WASHINGTON. Ukrainian soldiers blew up bridges to stop the advance of Russian ground forces. His pilots and air defense systems did not allow Russian fighters to conquer the sky. And a gang of savvy Ukrainian cyber-warriors is still defeating Moscow in the information war, drawing support at home and abroad.
To the surprise of many military analysts, Ukrainian forces are putting up tougher-than-expected resistance against Russian forces along and across front lines across a country the size of Texas, fighting with a resourcefulness and ingenuity that US analysts say could confuse Russian forces. for the coming weeks or months.
The Ukrainians are also exploiting the unfortunate start of a full-scale Russian offensive. Armed with man-portable anti-tank guns, they attacked a mile-long Russian armored column heading for Kiev, the capital, helping to halt a fuel- and food-starved advance and stretching out a march that was expected to take several days. possibly in weeks.
Of course, the Russian invasion is only a week old. The strategic southern city of Kherson fell on Wednesday; the Kremlin army intensified its bombardment of Kyiv and other cities; and despite a flood of fresh weapons from the West, Ukrainian leaders say they desperately need more weapons to destroy Russian tanks and shoot down Russian warplanes.
But the Ukrainian military is pursuing an extremely effective and mobile defense, using its knowledge of its home territory to stalemate Russian forces on multiple fronts, General Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday.
General Milli said part of the tactics used by the Ukrainian forces included using mobile weapons systems to confuse the Russians wherever they could. Ukrainian forces, he told journalists traveling with him in Europe, “are fighting against Russian troops with extraordinary skill and courage.”
US officials were impressed by the fighting prowess of the Ukrainians, but their view that Russia has superior military power has not changed.
Ukraine has managed to slow Russia’s advance, but it has not been able to stop it, and the resistance is not strong enough to change Mr. Putin’s military goals. But in the long term, U.S. officials say it will be difficult for Ukraine to continue to contain Russia’s advance.
Meanwhile, Ukrainians are turning into a military nation. “In combat, everything is never what you thought, and the side that learns faster and adapts faster will win,” said Frederick B. Hodges, the former US Army Chief of Europe, who now works at the Center. for the analysis of European politics. “So far, Ukraine is learning and adapting faster.”
Ukraine has one of the largest armed forces in Europe with 170,000 military personnel, 100,000 reservists and a territorial defense force of at least 100,000 veterans. Thousands of civilians are also now being recruited.
The Ukrainian army has been preparing for a further Russian invasion ever since Russia seized the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula in 2014 and began supporting separatists in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine. Many Ukrainian veterans participated in these battles, so part of the population is trained and knows how to fight the Russians.
US Special Operations Forces also trained the Ukrainian armed forces. The leaders in Kyiv then assigned these soldiers to regular units, which in turn allowed them to train the bulk of the army. American analysts say the training has made a difference on the battlefield.
Since 2014, the United States has provided more than $3 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and other supplies to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In those eight years, US military advisers, including Army Green Berets and National Guard fighters, have trained more than 27,000 Ukrainian soldiers at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center near Lviv in western Ukraine.
In Brussels on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the Ukrainian military is “doing better and putting up more resistance than most experts expected, and certainly more than Russia expected.”
“They are here to defend their land,” Mr. Stoltenberg told reporters traveling with General Milli.
Indeed, Michael R. Carpenter, US Representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, welcomed Ukrainian Marine Vitaliy Skakun in a speech in Vienna on Thursday. According to the Ukrainian military, a marine blew himself up on a bridge in the south of the Kherson region to prevent a line of Russian tanks from crossing.
Since the beginning of the invasion, the Ukrainian armed forces have been trying to turn the script around with more than 150,000 Russian troops concentrated on its borders. For example, last Thursday in the early hours of the war, Ukrainian forces repelled an attack by Russian paratroopers and special forces on a key airfield north of Kyiv, thwarting a Russian attempt to open a major air bridge on the outskirts of the capital.
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March 3, 2022 6:32 pm ET
“In defending cities and fighting on the outskirts, Ukrainian forces are doing quite well,” said Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at the CNA Defense Research Institute. “The erratic nature of Russia’s war effort certainly helps.”
As the Russians closed in on Kiev and Kharkov, the Ukrainians were able to move their forces to critical points faster than the invading forces. Not only did the Ukrainians move more nimbly, they also made the right choice of where to concentrate their firepower.
“The art of mechanized mobile warfare lies in the ability to focus overwhelming combat power on crucial sectors of the front, in places of your choice,” said Frederick Kagan, a military strategist who has advised US commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The Russians, surprisingly, could not do it. But the Ukrainians took advantage of their ability to quickly move reinforcements and counterattack.”
Thomas Bullock, an open-source analyst with the defense intelligence firm Janes, said Russian troops made tactical mistakes that the Ukrainians were able to exploit.
Russian-Ukrainian war: what you need to know
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Falling Ukrainian city. Russian troops took control of Kherson, the first city captured during the war. The capture of Kherson is significant because it allows the Russians to control most of the southern coast of Ukraine and move west towards Odessa.
“The Ukrainians seem to have had the most success ambushing Russian troops,” Bullock said. The Russians “stuck to the main roads in order to move quickly and not risk getting bogged down in the mud. But they advance along winding roads, and their flanks and supply lines are too vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks. And that’s where they’ve been most successful.”
A Ukrainian counterattack in Kyiv has driven Russian troops west and forced them to call for reinforcements as they attempt to encircle the city, said Mr. Kagan, a Russian military expert who leads the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute.
Although it is often easier to defend than to attack, especially in a complex invasion from multiple fronts, the Ukrainians took advantage of Russia’s decision to use too small a force, sometimes as little as two battalions at a time, to capture key points.
“On a tactical level, they were much more balanced than they should have been if the Russians had done well,” Mr. Kagan said. “Ukrainians just did it much smarter than Russians.”
The Ukrainians had far more success in the north, defending Kyiv and Kharkov, the country’s second largest city, than in the south, where better-trained Russian troops in Crimea had more success.
“In the south, on the Crimean front, when the Ukrainians fight a mechanized battle, they lose,” Bullock said.
However, the public may not be aware of this due to bias in the information available to them. The Ukrainian government publicized its victories and Russian attacks, which resulted in civilian deaths, but not the combat losses of their mechanized units.
“Ukrainians have done better than we expected, but there is a bias in open source,” Mr. Bullock said. “We see the success and skill of Ukraine. We don’t see much about Ukraine’s losses.”
In addition, because Russian officials try not to portray the operation as a war, they do not publish information about the battles in which their troops won.
As a result, in these early days of the invasion, the Ukrainians are defeating the Russians in their own information campaign.
“Ukrainians are winning the information war. This is quite impressive, given the prowess of the Russians,” said Mr. Bullock. “Ukrainians flooded the information space with their narrative and their point of view in order to mobilize support at home and abroad.”
However, US government officials believe Mr. Putin is likely to redouble his attacks. But some analysts say mounting Russian casualties, growing economic turmoil in Russia due to sanctions, and the possibility of a prolonged Ukrainian insurgency could overturn that strategy.
Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes reported from Washington, and Helen Cooper from Brussels.