There was much that was wrong about this judgment, some that was obvious at the time, some that would only become clear later. Immediately obvious was the inaptness of the comparison between the modern Russian ground forces and the Cold War Soviet ground forces: the former is tiny compared to the latter (less than one-sixth the size, without even counting the rest of the Warsaw Pact), and organized completely differently. The Russian ground forces started out with about 400,000 of their active personnel signed up as “contract servicemen”, with the remaining 200,000 or so being draftees. The force was designed so that the former were intended as the fighting edge, the latter as service personnel. The intention behind the overall design of the force is that this army was to be used for short high-intensity wars against massively overmatched adversaries along the Russian borders, and certainly not for extended conflicts against NATO member states (such as Turkey) who would certainly invoke Treaty collective defense provisions. The assumption was always that victory would be assured within weeks, a few months at most. A prolonged conflict would expose the expiration date of this army. Clearly, the Russians believed that Ukraine was the type of state that their army could easily victimize in short order.

Somewhat less obvious—although I can claim that I did see this at the time²—is that the Russian army had never trained for an operation of the scope and complexity of the assault on Ukraine, and while they would certainly find 40-year old experience on the conduct of such operations in old documents, field manuals, and in memories of doddering officers, lack of maneuver and logistics practice at scale would certainly be a problem for them.

The subtle error that even experts on force design appear to have made at the time is that almost nobody took the trouble to examine the force structure of the Ukrainian army. This sounds almost too bizarre to write down now, but it’s true. There were fantastic amounts of analysis by world experts on Russia’s military, which gave accounts and estimates of manpower, weapons, tactics, doctrine, strategy, logistical practice, history, politics, and so on, including lively debate, uncertainty bands on quantitative estimates, really an intellectual cornucopia. But on Ukraine, other than some sparse commentary by a few NATO officers who had actually been working to train up Ukrainian Army officers since the Russian 2014 invasion of Crimea, it was extremely difficult to find anything beyond what Wikipedia had to offer. Still, Wikipedia’s entry on the Armed Forces of the Ukraine is instructive: one can find there the interesting fact that Ukraine has had Universal Military Training (UMT), lasting 18 months for each conscript (as opposed to Russia’s 12-month training), and has had UMT continuously since independence, with only a brief interruption. This is significant, because Ukraine also has an inactive reserve, which all draftees enter after completing their 18-month training, and remain in until age 55.

What this means is that throughout the war, Ukraine has had potentially vastly more manpower at its disposal than Russia. Getting that manpower back into uniform, trained back to spec, and deployed usefully as part of an orderly pipeline was always going to be a complex problem. But it was never going to be the kind of issue that Russia is confronting now as it attempts to refill its depleted army ranks by means of manic improvisations intended to take the place of a force design process that would ordinarily require a decade of time and billions of dollars in government budgeting.

An Inadequate Supply Line: There was a great deal of anxiety—“hand-wringing” is too harsh a term for worries expressed by people whose heart is in the right place, but certainly high emotion—over the apparently slow response by the West, and especially by the Biden administration, in supplying needed weapons to the Ukrainian army in those first, desperate weeks. Especially when the Ukrainians themselves, from Zelenskyy (“I need ammunition!”) on down, were asking for everything, and “all” that was showing up seemed to be NATO hand-held infantry anti-tank and anti-air weapons, as well as the entire junkyard of Warsaw Pact hardware still in the armories of Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, the Baltic Republics, etc., there was a lot of public recrimination against a U.S. policy attitude holding that not blowing up the world in a thermonuclear war remained a priority. Critics argued heatedly that this was merely an excuse to slow-walk supplies urgently needed to save Ukraine from the assault.

What we know now is that there was no slow-walk. Instead, there was was a long game, with an orderly logistical plan to transition the Ukrainian armed forces from their Warsaw Pact-era weapons inventory to one composed of NATO-standard weapons, in the middle of a shooting war, without actually disrupting the war effort. If you think about it, this is an incredibly difficult feat to pull off, but if you look at the successive Pentagon drawdown lists of hardware that have been supplied to Ukraine since June, you can see the steadily accelerating progress of that effort, as NATO-standard artillery, aircraft munitions, electronic warfare gear, and other high-end weaponry have gradually pushed the boundary out. Most of these elements come with long logistical tails that include eye-watering spare parts lists, maintenance schedules, tech mechanics training, operator training, tactical training, integration with other systems, and probably more that I don’t even know about. Without some of these items, these weapons systems aren’t that useful. Without others, they stop working in a few days to a week, which is a bad investment of a multi-million dollar weapons system. Operating a HIMARS unit is not too dissimilar from operating a high-performance aircraft—you don’t just drive it around like a pickup truck, occasionally picking up some missile six-packs or gas. It needs all that infrastructure, or you might as well not bother.

