HOW UKRAINE WAS MADE TO FIGHT IN 2022

STRATEGISING how best to configure for a future conflict is a luxury Ukraine simply does not have. Its armed forces – now bolstered by thousands of volunteer soldiers – will ‘fight tonight’ and have done so every night since the 24th February last year.

Thrown into a conflict they never courted, Ukrainian troops have demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of Russian military mass, repeatedly confounding those commentators who predicted Vladimir Putin’s invasion would quickly end in victory for the Kremlin. Understanding how Ukraine has, to date, sustained a staunch defence of its territory is the focus of ongoing work being conducted by James Sladden, an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research.

The former Royal Marine, who advises and supports members of the media working in hostile environments and received a master’s with distinction in Applied Security Strategy from the University of Exeter, has completed multiple visits to Ukraine’s battlefields in a bid to produce a credible history of the conflict through timely field research and identify lessons for military practitioners from contemporary combat.

Ahead of publishing the findings of his work in a British Army Review Special later this year, James shared some insights from his interviews with those attempting to repel Russian occupation of Ukraine’s besieged towns and cities.

“When I’ve spoken to Ukrainians who have fought and continued to fight, the most striking thing for me is what happened in the early hours of the morning on the 24th February 2022, which was that ordinary people from all walks of life decided to fight back. They didn’t wait for someone to appear on television and tell them to join up, they just started queuing at recruitment offices.

“A nation seemed to grasp the existential threat it faced and decided to do something about it. Typical accounts of those opening hours of the war are that those now fighting heard the first missile strikes and immediately realised the magnitude of the situation. Putin went for shock and awe but what that communicated to Ukrainians was there was to be no middle ground or ‘wait and see’, they were under total attack. Those initial strikes gave clarity to the people, who then arranged to move their families west before, in most cases, going to the nearest recruitment office and joining the long queues of volunteers.

“A former conscript who had voluntarily rejoined to fight typified so many of the accounts I heard. He explained how the attitude to military service had changed because ‘it’s your friends, people from your town or village that you’re fighting for’. In the case of the defence of Kyiv, a city rose up to defend itself.

“Men were effectively handed an AK47 and two magazines, given some abbreviated training and then driven to positions and told to hold them. From company level down there was little in the way of communication, with hastily assembled units reliant on runners, mobile phones or handheld walkie talkies bought from toy shops. I have spoken with soldiers who were entrenched in positions and only saw their company commander once a day when they came around with food, ammunition or orders.

“Others just had to coordinate themselves and make it work. The key to success was everyone fundamentally got what they were trying to do, which was to keep the Russians north of the River Irpin. There was a simplicity to that objective but it should not be underestimated what different people can bring to a fight. Imaginative people found ways of applying their skills to the war effort in the absence of early high-level direction.

“Drone hobbyists put their drones in the air and began relaying messages to the military, civilians rounded up bulldozers and tractors to dig positions and small groups with access to weapons jumped in SUVs and went off to harass the Russians.

“And in targeting terms, the civilian population of Ukraine passed on immense amounts of information to their own side, using apps, phone calls and word of mouth to tell Ukrainian soldiers they had spotted x number of tanks in x location.

“It was all a kind of a mess but largely worked brilliantly. It was chaotic but that meant the Russian army didn’t know what the hell was going on. You can imagine the Russians trying to tie down intelligence and coming up against a wall of chaos that was willing to kick them at every turn.

“The self-organising nature of the defending force and entrepreneurship shown on the battlefields of Ukraine is an interesting topic for our own military to explore. How open are our mission command models to interaction and engagement with fresh volunteers and a mass of reservists called up from civilian life?

“The infantry provided the necessary friction to hold ground and tried to grind the Russians to a halt, but it was the artillery that made the difference in the defence of Kyiv. It provided the destruction at scale and proved absolutely essential in taking out river crossing pontoons and hitting the enemy columns behind them.

“The amount of artillery that was called in danger close to Ukrainian positions is recognition of how desperate the situation was at times and I’ve talked with battery commanders who told me how they did not stop firing and fighting for six days solid. They did not sleep and, as one of them put it, were almost delirious, but they continued because it was a battle winning necessity.

“Ukrainians will tell you that their ‘will to fight’ gave them an edge over their Russian adversaries, who they said would often pull back as soon as they came under fire. Of course, in the case of the Ukrainians they knew they could not pull back, they had to fight.

“While vastly different from recent UK experiences of conflict, the nature of the current fighting – a war of attrition and frontlines – does not come as a surprise, this war has been going on since 2014.

“When I left the Royal Marines in 2013 my career had largely been that of my generation – predominantly Afghanistan and counterinsurgency focused. The training I did largely reflected this and concentrated on things like improvised explosive devices, small arms and hearts and minds. Lectures on tanks, artillery and trenches just seemed a bit old fashioned and not especially relevant.

“It was with that narrow-minded view that I first deployed to Ukraine in November 2014 – following the start of hostilities in the Donbas – with the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] as part of the special monitoring mission. I arrived to find what was, for me, an alien environment; a conflict featuring trenches, tanks and artillery. What I had previously wrongly considered were old-fashioned ways of warfighting were suddenly very real, very relevant and in full use.

“I discarded the notion of anything being old or out of date from that point and realised that use and utility are largely contextual – it’s got nothing to do with when something was invented. Soldiering is inherently a very practical activity and if something works, that’s all that matters; that it’s fifth generation or first generation is not really an important consideration. This unusual mix of old and new was also seen during the Battle of Debaltseve in early 2015, which, at that time, was the biggest pitched battle Europe had seen for decades. Before the Russians succeeded in taking the city, there were Ukrainian troops fighting from trenches dug with shovels while BMPs and tanks from both sides exchanged fire. The juxtaposition of soldiers carrying basic kit and firing decades’ old AK4s while using smartphones was striking.

“That this form of warfare is back and relevant should not come as a surprise at all – we’ve had from 2014 onwards to realise that is the case. I remember coming back from that first visit to Ukraine and asking friends who were still in the military if they knew how to dig a trench properly and telling them ‘if you don’t and if your soldiers don’t, you need to learn very quickly because in the next war you’re going to be digging one and fighting from it’.

“At the time the focus of the British military was elsewhere and the lessons from Ukraine, from a European battlefield, were not really being given the attention they deserved. Debaltseve demonstrated that mass mattered but in the UK there was a focus on quality and the British Army was shedding mass in all sorts of ways.

“To put it bluntly, Ukraine has shown that in battle you need to be able to take hits and sustain equipment losses on a huge scale. That is one of the things I have found most sobering on my recent visits to the battlefields – in areas where the fighting has moved on there is debris of war everywhere.

“Both sides are losing so many people during these intense battles and there are entire squadron’s worth of equipment littering the ground. We don’t have that mass to lose.”