What it Means for Russia to Lose Two Generals in its War Against Ukraine

It’s expected that soldiers die in war. What’s not expected is for generals — not just one but two of them — to die in barely two weeks of what Russian military forces expected to be an easy victory over Ukraine.

What’s considerably more problematic is **WHO** the two Russian generals were.

Maj. Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky had been a Spetsnaz (special forces) commander. A trained paratrooper, he had fought in most of the recent Russian combat operations including the Syrian civil war, Chechnya, and the Russo-Georgian war in which — very much like what’s now happening in Ukraine — several Russian-speaking regions of the former Soviet republic of Georgia broke away. He was also involved in the Russian annexation of the formerly Ukrainian territory of Crimea.

In other words, he’s been through this before. He knew what to expect, he knew how previous Russian operations had succeeded, and he clearly was not a leader the Russians wanted to lose — definitely not due to a Ukrainian sniper.

There’s still some uncertainty about the circumstances surrounding what appears to be a second dead Russian general, Maj. Gen. Vitaly Gerasimov. He had a similar background in Chechnya, Syria, and the Crimean annexation. What’s particularly interesting is that the Ukrainians intercepted Russian reports of Gerasimov’s death, along with a number of other senior officers, because the Russian encrypted radio system wasn’t working.

Problems happen in warfare. That’s expected.

However, the level of problems being faced by the Russian military seems far greater than most — perhaps all — Western intelligence agencies expected. The Russians, perhaps better than most second-tier military forces, understand the importance of logistics. The Russians won the Second World War in large measure because the real Nazis — not the current Ukrainians who are being falsely painted as needing “de-Nazification” — outran their supply lines.

If the Russians were facing any major military force, the 40-mile-long convoy stuck on the roads between Russia and Kyiv would now be a blackened ruin. It’s not as if the Russians don’t know what happened on the “Highway of Death” to their ally, Saddam Hussein, after his failed invasion of Kuwait. That sort of logistical problem simply should not be happening to a country whose senior officers have extensive recent combat experience in comparable separatist operations, fighting both for (Georgia) and against (Syria, Chechnya) the separatist forces.

These are not generals whose prior experience was tabletop war games. What happened in places like Chechnya and Syria was brutality on a massive scale against religiously motivated opponents who passionately hated Russia and what it stands for. What happened in the Georgian separatist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia involved deaths on a far smaller scale, but also mass “ethnic cleansing” of non-Russians from the separatist pro-Russian regions that provides a likely blueprint for what the Russians expected to do in the pro-Russian eastern breakaway regions of Ukraine.

No matter what happens next in Ukraine, it seems patently obvious that the Russian military’s reputation for being a fearsome bear with bloody teeth and claws has been badly damaged.

The Ukrainians, unlike the Syrian insurgents and unlike (most) of the rebels in Chechnya and Georgia, actually have serious Soviet-era military training. They have a small though not inconsequential military force with a standing regular army, an air force, and the ability to contest the skies. They’re not an insurgency that has to rely on “hide, strike, retreat, and hide some more” tactics.

It’s way too early to predict a Russian defeat. The Russians have a decades-long history of being willing to do things deliberately that most Western military forces would never plan to do, and would instantly apologize for doing if they happened by mistake.

Let’s not forget that the recent Russian missile attack on a maternity hospital was likely **NOT** the first such attack. Early in the war, another Russian missile hit a civilian apartment building, but was on a trajectory leading straight to a hospital.

American and modern European armies deliberately avoid such targets. While the Russians won’t necessarily admit to doing such things deliberately, there’s no serious doubt that their goal is to demoralize the civilian population, cause as many women and children as possible to flee the cities they plan to attack, and then unleash a barrage of horrific warfare on the urban centers, claiming anyone left is either a soldier or a guerilla.

The only hope the Ukrainians have of victory depends upon convincing the West that they have a chance of winning. They’ve already done that. When it became obvious Ukrainians wouldn’t quickly surrender, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to “decapitate” the Ukrainian leadership by sending an assassination team to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That mission failed, but Ukrainian forces succeeded in their own decapitation operation against the invading army.

What the Russians face next is a serious risk to their reputation for ferocity.

I see no way in which this will end well.

The best-case scenario two weeks ago might have been for Russia to decide the Ukrainians were putting up a much greater fight than expected, with Putin settling for international recognition of his annexation of Crimea and a fair vote in the eastern Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine on whether to remain part of Ukraine in some sort of semi-autonomous status, become independent states comparable to the Russian-allied Belarus, or join Russia. The simple reality is that if Putin had played his cards better, he likely **COULD** have used the threat of military force to get Europe, in return for continued supply of oil and natural gas, to acquiesce in the severance of Russian-speaking regions from Ukraine.

At this point, however, Zelensky has no reason to negotiate away any part of his country. He may still lose on the battlefield — and most analysts believe he’ll lose the conventional battles and have to lead a long-term guerilla war, for which Europe and America may well have no stomach over the years needed to win — but for now, why would he negotiate for anything other than a unilateral retreat by Russia?

The predictable response by Russia will be to do in Ukraine what they did in Chechnya — flatten every building, kill as many as possible, and break the will of their opponents to resist.

Attacks on maternity hospitals, in that sort of scenario, are a feature, not a failure; a part of the plan, not a problem for which to apologize.

This will get much worse before it gets better, and it may not get better at all.