The Russian invasion and its failure in the first days

Abstract

ABSTRACT In February 2022, Russia launched a large-scale military operation to take full control of the Ukrainian state. The invasion achieved virtually none of Russia's originally stated goals and instead of demonstrating Russian military power and effectiveness, it showed the exact opposite. Ambitious goals that were supposed to be achieved within a few days, turned out to be completely unrealistic. The war has become a long-term conflict of high intensity, instead of a flash military operation. The author argues that the cause of the Russian failure was not only the erroneous intelligence evaluation of the adversary by the Russian intelligence services and numerous mistakes of Russian units at the tactical and operational level. Rather, failure has also been due the structural weaknesses and shortcomings of the Russian army as institution. These long-term shortcomings were identified during the previous combat deployment of Russian forces in local conflicts and have never been resolved.