If Russia invades Ukraine, what will be its capabilities and objectives? Think tanks engaged in military simulations. Here are their main conclusions.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
conquer or occupy
In a recent debate hosted by the Atlantic Council, a former defense minister of Ukraine, Andrii Zagorodniuk, argued that Russia does not yet have enough troops on Ukraine’s borders for the invasion to have place “in the next few days”. “We are talking about several weeks, they have almost no military hospitals, for example,” said Mr. Zagorodniuk, who was in post in 2019-2020.
But Tyson Wetzel, a US Air Force Lt. Col., believes that if the goal is to gain territory quickly and then negotiate a new border in eastern Ukraine, without occupying all Ukrainian territory conquered, the current Russian forces are sufficient. “It could be a way of formally annexing the Donbass,” said Ben Connable, a political scientist at the RAND think tank who led a 2020 assessment of Russian military capabilities abroad.
This RAND report precisely described an invasion scenario from eastern Ukraine to the city of Kharkiv. Donbass is a region of Ukraine that has partially escaped the Kiev government since 2014 thanks to Russian military support.
The Belarusian right wing
Another possibility would be to encircle Kiev by taking advantage of Russian military maneuvers in Belarus scheduled between February 10 and 20. “It could still be a bargaining chip here,” Lieutenant-Colonel Wetzel said on Tuesday. The Belarusian army could protect the right flank of Russian troops. An attack on Kiev could also be a diversion forcing Ukraine to strip the eastern front. »
Cut the Dnieper
In 2014, the Russians unsuccessfully attempted to take the city of Mariupol, located just south of Donbass. This time they could attempt to connect Russia and Crimea by invading southeastern Ukraine to the Dnieper River. “It would simplify Russian logistics in the region,” Lieutenant-Colonel Wetzel observed on Tuesday. The only problem is that ideally there should be an amphibious landing west of Mariupol, and at the moment there are only six troop carriers in the area with a total capacity of 2100 soldiers. It is not enough. »
A December report by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) noted that the conquest of southwestern Ukraine could block trade on the Dnieper, which is vital for the Ukrainian economy. An invasion of southwestern Ukraine would likely stop south of the city of Zaporizhia, according to debate participants from the Atlantic Council and the ISW report.
Surprise
Unlike her colleagues, Olesya Tkacheva, a political scientist at the Flemish Free University of Brussels who in 2017 published for RAND an analysis of Russia’s military performance in Ukraine in 2014, believes that the attack will not come now or in February, because Russian military doctrine favors surprise.
“It could have been in September or early January, but not now, because everyone is expecting it. RAND’s 2017 analysis found that the invasion of Crimea was successful, but not that of Donbass because the objectives, including the conquest of Mariupol, were not achieved.
Link with Transnistria
An even more ambitious option would be to occupy the entire Ukrainian coastline to build a bridge between Russia and Transnistria, a region of Moldova that escapes government control, just like Donbass. “There are Russian troops in Transnistria who could attack eastward,” Michael Kofman, of the CNA think tank (which operates the US Navy’s Naval Analysis Center), observed at the Atlantic conference. Council.
The problem then would be to conquer Odessa, but Mr. Connable thinks it might be enough to starve Odessa until Ukraine accepts the fait accompli. Mme Tkacheva believes that an invasion extending beyond eastern Ukraine would be difficult to justify to the Russian public, because that of Donbass was based on defending the region’s 500,000 Russian passport holders.
Olympic Games
In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia in the early morning of August 8, the opening day of the Beijing Olympics. The second Beijing Games open on Friday 4 February. In December, a report by the military analyst at the Heritage Foundation think tank argued that the opening of the Olympics could again be exploited to diminish media attention on Russian actions.
“I don’t think Russia wants to hide behind the Olympics like in 2008, especially since China is an even more valuable ally now and such a diversion would be unwelcome,” Mr. Connable said.