In the past few hours, we have seen the Russian response to the attack on the Kerch bridge over the weekend. It has responded in two ways. First, a series of missile attacks against civilian targets across Ukraine. Second, command changes. 1/24 🧵 
2/ Perhaps inevitably, Putin and his morally bankrupt military leadership turned to their normal response to such ‘outrages’ – bombing Ukrainian cities. abc.net.au/news/2022-10-1…
3/ Back in July, the Ukrainian President described how over 2900 Russian missiles had been fired at Ukrainian cities until that point. With the attacks over the past 24 hours in cities across Ukraine, this missile count continues to rise. president.gov.ua/en/news/rosijs…
4/ It has become one of the awful certainties of this war; the Russians cannot defeat the Ukrainian military in the field and therefore resort to terrorising Ukrainians civilians instead.
5/ A new round of sackings of senior Russian military commanders also occurred in the wake of the attack on the Kerch bridge. It has seen appointment of Colonel General Sergei Surovikin as the overall commander of the Russian ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.
6/ In military operations, one of the most important principles is that of unity of command. This means that all forces should operate under a single commander who has the authority to direct these forces in the pursuit of a common purpose.
7/ It has been a principle, that until now, the Russians appear to have steadfastly ignored. The beginning of the invasion featured multiple advances in the north, northeast, east and south of Ukraine, all under different commanders and without any obvious coordinating mechanism.
8/ The Russians then attempted to fix this situation in April with the appointment of Aleksandr Dvornikov, a brutal leader and veteran of the Russian campaign in Syria. But Dvornikov was to struggle in the bitter attritional fight that was the Donbas.
9/ Even with an overwhelming advantage in artillery, he was only able to wrangle a pyrrhic victory with the capture of #Severodonetsk. Thousands of Russians were killed during the battle, and Dvonikov was replaced shortly afterwards.
10/ Russian troops were then divided between the Army Groups "Center" and "South", again working against unity of command. The reverses suffered by the Russians across Ukraine in the past two months has obviously convinced the Kremlin to again try a single commander.
11/ The reality is, there is no Russian general alive who can reverse the situation in #Ukraine. The flaws in Russia’s battlefield performance are more deeply rooted than bad Russian C2, the failed transformation program of the past decade, or poor battlefield leadership.
12/ The largest single cause of failure in the Russian invasion (on the Russian side) has been bad #strategy. At the heart of this poor strategy has been bad assumptions and a fundamental misalignment of desired political outcomes with the military means available.
13/ From the beginning of this invasion, Putin has insisted that Ukraine is not a real state. He assumed, that the Ukrainian military would not fight, the Russians would be welcomed as liberators and that the west would not intervene decisively.
14/ And because of these strategic assumptions, Russia invaded with a force that was too small, attacked on too many fronts in an uncoordinated way, failed to gain any control of Ukrainian airspace and has been behind the curve on strategic influence operations.
15/ Any one of these would be difficult to recover from. All of them in combination are probably fatal for the Russian special military operation. And in the face of a smarter, more effective & better led Ukrainian military, it is very unlikely the Russians can recover.
16/ Putin had one opportunity to drag some perception of success out of the invasion mess in the wake of his 9 May speech. In his Red Square address, Putin focussed the conflict on liberating the Donbas.
17/ If he had stuck with that political objective & then mobilised his military, we may be seeing a very different war now. The Russian military may have been capable of delivering something with these scaled back objectives that Putin could have sold to Russians as a ‘victory’.
18/ But Putin procrastinated on mobilisation for months. And then, his September annexation declaration to incorporate four more Ukrainian provinces into Russia once again expanded the political objectives for this war. warontherocks.com/2022/09/ukrain…
19/ With a Russian military stretched to the limit in Ukraine already, and struggling to mobilise more troops, it was a demonstration again of misalignment between political objectives and military capacity.
20/ Indeed, the gap between political desires and military means is greater now than it was at the start of the invasion. The newly mobilised troops are likely to be little more than human speed bumps for advancing Ukrainian forces.
21/ Williamson Murray & Alan Millet have written that “it is more important to make correct decisions at the political and strategic level than it is at the operational or tactical level. Mistakes in operations and tactics can be corrected, but strategic mistakes live forever.”
22/ Throughout this war, Putin has constantly failed to align his political objectives for Ukraine with the military means required to achieve them.
23/ Putin may continue to lob missiles at innocent Ukrainian civilians in the short term. But, he is finding out now how his strategic mistakes will haunt him & the Russian people forever. End. abc.net.au/news/2022-10-1…
24/ Thank you to the following whose images were used in this thread: @ZelenskyyUa @IAPonomarenko @NBCNews @nytimes @KyivIndependent @abcnews
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