolutely. You know, the Russian military has its own drones,

but they've clearly not been good enough and not deployed at scale enough to really make that difference that they should be making on the battlefield. That's what I wanted to say in this material. That's all for now. Goodbye and I hope to see you in the evening. So, Anton, this is kind of amazing to me.

I mean, you know, throughout the war, we've really not seen much of any dissent from the Russian media. But this guy, I mean, he's not even really Russian media, right? He's this military influencer whose job it is to be pro-government in favor of the war. I mean, he's supposed to be spreading the party line, right? So I guess I'm wondering, what does it mean that he's talking this way? And is it dangerous for him to be doing that? Well, it is risky. I mean, it is risky these days in Russia to really say anything critical about the war effort. At the same time, those three guys that I quoted, they all continue very much to support the war. they all continue very much to support the war. But the fact that you have some of the loudest cheerleaders of the war effort going public with criticism like this and saying that these aren't just individual tactical mistakes, that the command of the war effort itself is somehow rotten or riddled with problems, that certainly is a signal that things are not

going well from the Kremlin's perspective. And yet another piece of evidence for that is that it's not just online that you're starting to see pro-Kremlin commentators, criticizing various aspects of the war effort. It's even starting to show up on the Kremlin's most important propaganda outlet, which is state television. So tell me about that. So Russian state TV has all these political talk shows where they're broadcast in prime time and you have political analysts, politicians, lawmakers, retired military officers come on and repeat and amplify the Kremlin's very paranoid, militaristic worldview. And what happened a few days ago is that a retired military officer came on who's known as a pretty conservative military analyst. And he gave a quite stunning indictment of the war effort and where Russia finds itself now on the international stage.

So, first he warns the guests of the show and the many people watching at home not to, quote, drink information tranquilizers. So, not to believe everything that makes you feel good about the idea that morale in the Ukrainian military is low, that the Ukrainians are on the verge of collapse, that the Russians will necessarily prevail. All of that does not correspond with reality, he says. He talks about low morale, hints at the fact that it's the Russian military that has low morale. That the Ukrainians are the ones who have a million people willing to fight, that they're fighting for their homeland,

and that they are getting more and more equipment from the West to carry on this fight. So he says, and you can see, you know, as he's saying this, the camera shows the guests around him kind of getting a little bit uncomfortable about what's going on, but he keeps talking and he says, actually, things will, quote, get worse for Russia. He notes that Russia is increasingly isolated Россия. Он отметил, что Россия вовсе больше и больше

изолирована на стадии мира. Он говорит, что «мы в полной геополитической изоляции, весь мир против нас, даже если мы не хотим признавать весь мир. И вот из этой ситуации надо выходить». The whole world is against us, even if we don't want to admit it. And the host of the show, Olga Skabeva, one of the most prominent pro-Kremlin television presenters in Russia, tries to interrupt him, and she says, What do you mean, we're isolated?

It's just the West that's against us. What about China? What about India? He responds, well, Even China and India's support is not exactly full-throated here. Pskobeva kind of goes in with the standard Kremlin line that Russia had no choice but to invade. Whereas Khodaryonok, the retired colonel speaking here, says... Russia's military, political and military-technical resources are limited in this conflict.

So it was a really kind of fairly benign analysis if you look at it from a Western perspective. But if you put yourself on the couch of a Russian who gets their news exclusively from state television, this is kind of a shocking thing to hear. Right. I think what's going on here is that the Kremlin throughout, even now, almost three months in, is saying the special operation is going according to plan. And that has become, just with every passing day, an ever more ludicrous thing to say, even to the Russian ear. more ludicrous thing to say, even to the Russian ear. And so I think what you're seeing right now is this very important trend happening in Russia, where even people who are in favor of the war, who like Putin and trust Putin and buy into this reasoning for why Russia should invade Ukraine, even they are starting to recognize

that the Russian war effort is running into some really serious problems. And this comes as people outside Russia are doing their own kind of second guessing of their understanding of Russia's military. Because leading up to this war, a lot of Western analysts and journalists, frankly, including myself, we all thought that the Russian military was a lot more powerful, a lot more effective than what we've seen in the last three months. So the question is, how did everyone get it wrong? We'll be right back. So Anton, we all thought the Russian military was this mighty fighting machine, but it didn't turn out that way.

