One Year of War Part 2: Russia's Military and Occupation Struggles
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This is Overwatch, a podcast presented by the Institute for the Study of War. ISW is marking the first anniversary of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine with a three-part interview series between ISW Russia team lead Mason Clark and senior members of his team.

In this episode, Mason and Russia analyst Carolina Hurd will discuss the Russian military struggles on the battlefield and the challenges faced by Russian occupation authorities in Ukraine. Carolina will also explain how ISW uses open sources to track human rights abuses and Russian repression measures in occupied territory. I'm Mason Clark, senior analyst and Russia team lead here at the Institute for the Study of War. Today, I'm speaking with Carolina Hurd, an analyst on the Russia team here at ISW.

Lina has worked with us since January 2022 covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February of just last year. Her work is focused on Russian operational design and campaign planning, the details of their military capabilities, as well as particularly focusing on Russian administration of occupied territories and the war crimes that are occurring in those Russian occupied territories. Lina, thanks for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me, Mason.

So for this series of podcasts, I'm talking to the senior members of the team about their key insights on the first year of the Russian invasion, some insight into our methodology, what goes into the daily reports we produce, and what they're watching going forwards into 2023 and beyond. So just to start off, what are some of the key items that stood out to you the most in the first year of the war and on your writing in the updates?

Some of the key items that have really stood out to me since I've been working on the updates is kind of a reverse inflection, if you will, in that there's been so little learning done by the Russian military and they've so consistently recreated massive tactical and operational failures over and over again throughout the course of multiple different campaigns. We've seen them pin themselves on Severodonetsk and Lysychansk and then once again on Bakhmut and they seem to just not be able to learn

from their mistakes in these areas and continue to pin themselves on small settlements, prioritizing tactical advances over operationally significant gains. So let's break that down a little bit. What are some examples of this Russian operational design, meaning the different campaigns that they've been conducted throughout the course of the war? What have been their similarities and what's caused them to fail or at minimum take much longer than the Kremlin desires?

So we've seen on the highest level the Kremlin continuing to set maximalist goals, for example, the capture of all of Ukraine or the capture of the entire Donbas by March of 2023. But these goals do not have, they don't translate down to the operational or tactical levels because Russian forces lack the tactical and operational capabilities to achieve the goals that the Kremlin and the Russian MOD set for them.

So, for example, over the summer we saw this with the capture of the Donbas. They had to scale that down because it took Russian forces months and months and months to be able to just take Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, which are two settlements in Luhansk Oblast, very close to the Luhansk Oblast border. These are relatively small settlements as well. And it took Russian forces months to be able to take them, which of course burned through manpower and equipment and artillery, et cetera.

And when they finally took those two small settlements and reached the Luhansk-Oblast border, their offensive essentially culminated. And then we saw a recreation of this in many ways, and we're still seeing it with the offensive on Vahhmut.

The Bakhmut offensive is likely part of the larger goal to take Donetsk Oblast or the Donbass by a certain date, but the tactical capabilities do not translate to an ability to actually accomplish this goal. So we've seen Russian forces fighting for tiny, tiny settlements, and I'm talking settlements that are a few blocks across.

to the south of Bakhmut since about May of 2022, but really in earnest since August of 2022. And it took them eight months to advance less than 20 miles to their positions where they are now in Bakhmut. So we're seeing basically a recreation of what was essentially a failure in Sovjet-Adenyansk and Lysychansk, now in Bakhmut in such a way that shows that Russian forces simply are not learning from their failures.

Now, what are some of these failures at that very tactical level? You amongst the team have been one of the most involved with tracking the sort of block by block progress of Russian fighting. What are you seeing in terms of their tactical approaches throughout the war? Is there anything that they have started to change over time? So we've seen a little bit of a shift in tactics on the more granular level, partially driven by the failures that have resulted from the initial basically

campaign failures that Russian forces have continuously recreated. So initially, when we were seeing Russian forces pin themselves on small settlements, the tactics behind this would be basically massed fire, so very intense artillery fire on a small area until it was basically just raised to the ground. And then larger groups, maybe at first we were seeing

battalions and then platoons whatever sweeping into the settlement taking it. That would be kind of the tactic of taking a settlement but because that in and out of itself is costly and Russian forces started taking huge manpower losses and equipment losses, the groups that were taking settlements became smaller and smaller and smaller and now we're seeing this happen more on the assault group level especially around Bakhmut. Wagner is pursuing advances on

in groups of five to ten people maybe. And also there's been a lower reliance on artillery because Russian forces have just burned through their artillery capabilities because they relied so heavily on it throughout the summer and the fall.

