The war in Ukraine: some thoughts
Apart from our own geopolitical interests in the survival of Ukraine against Russian aggression, we should learn every lesson we can from the ongoing conflict
This is not intended to be a systematic analysis of the conflict in Ukraine so far, nor is it a prediction of how it will unfold from here. For really good insights into what has happened and how the war is developing, I can recommend the Substacks of Professor Phillips O’Brien, who teaches strategic studies at my alma mater the University of St Andrews; Mick Ryan, former head of the Australian Defence College; and Sir Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. There is also consistently good coverage on Times Radio, especially the Frontline section which has heard from Professor Michael Clarke, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, General Philip Breedlove and Michael Binyon, among others.
However, I watch and read a lot of coverage of the war, and some thoughts come back to me again and again. I’ve written here about the potential nuclear aspect of the conflict, what a settlement might look like, the use of cluster munitions, the importance of maintaining military assistance and even the pope’s peculiar stance on Russia’s invasion. Elsewhere, in CapX I looked at the European Union’s response to the shortcomings of the defence industry, for The Spectator I wrote about Denmark sending its entire stock of artillery to Ukraine, in The Hill I argued that the United States cannot afford to let Ukraine be defeated and for City AM I explored the lessons the West needs to draw from the conduct of the war and the need to re-examine our own military capabilities.
So here are some points for discussion, I put them no more assertively than that. They may contain as many questions as answers, but we have to learn every possible lesson from what has happened and interrogate ourselves rigorously and ruthlessly.
The cost disparity: when little cheap things defeat big expensive things
Last month it was reported that the Ukrainian Army was withdrawing from front-line combat the M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks it had received from the United States. Ukraine had lobbied hard for months for heavy armour from Western countries, requesting Leopard 2s from Germany, Poland and Finland and Challenger 2s from the United Kingdom as well as the mainstay of American armoured units, the Abrams. Eventually, in January 2023, the Biden administration agreed to send 31 tanks to Ukraine, despite having argued that they were too difficult to operate and maintain in the conditions of the combat zone in Ukraine.
The M1A1 is a major bit of kit. It weighs nearly 70 tons, carries a smoothbore 120 mm main gun and costs in the region of $10 million. Like the other third-generation MBTs used by major NATO powers, the Leopard 2, Challenger 2 and the French Leclerc, it is a product of the latter stages of the Cold War and was designed in the context of an expected large-scale armoured clash in central Europe. But it has been the fate of all of these vehicles only ever to be used in active combat in very different circumstances, such as in the blitzkrieg against Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003 and then in counter-insurgency and stabilisation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When Russian military units crossed the border into Ukraine in February 2022, it looked for a while as if we were finally seeing the kind of manoeuvre warfare across large areas of land which our military planners had conceived for decades. The tank was at last coming into its own and showing its mettle, showing what it could do that no other military asset can. But that state of affairs did not last long.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have changed the game. Tanks have always been vulnerable to attack from the air: they are large and relatively slow-moving, and the armour on their roofs and upper decks is at its thinnest. Once the Allies had established air superiority over Normandy after the D-Day landings in June 1944, the German Army was virtually unable to move armour during daylight and had to plan any substantial journeys under cover of darkness to avoid the deadly attentions of American and British fighter-bombers. The proliferation of small drones in the war in Ukraine has, however, made this problem greater by many orders of magnitude.
Drones make tanks vulnerable in two principal ways. Firstly, they can be used merely for reconnaissance, identifying and targeting assets for artillery or air strikes. A 70-ton tank making its way along a road in rural Ukraine is a very clear target and using a drone as a spotter allows artillery beyond line-of-sight to deliver lethal force without ever being exposed. But we are also seeing drones themselves being armed.
NATO countries, most infamously the United States, have used armed UAVs for years, assets like the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, introduced in 2007, which can carry Hellfire II missiles, Paveway II laser-guided bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munition-equipped “dumb” bombs. What has happened in Ukraine, however, is the rapid use and adaptation of cheap commercial first-person-view (FPV) drones, which weigh only a few pound and can be bought for a few hundred dollars: these are then fitted with a pound of explosives and are transformed into a brilliantly simple and effective radio-controlled anti-tank weapon which can be used at a range of several miles.
It has been pointed out, and it is true enough to say, that these drones will sometimes only cause minor damage to tanks, and can sometimes be defended against relatively simply with heavier armour on vulnerable upper surfaces or wire mesh to detonate the munition before it actually hits the tank itself. But the whole dynamic of armoured warfare has been changed. Partly we have to bear in mind that relatively minor damage to a main battle tank—say, the loss of its aerials, or the shedding of a track—may be eminently reparable but can have an immediate and disproportionate tactical effect in taking the vehicle out of service when it is required for combat. If you are a Ukrainian commander with a plan of attack posited on, say, a dozen MBTs, then to have one or two removed from your inventory is a huge recalibration of your strength, no matter how trivial and transient the reason for the asset’s unavailability.
