Lessons Learned from Russia’s Ukraine Invasion

Those changes paid huge dividends this year, allowing Ukraine’s combat leaders to make their own decisions based on battlefield realities rather than taking play-by-play orders from some faraway commander, as the Russians still do.

Ukrainian pilots also relied on their creativity and courage to stay in the fight, despite their technological and numerical disadvantages. After the Russians destroyed many of the Ukrainians’ ground-based navigation aids, the Ukrainian pilots improvised ad hoc solutions to navigate their aircraft. One MiG-29 fighter pilot told me he sometimes flew combat missions using a handheld Garmin GPS unit — the same kind you might use on a cross-country road trip. His fellow pilots flew so low to stay under the Russians’ radars that they sometimes returned with street signs embedded in their air intakes.

To escape Russian missiles in between missions, the Ukrainian air force used makeshift runways and bases. And yet they stayed in the fight, and to this day, the Russian air force has never achieved anything close to air superiority over all of Ukraine.

One Ukrainian MiG-29 pilot, whose callsign is “Juice,” told me:

“Maybe it’s stupid, but we don’t give a shit about technologies — we’re just trying to do everything with what we’ve got. It’s our land, it’s our families, it’s our cities. We are defending them. That’s the main motivation for us. And we succeed in this because the Russians are surprised. They are fucking surprised … Because they were not expecting resistance in the air at all.”

^{Juice, pictured in the cockpit of a Ukrainian MiG-29 fighter jet, spoke exclusively to Coffee or Die in March 2022. Photo courtesy of Juice/Ukrainian Air Force.}

For its part, the Russian air force appears to have been complacent after years of flying in the uncontested airspace over Syria. And that complacency likely contributed to their underestimation of Ukraine’s air force. Similarly, many Ukrainian veterans of the Battle of Kyiv have told me that, in their minds, the Russians they faced were not psychologically prepared for the harsh realities of combat.

Some Russian units didn’t even know they were going to war until the last minute. Some Russian units brought along parade uniforms, expecting a triumphant march down Kyiv’s Khreshchatyk Boulevard after a few easy days of combat. Yet Moscow’s initial invasion plan fell apart after it encountered a ferocious adversary who was dug in and fighting smart.

Ukraine’s combat veterans were particularly instrumental in those early days of the war. Many rejoined the regular army. Others served in territorial defense units or spearheaded volunteer operations. Many veteran combat pilots also rejoined their former units and quickly regained proficiency in their warplanes while flying combat missions.

Prior to the full-scale invasion, Ukraine had more than 400,000 combat veterans of the war in the Donbas. That pool of manpower comprised the country’s first group of reservists, known as Operational Reserve-1, who were rapidly mobilized and integrated into active combat units.

Among their comrades, mobilized Ukrainian veterans were nicknamed the “dinosaurs.” Not only were they proficient soldiers, but those veterans — especially those who served in 2014 and 2015 — also played the invaluable role of mentoring newer troops who had never faced lethal danger or experienced the chaos of combat.

^{Emergency personnel work at the scene following a drone attack in Rzhyshchiv, Kyiv region, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 22, 2023. AP photo by Efrem Lukatsky.}

Many of the volunteer soldiers I’ve interviewed this past year, most of whom had little or no military experience before the full-scale war, credited their survival to the lessons and the examples handed down to them by combat veterans of the Donbas. Across the spectrum of Ukraine’s armed forces, the positive impact of all that practical knowledge passed on by the dinosaurs far exceeded what a new recruit might learn in basic training.

The trench war in the Donbas served as a prelude to many of the headline-grabbing trends of the full-scale war. Those eight years spurred many of the innovations we’ve seen from the Ukrainians this past year. The use of small drones, for example. As far back as the summer of 2014, I observed Ukrainian units jury-rigging commercial, off-the-shelf drones for use in ISR, as well as for dropping small munitions on their enemies.

The Russians also adapted the use of small drones for reconnaissance and dropping weapons years before the full-scale invasion. Consequently, the Ukrainians became significantly more “drone conscious.” They avoided gathering outside, especially in clear weather, and they camouflaged their trenches and dugouts from aerial reconnaissance. During winter, after the leaves fell and there was less natural concealment, Ukrainian troops paid particular attention to concealing their movements and positions.

At a front-line post near Luhansk in 2021, a Ukrainian lieutenant named Illia told me, “It puts you under constant pressure when you always expect something from the air. You can never relax.”

Being out there, under that constant threat, made me reflect on my own military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, where we had relatively safe places to relax and decompress between missions. That’s a luxury the Ukrainians do not enjoy — even when they are back home with their families in places like Kyiv and Kharkiv.

