By Scott Taylor
We are now well into the second year since Russia invaded Ukraine and it appears that a costly stalemate has resulted, with no short term end in sight.
In February 2022 Russian President Vladimir Putin shocked many military pundits – myself admittedly included – when he made good on his long standing threat to invade Ukraine.
It was believed by the Russian strategists that a formidable show of strength would collapse the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s will to resist.
After a victory parade through the streets of Kiev, Putin would install a pro-Russian regime to replace a deposed President Zelenskyy.
As with the David versus Goliath fable what looked to be a one-sided contest suddenly took an unexpected turn.
Wherein diminutive David used a slingshot to fell the giant, Ukraine used a barrage of NATO supplied anti-tank missiles to destroy Putin’s massed armoured columns.
To be fair, close observers of this conflict would not have been surprised at this embarrassing setback for the Russian military.
A fact that most western military analysts choose to omit from their commentaries is the fact that armed hostilities broke out in Ukraine in February 2014.
At that juncture, shortly after pro-western protesters had driven pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from power following the Maidan riots, the ethnic Russian population of Donbass declared their own independence from Ukraine.
While Putin staged a referendum and annexed the Crimea, the two self--proclaimed independent Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk were not absorbed into Russia.
Both Donetsk and Luhansk formed their own militias with the covert assistance of the notorious Wagner private military company.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces of 2014 were disunified and demoralized by the dissolution of their state into two armed camps.
In the initial clashes against the Russian backed separatists forces in the Donbass, the Ukraine military fared poorly and they too turned to privately funded militias such as the notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
The fighting was intense, and while the Minsk peace accords were signed, first in September 2014 and a second Minsk II agreement in February 2015, combat on the demarcation line subsided but never ceased.
This frozen conflict between Ukrainian troops loyal to the pro-western administration in Kyiv and those Russian-Ukrainian separatists in the Donbass was the genesis for the Canadian government to commit to Operation UNIFIER in 2015.
This operation is ongoing to this day and involves hundreds of Canadian military trainers. This is part of the much larger NATO Operation REASSURANCE.
It is estimated that Canadian trainers had developed 30,000 Ukrainian recruits into first class combat soldiers by the time Russia invaded in February 2022.
With seven years of NATO training, the extensive provision of sophisticated NATO weaponry and the formal absorption of battle tested units like Azov, the Ukraine military was no longer the demoralized rabble they were back in 2014.
On the flip side, the Russian military relied on it’s own propaganda, amplified by the NATO fearmongers, to portray themselves as an invincible fighting force.
That discrepancy in expectations versus reality led to Russia’s initial assaults columns being destroyed. Thousands of shattered Russian tanks and armoured columns littered the routes of advance, providing stark evidence of the severity of Russia’s defeat.
Putin then settled for the much reduced objective of simply securing the Donbass. Reversing his earlier decision to keep the Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent autonomous regions within a unified Ukraine, Putin formally incorporated both of these republics, plus the Ukrainian Oblasts of Kherson and Zaporzhiaca into the Russian Federation on September 30, 2022.
Shortly thereafter the Armed Forces of Ukraine launched a blitzkrieg counter-offensive that successfully recaptured vast swaths of Russian controlled territory.
The success of last fall’s offensive, along with a major increase in NATO’s provisions of additional modern armoured vehicles including 10 Canadian Leopard II tanks, had Western defence pundits eagerly anticipating major gains for Ukraine with their next big push.
This long awaited major Ukraine counter-attack began in early June, but after two months of bitter fighting and huge casualties, very little ground has been gained.
The reason for this is that the Russian military has learned from its painful lessons in the early clashes. With the winter months lull in fighting, the Russians were able to dig extensive fortifications and more importantly, lay a deeply layered series of minefields. Although casualties among Russians to date have been staggering, those who survived are now battle hardened veterans. They are no longer the parade square paper tigers that rolled across the Ukraine border in February 2022.
Unfortunately for all involved it appears that neither Russia nor the NATO supplied and trained Armed Forces of Ukraine have the capability to deliver a heavy enough knock-out blow that would end this war any time soon.
