Opinion: Russia blames its own dead soldiers

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Editor’s note: David A. Andelman, CNN contributor, two-time Deadline Club Award winner, Knight of the French Legion of Honor, author of A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen and blog about Andelman Unleashed. He was previously correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. See more opinions on CNN.

CN—

The war in Ukraine entered 2023 with its deadliest attack yet on Russian troops and an attempt by Moscow to shift most of the blame to its own dead soldiers.

Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day, a Ukrainian strike on the occupied town of Makiivka killed dozens of soldiers, with Russia’s Defense Ministry saying the use of its soldiers’ mobile phones revealed their locations.

Whether Russia lost 400 men as Ukraine claims, or 89 as Moscow claims, the outcome of the attack is the same: Russia’s highest death toll since the war began more than 10 months.

If the Russian account is accurate, it was the mobile phones that novice troops used in violation of regulations that allowed Ukrainian forces to target them most accurately. Ukraine, however, did not say how the attack was carried out. But the implications are broader and deeper, especially for how Russia is currently waging its war.

Makiivka’s strike underscores not only Ukraine’s Western-backed weapons capabilities, but also Russia’s colossal strategic mistakes, whether due to ignorance, incompetence or simple negligence.

Tellingly, days after the deadliest known attack on Russian servicemen, President Vladimir Putin called for a temporary ceasefire, citing the Orthodox Christmas holiday. The move was rightly dismissed by Ukraine and the United States as a cynical attempt to find respite amid a very poor start to the year for Russian forces.

As US President Joe Biden said about Putin, I think he’s trying to find oxygen.

Russian officials said four HIMARS rockets launched by Ukraine hit the vocational school where its forces were housed, apparently next to a major weapons depot. (Two more HIMARS rockets were shot down by Russian air defenses).

This narrative would appear to validate the continued, if not expanded, use of the HIMARS weapons systems that the United States has provided to Ukraine.

The satellite-guided HIMARS abbreviation for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System currently has a range of 80 kilometers. A longer range HIMARS of 300 kilometers has not yet been authorized, despite repeated calls from Ukraine. (The Biden administration has worried that the longer-range system could expand the war beyond Ukraine’s borders and lead to an escalation of hostilities.)

Meanwhile, Russia continues to store arms and ammunition in large quantities close to the troops they will provide and well within range of enemy weapons. Standard military practice dictates that large depots be dismantled and dispersed and located far behind enemy lines, even in Russian territory that Western powers have declared off limits to Ukrainian strikes.

Chris Dougherty, senior defense program fellow and co-director of the Gaming Lab at the Center for New American Security in Washington, told me that Russia’s inability to dismantle or relocate large weapons depots is largely a function of of the reality that their forces cannot adequately communicate.

Because of these poor communications, commanders would not know what reserves were available to them if supplies were widely dispersed.

This is a view shared by other experts. Poor communications security appears to be common practice in the Russian military, James Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told me in an email exchange.

To compound the problem, the UK Ministry of Defense said after the recent Makiivka strikes that the Russian military had a history of unsafe munitions storage long before the current war, but this incident highlights how unsafe practices occupations contribute to the high casualty rate in Russia.

The soldiers killed at Makiivka appear to have been recent conscripts, part of a larger picture of Russian soldiers sent to the front lines with little training and deeply substandard equipment and weapons.

Indeed, a number of the latest arrivals to the war are detainees from Russian prisons, released and immediately transferred to the Ukrainian front. One can only imagine how appealing the use of mobile phones would be to prisoners accustomed to years of solitary confinement with little or no contact with the outside world.

The mistakes made by the Russian military are now becoming so egregious and, as the Makiivka attack shows, so deadly for Russian forces, that some of Putin’s most ardent apologists have now begun to turn against the military establishment. .

Semyon Pegov, who blogs under the alias WarGonzo and personally received the Order of Courage from President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin two weeks ago, has attacked the Defense Ministry for its blatant attempt to smear blame by suggesting that c It was the troops’ own use of cell phones that led to the precision of the attack.

He wondered how the Ministry of Defense could be so sure that the location of soldiers housed in a school building could not have been determined using drone surveillance or a local informant.

He is not the only Russian war blogger to sow doubt. As expected, the responsibility for what happened in Makiivka began to be placed on the soldiers themselves, said a message on the Telegram channel known as Gray Zone, linked to the longtime ally of the Kremlin Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group. In this case, it is 99% a lie and an attempt to shift blame.

The question is when the blame will start shifting from the military to Putin himself, especially as he seems ill-prepared to change direction at the highest level. The latest change was the appointment of Sergei Surovikin as the first person to be placed in overall command of all Russian forces on the Ukrainian front, an army general formerly responsible for the brutal Russian bombardment of Aleppo in Syria.

A month earlier, the Ministry of Defense underwent a shake-up when Colonel General Mikhail Y. Mizintsev, known to Western officials as the Butcher of Mariupol, was appointed Deputy Defense Minister to oversee logistics, replacing the four-star general Dmitry V. Bulgakov, who had held the position since 2008. The location of the arms depot, adjacent to the Makiivka recruits, would probably have been under the supervision of Mizintsev.

Yet Putin’s favorite Sergei Shoigu remained defense minister as late as Saturday, before the Makiivka attack, telling his forces in a celebratory video: Our victory, like the New Year, is inevitable.

How long Putin can isolate himself and prevent blame from turning on himself is the key question in the wake of Makiivka. There is no indication that Ukrainian forces intend to reduce pressure on Russian forces east or south of their country as the war enters a new calendar year.

And there seems to be little suggestion that the West will relax its support for Ukraine. The United States and increasingly Europe, which recently pledged to increase its funding by $2 billion in 2023, seem determined to see Ukraine through this winter and beyond.

Just this week, the Biden administration announced that the United States was considering sending Bradley armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron also announced that he would send light tanks, although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had asked for heavier battle tanks to be sent. All of this puts German Chancellor Olaf Scholz under increasing pressure to add his mighty Leopard 2 tanks to the mix.

That’s an awesome weapon wishlist. And all in all, a very good start to the year for the forces of democracy.

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