The more profound factor is the disproportionate effect of an almost ludicrously cheap weapon on a vastly expensive piece of equipment. Put simply, if a $300 drone can put a $10 million tank out of action, whether temporarily or permanently, you have an imbalance which is surely unsustainable. I wrote last year about what I have called the “Tirpitz Syndrome”, whereby a military asset may be extraordinarily potent but it is so costly and potentially difficult to replace that commanders become too anxious to allow it to be used, rendering it effectively pointless. We have seen for decades now the way technology had developed so quickly that our tanks, planes and ships have dizzying capabilities but come with a similarly daunting price tag. The result is that we are able to have fewer and fewer of them: for example, the Royal Navy currently has six Type 45 guided-missile destroyers, vessels of incredible sophistication and capability, but they replaced 16 Type 42 destroyers, which were themselves successors to the eight County-class and eight cancelled Type 82 destroyers. As we are discovering in the Red Sea at the moment, as the Houthis in Yemen continue to attack commercial shipping, a ship, no matter how capable, can only be in one place at once.
This is a perfect illustration of my not having an answer yet. I am certain of this, however: the widespread use of cheap, disposable FPV drones must be a major factor in a new conception of armoured doctrine. Our military thinkers will have to re-examine what we want tanks to do, how we want them to operate and how they will respond to the current and likely future threats. We have spent a lot of the past 30 years using MBTs for tasks for which they were never designed, which is not to say they have no contribution to make: I remember talking to an infantry officer in Iraq in 2007 who had a troop of Challenger 2s attached to the battalion he was commanding. No-one involved in the design of the 75-ton beasts had surely ever imagined their use in urban counter-insurgency, and close-quarter fighting does bring some huge vulnerabilities for MBTs. Nevertheless, he admitted, the sheer scale and physicality of the Challengers, as well as their relative invulnerability, gave him an extra quality against the anti-coalition militias in Basra which he regarded as valuable.
There is a school of thought which says that the contemporary MBT is no longer a useful or viable piece of equipment. Deploying a single asset which costs $10 million is a major gamble: to take the British Army as an example, it was reported last year that there were only 157 Challenger 2s available for active service (from a nominal fleet of 227). The Ministry of Defence planned to upgrade 148 of these to Challenger 3 specification, with initial operating capability in 2027 and the assets fully in service by 2030. In January 2023, however, the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, told the House of Commons that the requirement for the Challenger 3 upgrade would be reviewed in the light of the war in Ukraine. He summed up the problem rather well:
One lesson of Ukraine… is that, whether it is a modern or not-so-modern tank, unless it is properly protected and supported, by counter-drone capability, electronic warfare or a proper wrap, it can become incredibly vulnerable, going from being the lion on the savannah to being a very vulnerable thing. When we look at the finite amount of money we all have in government, how much do we commit to make a perfectly formed battle group, or how much do we take a risk?
Another problem is the sheer size of modern MBTs, what one commentator dubbed “the growth and weight spiral”. The more armour, armament and other equipment we add to platforms, the heavier (and therefore generally slower and less manoeuvrable) they become. They also present greater challenges to basic infrastructure like roads and bridges, become more prone to bogging down in soft ground, and limit their portability by air. The Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, the US Air Force’s transport workhorse, can carry a single M1A1 Abrams without leaving very much margin, while the larger but rarer Lockheed C-5 Galaxy can carry two.
Our military thinkers have a great deal to factor in. Main battle tanks are powerful, mobile and well-protected platforms, but they cannot grow in size, weight and expense without any kind of limitation. They can be disproportionately vulnerable to cheap, plentiful weapons, and they require a great deal of specialised maintenance. Some of the Leopard 2s donated to Ukraine had to be withdrawn to facilities in Poland and Lithuania for proper repair, and in January a German politician warned that almost all of the tanks his country had supplied were not currently in service because of the duration of repairs or shortage of parts. This is a vastly complex consideration of costs, benefits, capability requirements and technological development and I am not at all clear in my own mind what the answer will look like.