So we've seen a gradual tactical shift away from massed fire into more of the sort of, it's not necessarily a human wave attack, that's an incorrect word, but basically infantry driven frontal assaults that are happening on a smaller and smaller scale because of smaller and smaller availabilities of manpower.

So with the ongoing Russian offensive in Luhansk Oblast, even though it's not taking much territory, it does seem to be the largest concentration of forces the Russians can achieve right now, though they have some reserves. Are you seeing any sorts of changes and what are your assessments for how they're going to be able to progress? It's important to differentiate what's going on in Luhansk Oblast for this new offensive and what has been going on in Bakhmut, which is in Donetsk Oblast.

The offensive around Bakhmut has been driven by the Wagner Group, which is a very irregular ad hoc type of formation. And they use different tactics than the conventional Russian units that are currently arrayed along the Luhansk-Odoss border. So while we've seen Wagner around Bakhmut pursue more of this frontal assault infantry driven offensive,

style attack on small settlements. This is not really what we've been observing in the Heinz Goldblast. We've seen conventional elements, which tend to be maybe a little higher, a little bit better trained, though not necessarily because they're also comprised largely of mobilized men with not as much training. However, typically higher discipline, potentially slightly higher quality of troops with more training than Wagner, who are largely prisoners recruited from penal colonies.

So we've seen this kind of differentiation in tactics already in that the conventional units that are committed to the Luhansk-Oblast Frontline are pursuing more of the sort of decisive offensive operation wherein they are identifying and attacking through Ukrainian defensive lines and fortifications.

and taking unspecified grounds, unspecified positions, but in a way that isn't necessarily burning through manpower and equipment as quickly as was the case in Wagner offensives around Bachmut. So we're seeing a very interesting divergence in tactics due to the forces that are pursuing the operations in these two very distinct areas in the theater.

Changing tack a little bit here, the other key item that you focused on throughout our coverage in 2022 has been what's happening behind Russian lines in the occupied territories. Could you talk a little bit about what in particular stood out to you about how the Russians are administering the temporarily occupied territories and what sort of means you've used to collect on what's going on? As of course, the information environment is quite limited.

So I think the thing that has really stood out to me in terms of the administration of occupational frameworks behind Russian lines has been how Russian occupation leaders are doing this with very seemingly innocuous little changes in laws and decrees and that sort of thing that really actually have very, very lasting ramifications on basically administrative, social, legal, and bureaucratic control of occupied areas.

For example, we've seen individual occupation leaders of the four occupied oblasts talk about on their Telegram channels. And this is how we collect all of this, by the way. This is all 100% available in the open source with individual occupation leaders and Russian politicians talking about these very seemingly innocuous programs on public platforms to advertise them.

So we've seen the best example of this is basically the installation of social benefit schemes in occupied areas. The two that I've focused on has been the provision of something called maternity capital, which is a social payment for a family that has more than one child. And then the other thing is basically to do with birth certificate registration.

So this is all information that has been provided by the occupation head of, for example, Zaporizhia Oblast or the LNR head. And it basically just goes to show that Russian occupation officials are trying to use the promise of social benefit payments

to basically coerce people into interacting with Russian occupation organs and then registering with these occupation organs, providing their personal data, and then that can be used to basically crypto-rucify occupied areas of Ukraine.

That's been one of the major inflections for me, has been noticing these seemingly small and unimportant and kind of mundane social benefits and the way that those are actually being used to expand occupational control of occupied areas. The second thing that has really stood out to me is how blatant and open Russian officials, Kremlin-appointed Russian officials, might I add,

and occupation leaders have been in talking about the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and then the subsequent adoption of these Ukrainian children into Russian families.

We've seen time and time again, occupation leaders basically tout the fact they've removed hundreds of children from occupied areas to Russia or deeper to occupied areas of Ukraine and adopted them out to Russian families or basically used a variety of schemes to justify this deportation.

This is all entirely available on telegram channels in Russian newspapers. That's been really a major inflection in the way that I've come to understand the way that Russia is trying to exert social control over occupied areas of Ukraine.

