We can stop blaming the generals. Vladimir Putin himself, say Western intelligence sources, has been making "operational and tactical decisions 'at the level of a colonel or brigadier.'"
But, what general at even the highest rank would question this particular brigadier's judgment? Squabbling with Vladimir could cause a nasty case of Erwin Rommelitis.
In a Guardian report, there is no timeline given for Putin's military involvement. Thus we may speculate with confidence that the autocrat was behind Russia's Kyiv offensive, in which every decision made was the wrong decision — spectacularly wrong, beginning with the invasion's timing. (In addition to speculating about Putin and tactics, we may also confidently assume that he has been in maladroit charge of strategy.) Just as Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in an ill-advised month — June, which pushed the offensive that much closer to "General Winter" — Putin invaded Ukraine at an ideal time for his tanks to sink in thawing mush.
After losing Ukraine's North, the autocrat moved on to losing the Northeast, the entire Kharkiv area. That territorial loss has endangered Russia's supply lines in its push to the south, the Donbas. There, says Western intelligence, Russian forces have now abandoned plans to encircle Ukrainian troops and take all of the Donbas's Donetsk province. The aggressor will settle for Luhansk only. This, by my count, is the fourth reduction of Russian war aims, in less than three months.
As noted in the preceding post, a recently attempted river crossing by Russia at a strategic point toward the Donbas was nothing less than catastrophic. The attempt "showed a stunning lack of tactical sense," observed the Institute for the Study of War. Ukrainian artillery was able to "kill hundreds" of Russian soldiers and destroy vehicles "tightly bunched up at both ends of the bridge." The Guardian reports that "the Russian president is helping determine the movement of forces in the Donbas" specifically — as he surely did in Kyiv and Kharkiv.
Widely read Russian bloggers are noticing, and thereafter commenting on the army's incompetence. The bloggers' criticisms are not antiwar propaganda — yet — although the loss of thousands of Russian soldiers is almost certainly disaffecting the population, which could lead to a subversive mentality. Putin's fear of such a development has led him to order his scattered, defeated troops in the Northeast to stay put (if they can), for he hopes to keep Ukrainian forces from positioning into artillery range of Belgorod, Russia. One can easily imagine the domestic unrest caused by the daily bombardment of a large Russian city.
Putin's intelligent counterpart, Ben Barry, a former brigadier general in the British army, notes that "a head of government should have better things to do than make military decisions. They should be setting the political strategy rather than getting bogged down in day to day activity." A lot of dead Russian soldiers would quite agree. Many live observers, including this writer, would agree with Britain's chief of defence staff, Adm. Sir Tony Radakin. Ukraine, he asserts, is winning this war.
Indeed, most of Putin's geographically closest allies seem to agree with Adm. Radakin. The Russian president met with five of them yesterday and only one, Belarus, voiced support of his war on Ukraine. Would they have been supportive had Putin not botched the war and ordered thousands of war crimes along the way? Probably.
None of this is to say that the Russian generals on Ukrainian ground would have demonstrated military genius or obeyed international rules of war in the absence of Putin's micromanagement. By all accounts the Russian army is, from bottom to top, a basket case in a dumpster fire.
Vladimir Putin, however, has made the basket much larger and set the dumpster more ablaze. Brig. Gen. Barry is right: The war-bumbling autocrat should have stuck to politics.