Why? How did it get to where it is? So to answer that question, we have to go back to 2008, to the war with Georgia. Russia invaded Georgia in August of 2008 and fought a five-day war, quickly overwhelmed the much smaller Georgian military. But that war really threw a spotlight on some deep problems in a military that had essentially become this decrepit shell of the mighty Soviet Red Army. There were problems in communication so bad that officers were using their personal cell phones rather than the army communications equipment. There was failure in radio contact between ground troops and the Air Force, leading to some really serious friendly fire attacks.

Tanks and armored personnel carriers were breaking down. In fact, around that time, Army vehicles were so decrepit that repair crews were stationed roughly every 15 miles along their route. And there were so many morale problems in the military. Living conditions were really bad in many cases. So that was supposed to be a real turning point in what the Russian military was. Because it had become so obvious because this was their first international incursion since the collapse of the Soviet Union, right? As Putin ratcheted up his aggressive foreign policy and his bid to remake Russia as a great

power that has influence around the world and is respected around the world, a powerful military was really one of the key elements. So it was Putin back then in 2008 who helped launch an effort to really reform the military, make it into a leaner and more effective and more lethal fighting machine. Okay, so 2008 means that was eight years after Putin became president. And this reform really was kind of something he wanted to push through. What did he do? So the idea was, among other things, to kind of bring the Russian military into the digital age, to move on from that increasingly obsolete Soviet-era technology that the military was using,

really taking a lot of cues from that more nimble American military that Russian planners could see in action in Afghanistan and Iraq around that time, improve communication systems, improve artillery systems, very importantly, improve the command structure to kind of try to make it a less top-heavy military to give lower-level officers more authority in the way they have in Western militaries. So this was a huge undertaking. And Putin put one guy in charge of it all. His name is Anatoly Serdyukov, the defense minister at the time.

Russia poured billions upon billions of dollars into this. In fact, Russia has been spending more than 3% of its entire economic output on defense compared to the fact that most European countries have been struggling to spend 2% of GDP on defense. And you know, for much of the last decade, these reforms seem to be paying off. You turn on Russian TV and very frequently you see these dramatic missile launches showing off Russia's latest technology. You see these huge military exercises that Russia does regularly with tens of thousands of troops seeming to show Russia's newfound military might and prowess. They take this kind of imagery so seriously that the Russian Defense ministry even has its own television channel.

Okay, so there's this unbelievably glitzy display, right? It's really projecting Russian power. But what was going on underneath the surface? Well, underneath the surface, we now realize these reforms were not really taking hold. For one thing, that Soviet-style top-heavy command structure, as we look at the way the Ukraine war has been going, very clearly remains. We're seeing so many examples, like the river crossing

we talked about at the beginning of the show, that are showing that officers on the ground have very limited authority in making decisions. And clearly, a lot of these decisions are still being made at a very high level with limited flexibility on the ground that just makes it so hard for units to react to rapidly changing conditions. Because the guys who were ordinary soldiers can't troubleshoot. They can't do it on the fly. Exactly. And in this kind of fast-moving modern battlefield,

you need to have the people on the ground being able to make the decisions. And then secondly, corruption. That bane of post-Soviet Russia continues to plague the military. Anton, why was the corruption such a problem? Well, it just meant that all this money that was supposed to go to modernizing the military went to line the pockets of generals and colonels. There have been so many cases reported in the Russian state news media of colonels and generals being charged with

fraud and embezzlement on the scale of $13 million, $25 million, things like overstating the spending on contracts for satellites and other equipment and pocketing the difference. And of course, if that's what's being reported in the Russian state news media, what else is out there that isn't being reported publicly in Russia? Right. And that defense minister I talked about earlier, Anatoly Serdyukov, who was put in charge by Putin in 2008 to carry out those military reforms, well, he was fired a few years later for being involved in a corruption scandal. So that corruption really pervades the military. In fact, our colleague Neil McFarquhar did a great story about this a few days ago, and

