Putin's awaited nightmare... Features of the upcoming uprising in Ukraine

Translation Introduction:

What is Russia really planning about Ukraine?

What future awaits it if it imposed its control by force on the country?

In this article, Douglas London, a former official in the US Central Intelligence Agency for more than three decades, takes us to the scenario that Russia will face if it decides to occupy all or parts of Ukraine, predicting that Moscow will face a fierce and costly guerrilla war whose repercussions may exceed the Ukrainian arena inside Russia itself.

Translation text:

Russian forces hit a number of targets along and across Ukraine, seizing vital facilities and vast areas of land, and the Ukrainian army cannot now match that Russian might. It is Russian President Vladimir Putin who will decide how far his forces will penetrate Ukraine.

As a CIA operations officer and Russian speaker I served in Central Asia and directed a number of counterinsurgency operations;

I don't think Putin attacked Ukraine without a credible plan to paint the end of the war, especially with the potential cost of an open war.

However, Putin's worst plans may be easily unraveled in the face of Ukrainian popular resistance and the scenario of an uprising.

Even if Russia limits its conquest to eastern and southern Ukraine, the sovereign Ukrainian government in the rest of the country will not stop fighting, and will enjoy international military and economic support, and the support of the Ukrainian people who will rally around it.

But if Russia goes ahead with its invasion to occupy Ukraine in its entirety, and installs a government loyal to the Kremlin in Kiev;

It will ignite a prolonged and difficult conflict of another kind.

In this case, Putin will face a bloody and prolonged uprising that could extend beyond Ukraine's borders, and could even reach Belarus and challenge President Alexander Lukashenko, Putin's closest ally, and shake the foundations of stability in countries around Russia such as Kazakhstan, and even within Russia itself.

When conflicts flare up, results may arise that no one imagined or expected before, and those results quickly become very realistic, and Putin may not be ready today to confront the uprising - or uprisings - that will result from the current war.

The victor regrets, even after a while

The great powers have always waged wars against the weaker ones, only to quickly find themselves in a spiral of failure to carve out a well-studied path to end the war they started, a lack of insight that revealed itself clearly in the confused occupations that took place previously.

There is a difference between the United States' invasion of Vietnam in 1965, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, as well as the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979;

And the difficult task of staying in those countries in the face of their valiant and stubborn uprisings.

Russia can grab whatever it wants from Ukraine, but its plans to bring Ukraine to its knees will need much more than the Russian reserve forces that Putin suggested might occupy the region as "peacekeepers" after the initial military operation's objectives were achieved. Russia is already in Ukraine thanks to Putin’s aggressiveness over the past eight years, which Ukrainians have spent planning, training and preparing to resist a possible Russian occupation (after Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014)*.

Ukraine is well aware that neither the United States nor NATO forces will help it directly on the battlefield, and therefore its strategy will not depend on repelling the Russian invasion and forcing it to withdraw, but rather on draining Moscow inside Ukraine so that its occupation becomes unsustainable.

Any future uprising would benefit from Ukraine's geography, as it is a country that shares borders with four NATO member states, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, and Belarus itself shares borders with Poland to the west and Lithuania to the north. Those long borders give Washington and NATO a sustainable way to support The Ukrainian resistance and its uprising for a long time, and the sleep of Belarus, if it decided to secretly support the opponents of Lukashenko's regime.

It should be noted here that Moldova, a small country in southwestern Ukraine, is an interesting player as well. Although it is an officially neutral country, it has cooperated in the past with the United States and NATO, and it has a somewhat cold relationship with Moscow due to the tension over the separatist region of "Tarnistria" The small and loyal to Moscow along the Moldavian-Ukrainian border, where Moscow supports that region and places a number of its Russian forces in the name of "peacekeeping", a role that has been pushing Moldova towards the west, as "Maya Sandu", the former Prime Minister of Moldova, succeeded in defeating the president Although Moldova is unlikely to openly irritate the Kremlin, Sandu may be willing to cooperate with the Ukrainian resistance from behind the scenes.

It's a lesson the United States learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan: uprisings always had solid supply lines, an inexhaustible stock of fighting men, and sanctuary across the border that would allow them to go on indefinitely and sap an occupying army's resolve to fight and torpedo political support for the occupation in their home country.

Russia will have to reconsider before it chases the rebels across the border into Poland, for example, as its move could spark a war with NATO (by virtue of Poland's membership in it)*.

The lifeline of the intifada

The United States will play a major and pivotal role in supporting the Ukrainian uprising.

Washington has been moving carefully under the Obama and Trump administrations in response to cyber attacks, disinformation, and Russian military expansion, and it did not want to open the door to an escalation that would spiral out of control and bring Russian cyber attacks on American banks, companies, and infrastructure.

However, the Biden administration has so far not taken this path in dealing with Russia, but rather revealed the identities of the Russian hacking programmers, and recovered the money they obtained through cyber ransomware attacks, and worked to extradite Russian businessmen to it to appear before the United States courts, and it also allowed the publication of Secret intelligence documents about Russia's plans in Ukraine to unite its allies and direct a specific media discourse in this regard.