^{Oleg, 13, holds a training weapon at a military training course with the Georgian National Legion in Kyiv on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die.}

Civil Resilience

For eight years, places like Kyiv remained quarantined from the physical effects of daily combat hundreds of miles away in the eastern Donbas region. The war was always there, but outside the war zone, life went on basically as normal. 

The war was an abstraction for most Ukrainians, a series of sad news stories that they were able to tune out as they went about their daily routines. Consequently, the war became an unequally shared burden within Ukrainian society. Soldiers returning home from combat often felt isolated and out of place. As a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, that disconnect felt very familiar to me.

But the full-scale war changed all that.

No corner of Ukraine is currently spared from Russia’s invasion, and it’s an all-hands-on-deck effort to defend the homeland. The spirit of volunteerism among Ukraine’s civilians, which saved their country from disaster in 2014, kicked into overdrive when the full-scale war began. Literally overnight, Ukraine’s civil society mobilized to support the war effort.

Local defense forces rapidly fortified the entire country and built checkpoints around every settlement — from Kyiv to the smallest village. Along the main roads, militias stacked tires to be set ablaze as smokescreens against Russian forces. Volunteers took down road signs with the names of villages and towns in order to confuse the advancing Russians.

^{Members of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, volunteer military units of the Armed Forces, train close to Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022. Hundreds of civilians joined Ukraine’s army reserves in the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion. AP photo by Efrem Lukatsky.}

In my wife’s hometown of Horishni Plavni, the war galvanized the city’s population. No one wanted to sit idle — they felt compelled to do whatever they could to support the war effort. Volunteers gathered food for soldiers and refugees at the local library. In the local performing arts hall, where Lilly used to dance ballet, hundreds of people of all ages worked day and night to sew camouflage netting for soldiers on the front lines. When parting ways, people started saying things like “everything will be okay” or “until victory” rather than offering a simple goodbye.

For an outsider, it was striking to witness. The Russian army was bearing down on this place, and yet rather than submit to fear or focus on personal priorities, these Ukrainians volunteered to help their community and their army.

Olena Dudko, the director of Horishni Plavni’s library, told me: “I’m extremely proud of our nation, and I know it’s impossible for Russia to defeat us. This is our land, and we will stand our ground.”

Across the country, Ukrainians were similarly able to instantly adapt to wartime life without their society unraveling. And after more than one year of full-scale warfare, Ukrainians are now more united than they ever were during the past three decades of post-Soviet independence.

Part of that society-resistance effort was due to planning by the Ukrainian government. In May 2021, Ukraine’s parliament adopted a new law, titled: “On the Fundamentals of National Resistance.” This law, which fully went into effect in January 2022, enshrined civilian resistance as a key component of Ukraine’s national defense against a Russian invasion.

^{People, including Ukrainians, take part in a demonstration in support of Ukraine outside the Russian Embassy in Tallinn, Estonia, Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022. AP photo by Raul Mee.}

Based on the “comprehensive defense” systems in NATO countries such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Ukraine’s national resistance concept was built around three pillars — Territorial Defense Forces, mobilized civilians in irregular resistance units, and military training for the civilian population.

For their part, Territorial Defense units played key roles in saving Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv. And Ukraine’s resistance units, operating under Special Forces Command, also proved valuable in the early days of the full-scale war. Mobilized civilian partisans provided intelligence about enemy locations, and they took part in sabotage operations. In my wife’s hometown, which was never occupied, National Resistance Movement force partisans stockpiled weapons and Molotov cocktails, and they patrolled for Russian collaborators passing on intelligence for Russian missile and drone strikes.

After the invasion, Ukrainian SOF launched the National Resistance Center website to support the partisan movement. The website offers tips on guerrilla warfare and provides a way to anonymously report Russian military locations. The National Resistance Center’s slogan is: “Each one of us can resist the enemy and do his part for victory. Together, we will turn the enemies’ lives into hell.”

Over the past year, National Resistance Movement partisans developed into an effective irregular force. They do both kinetic and non-kinetic operations — including protests and the assassinations of pro-Russian collaborators and Russian occupation authorities. They also harass Russian troops in occupied areas, drawing resources away from front-line fighting.

While the National Resistance Movement is a relatively new concept, Ukraine’s nationwide network of Territorial Defense Forces was not a new idea in 2022. Most of these units formed in the immediate wake of Russia’s 2014 invasion. Their original purpose was to act as an operational reserve for the regular armed forces and to defend their local areas.

