E65: Russia's Options on Ukraine Remain Varied and Flexible
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This is Overwatch, a podcast presented by the Institute for the Study of War. I'm Jacob Taylor. Russia continues to increase its military forces poised on Ukraine's border. The situation is tense, deadly, and complicated.

On this episode, ISW Russia team lead Mason Clark will explain the current military picture and what he and his team believe will happen next. Thanks for having me today, Jacob. Today, I'd like to discuss the general situation we're seeing around Ukraine, not just the current ongoing military buildup, but what the Kremlin actually did prior in 2021 and what its likely objectives are and different options as we watch the situation going forward in February and March.

So the key item that has been in the news the most recently is a major Russian military buildup around Ukraine since October 2021, followed up by with a number of frankly quite egregious Russian security demands in December and a number of diplomatic negotiations with the US and NATO in January of 2022.

So the developments that we're watching now actually began back in March and April of 2021. We saw a major Russian build up near the Ukrainian border, a number of forces not just permanently deployed near Ukraine, but being pulled from all over Russia, including forces from as far away as the border with Kazakhstan. We're deploying it to the border in sort of small units and assembling more permanent training grounds, camping areas and shifting equipment.

We saw this main rush in March and April, and at the time we did not assess that a Russian offensive was likely, but it was sort of a key initial step for the Russians in the campaign that they would later continue in the latter months of 2021.

This, as I previously mentioned, escalated in October and November. We saw a lot more Russian forces deploying forwards. Russian units in the area began conducting a higher pace of readiness exercises and even highly unusual exercises to sort of build out command and control structures, practice specific tasks, that sort of thing that could support some sort of offensive operation.

Now, I want to clarify that we've seen a fairly steady pace of Russian deployments ever since October and November. It wasn't as if all the deployments occurred and the forces were in place and that was it, or that there have been these sort of major escalations. It's been this steady drip of Russian forces near the Ukrainian border. However, a big difference in this buildup, Russian buildup that is, that started in October, November, was the way that the US and NATO responded.

which was much more direct than in response to past Russian buildups. There was a lot of leaks from US intelligence personnel later supported by direct statements from the White House and DOD that the Russians were prepping to conduct some sort of offensive against Ukraine and very clearly calling out this Russian action.

This may have actually caught the Russians by surprise and changed their approach to the crisis because in the early weeks of the buildup, it was very much in line with things that we've seen the Russians do in the past of deploying forces to the Ukrainian border and escalating regular shelling on the front lines in occupied Donbass, which is the area of eastern Ukraine that is occupied by Russian proxies.

and use that as sort of a preliminary step for diplomatic demands of Ukraine. But this time, the crisis and the Russian efforts escalated as we moved into November and December. In early December, both the US and Russia moved the situation up a level, so to speak, into direct talks and discussing not just the Russian buildup around Ukraine,

But wider relations between Russia and the US, Russia and NATO and European security architecture as a whole. With a list of Russian demands that then moved into the diplomatic process that we saw in January. On December 7th, Russian President Putin and US President Biden held a call on the situation that in many ways crystallized this crisis in international media. And that's when we began seeing major coverage from both US and European outlines of what was going on on the ground.

The Kremlin followed this up on December 17th by publishing what it called a draft treaty of security demands with the US and NATO. To put it simply, the demands were absolutely ludicrous and essentially a laundry list of all of the demands the Kremlin has made of the US and its perceived grievances across the last 20 years.

Central to these demands was a written legal guarantee to Russia that NATO would not bring in any more Eastern European states, a written guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO as sort of a subset of that, and guarantees that NATO would remove several weapon systems such as major ballistic missile systems and even some training deployments to Eastern NATO states to assuage Russian security concerns.

