Putin's failures.. Has the Russian president neglected the lessons of history?

Introduction to translation

In this article from The Atlantic, military history researcher Anthony Beaver compares the military tactics used by Russia in its current war in Ukraine, and the tactics used by Soviet forces during World War II, to conclude that the Russian president is re-cloning the old military methods today. itself, a scenario that could - according to Beaver - produce devastating results whose main reason is Putin's inability to transcend Russia's Soviet past.

translation text

The famous German chancellor in the nineteenth century, "Otto von Bismarck," once said that only a fool learns from his mistakes, "I learned from the mistakes of others," he said.

The surprising thing now is that the Russian army is repeating the mistakes of its Soviet predecessor.

Marshal Georgi Zhukov sent his heavily armed armies to Berlin in April 1945 under heavy pressure from Stalin without the support of the infantry.

The fact is that Vladimir Putin's forces are not only making the same mistake, but they have copied the way the Soviets attached pieces of iron to the turrets of their tanks in the hope that the added metal would preemptively detonate anti-tank weapons before they hit the tanks, but this did not make Russian tanks safe and did not saves them, but rather leads - simply - to enhance the focus on them in the battle, and attracts the Ukrainian sniper teams, just as Soviet tanks attracted teams from the "Hitler Youth" and the "Special Security Forces".

History obsession

The Russian president's obsession with history, especially with regard to the "Great Patriotic War" against Germany, drifted his political discourse into gruesome self-contradictions;

What clearly affected his military approach.

Tanks were a great symbol of strength and solidity during World War II, and for Putin to look at them the same today is hard to believe. Vehicles have proven to be vulnerable to drones and anti-tank weapons in recent conflicts in Libya and elsewhere. Consider, for example, Azerbaijan's ability to destroy Armenian tanks smoothly;

Which was considered an essential reason for its victory in 2020 in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

But it seems that Putin has not learned as much as he has not forgotten from the past.

Soviet political officials had told the Warsaw Pact forces that entered Czechoslovakia in August 1968 that they would be welcomed as the torchbearers of freedom, and they found themselves hated, without sufficient fuel, starved and demoralized.

Putin's grip on the local media can hide the truth from most of the Russian people, but his recruits - some of whom are now being forced to sign new contracts to become volunteers - undoubtedly know the truth.

Putin treats his people just as harshly as he treats his enemies, to the extent that the military brought a mobile crematorium to Ukraine to dispose of Russian victims to reduce the amount of body bags brought home.

Putin's Soviet predecessors had a similar disregard for the feelings of their soldiers. In 1945 the Red Army faced a series of uprisings in its ranks. After the soldiers' disdain on numerous occasions by officials and political departments, the soldiers were ordered to leave at night to a distant wasteland, not to retrieve their fallen comrades. Rather, they were stripped of their uniforms to be reused by the soldiers who came in their place.

Another pattern that is repeating itself in Ukraine today is the Russian army's reliance on heavy guns. In World War II, the Red Army boasted of the strength of its artillery, which it described at the time as "the lord of war."

In the Berlin operation, Zhukov's artillery fired more than 3 million shells, destroying the city more than the Allied strategic air force.

The Soviets used "Katyusha" rocket launchers - which German soldiers called "Stalin's machine" because of its howling-like sound - to eliminate any remaining fighters who tried to defend the city.

Whereas Putin's conventional artillery pulverizes open Ukrainian buildings in the same old fashioned way to smash potential sniper positions, thermobaric munitions — destructive "vacuum bombs" that create fireballs that draw oxygen away from their targets — are now replacing older Katyushas.

The Russians' destruction of the cities of "Grozny" and "Aleppo" has already made clear to us the extent to which their doctrine of intra-city conflict has barely developed since World War II, contrary to the doctrine of Western armies, as the international coalition that recaptured the cities of "Raqqa" and "Mosul" from the grip of ISIS sought a more precise approach to what it targets. It tightened its grip by encircling and besieging each city and then purging it sector by sector.

Putin's army..and the Red Army

Of course, Putin's army is not the Red Army, just as Putin's Russia is not the Russia of the Soviet Union.

The institutional corruption that is rampant throughout the government has affected everything, and the officers are profiting from the sale of spare parts and ignoring the necessary logistical support in favor of luxury projects.

While Ukrainian fighters are destroying Russian Cold War-era T-72 tanks just as hunters hunt ducks row by row, the Russian priority has been to keep enough money to pay for the new generation of high-tech Armata tanks.

Although the Armata tanks can still do more than pass through Red Square on Victory Day on the ninth of May each year to dazzle the masses and foreign media, they will actually face the same fate on the battlefield as the T tanks. 72".

Elite forces, paratroopers, and spetsnaz still exist within the Russian army, but they can do little on their own in the chaos of bad military management.

The loss of wisdom and insight involved in the introduction of the new encrypted communications system for the Russian army would have been hard to believe in the more disciplined old Soviet times, when mistakes like this were met with severe punishment.

This supposedly secure communications system relies on the third-generation towers that Russia blew up when it invaded Ukraine.

With the system now simply out of service, the Russian officers had to make voice calls on cell phones, while the cheerful Ukrainian volunteers listened with ease.

There are indications that Putin's forces are now adjusting their tactics and preparing for two important strategic shifts in eastern Ukraine and Kiev.

The invasion of Georgia in 2008, which represented a setback for the small former Soviet republic, nonetheless cleared Russia's weakness and incompetence, and resulted in plans to reform Russia's armed forces.

These efforts have clearly failed miserably.

This tells us so much about the loss of ideals, integrity, and sense of duty within the Putin regime, and it is hard to see how this might change at this late and crucial stage of the invasion of Ukraine.

The Red Army surprised itself and the world at Stalingrad in 1942 with a sudden turn, and there are indications that Putin's forces are now adjusting their tactics and preparing for two important strategic shifts in eastern Ukraine and Kiev.

Stalin's insistence on adjusting the course of the Russian army - accompanied by the execution of deserters and failed officers - would widen the conflict into a bloodbath of crushing destruction.

Yet, contrary to all expectations before the war, the collapse of the Russian military appears to be an even small possibility. A complete collapse of morale could lead to a shameful withdrawal, a scenario with potentially devastating consequences for Putin's inability to transcend Russia's Soviet past.

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Translation: Karim Muhammad

This report has been translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect the website of Meydan.