Is Putin involved in strategic battlefield decisions in Ukraine invasion?

Read More

It is Vladimir Putin’s war – or least that’s how the west characterises it. Not only was the decision to invade Ukraine made by the Russian president, but western military officials now say Putin is engaged in battlefield decision making “at the level of a colonel or brigadier” as the Donbas offensive in eastern Ukraine unfolds.

In part, the observation is not very surprising. Any idea that the Russian president – as commander in chief – would not be involved in the battle plans, particularly once the war in Ukraine started going badly, would be impossible to believe. Autocratic regimes tend not to favour military decentralisation.

But it also comes at a point of embarrassing military failure. An attempt to encircle Ukrainian forces last week resulted in nearly 500 killed and the loss of over 70 armoured vehicles in a disastrous attempt to cross the Siverski Donets river, which took place, western sources said, not under the cover of darkness but in broad daylight .

So if the western claim is to be believed, Putin would have approved the battle plan. Decision making at the “level of a colonel or brigadier” implies a brigade level command of two or more battalions, the movement of 1,500 or more troops: precisely the kind of force that tried and failed to ford the strategic river.

Prof Sir Lawrence Freedman from King’s College London, said he judged the military statement about Putin’s level of involvement to be plausible: “Putin has chased the military operation, first by giving very little notice he would launch an attack and then pushing hard for quick wins. That’s particularly been the problem with the second stage of the war, in the Donbas.”

Yet claims about Putin goes further still. It brings to mind the idea of a political leader impatient of, or no longer trusting their generals – most notably the downfall of Adolf Hitler, who in the latter stages of the second world war, as described by biographer Ian Kershaw, refused to heed his generals’ calls for tactical retreats in the east and insisted instead upon overoptimistic counteroffensives, as in the Ardennes in the winter of 1944/5.

But there are no shortage of other examples. In the early stages of the Vietnam war, US president Lyndon Johnson and his administration began a bombing campaign aimed at communist North Vietnam in 1965 called Rolling Thunder, which defined the targets that could be attacked to avoid offending China or Soviet Russia. The confused strategy was an attempt to break the resolve of Hanoi by bombing lesser targets from the air, and a step in an escalating war that the US would ultimately lose.

In the run up to the final Iraq war, the country’s dictator Saddam Hussein decided that the country’s air force should play no part in the war, with its planes “in palm groves or buried them in the sand” according to an account in Foreign Affairs written three years after the war. The belief was the Iraqi air force would be no match for the western invaders – and that it was best saved for a post war future under his leadership that never transpired after the capture of Baghdad.

But despite all the stories of meddling, the relationship between political leadership and military command has always been complex and at times fraught. Freedman, also the author of a soon to be published book on the subject called Command, says military decisions during war time are “intensely political” and that it is up to political leaderships to “set objectives, push senior commanders, ask questions”.

The goal, Freedman argues, is to ensure there is “a dialogue between politicians and the military” and to that leaders are not overruling legitimate objections or trying to micromanage the battle-plans at a time when they should be concentrating on wider diplomatic or political strategies.

For Putin, as the war in Ukraine approaches its twelfth week, the question arises whether the Russian leader has the time to focus on all that is before him if he is embroiled in tactical decision making in a Donbas offensive that is stalling – and the impact that further military failures would have on his standing.

In the past few days some Russian military bloggers and experts have begun to question the strategy. One popular Russian blogger who uses the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarzky on his Telegram channel wrote: “Until we know the name of the ‘military genius’ who put a battalion tactical group by the river and he doesn’t answer for it publicly, then there will never be reforms in the army.”

It turns out the writer might have been criticising Putin himself.