If the government of Ukraine remains independent operating from Kiev or Lviv (the largest city in the west of the country), the United States and NATO countries can openly support it with arms, training, and money, as the legal charter allows US intelligence to cooperate with counterparts in other countries to provide training and tools, which is what happened Already with Ukraine over the past years.

But if Russia succeeds in overthrowing the government and occupying the whole country, the support will have to be secret, since military support for an effort (without an official umbrella from a specific state)* against another sovereign state (which is Russia in this case)* must become Secretly, if the United States was not at war with the latter country, which is what happened when Washington supported the Afghan mujahideen in the eighties, the Iraqi Kurds before 2003, and the Syrian revolutionaries ten years ago.

The CIA has a long history of supporting uprisings of this kind. The mother agency of American intelligence, known as the Strategic Services Department, emerged during World War II by supporting the resistance in France, the Netherlands, and East Asia (against the Axis forces)*.

The US intelligence now has recent experience in supporting and confronting the uprisings in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, which makes it ready to confront the modern regular forces of Russia by helping the Ukrainian rebels target valuable military sites or have a significant moral impact on the Russian forces.

A press report on Yahoo published last January details of a secret US intelligence program to train elite Ukrainian special forces with a number of intelligence workers starting in 2015. According to the report, the program included the deployment of affiliated paramilitary officers The CIA in Ukraine.

U.S. and Ukrainian officials have long arranged for this day, and there is no doubt that the secret program to organize the resistance against Russia already has communications infrastructure, intelligence-gathering capabilities, and operational plans awaiting implementation.

The Ukrainian people are out of the bottle

The anti-Russian uprising will inevitably face obstacles and setbacks, and Putin, in turn, is well aware of the possibility of organizing a Ukrainian resistance to an expanding Russian occupation.

US officials claim that the Russian government has lists of Ukrainian political and security officials that it will arrest - or even assassinate - if it fully controls the country, as well as a list of the pro-Kremlin figures it will appoint as their successors.

Russia will then seek to undermine any upcoming uprising by moving quickly to get rid of its potential leaders and supporters.

For its part, the uprising against the Russian forces will take time to gain sufficient momentum and achieve its goals, and it may take years, not just a few months, for the uprising to acquire maturity, organization and an effective offensive rhythm.

My memory as an American (who worked with his country's intelligence)* can help me remember how easily I walked the streets of Kabul and Baghdad in 2002 and 2003, and ate in the cafes of both cities, unaware at all of what was going on around me.

But after only a year or two (from the American invasion of the two countries)*, it became necessary for me to wear a bulletproof vest and to always be accompanied by a convoy of security details to protect me in heavy armored vehicles to avoid sudden attacks and the explosion of explosive devices.

The Ukrainian rebels will need to study the latest developments in modern technology, which may make their task more difficult today.

During World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Soviet War in Afghanistan;

Organized groups of fighters were able to withdraw and scatter into the countryside or the mountains, but escaping the grip of the occupying forces has now been made more difficult thanks to drones, satellites and thermal imaging.

The rebels would also carry out cross-border raids, but to maintain such a pattern of military operations behind enemy lines would need the support of the inhabitants of those areas - ostensibly ordinary people who secretly have access to weapons and communications - and who could then evade exposure from by the Russians.

Of course, the Russians will stigmatize such attacks as terrorism, while the Westerners will celebrate them as an act of resistance.

At the beginning of the uprising, the Russians will succeed in uncovering many cells of the rebels, and they will unveil their first leaders after years of gathering intelligence, but the rebels will soon adapt - perhaps much faster than the huge regular armies they are fighting - so new leaders will emerge, polished by the first experiences of war, Their light, fast movement pattern will give them an edge over time.

Russia may hope that its incursion will be limited to the regions of Ukraine with a Russian majority, which may be inclined to accept Russian rule, or perhaps Moscow will seek to speed up the pace of its conquest so that it will take control of the country as quickly as possible and completely subjugate it before effective resistance emerges in its flanks.

However, the characteristics of Russia’s military superiority over the Ukrainian army will slowly erode in the latter scenario, as its enemy transforms from an organized army into a fast-moving, decentralized resistance force, and the occupying forces will find themselves under the yoke of attacks designed to drop the dead and undermine the combative spirit of their soldiers.

It is here that a propaganda campaign for influence will emerge, teeming with gruesome images of the massacres of both Ukrainian civilians and Russian military personnel;

It incites a desire to reverse the decision to war within Russia, and undermines Moscow's narrative that its forces were welcomed by the local population, who saw their coming as a liberation for their country.

Putin's intentions from this war that he chose himself are still the subject of heated debate, and the picture may become clear in the coming days and weeks while Russia continues its attack, but if its goals reach their maximum in an effort to redraw the borders and overthrow the current government, the uprising will inevitably come, and it will be difficult Putin and his enemies alike must control the forces that have just emerged from that war.

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This article has been translated from Foreign Affairs and does not necessarily reflect the Meydan website.

Translation: Nour Khairy.