Thread by @BretDevereaux

This is just a baffling reading of Russian aims and actions to me, but since it is apparently being made, I suppose it is worth talking about.

I think in order to make any sense of motivations here, you have to look at what Russia is *doing* not what it is saying. 1/

https://twitter.com/michaelbd/status/1508833622157049863

Because Russia has said all sorts of crazy things!

They said they weren't going to invade (

https://twitter.com/markmackinnon/status/1493501942072496129

) at all!

Right now they're saying this is about the DNR/LNR, but when Putin invaded, he said the goal was to 'demilitarize' and denazify' Ukraine. 2/

The issue with trying to parse Russian statements by Russian foreign ministry spokespeople is that *they* didn't know either - the White House had a better sense of the timeline than Russia's formal foreign policy apparatus: foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/18/bid… 3/

Meanwhile you have the standard set of Russian up-is-down obvious lies which just make attempting to trust their statements foolish.

In the days before the invasion, Bellingcat was doing its thing, for instance, with Russia's misinformation war: bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/2… 4/

So again, focus on what they *do* rather than what they *say* because so much of what they say is misinformation.

What did Russia *do*? What sort of goals did their army actually attempt to achieve?

In short, what intentions can we read in their operational plan? 5/

The initial Russian attack was launched as a series of high-speed lunges towards major Ukrainian civilian centers. In the South, separate Russian formations drove on Kherson and Melitopol, the latter from there towards Mariupol and Zaporizhzhia. 6/

(btw, check out Nathan Ruser's now un-updated substack if you want to get a sense of the early days: putinukrainebriefing.substack.com and chronology. Alternately, pile back through the ISW campaign assessments: understandingwar.org). 7/

Strikingly, the forces sent towards Kherson, once over the river, lunged towards Mykolaiv and up the west bank of the Dnieper. That move makes little sense as a pinning attack, but a lot of sense if the goal was to link up with the next effort. 8/

Another Russian force pushed south from the Russian border towards Kharkiv. If the goal was merely to pin the city (which is not in Donetsk or Luhansk oblasts), this ought to have been methodical work. Instead, Russian forces try immediately to surround and bypass the city...9/

...with, in the end, very negative results as they were unable to isolate or bypass Kharkiv.

It doesn't take a Napoleon to see the operational concept here though: a grand encirclement, one prong cuts north from Crimea, the other south from Kharkiv... 10/

...cutting the Ukrainian forces in Donetsk and Luhansk off from the rest of the country. Its a bold operational plan, but if the goal is merely to get the DNR/LNR on their oblast borders, it is wild overkill - a pair of c. 200m lunges in place of a 40m push. 11/

As a limited operation to force fairly modest border adjustments, it doesn't make a lot of sense. But if the goal is regime change, isolating the main Ukrainian force from the rest of the country makes a lot of sense - you are removing the seed of military resistance. 12/

Meanwhile, we have the north - 3 major efforts here, consuming a large fraction of the total engaged forces: attacks on the East and West of the Dnieper from Belarus, combined with a push from Sumy. 13/

The Sumy advance is instructive - instead of going south towards Poltava, those forces get drawn west, towards Kyiv, bypassing one town after another as they race in that direction. As a pinning maneuver, this makes little sense - but as a reaction... 14/

...to failure in Kyiv, it makes perfect sense, trying to widen the front to actually isolate the city, a necessary precondition for its capture.

Finally, of course, we have the airborne operations against Kyiv itself, the Hostomel raid, etc. 15/

Meanwhile you have movement along the original Donbas line of contact and...well, there isn't much? Even now, the ISW's assessments of gains on the line of contact are...unimpressive. To believe the "it's all about the DNR/LNR" take, you have to believe...16/

...that Russia attacked basically every part of Eastern Ukraine *except* their primary political objective and that they are *only now* some 5 weeks into their 72 hour war deciding to do the thing they came here to do.

This would be an *even more insane* operational plan. 17/

But of course that wasn't the plan. The plan was a coup de main aimed at a fait accompli, which is exactly a passing familiarity with indirect strategy between nuclear powers suggests to expect (see here at "War Under the Umbrella" acoup.blog/2022/03/11/col…) 18/

And I find it striking that this is sufficiently obvious from the operational plan that basically the whole of miltwitter and IRtwitter sussed it out almost immediately.

This was an operational plan for regime change, which is why the majority of resources went to Kyiv...19/

...while far less happened on the line of contact. It involved a lot of risky lunges - we know they were risky because of how badly they've failed - deep into Ukrainian territory to set conditions for a maximal political settlement.

Russia went big because it had big aims. 20/

I think its worth noting just how disparate these efforts were - by Feb 27th, Russian forces had rushed to Kyiv on both sides of the Dneiper and one column had flung itself 150 miles down the road through Sumy Oblast, bypassing Nizhyn to get to Kyiv... 21/

While at the same time the Russian push along the Donbas axis in northern Luhansk had barely started to move at all. understandingwar.org/backgrounder/r…
22/
understandingwar.org/sites/default/…

And so I suppose what I find so frustrating about this is that the correlation of the actual operational plans to Putin's actually stated objectives (nytimes.com/2022/02/23/wor…) is very clear to anyone who can read an operational plan. 23/

So if you write for a major publication and *can't* read an operational plan because you are specialized in 'American political thought' (his AEI bio), then maybe differ judgement to people who actually *can* read an operational plan.

Like, even a little bit. 24/

In sum: this was not a smash&grab to get DNR/LNR - the operational plan is inconsistent with those aims. Thinking that was the goal requires assuming *less* Russian competence, not more.

Goal was regime change, it failed, now Putin backtracks. Sometimes the obvious is true. end/

I suppose I should add, when I talk about listening to people who can read an operational plan, I don't necessarily mean myself - check out updates from @TheStudyofWar @KofmanMichael (also his WotR podcast updates, warontherocks.com/2022/03/a-new-…) @WarintheFuture @Nrg8000 etc.