There's a number of other elements as well about reporting on military exercises and several other items. But essentially, if all the demands were met, NATO would be completely nullified as an alliance. It would lose the ability to expand, and Russia would have in many ways a veto power over many NATO and Western exercises. So the agreements were quite unfulfilled.

out of left field, but were a way essentially for the Kremlin to put on the table all of these longstanding demands. Because Russian President Putin and the Kremlin as a whole has long decried NATO as an offensive alliance and has claimed that Russia was promised that NATO would never expand and that Russia is in fact on the defensive in Ukraine because NATO continues to provide some support to Ukraine, even though Ukraine does not have what is known as a membership action plan to actually formally enter NATO.

In the second half of December, we had a lot of back and forth messaging from the Kremlin and the US and NATO on these Russian security demands that led to a series of negotiations in Europe, particularly in the week of January 10th through the 13th. Both direct US-Russia negotiations in Geneva, US-NATO, pardon me, Russia-NATO negotiations in Brussels, and major negotiations at the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, in Vienna.

These were followed up with a number of calls, both the Russians talking to their allies, US and NATO talking amongst themselves and with Ukraine, and several follow up engagements between the US and Russia and Russia and NATO. On these various Russian demands, the Kremlin portrayed that they were not being taken seriously, but then the diplomatic engagements were in some ways respectful and legitimate.

legitimate. And these sort of came to an end point and we're in a bit of an interregnum, so to speak, right now, when the US submitted a formal written response, which is something the Kremlin had demanded, to the list of Russian security guarantees last week on January 26th, essentially saying, as the US and NATO had been messaging all along, that they were all completely off the table and not going to be met by the US and NATO.

So that's where we are now in the turnover from January into February on the diplomatic front is that the US has officially said it will not meet these major Russian demands. The Kremlin has said that this is very bad essentially for the Kremlin and that Russia may need to take some sort of military technical response to its security demands not being met. While continuing to stress that it does not intend to launch a war in Ukraine and we're waiting for next steps and seeing what the Kremlin might do around this wider situation.

So refocusing back down on what we're seeing around Ukraine itself and various Russian military deployments, I want to talk through what options the Kremlin has in the situation. So as I previously referenced, Russia has been continuing its military buildup on the eastern border of Ukraine, in Belarus, which I'll talk about in a bit more detail, as well as in the illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula.

You've probably seen in the news the concept of a BTG, a battalion tactical group, as sort of the main unit of measurement, so to speak, of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border. And I want to briefly explain what those are. They're units of around 800 to 900 personnel.

That are, to put it in technical terms, the smallest independent unit that the Russian military can deploy. Essentially the main tactical elements that they would move around in any operation rather than smaller groups of just 300 personnel, so to speak, or deploying forces in entire regiments or divisions up in the thousands. So that's why these BTGs counts have been floating around in the media so much.

And on that, they have likely in the mid-70s of BTGs around Ukraine, including in Belarus, as well as overall around, we think, 110,000 personnel near the Ukrainian border. Now, there's a disparity between 70 BTGs, around 800 and 900 personnel, and that 110,000 number because a lot of those other troops are support elements, supply chains and medical facilities and other combat support elements that would be

be enabling these BTGs in an actual offensive operation. These deployments are continuing. We continue to see BTGs trickle in from all across Russia as far away as Russia's Eastern Military District, which is near China and the Pacific Ocean. So the Russian military is pulling a lot of forces and sending them to the Ukrainian border in various allocations.

Despite this ongoing buildup, we still, knocking on every piece of wooden site, assess that a full Russian mechanized invasion of Ukraine is unlikely for several reasons. One, it would be a major change from the Kremlin's past approach to Ukraine, which has been to not only ensure that Ukraine never joins the EU and NATO, but make sure that it is permanently in Russia's orbit through some sort of Kremlin-favorable government.

It's used both information and subversive actions to carry this out, as well as limited military operations in Donbass and Crimea. Although those have been heavily filtered through claimed Russian proxies, and the Kremlin still maintains that it is not an active belligerent in the fighting in eastern Ukraine, which is, to be clear, completely false. Russian officers completely control those proxy forces.

