The Drums of War

"Peace on our continent has been shattered. Russia is using force to try to rewrite history, and deny Ukraine its free and independent path."

"This is a deliberate, cold-blooded and long-planned invasion. Russia's unjustified, unprovoked attack on Ukraine is putting countless innocent lives at risk with air and missile attacks."

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg

Missiles pounded Kyiv on Friday, Feb. 25, 2022, as Russian forces advance to the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital — a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine that has shocked the world. Here, Natali Sevriukova is seen next to her home in Kyiv after a rocket attack. (Emilio Morenatti/The Associated Press)

 

NATO plans to create combat units in Romania and Bulgaria, possibly Hungary and Slovakia as well, to reflect those already set up several years earlier in Poland and the Baltic states, as a deterrent to potential Russian aggression in Vladimir Putin's pathological delusion that he will go down in history with a legacy project fulfilled; the reincarnation of the Soviet Union by re-creating the forcible union that most of its neighbours dread.

No NATO troops were to be sent to Ukraine to aid its resistance to the Russian invasion. Ukraine is on its own. Its delicate state of ongoing oppression by Russia was what led NATO to keep Ukraine at arm's length, even though other former USSR satrapies have been accepted into the Alliance. Foreseeing just such an event occurring at some future date -- albeit not quite in the violent form currently seen -- led NATO to err on the side of caution.

"As recently as 2016, an operation on this scale would have required every battalion tactical group in Russia's ground forces; with more contract personnel, and thus more BTGs, Moscow can now undertake such a move while still retaining substantial forces elsewhere in Russia."

IISS Military Balance 2022 global military capacity survey

Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe, is hugely outmatched against the largest geographic country in the world, Russia, despite materiel support that NATO countries have provided to the Ukraine military to help beef up its military arsenal. In 2020, military spending in Ukraine came in at about $6 billion, roughly a tenth of the figure for Russian military expenditures for the same year; $62 billion.

Russia has had quite a bit of practise in nipping away bits and pieces of the geography of former Soviet member-countries. As it did in Georgia, and that former Soviet satellite was left to defend itself and still lost two of its territories to Russia. Russian warplanes have had ample practise, not just the war games of recent vintage with Belarus, but real-time conflict flying aerial missions over Syria where it bombed civilian enclaves, along with hospitals.

Its practise run in 2014 with ethnic Russian rebels culminating for the time being with the seizing of the Crimean peninsula and portions of eastern Ukraine in the Donbas gave it ample practise for a long-range plan for total control and absorption of Ukraine in its bid for imperial influence over the former Soviet Union states. Ukraine has been viewed by President Putin as the jewel in its imperial crown, first to be wholly re-absorbed, leaving other former states in fear.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when Russia was left a crumbling vestige of its former self, the ascension of Vladimir Putin to the presidency several decades ago saw Russia's vast reserves of gas and oil in huge demand throughout Europe. That source of income built Russia a formidable treasury, quite a bit of it used for rebuilding its military.

Enabling him at this juncture to deploy over 100,000 troops to the border with Ukraine and 30,000 in Belarus, a show of purpose for that military investment in the past 35 years. Reclaiming Abkhazia and South Ossetia were mere trifles to practise on; the absorption of Ukraine is more to the point for Mr. Putin's reemerging Greater Russia ambitions.

12 Russian battalion tactical groups were put into action around northeast Ukraine in 2015 during the war that wasn't quite a war, but as U.S. President named it, a 'minor incident'. Not, however, so minor to Ukraine which lost Crimea in that bitter encounter. Now, well over 100 battalion tactical groups have been deployed to make for this full-scale invasion from Russia and Belarus.

Ukraine has 290,000 military personnel, to Russia's 900,000, and Russia can call up another two million reservists, as compared to Ukraine's 900,000. The Russian army has over 12,000 tanks, with Ukraine in possession of less than 3,000. A similar imbalance exists in the numbers of armoured vehicles and artillery. Ukraine with its 34 attack helicopters and 98 jets is up against Russia's 500 attack helicopters and 1,500 fighter jets.

Ukrainian President Vlodomir Zelensky insists he's not leaving Kyiv as Russian forces close in on the Ukrainian capital.