That’s what was happening in April and May, while the Warsaw Pact junkyards were getting emptied out: a lot of logistics was getting set up to turn Ukraine into a NATO client state. It wasn’t showy, and the payoff was not going to be apparent for several months. But the Biden administration did not use fear of thermonuclear war as an excuse to do nothing: it used risk of thermonuclear war as a boundary to delineate a space within which it could operate. Inside that space, largely in secret, it began to move in a way to help the Ukrainians create the basis for their eventual victory in the war.

The Rear Areas: The Western attention to Ukrainian supply is only part of the logistical story of the war. From the very beginning of the conflict, in a way that was not evident in the nightly footage of detonations, desperate actions, and depressing outrages, limitations of logistical practice of the Russian armed forces impeded the invasion effort, and became the immediate focus of attention of the Ukrainian Army (abbreviated UA here) general staff. The UA knew the outlines of Russian logistical thinking well from Soviet days, having only really turned to the very different Western logistical practices under NATO tutelage since 2014.

The radical difference between the logistics and supply practice Russia and that of the West is described in this excellent and readable recent academic paper published by the Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, which is updated with lessons from the war in Ukraine. Another great resource is this well-timed post on the War on the Rocks blog from November 2021. The crucial aspect of Russian practice, and the Achilles heel that the Ukrainian quickly identified, is the reliance on the rail network for all long-haul transportation of military supplies—“long-haul” being distances above about 140 km/90 miles. Russian logisticians therefore establish logistical distribution hubs at railhead served by high-capacity track, then use trains on lower-capacity track (often single or double track) to convey those supplies, which are crated but unpalleted, to trucking hubs within 140 km of the front, where they are unloaded and dispatched by truck to their final addresses.

The map that I’ve assembled above from the excellent personal railroad site of Yuri Popov, a physics instructor at the University of Michigan, shows the rail connections from Russia to Eastern and North-Eastern Ukraine. I’ll be referring to it as we go along. Note one conspicuous feature, however: there actually aren’t that many available connections between Russia and Ukraine.

Necessity driven by political geography and rail connectivity forced the Russians to supply the entire war from two distribution hubs: Belgorod in the north, and Rostov-on-Don in the south. If you look at the map again and focus on the Belgorod lines you can see why the Russians are so pissed off about their failure to take Kharkiv. Had they succeeded there, they might actually have won the war by now, because Kharkiv would have given them easy interior access to the Ukrainian rail network, which the Ukrainians themselves have been using to great effect to exploit their interior lines of communication. The UA would have been forced to tear up those lines to stop the Russians, greatly degrading their own war effort, and they probably would have lost the entire Donbas by May anyway. By holding Kharkiv, the UA kept the Russians moving around the periphery of the rail network, and held the interior for themselves. It was a crucial move in the war, that we can only really see the significance of now.

A feature that resulted from this outcome is the fact that for most of the war, the Russian army eastern forces have been supplied from Belgorod through a rail line terminating at a trucking hub at Kupyansk³. This corresponds on the map above to the line annotated by the middle arrow. The Southern theatre has been largely supplied from the Rostov-on-Don hub, by means of rail lines through Crimea passing over the Kerch Straits bridge, through the rail junction at Dzankhoi (where the UA Special Operations Forces (SOF) arranged for an ammunition warehouse to explode last August. Hmm..)

Intelligence, Deception: One factor that could be suspected, but of course never overtly stated or reported, was that one of the most important forms of Western—principally US—assistance to Ukraine came in the form of growing intelligence cooperation. According to reporting by the Washington Post in August, this cooperation was cautious and circumspect at first, as the Ukrainian government was known to have been penetrated by Russian operatives. Over time, as confidence in Ukrainian security measures grew so did the cooperation, to the point that it seems quite likely that currently, near-real-time US remote sensing data from space and airborne platforms is probably making it to customers in the UA.

Part of the evidence that is on public display of the Ukrainian capability for highly secure operation is, as we will see, the extent to which they have been able to conceal from the Russians and from the public both capabilities and intentions that in retrospect were practically in plain view. The UA and the Ukrainian government have, by necessity, employed a weapon that weaker parties traditionally turn to in wartime: deception. As we will see, they implemented a program of deception that paid dividends to a degree at least matching the spectacular successes that the British, and, later, the Western Allies, achieved in WWII. That is the story to which we turn next, as we take up a chronology of the war.

Tomorrow: The essay’s conclusion, A War In Four Acts.