In a forest landscape, small groups of soldiers, anti-tank tubes slung over their shoulders, move discreetly to ambush Russian combat vehicles: this is the Ukraine war as it has arisen on social networks and in the world’s media at the start of the invasion.
A “mobile and extremely effective defense, which takes advantage of the knowledge of the terrain of the Ukrainian army”, according to US General Mark A. Milley, for a result that stunned the Western military world: the retreat of the Russian army from all of northern Ukraine; the bitter failure of Moscow in its attempt to capture kyiv; and spectacular “coups” such as, on April 13, the strike against the Moscowflagship of the Black Sea Fleet, which sank the following day.
Many unknowns
The story of this “offensive defense” with airs of guerrilla is carried by authorities of kyiv which let filter the images of calcined Russian vehicles and impressive shootings of anti-tank missiles, while appearing much more reluctant to show their own units. “Ukrainians exercise very tight control over the images of their armed forces,” confirms Gustav Gressel, specialist in Russian defense policy at the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations. No journalists alongside the kyiv army, and videos of Ukrainian units in combat rarely exceeding a few tens of seconds.
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“It’s like watching a match in which you only see one of the two boxers”, sums up Michael Kofman, expert at the American think tank CNA. Another blind spot, that of the losses suffered by the Ukrainian forces: the figure of 1,300 soldiers killed mentioned by President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 12 – the latest quantified assessment to date – is certainly underestimated.
The image of an agile army armed with anti-tank missiles – of Soviet, Ukrainian, American, German, British and French manufacture – is not wrong. “But that’s only part of this war,” Judge Gustav Gressel. Beyond this visible aspect, it is a more classic war, made up of movements of mechanized units and artillery barrages, which has opposed the Ukrainian and Russian armies so far.
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A rare example of this confrontation, which often takes place in the open countryside and far from smartphones: the destruction, at the beginning of March, of a column of Russian tanks in Brovary, in the suburbs of kyiv, which fell into an ambush by Ukrainian soldiers equipped with anti-tank missiles and ended with an artillery strike.
“This engagement is undoubtedly quite representative of the successes that the Ukrainian army has been able to achieve, explains Michael Kofman. We see in particular that in the south of the country the use of heavy artillery enabled them to repel the Russian attacks. »
“A new war is beginning”
How in this war “classic” and beyond these ambushes, did the Ukrainians manage to repel the powerful Russian army? The reasons are many: rapid modernization of the Ukrainian army since 2014; extremely high soldier morale in the face of a threat seen as existential; use of drones; crucial role of the constant flow of information provided by Western intelligence… “But it was above all the arrogance of the Russians that allowed the Ukrainians to buy time, mobilize and prepare their forces”, esteem Gustav Gressel.
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Attention now turns to the south and east of the country, which has become the main theater for a Russian army that has revised its objectives downwards and is now aiming to conquer the Donbass. “A whole new war is beginning,” let go in early April Alexei Arestovitch, adviser to the Ukrainian president. A war in which Ukraine’s original advantages – from Russian hubris to the ambush-prone forests and swamps of the Kyiv region – may no longer apply.
“The Ukrainians are extremely lucid about the conflict, they know perfectly well that the first weeks were only the first phase of the war and that a war of attrition does not necessarily favor them”, notes Michael Kofman. Hence kyiv’s demands for supplies of heavy weapons – anti-ship missiles, tanks and artillery – for a war whose intensity and violence will only intensify.