With Russia’s conventional war machine failing, Putin is deploying his unconventional playbook which kept Assad in power
The third most powerful conventional army on the planet – according to the head of GCHQ – has been exhausted by one of the least powerful. The 20th century tactics and equipment of the Russian forces have been decimated by the 21st century tactics and equipment of the Ukrainian Army, backed up by Western weapons and intelligence.
True, it is easier to defend your country than attack another – especially when you press ganged into the fight – but the staggering ineptitude of the Russian Army is a huge surprise to those of us who faced them off in the Cold War. I am yet to see any camouflage on a Russian tank or cam cream on a Russian soldier, for instance – this reeks of an unprofessional, untrained, and an ineffective force.
Alarmingly, Putin seems to realise this, recently appointing General ‘Armageddon’ Surovikin as the overall commander in Ukraine. I saw Surovikin up close in Syria, an architect of what I’m coining “unconventional warfare”. With Russia’s conventional war machine failing so badly in Ukraine, Putin seems to be taking out his unconventional playbook from Syria, which kept Assad in power against all the odds.
At the heart of unconventional warfare is attacking the civilian population directly. Having failed to overcome the Ukrainian soldiers on the front line, Surovikin is now attacking their families at home, murdering children in their schools and injured soldiers in their hospitals. The World Health Organisation reported last week that over 500 medical facilities had been directly attacked by Russian missiles and bombs. This is a repeat of the Syrian campaign, where the charity I advised during the 10 years of that conflict, UOSSM, had over 1000 medics killed by attacks on their hospitals.
These tactics, the Russians believe, will break the will of the people to resist and force their government to sue for peace. This is yet another huge strategic misjudgement by Putin; the Ukrainian people are made of sterner stuff than this tyrant, and the more he tries to knock them down the stronger they get.
In Syria, the unconventional warfare also included chemical weapons, which the Russians allowed Assad to use with abandon. This threat must be taken most seriously as he tries to weaken the resolve of Western leaders to deliver arms and intelligence.
I saw at close hand the four-year conventional attack on Aleppo end after only 17 days of chlorine barrel bomb attacks. If you raise a city like Aleppo, or Zaporizhzhia to the ground, people can hide under the rubble, impervious to conventional bombs and bullets. But if you drop gas on it, as Assad did in Aleppo, you kill people underground or force them above ground where they are shot or captured.
If you have no morals or scruples, you would always use chemical weapons to fight in towns and cities, and I do not think Putin has either; Surovikin certainly does not.
Putin’s nuclear weapon threats may be ‘bluff and bluster’, but there is still a nuclear threat which could be almost as devastating: turning nuclear power stations into improvised weapons. Putin has pretty much said this is his plan, as he declared his intention to put the lights out in Ukraine. But it goes further: as I have written about before, some kind of incident at one of these nuclear power plants could offer a pause to hostilities in a manner that serves Putin’s goals.
Unconventional warfare is in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention and the rules of war and decency. But we are facing a tyrant as evil as any writer could make him, almost unconstrained in the pain and toil he is prepared to meat out in Ukraine.
Putin judged that the West would allow him to stroll into the country unhindered and become the modern day ‘Peter the Great’. But Nato woke up, the perceived ‘soft underbelly’ of Europe stiffened, and Putin is on his way down.
The West must prepare and demonstrate the ability to execute an overwhelming and devastating conventional response if it looks like Putin is planning to use devastating unconventional weapons. Otherwise the financial turmoil of this week is going to become horrifically irrelevant.