^{Rumia, 59, a member of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, trains close to Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022. AP photo by Efrem Lukatsky, File.}

When the full-scale war began last February, Vasiliy — who was by then 60 years old — returned to active duty. He died in combat near Izyum on Aug. 24, 2022.

Ukraine lost many of its most experienced soldiers in the first year of the war.

As the war drags on, and as attritional battles like Bakhmut continue to take their toll, Ukraine’s ranks have thinned of soldiers with combat experience prior to 2022, as well as those who participated in Western training programs, like the US-led mission at Yavoriv in Western Ukraine.

Combat attrition has forced the Ukrainian military to mobilize thousands of new recruits under the national draft. Under the current law, all physically fit Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 are subject to conscription. My 57-year-old father-in-law, a Soviet army veteran of the Afghanistan era, falls into the group, and he’s currently assisting his city’s territorial defense force.

During the first few months of 2023, Ukraine has stepped up its national mobilization activities, and Ukrainian lawmakers are also trying to close loopholes for draft dodgers. This increased enforcement of the draft likely reflects the heavy toll of attritional battles, such as in Bakhmut.

According to some Ukrainian commanders, many of these new recruits lack sufficient training and are not psychologically prepared for the intensity of full-scale, conventional warfare. Thus, as the experience level and proficiency of the average Ukrainian soldier drops, there’s a risk that Ukraine’s forces could lose some of that flexibility and adaptability that gave them a qualitative edge over the Russians at the war’s outset.

^{A Ukrainian civilian trains at a shooting range outside of Kyiv with the Georgian National Legion on Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die.}

Over the past year, the Russians have also tried to adapt and incorporate some tenets of mission command in their operations. Russian forces are now reportedly moving away from the battalion tactical group, which was their primary combined arms formation at the war’s outset. 

According to a recent report by the Hudson Institute: “The once-vaunted [battalion tactical group] has failed to meet the requirements of large-scale operations in a prolonged interstate war, lacking the tactical flexibility and adaptive edge required for modern warfare.”

Thus, Russian military planners have devised a lighter, more flexible force generation pattern. Their new task force, named the “assault detachment,” comprises two or three companies and prioritizes tactical flexibility and freedom of movement in small-unit operations. This new formation mimics, in some ways, Wagner’s way of warfighting, which gives commanders greater flexibility to fight as they see fit and to find and exploit weak points.

Yet, the majority of Russia’s professional military was wiped out in the war’s opening months. Consequently, the Russians depend on ill-trained and unmotivated conscripts to fill their ranks. These troops are often press-ganged into service and drawn from a culture that does not value individual initiative and out-of-the-box thinking.

Russia’s soldiers are products of the civil society that produced them, and it is unrealistic to expect a new Russian recruit, who grew up in a police state, to demonstrate individual initiative and creativity on the battlefield. Thus, the Russians can try to reorganize their forces to become more flexible and adaptive, but, in my opinion, those changes won’t make a decisive difference on the battlefield.

^{Civilian trainees participate in a military training course with the Georgian National Legion in Kyiv on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.}

Non-Specialists

Another attribute of the typical Ukrainian soldier that I’d like to highlight is their general handiness, or “MacGyverness,” for lack of a better term. Most Ukrainians, even those with white-collar jobs, possess a wealth of practical knowledge and skills that exceed those of the average American.

In middle school, male Ukrainian students attend shop classes and learn basic auto mechanics. Female students take housekeeping classes, learning how to cook, sew, and other practical skills. In high school, Ukrainian students, both male and female, take classes in basic military skills, including marksmanship and first aid. Consequently, one of the greatest assets for Ukraine in this war has been its population’s baseline level of practical know-how.

These are people who can take care of themselves. They know how to survive on very little and work with what they have at hand. And that versatility applies to pilots, as well.

The early days of the war were nerve-wracking for Ukraine’s combat pilots — both in terms of the air war and the persistent threats faced on the ground between missions. Juice, the MiG-29 pilot, told me his home base was hit by missiles, airstrikes, and helicopter attacks — and they also faced the constant threat of raids by Russian special operations units. So, between combat sorties, Juice threw on a body armor vest and grabbed a gun to help defend his air base from the ground.

“It was something terrible, we had a lot of threats around the airfield,” he told me. “I was preparing for this, but I was still not ready.”

^{Oleksandr, an injured Ukrainian soldier, smokes a cigarette before evacuation by volunteers of the Hospitallers paramedic organization near a special medical bus in Donetsk region, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 22, 2023. AP photo by Evgeniy Maloletka.}

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