No maps, no bullets, old guns, Putin’s catastrophic war in Ukraine

Their they never had a chance.
Scrambling through cratered farmsteads, troops of the Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, med kits or working walkie-talkies.

Just a few weeks ago they had been workers and truck driverswatching an endless display of supposed Russian military victories on home televisions before being drafted in September.

Now they were piled atop crammed armored vehicles, trudging through fallow fall fields with half-century-old Kalashnikov rifles and practically nothing to eat. Russia had been at war for nearly a year, but her army looked less prepared than ever.

In interviews with this newspaper, members of the brigade said that some of them had just fired a weapon before and also they had almost no bullets. Much less air cover or artillery. But they were not afraid: they would never fight, their commanders had promised them.

Only when shells began crashing around him, tearing his comrades to pieces did he noticeand they realized how they were deceived.

Lying on the ground, an enlisted Russian soldier named Mikhail recalled opening his eyes in surprise: the mangled bodies of their comrades scattered across the field. Her shrapnel had also ripped open her belly. Desperate to escape, she said, she crept into a grove of trees and tried to dig a trench with her bare hands.

Of the 60 members of his platoon near the eastern Ukrainian town of Pavlivka that day in late October, about 40 were killed, Mikhail said, by telephone from a military hospital outside Moscow. Only eight escaped without injury.

“This is not a war,” Mikhail said, forcing himself through heavy breathing. “It is the destruction of the Russian people by their commanders”.

Vladimir Putin’s war was never meant to be like this. When the CIA chief traveled to Moscow last year to warn of an invasion of Ukraine, he was greeted by a hopeful Kremlin, with the national security adviser boasting that the military was enough strong to face even the United States ..UU.

The Russian invasion plans, obtained by the New York Times, show the military would have to travel hundreds of miles across Ukraine and succeed in a few days. Officers have been told to pack their uniforms and medals for military parades in Kiev.

But instead of that resounding victory, with tens of thousands of soldiers dead and parts of his army in shambles after 10 months of war, Putin faces something entirely different: the greatest human and strategic calamity of his nation since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

insect cascade

How could one of the most powerful militaries in the world, led by a celebrated tactician like Putin, have failed so badly against its much smaller and weaker rival? To piece together the answer, Russian government propaganda emails, documents and directives were examined, and officials and Putin confidants were interviewed.

The Times investigation found a surprising cascade of errors which began with the Russian leader isolated in the pandemic, obsessed with his legacy, convinced of his brilliance and continued after conscript soldiers like Mikhail were sent to slaughter. At every turn, the faults were deeper than previously known.

In interviews, Putin’s associates said that he fell into a spiral of self-aggrandisement and anti-Western zealwhich led him to make the fateful decision to invade Ukraine in near-total isolation, without consulting experts who saw the war as sheer madness.

Aides and stooges stoked Putin’s grudges and suspicions, a vicious cycle that one former confidant likened to the radicalizing effect of a social media algorithm. Even some of the president’s closest advisers remained in the dark until the tanks started moving. As another longtime confidante put it, “Putin decided the thought of him would be enough.”

The Russian military, despite Western assumptions about its prowess, was badly compromised, gutted by years of theft. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been earmarked for the modernization of the military. under the command of Putin, but corruption has trapped thousands of officers.

A military contractor has frantically decided to hang huge patriotic banners to hide the decrepit condition of a major Russian tank base, hoping to fool a delegation of senior officers. Visitors were even barred from entering to use the bathroom, he said, lest they discover the ploy.

Once the invasion began, Russia squandered its hold on Ukraine through blunders. It was based on old maps and bad information to launch its missiles, surprisingly leaving the Ukrainian air defenses intact, ready to defend the country.

Russia’s vaunted hacker teams have tried and failed to win in what some officials are calling the first major cyberweapons test in a real war.

Russian soldiers, many surprised they were going to war, used their cell phones to call home, which allowed the Ukrainians to track and eliminate them. And the Russian military was so heavy and sclerotic that it didn’t adjust, even after taking heavy losses.

While their planes were being shot down, many Russian pilots flew as if they were facing no danger, almost as if they were at an air show.

Driven by her grand ambitions, Russia has conquered more territory than it could defend, leaving thousands of square kilometers in the hands of tiny groups of malnourished fighters, undertrained and underequipped.

Many were conscripts or ragtag separatists from divided eastern Ukraine, with 1940s gear or little more than Internet printouts that described how to use a sniper riflesuggesting that the soldiers learned to fight as they went.

With new weapons from the West in hand, the Ukrainians defeated them, but the Russian commanders continued to send waves of ground troops in absurd assaults, again and again. “no one will stay alivesaid a Russian soldier who realized this after being ordered to march directly into the sights of Ukrainian artillery. In the end, he and his demoralized companions refused to go.

Putin has divided his war into fiefdoms, leaving no one powerful enough to challenge him. Many of his fighters are commanded by people who they are not even part of the armysuch as his former bodyguard, leader of Chechnya and mercenary boss who provided catering for Kremlin events.

When the initial invasion failed, the fragmented approach only deepened, undermining an already disjointed war effort. Now Putin’s fragmented armies often function as rivals, competing for weapons and sometimes turning brutally against each other.

One soldier recounted how the clashes turned violent, with a Russian tank commander deliberately charging at his alleged allies and blow up their checkpoint.

From the very first days of the invasion, Putin admitted this in private the war was not going according to plan. During a meeting in March with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Putin admitted the Ukrainians were tougher “than they told me,” according to two people close to the meeting. “This probably it will be much more difficult than we thought. But the war is on their turf, not ours. We are a great country and we have patience”.

People who know Putin say he is ready to sacrifice lives and untold treasures for as long as necessaryand in a rare face-to-face meeting with Americans last month, the Russians wanted to send a strong message to President Biden: No matter how many Russian soldiers are killed or wounded on the battlefield, Russia will not surrender.

A NATO member has warned his allies that Putin is willing to accept dead or wounded until 300,000 Russian soldiersabout three times their estimated losses thus far.

Just days after facing the setback of war from normally friendly leaders in September, Putin doubled down on the invasion, calling in hundreds of thousands of men in a plan that was supposed to swing the war in Russia’s favor but instead provoked growing anger at home.

Shortly thereafter, hundreds of Russian soldiers were killed outside Pavlivka, including comrades Mikhail had recruited into the 155th’s blind advance.

“Legs, guts. i mean meat. Just meat,” said another platoon member, Aleksandr, from a hospital in Russia. “I know that sounds awful, but it can’t be described any other way. people have turned into burgers”.

Aleksandr recounted how he and his fellow recruits had asked their instructor in Russia what they could learn about how to shoot a gun and become a soldier in the few weeks before being sent to Ukraine.

“He was honest: ‘Nothing,'” Aleksandr recalled the instructor’s response.
​THE NEW YORK TIMES