“Potemkin Navy”: the military weaknesses of Russia that the war in Ukraine uncovered

PARIS.- Vladimir Putin It has been repeating for ten years that Russia has the second most modern military power on the planet. However, corrupted by corruption, deluded by mirages of conflicts very different from the war in Ukraine, the Russian armed forces are revealing their immense weaknesses. So many that Western experts already call it ironically The Potemkin Army.

On March 1, 2018, thunderous applause resounded in the Manège, a historic building a stone’s throw from the Kremlin where, in a Jupiterian show, Vladimir Putin presented the country’s military progress: nuclear-powered drones, hypersonic defense systems “that follow their targets like a meteorite”, apocalyptic weapons “that no one in the world possesses”… The Russian president seemed to have no limits: he presented the military excellence of the Kremlin so well that most experts ended up believing him. The 1,500 guests from the Russian political-economic elite were in glory.

Four years later, Putin himself was slammed into the reality of the war, when the Russian Goliath met the Ukrainian David. Since launching its war in Ukraine on March 24, Russian forces have managed to seize only one major city, Kherson, along with the ruins of Mariupol and parts of Donbass, the industrial region in the east of the country, partially occupied by Moscow. since 2014. That meager loot was obtained at the gigantic price of between 13,000 and 20,000 dead soldiers in two months, a figure that exceeds Soviet losses in Afghanistan for a decade; the lives of 12 generals, 300 officers and 500 members of elite divisions, including about 20 pilots, according to the independent site Mediazone.

In 80 days of war, Russia lost the cruiser Moskva, flagship of the Black Sea fleet and another dozen naval units, about 500 tanks and several helicopters. The fiasco has been so gigantic that it is difficult to find a Western general who does not declare himself “absolutely stunned”.

“Until today, no one saw new generation weapons in Ukraine -such as the Su-57 planes, the T-90 tanks or the remote-guided munitions- that Russian propaganda proclaimed to us. On the contrary, Moscow sent old equipment of Russian-Soviet design, widely surpassed by the efficient military supplies sent to kyiv by the United States and the Europeans”, says French General Dominique Trinquant.

“We are not facing a professional army. It looks more like a band of undisciplined rubble,” said Admiral James Foggo, former commander of US forces in Europe and Africa.

At the beginning of the war, the entire planet saw images of a gigantic column of military vehicles immobilized in the north of Ukraine, while Russian officers used simple walkie talkies to communicate, allowing their Ukrainian opponents listened to everything they said.

The result was a semi-retreat: Putin was forced to withdraw the troops deployed around kyiv and the north of the country and retreat to the east to, at least, seize Donbass -partly in the hands of Russian separatists since 2015-, and to the south to try to establish a corridor with annexed Crimea. And setbacks keep coming: on Wednesday, satellite images of dozens of Russian tanks and armored vehicles destroyed during the unsuccessful Donets River crossing, once again demonstrated Russian incapacity. In the episode, Moscow appears to have lost an entire battalion, about 1,200 men.

Contrary to what was thought, that Russia would support its entire military offensive with “devastating” cyberattacks, Moscow never succeeded in destroying Ukrainian communication and electronic control systems.. That threat did not materialize, probably because since 2015 Ukraine has had the support of all Western intelligence agencies, whose cyber warfare capabilities have a much larger contingent of talents and the savoir-faire of the North American technological giants.

Thus, a few hours before the invasion, Microsoft detected -and blocked- malware whose objective was to erase the data of the Ukrainian government ministries and financial institutions. In turn, SpaceX sent Starlink internet terminals to Ukraine, to compensate for internet disturbances in the country.

Another Russian threat that was not carried out was the use of its air force, which never achieved control of Ukrainian airspace, even though Moscow has almost ten times as many planes as kyiv. True, Russia launched a battery of missiles to disable radars and airports on the first day of the invasion. But that attack was not followed up for a second, because Russia’s arsenal of precision-guided missiles and other expensive munitions is limited. Besides, Russian pilots seem inexperienced, probably because, as with precision-guided weapons, effective training costs fortunes.

“Putin had the option of going into this war with a large number of these missiles or with a significant stock of foreign exchange reserves. He decided on the latter. Now that half of the reserves have been blocked by unprecedented Western sanctions, you must regret your decision”, analyzes Colonel Pierre Servent, a specialist in geostrategy.

And given Russia’s limited ability to speed up the production of weapons – particularly the most sophisticated ones, which require inputs from abroad – its prospects for sustaining its war in Ukraine look increasingly bleak.

“If the Ukrainians can hold out a little longer, that determination, as well as potentially unlimited support from the West, will likely turn the tide of the war.” says Daniel Gros, a specialist at the Center for European Policy Studies.

However, Vladimir Putin continues to insist that “his special operation to denazify Little Russia (as the Russians call Ukraine) scrupulously follows the initial plans.” A stubbornness that leads experts to ironically describe the Russian armed forces as “Army Potemkin”.

The term alludes to Grigori Aleksandrovitch Potemkin, governor of the “New Russia”, who reportedly built false painted cardboard villages to impress Tsarina Catherine II when, in 1787, he made an inspection trip to the recently acquired Crimea, together with his neighboring territories. The story of the “Potemkin peoples” is largely a myth and historians disagree about what the sovereign actually saw during her tour.

In fact, it seems that Potemkin made considerable investments in that region, but that he did not have the necessary resources to join this new territory to the rest of Russia. Sixty years later, this fragile infrastructure, associated with a failure to strengthen logistics capabilities, prevented Russia from defending itself against the British and European armies during the Crimean War.

“The testimonies according to which Russian troops are facing food and fuel shortages today suggest that their armed forces have not learned their lesson since then. Logistics is always the sector most vulnerable to corruption in the military field”, analyzes Servent.

Inherent in the system, indeed, corruption has undermined all the Kremlin’s military modernization efforts for years. It is estimated that only 10% of the Russian armament budget meets its objective. The other 90% disappears in the paths of corruption, present at all levels, both in the military-industrial administration councils and in the unknown administrative offices. Even Anatoly Serdioukov, Putin’s defense minister, was ousted in 2012 over a corruption scandal.