Russia’s failed lessons from Chechnya

“As Ukraine’s counteroffensive enters its second week, a top Zelensky advisor urges Ukrainians in Russian-occupied territories to ready bomb shelters and supplies ahead of looming battles,” Christopher Miller, world and national security reporter at Politico recently tweeted.

The original Tweet referenced by Miller was even more bullish, urging Ukrainians in Crimea to prepare as “everything will be Ukrainian”.

Amid Ukraine’s counteroffensive, recent analysis has shone a light on the similarities between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with their invasions of Afghanistan in 1979 and their First and Second Chechen Wars in the 1990s.

Particularly, the Russian government repeated their past failures in logistical planning, force structure and human intelligence.  

But now for a trip down memory lane.

In February, analysts questioned whether Russia would dare invade at all, as a poorly executed invasion would signal to the world that (despite the bluster) Russia actually possesses and manufactures substandard military technology. Further, observers argued that Ukraine’s irregular warfare capabilities would create a sustained insurgency that would simply be intolerable for the Russian government.

In early March, online sleuths took to social media to argue that a combination of poor vehicle maintenance and badly made Chinese tyres had stalled Russia’s advance to Kyiv, forcing military vehicles off of muddy fields and onto roads. This had resulted in Russian-tank-induced traffic jams on major Ukrainian highways. A sitting duck for Ukrainian drones and special operations forces (SOF) teams.

VIEW ALL

A month into the war, Major General (Ret’d) Mick Ryan took to Twitter to detail some surprising omissions in Russia’s battlefield capabilities. His 25-post Twitter explanation identified three missing areas that raised the eyebrows of Western military strategists: few (observable) cyber operations, poor Russian command and control structure and a lack of human-machine teaming.

Given such noticeable oversights, is the Russian military repeating the same mistakes from past military interventions?

Writing for the Small Wars Journal, Marc Belciug provided a historical snapshot of Russia’s invasions of Chechnya, and lessons from their failures.

According to Belciug’s analysis, critical strategic oversights include: the affinity of the Chechen people to their nationality over a broader Russian identity, and how Russia’s overreliance on “shock and awe” tactics drove many of Chechnya’s politically ambivalent citizens toward the pro-independence government.

These oversights, the analyst contends, created a fertile ground for Chechen independence movements to pursue policies of irregular warfare and distributed lethality against the poorly trained and ill-equipped Russian forces.

“Russian ground troops did not begin to move until December 11th. Local resistance on the way to the capital also slowed them down which forced a revision of their schedule,” Belciug observes.

“In the end Russian troops reached Grozny only on the 26th of December, thus allowing ample time for the defenders to prepare and losing any semblance of surprise.”

Right from the start of the campaign, the Russian military was ill-informed by their human intelligence and logistics capabilities. Needless to say, the invasion did not go to plan.

According to the writer, the two-week operation took two months, and the much of the pro-independence Chechen hierarchy fled, marking the start to an irregular warfare campaign that rooted itself across the country.

With the dispersal of the Chechen high command, the war shifted from focusing simply on the competitive control over territory to overcoming insurgents in the countryside. Amazingly, two years later, the insurgent Chechen forces would retake Grozny from the Russian army.

Forewarning Russia’s humanitarian atrocities in Ukraine, Belciug explained that Russia’s military strategy drove regular Chechen civilians to become anti-Russian insurgents, provoked by mass murders and destructive aerial bombardments.

Carlotta Gall, writing for the New York Times, draws a link between Russia’s advance on Grozny with their failed assault on Kyiv, and their subsequent use of humanitarian atrocities to achieve political goals.

“Chechnya’s experience is worth recalling since it was the first time we saw Vladimir V. Putin develop his game plan to reassert Russian dominion wherever he wanted,” Gall wrote.

“His methods are brute force and terror: the bombing and besieging of cities, deliberate targeting of civilians, and the abduction and jailing of local leaders and journalists and their replacement by loyal quislings.”

While the Russian military may have learnt how to use “shock and awe”, they failed to integrate lessons from their logistical planning.

“Ukrainian troops were waiting and mounted repeated ambushes. They destroyed tanks and armoured vehicles, creating such a pileup that they blocked the Russian advance,” Gall continued.

Nevertheless, writers have observed one stark difference between the First and Second Chechen Wars and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

According to Thomas de Waal in The Wall Street Journal, one key difference is the Russian public’s tolerance toward local casualties.

“Back in 1996, there were some limits to the Russian public’s tolerance for mass death, however. Yeltsin was forced to sue for peace in Chechnya in large part because the war had become so unpopular and because so many young soldiers were dying,” the journalist writes.

“Mr Putin can reassure himself that Russia is a very different country now, with the mostly free media and political opposition of the 1990s firmly removed. Yet the scale of the war in Ukraine in 2022 and its cost to Russia are also far greater.”

This is one crucial lesson from previous conflicts that the Kremlin may have learnt – keeping the war going and worsening human outcomes in Ukraine and Russia alike.