So related to that, of course, Putin has claimed that Russia has annexed at least areas of those four Ukrainian oblasts into Russia last fall. What are some differences in terms of how the administration is being enacted? I know it's certainly not the same as if they actually were Russian oblasts, but what are some of the key things that have stood out to you about the gap between that claimed annexation and the reality on the ground?

So the occupation leaders in this area are very, very invested in trying to present their occupation administrations as doing the right thing and as basically bringing new life to these occupied regions. But from kind of the limited view that we have into occupied territories that isn't coming from Russian sources, we know that this is just not the case. You know,

You know, Russian occupation officials aren't bringing new life to occupied areas, they're just russifying these areas. The infrastructure projects that they're promising aren't necessarily happening to the scale that they say they are. So there's been a divergence between the reality on the ground and what Russian officials are promising and using the promise of to coerce, basically cooperation with occupation governments.

So looking forward a bit now, how do you anticipate Russian occupation administration changing in 2023? Very relatedly, what does the Kremlin want out of these occupied territories rather than simply, you know, naturally they want to hold these positions, but what are they trying to get out of this illegally annexed Russian or pardon me, Ukrainian territory?

So to answer the first part of your question, the way that I foresee this changing and the way that we've already observed this changing is that what started out as kind of local directives by occupation leaders to institute social benefit schemes, the removal of children for medical reasons, that sort of thing, that is now being taken up and actually institutionalized and formalized through formal Russian legislation. So it's no longer just individual announcements and individual recommendations.

I suppose, decrees made by occupation leaders, but now it's been formalized and properly integrated into the Russian legal code. So that's been the biggest change we've seen almost in the last few months, the first few months of 2023. But also what I foresee will continue to happen is that these lower level, more grassroots decrees are going to be translated up into the highest level of Russian law.

So that's to answer the first part of your question. To answer the second part of your question,

Russia wants to continue to strengthen administrative control of these territories because these territories are a pool of resources, economic resources, social resources, administrative resources for Russia, but also a pool of personnel to build out military capability. We've already seen forced recruitment in occupied areas. This will continue to happen likely as

More people are given Russian passports that will kind of open the door for more pseudo-legal mobilization of what will then be defined as Russian citizens living in Ukrainian territory. So that will also increase military capability, force generation capability. And then on a kind of wider and more nefarious level, this is also part of an extended campaign to essentially erase Ukrainian identity.

We've seen this time and time again through all of these seemingly innocuous impositions of social benefit schemes, different infrastructure projects, education reforms. They're all premised on the idea that Ukrainian identity is going to be replaced by Russian identity, by the corresponding Russian systems. And that's really what's overlaying all of what's been happening in occupied territories.

So you addressed there that the Kremlin is looking for additional means to get manpower into its fighting forces. And we've, of course, been observing this shift of trying to rebuild the shattered conventional Russian military. Sort of close out and go back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of operational design.

What's your forecast of the prospects of this Russian offensive in Luhansk Oblast? Is it going to succeed? What's it going to look like in terms of size? And what is the Russian military doing to, as it hopes, finally achieve a major success in 2023?

The first thing that I want to say to that is that the initiation of an offensive does not mean that its success is predetermined in any way. Just because Russian forces are on the offensive now does not mean that this offensive will succeed. We have analyzed this offensive has likely very maximalist goals of taking significant swaths of territory that we just do not believe Russian forces have the tactical capacity or operational ability to do.

So the prospects of this offensive are probably going to resemble quite a bit the prospects of the other offensives that we've seen, in that Russian forces will probably be able to take some ground, but it will be small ground in rural areas that just isn't going to cause Russian forces to take all of Donbass by March. So...

The one maybe difference here is that there'll be more bodies because we've assessed that there's about 150,000 men in training grounds right now, the conscript class that is still training. And as they deploy to the front line, there will be more physical bodies pursuing offensive operations, which just law of averages that will probably allow Russian forces to take

more ground but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have learned from their past mistakes or that they'll be able to take operationally significant ground well we'll certainly be tracking this very closely throughout the rest of the spring and further into 2023 seeing how this russian offensive plays out as well as of course the prospect of any ukrainian counter-offensives

Well, Lena, I'm sure we could talk about this for hours more, but thank you so much for joining me today. And it was great to hear your insights and looking forward at the rest of the year. Always a pleasure. Thank you so much, Mason. Thank you for listening to this episode of Overwatch.

We look forward to your feedback on this episode and previous ones. Visit www.understandingwar.org to learn about ISW's work and to sign up for our mailing list.