Crimea: war and politics might reach different conclusions
One of the abiding problems of analysing the conflict in Ukraine is imagining how the war might end. At one extreme, of course, we can guess with relative ease even if we would rather not: if the tide turns decisively against Volodymyr Zelenskyy, one can picture a series of military successes by Russia, and the capture of major Ukrainian cities including eventually Kyiv. The Ukrainian government would be toppled and its leadership forced to flee or else at least captured but more probably killed somehow or other. A Russian-controlled régime would then take control, and Ukraine would effectively cease to be an independent state. We know that Vladimir Putin does not regard Ukraine as a genuinely autonomous nation or people, and three years ago he wrote that “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia”. We can also take as read that a puppet government in Kyiv would not be one which relied on free and fair elections for its legitimacy or power.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, no-one is suggesting that Ukrainian forces will conquer Moscow. A Ukrainian victory will, therefore, be in some way a measure of compromise, and where the extent of that compromise is drawn is fiercely contested. A modest version might be one in which Russia withdrew to the borders of February 2022, which would at least demonstrate that Putin had not profited from his war of aggression. But the first territorial incursions by Russian forces into Ukrainian territory were in February 2014, when they supported pro-Russian activists in Crimea and seized control of the Council of Ministers and the parliament. One could reasonably argue, then, that a settlement must see Russia relinquish control of Crimea as well as other parts of Ukraine.
Listening to Times Radio Frontline earlier, I heard several commentators say that the recent delivery of long-range MGM-140 ATACMS ballistic missiles has given Ukraine the ability to strike targets up to 190 miles away, allowing them to hit Russian units and infrastructure deep behind the front line. In particular, this brings into range the Kerch Bridge, the 12-mile road-and-rail crossing between the Taman Peninsula in mainland Russia and Crimea’s Kerch Peninsula which is the main Russian logistic route into Crimea. Ukraine has already had considerable success in degrading Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based at Sevastopol, including sinking its flagship, the guided missile cruiser Moskva, in April 2022. It was, therefore, several contributors suggested, perfectly possible that Ukraine could defeat Russian forces in Crimea in military terms.
Military victory in Crimea is not, however, the beginning and end of the matter. In legal terms, I am perfectly happy to acknowledge that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was illegal, and nothing I say hereafter is intended to excuse or condone that. But there is a difference between defending the status quo and restoring the status quo ante, and in attempting the latter one has to look at context.
Crimea’s history is complex and scarred by violence. The peninsula only came under the control of the Russian Empire in 1783, when it was an autonomous khanate populated by Crimean Tatars which had until recently been under the loose authority of the Ottoman Empire. During the Russian Civil War of 1917-21, it came under nine different jurisdictions, some for barely more than a month, including (May to June 1918) the Ukrainian State, an anti-Bolshevik government led by the aristocratic former general Pavlo Skoropadskyi. In October 1921, however, it became the Crimean Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, an autonomous SSR within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which in turn was the largest component of the USSR.
In 1954, however, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet transferred Crimea from the legal jurisdiction of the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, recognising the territory’s “close links” with Ukraine. This move was partly to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Agreement, which had united Russia and Ukraine; of course, it had little practical significance, since it meant that Crimea passed from one part of the Soviet Union to another but remained within the USSR as a whole. It was only with the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 and the independence of Ukraine, with Crimea as a part of the new state, that the decision came to have practical implications.
The problem is one of demographics. In 1944, the Soviet government effectively ethnically cleansed Crimea, deporting the Tatar population as punishment for having co-operating with the German forces during Operation Barbarossa. It is estimated that 228,392 people were deported, of whom at least 191,044 were Crimean Tatars. They were taken in overcrowded trains to central Asia, and 7,889 died during the journey. On 4 July 1944, the NKVD informed Joseph Stalin that Crimea was officially free of Tatars. They had also deported 9,620 Armenians, 12,420 Bulgarians, 15,040 Greeks, 1,119 Germans and 3,652 foreign citizens. All of this took place in less than three months.
Before the Second World War, Tatars had made up a fifth of the population of Crimea. When official numbers were recorded in 1959, the population was 72 per cent Russian and 22 per cent Ukrainian. Tatars began to return after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the fact remains that Crimea, while it had legally been part of Ukraine since independence in 1992, notwithstanding Putin’s annexation of 2014, is home to a predominantly Russian population, with Ukrainians a small minority of around 15 per cent.
Given this unalterable fact—unalterable without resorting to the kind of ethnic cleansing about which Stalin was relaxed—it is hard to see how Ukraine could practically reassert its authority over Crimea even in the event of a decisive military victory. Certainly, the United Nations General Assembly voted shortly after the annexation that it did not recognise the legitimacy of the transfer of jurisdiction. Politically and presentationally, however, this war has been fought in part on the notion that the Ukrainian people have a right to sovereignty and self-determination. It would be contradictory, therefore, to say that the people of Crimea, two-thirds Russian, should nevertheless be subject to Ukraine’s authority.
(There is a deeper question here about the principle of self-determination. It is a fundamental part of the international legal system and enshrined in Article 1 of the United Nations Charter, but in practice it is not always clear what constitutes a “people” and therefore to whom the right attaches, or how it might interact with competing legal or political imperatives. My own view is that we have magnified a slightly glib assertion made by President Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points of 1918, which was largely aimed at the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and left ourselves burdened with an unworkable precept. But that is for another day.)