But it would be a major change for Putin to jump from that to a full mechanized invasion of Ukraine that would likely cause untold casualties, very clearly reveal Russia as a belligerent, and frankly not play well in international media, as well as sort of in the post-Soviet space where Russia is trying to advertise itself as defending Russian speakers.

Second, an invasion, a major invasion would come with very high costs for the Kremlin. One, in terms of Russian casualties, which very, very notably we want to flag, the Kremlin is not preparing the Russian population for. It continues to deny that there will be a major war and is not doing the sort of narratives

You must be prepared for your sons to have to fight and die to fight the evil Ukrainians or anything like that that you would expect prior to a major war. And the Kremlin is likely very cognizant of how these Russian casualties play back home from its deployment to Syria, where they have gone out of their way to cover up Russian casualties and further back into the wars in Georgia and Chechnya and even further back into the Soviet war in Afghanistan. This is likely very fresh in the Kremlin's thinking.

Second, it would be incredibly costly economically, not just in terms of the sanctions that the U.S. and Europe would impose on Russia for any major invasion, but in terms of lost opportunities of Russia changing how it can portray itself in the international space. And likely many states would shy away from economic ties with Russia after such an aggressive action.

Third and finally is how tough the operation would likely be. A lot has been made of how effective the Russian military has become since 2014, but the Ukrainian military has also seriously improved since 2014 at the beginning of the war in Donbas.

It's likely that a major Russian operation would turn into a grinding slog in many areas, including major urban combat in metropolitan areas such as the capital of Kyiv, and likely a Ukrainian insurgency in occupied areas. So for a number of reasons, we think that a major Russian invasion to occupy all of Ukraine is highly unlikely.

However, we do think the Kremlin could pursue one or more military options to degrade the Ukrainian military and impose further demands that are unfortunately becoming increasingly likely. We forecast back in early December in a series of reports that we published that Russia would permanently deploy forces into Belarus, which we are now seeing in early January and extending into February. This is going to be a permanent threat to both Ukraine and NATO, which I'll touch on a little bit later.

We also think it's increasingly likely that Russia will deploy forces overtly into the occupied Donbas, which it previously has not. As I mentioned, preferring to claim that is just using proxies and denying the presence of Russian troops.

We're seeing a lot of Kremlin narratives about the need to protect Russian speakers and even Russian citizens since the Kremlin has illegally handed out Russian passports to residents in Donbas over the last couple of years. And even a lot of calls by various Russian parliamentarians for Russia to directly ship weapons to the DNR and LNR, the Netsk and Luhansk People's Republics. Those are the two sort of proxies that Russia has to protect them from what the Kremlin is very overtly claiming is a looming Ukrainian offensive against Donbas, which

is not being planned. And so we think this is increasingly likely that there will be some permanent Russian deployment into Donbas, which would further threaten Ukrainian President Zelensky as sort of a claim deterrence to a Ukrainian offensive. This may be accompanied by some sort of military operation intended to degrade the Ukrainian military and possibly capture some terrain, likely a heavy air and missile campaign intended to reduce Ukrainian forces on the front line as well as further back

in the Ukrainian rear areas to demonstrate to the government in Kiev that it would not be able to resist a full Russian invasion without Russia actually having to carry out that full mechanized invasion and compelling Kiev into concessions on Russian favorable terms, such as finally legitimizing its proxies in Donbas and reintegrating them back into the Ukrainian political system, or perhaps establishing some sort of demilitarized zone within Ukraine itself, where Ukraine and NATO partners cannot deploy any heavy forces.

I won't go into too many more details on the various military options we could see here, but we think they would likely focus around Donbas itself and possibly Crimea, as that is where we have seen the preponderance of Russian forces that are prepared for large-scale operations. They're integrated at high levels of command and control. They've been practicing for this sort of operation for not just the last few months, but for years, and have been established, primarily the Eighth Combined Arms Army, to conduct such operations.

