President Putin wants to replace President Zelensky’s democratically elected authority with his own, more compliant, regime. Ed Arnold of Rusi says “anything less that the capture of Kyiv would not achieve Russia’s objectives”.
The question now is, how easy will that be? Russian forces appear to be making an attempt to encircle the city. But they’re likely to face stiffer resistance the deeper they push in.
Urban warfare often gives the defender the advantage. Attacking forces will find it harder to manoeuvre from street to street, where buildings become defensive positions. Civilians, too, can become part of the resistance and potential targets. Urban warfare if the most difficult and bloody for any advancing army and requires more forces.
The Dnieper river forms a natural barrier between east and west Ukraine. Ed Arnold describes it as a potential “limit of exploitation” for Russian forces.
If they can capture Kiev and the rest of the country, then Mr Arnold suggests there may be little advantage in pushing further west. President Putin may hope that after his forces have captured the capital and defeated Ukraine’s army, the resistance will crumble.
But while 190,000 troops may be enough to carry out an invasion, military experts doubt whether it’s enough to occupy Europe’s second-largest country. Ukraine is larger than France. Gen Barrons, who was a British military commander in Iraq, says: “If Mr Putin’s intent was to occupy the whole of Ukraine with a force of around 150,000, that would only conceivably work if it had the consent of the population.”
He says that, while there is an element of the population that cleaves to Russia in the east, any Russian-installed government would struggle to rule by consent a population of some 40 million.
Gen Barrons believes that while Russia has the forces in place to defeat Ukraine’s army eventually, that could be replaced by a “very resilient insurgency”. Any expectation by President Putin that he can control the entire country, he says, “may be a major miscalculation”.(bbc.com/syah)