The final complicating factor is the strategic importance to Russia of the Crimean port of Sevastopol. It was established as a Russian naval base in 1783 and has since then been the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet; after a period of tension following Ukraine’s independence, Russia and Ukraine concluded an agreement in 1995 by which a joint fleet was established but would see Russia buy out the Ukrainian share, and a treaty signed in 1997 gave Russia a 20-year lease on naval facilities in Sevastopol.
This is important because Sevastopol is the only significant warm deepwater port available to Russia. Of the other headquarters of the Russian Navy, Severomorsk is prone to freezing, Vladivostok can only be maintained with the use of ice-breakers and Kaliningrad, although ice-free, is physically separated from Russia. Sevastopol therefore provides vital strategic access to the world’s waterways, and Putin would be extremely reluctant to give it up.
All of this is going to make any settlement of the status of Crimea delicate. Russia lacks legal title and has demonstrated bad faith—to say the least—in its annexation and the abandonment of its commitments on Sevastopol under the 1997 treaty. Even if Russian military units are forced out of the peninsula, which would be a major achievement, the political fall-out would be difficult and could have a negative effect on the case for restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty over other occupied territories. While I offer no solutions, I encourage you to read this thought-provoking analysis by editor Svitlana Hudkova in Ukrainian journal Zaborona.
A gunners’ war?
I will touch on this only very briefly. One of the most striking features of the war in Ukraine since February 2022 has been the intensity of artillery exchanges. More than any major conflict for decades, it has been a gunners’ war, and this has exposed the inadequacy of ammunition stocks on both sides. The scale of usage is staggering: Russian forces are calculated to be firing 10,000 shells every day, while shortages are severely hampering Ukraine’s ability to respond, limiting Ukrainian forces to more like 2,000 shells a day. Artillery has been responsible for around 80 per cent of casualties, and both sides have had to seek new sources of ammunition to feed the voracious appetite of their guns. Russia’s industrial response has been impressive, and it is expected to produce three million shells this year, compared to only 1.2 million in Europe and the United States combined, but even then Russia has also purchased another million rounds from North Korea.
I won’t dwell on the urgency of increasing the supply of ammunition to Ukraine. As I wrote for CapX (see above), I think the European Union’s response, its Defence Industrial Strategy published in March 2024, is utterly inadequate. It represents hardly any new investment, and by focusing on procurement from within the EU, it thereby excludes the United Kingdom and the United States, which is potentially divisive within NATO.
What I am more interested in at this stage is whether this stratospheric consumption rate of ammunition is peculiar to the conflict in Ukraine, or whether we should prepare for much heavier rates of fire in other future operations. Britain and America have generally undertaken operations against irregular forces and militias over the past 30 years, which provides fewer scenarios in which major artillery exchanges are likely. Indeed, perhaps the overwhelming lesson to be drawn from the current conflict in Gaza is that fighting an irregular force, especially one like Hamas which has no hesitation in using the civilian population as a shield, does not lend itself to sustained barrage or bombardment unless you are prepared for very high civilian casualties.
In Britain, we have been caught out by changing doctrine before. In the opening months of the First World War, we had relied on shrapnel anti-personnel shells for use against infantry on open ground, but the transformation of the conflict into trench warfare demanded a greater use of high-explosive shells, of which our stocks quickly ran low. This problem was publicised by The Daily Mail in May 1915, and the ensuing political furore was enough to force the prime minister, H.H. Asquith, to invite the Conservative opposition to join a coalition government and create an independent Ministry of Munitions under David Lloyd George to handle the production of ammunition directly.
Has doctrine changed since February 2022? I’m sceptical. On the one hand, it is clear that prolonged artillery barrages are an established part of the Russian method of waging war, and that is a consideration given recent heightened concerns that a conflict between NATO and Russia is by no means impossible. It is, on the other hand, far less likely to apply to more asymmetric forms of warfare, like we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, and could see for example in the Sahel or the Horn of Africa. But major decisions on the defence industry have to be taken alongside judgements about future doctrine and equipment, otherwise we risk half-preparing for a scenario which then may never occur.
Conclusion
This stage of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has now lasted for 26 months, longer than the War of the Polish Succession (1733-35), the Mexican-American War (1846-48) and the Spanish-American War of 1898. An immediate end seems unlikely, and most observers expect it will last at least into 2025. We should be in lock-step with our Ukrainian allies and provide every element of material support they need, without conditions or caveats on how they are used. But we should also be monitoring the progress of the war from an analytical and academic point of view, as an invaluable if grim laboratory. Much better that we learn from mistakes made in this conflict than from mistakes we go on to make ourselves in another war.