he quotes a Western official saying that, in essence, in the Russian military, each person steals as much of the allocated funds as is appropriate for their rank. So a colonel steals this much, a general steals more. It really does feel like corruption is so deeply ingrained in the Russian military, it's essentially part of how the system functions still. There's kind of a manual for it. Exactly. So even Putin, this all-powerful leader who wants this reform really badly, can't get it because the corruption is just so entrenched and change just turned out to be

impossible. I mean, real change. So in the end, it was just the same old Russian army that it always had been. But why then did we think it was so great? I mean, how did we see it the way we did just three months ago? Well, you know, it had recorded some successes that were very visible to the outside world. Think about the annexation of Crimea in 2014, where the Russian military managed to take control of that peninsula without firing a single shot. Think about the intervention in Syria in 2015, where Russia used this combination of precision-guided missile strikes as well as brutal bombardment of Syrian cities to change the tide of the Syrian civil war, to keep Putin's ally Assad in power, and to essentially give Russia a seat at the table in the geopolitics

of the Middle East. Those were all instances where it seemed like Russia's military had in fact been modernized to something more resembling a 21st century force and was successful in carrying out political objectives for the Kremlin. But if you look more closely at those efforts, you see they were so different from what the Russian military is facing now. And of course, Crimea was geographically a very limited and politically kind of a special case. Syria, Russia was barely engaged on the ground, had dominance of the air space, was facing very little of a fight back. So in a sense, those engagements showed us some limited improvements by the Russian military, but they were also kind of a mirage if you think about the type of military Russia clearly needed to make the current invasion of Ukraine work out.

What we've learned here is that the part of the Russian military that's modern is in fact very small. And that Russia's military is kind of the same as it always was. But also that the enemy itself has changed. It's now all of Ukraine. And that military is bigger, it's better equipped, and it has all this help from the outside world. So it seems like that is actually making Russia's failure to modernize an even bigger problem for them now. Yes, definitely. And also, as you say, the fact that the Russians clearly didn't count on Ukraine getting this much help from the West also worked to the Kremlin's detriment. But I do want to add that Russia still has more cards to

play. It has huge resources still to draw on, both in terms of manpower and equipment. So one of the things that Putin hasn't done, as we've talked about before on this show, is he still hasn't officially declared war. He hasn't instituted any kind of larger draft to put the military on a real wartime footing. He could still do that. And at that point, if he's sending another 100,000 or more men into the fight, the fact that these military reforms didn't work out potentially don't mean all that much. Russia could still find ways to overwhelm Ukraine and win this war. win this war. Even though Russia is struggling now, we're not seeing any indications that the Russians are ready to fold here and go home. Right. Just because Russia's military isn't that modern doesn't mean it's going to lose.

Exactly. Anton, thank you. Thank you, Sabrina. On Friday, senior lawmakers in Russia's parliament introduced an amendment that would expand the pool of potential recruits to its military by eliminating the age limit for service. The change would allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to shore up the numbers of fighting forces without ordering a large-scale draft. Under the current law, Russian citizens must be aged 18 to 40 to sign a first-time contract.

The change would allow Russians older than 40 to sign contracts. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Sunday, President Biden arrived in Tokyo to begin the second leg of his diplomatic tour in Asia. The president will announce a new alliance focused on strengthening economic ties between the U.S. and Asian Pacific nations. The administration's plan, called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, will set standards for the digital economy, clean energy, and the global supply chain. It is also aimed at countering the influence of China in the region. Mr. Biden's plan comes five years after his predecessor, Donald Trump, withdrew the United States from a sweeping trade accord in the region negotiated by former President Barack Obama, leaving a void that China has

increasingly filled. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon-Johnson and Ricky Nowetzki, with help from Will Reed, Aastha Chaturvedi, Caitlin Roberts, and Mark George. It was edited by Michael Benoit and John Ketchum, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Alicia Baitube, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Serena Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.