Whereas the units that we're seeing on Ukraine's northeastern border, as well as moving into Belarus, are more of a hodgepodge of units that are likely intended as a blocking force and would be, frankly, a strange choice to be the main thrust of a Russian operation. Since they're not very well coordinated together, they're pulled from a lot of different units and are not synthesized into a whole that you would need for this sort of large-scale maneuver war.

The last major item that I'd like to touch on today is, frankly, sort of a direct rebuttal of how this ongoing situation is being covered in a lot of Western media. This is not going to just be an over and done crisis of either Putin invades Ukraine or he doesn't. And then we can sort of close the book.

First of all, a lot of nuance is lost in just discussing this as invasion or no invasion. As we assess, we don't think that a full mechanized invasion of all of unoccupied Ukraine is likely. It still could occur, but very unlikely. But there's a whole barometer of military operations below that level that Russia could carry out that would be more than simply the status quo of shelling on the front lines.

even if he doesn't conduct a major operation or if he conducts one of these smaller operations that won't end the Russian threat. The Russian force deployments that we're watching are going to have long term implications, not just for Ukraine but NATO as well. Particularly the permanent deployments into Belarus are going to require NATO to shift its force posture in its eastern member states.

We've not previously had 30,000 Russian troops in Belarus right on the Polish and Baltic states borders, for example. And that's going to require a long-term reevaluation of what NATO needs to do to counter the Russian threat.

With the forces being shifted to the Ukrainian border, there's been a lot of statements that Putin can't sustain this, the forces will eventually need to return or stuff like that, that we don't really buy into. Yes, it's costly, but he's clearly showing the intent and capability to do so. And there's a high likelihood that a lot of these Russian forces are going to stay in their new positions on the Ukrainian border. And the exercises they've been carrying out are going to have increased their various combat capabilities.

It's going to be a permanent knife at Ukrainian President Zelensky's throat, demonstrating that Putin, if he wants, can carry out a major operation against Ukraine to undermine it, destroy its military, take additional territory, that sort of thing. And possibly even more importantly, already without carrying out this new military kinetic escalation, Putin has demonstrated to Ukrainian President Zelensky that he can't really expect direct NATO support.

Of course, a number of European states and NATO members are shipping a lot of lethal and non-lethal aid to the Ukrainian military, supporting it against any future Russian operation. But the US and NATO have made clear to Zelensky that no forces are going to actively deploy into Ukraine.

This may be in some ways what the Kremlin has been seeking of now to come up with sort of an imagined dialogue here. Putin can go straight to Zelensky and go, okay, now you see, stop resisting us on our demands on legitimizing the DNR and LNR and our various requirements for you never joining the EU and NATO because you're not going to get any help. And why even try and fight this invasion because you lose?

This is going to be a longer term challenge of these forces being here and on backup at the NATO and EU level, the Kremlin has essentially put on the table all of its demands. Going back to what I discussed at the beginning of the podcast of that list of demands that it published on December 17th and that the US provided a written response to on January 26th. The Kremlin is going to be able to use this in the future to essentially say we presented NATO and the US with all of our reasonable demands and they were refused.

This is a very key point for the way the Kremlin sort of structures its foreign policy as being so centralized on legitimization of its actions and information campaigns. And they're going to be able to bring this back up essentially as it costs belly for future actions, either an actual war or future demands of we've already said that the US and NATO have not listened to us, therefore we must do X, Y and Z. So we're watching for the Kremlin short term military options here.

As I said, likely not a full invasion, but a number of options below that level that would be kinetic operations and intended to coerce Ukraine into further concessions as well as the US and NATO. And this is going to be a long term crisis that the US and its allies are going to have to stay attentive to as the Russian military shifts more and more forces west and it continues its demands of the US and NATO.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Overwatch. ISW is pleased to announce that applications are now open for the 2022 Hertog War Studies program. This is a premier program that aims to educate advanced undergraduate students about the theory, practice, organization, and control of war and military forces. Visit HertogFoundation.org or check the show notes for this episode to learn more and apply.