As I was watching YouTube videos of Ukrainian forces advancing against Russian troops, my mind flashed back to a conversation I had in a pizza restaurant in Kharkiv in July with a 50-year-old Ukrainian military volunteer whose moniker was Sergo.
Despite a bad leg (seriously mangled during service in 2014, when Russia first invaded eastern Ukraine), Sergo left his construction business and rushed to the front when Russia threatened his city. “The people protected the government, not vice versa,” he told me. “All Kharkiv was furious at the invasion.”
Together with a fellow veteran and tank specialist — who had lost a leg in 2014 — Sergo located an “old-fashioned” antitank weapon and got to the ninth floor of an apartment building in the besieged Kharkiv district of Saltivka. “We waited for Russian tanks and burned one,” he recalled.
Sergo’s story, and many others that I heard like it, illustrates the real reasons for Ukraine’s success — which go far deeper than the critical U.S. supply of long-range, precision weapons, or the shoddiness of the Russian army.
The Ukrainians know why they are fighting; theirs is an existential war for survival. As Vladimir Putin has made clear, a defeat would mean they would lose their sovereignty and live under brutal Russian repression. “We are fighting for our independence and our identity,” Sergo said.
But equally important to their victories is the democratic structure of Ukrainians’ society and military. They were ready for modern, 21st-century warfare. The Russians still seem stuck in World War II.
“We are smaller than Russia and don’t have so much artillery or manpower,” I was told by Yehor Soboliev, a former member of parliament who joined the military as soon as Russia attacked Kyiv. “But we have social capital. We were born for this kind of networked war.”
What Soboliev means is that today’s warfare often demands decentralized decision-making and adaptive action on the front lines, especially in the era of drone warfare, when new opportunities arise suddenly from what the drone allows soldiers to see. “In the United States, officers on the ground can make decisions,” the former parliament member noted. Ukrainians are capable of doing the same.
The Russians, on the other hand, he said, “are much more centralized than us, like mental slaves.” In an army top heavy with generals, Russian officers wait for orders from above.
It was the kind of decentralization Soboliev described that led to the critical Ukrainian victory in Kyiv in late March and early April, when Russian troops were forced to withdraw after two months of ugly destruction around and on the edges of the capital city.
“We made decisions at the horizontal level,” Soboliev said, “which is why we were so quick and successful.” With senior commanders flummoxed by the sudden Russian invasion, local Ukrainian volunteer units activated their own connections to link up regular army units with military and civilian volunteers — networking on the front line. “One lady would call Sasha or Pasha,” who would call in sightings of Russians to military units or take them supplies.
I heard similar stories in July from young officers who were sent, unprepared, to the front in Mykolaiv in February when Russian troops poured in from Crimea.
Two military lawyers, Alex and Volodymyr (who use only their first names as they are on active duty), were called back from vacation and thrust into battle unprepared in late February. Their unit was soon surrounded, in a forest, by Russian infantry and tanks. The soldiers, including several female officers, were trapped in five cars, three of them civilian vehicles, with only their rifles at hand. “Our signals were broken, and we had no connection with command,” Alex recalled, as we sat in one of the only restaurants still open in boarded-up Mykolaiv on their day off in July.
The unit conferred, then made a decision: The female officers scrounged track suits from some of the men, put aside their rifles, and drove straight into Russian lines, claiming to be civilians fleeing the violence. They got through to headquarters, gave the coordinates of their comrades, who were rescued, and of the Russians, who were cut down. “We used our brains. We are Ukrainians,” Alex declared proudly.
“What the war showed,” he told me, “is the quality of young Ukrainian officers of middle and lower rank. Just because of them we survived, because they took command in their own hands when senior officers were unable.” Volodomyr, who had never driven a tank, became a tank platoon commander and later saved Alex’s life in a subsequent battle.
Of course, the war is now in a very different phase, with coordinated Ukrainian counteroffensives being conducted on several fronts, crucially aided by U.S. intelligence-sharing and long-range artillery and multiple rocket launchers sent by European nations and the United States.
But the point remains that Ukraine’s advances reflect their society, which has broken away from the imposed Soviet model to produce a generation of educated, innovative civilians and soldiers — many with solid IT training — who are capable of leadership in a crisis.
Russia, meanwhile, is heavily dragooning poor ethnic minorities into its desperate new military mobilization, as hundreds of thousands of its educated young men flee the country rather than fight fellow Slavs. All while military orders from Moscow, endorsed by Putin, force their officers to fight in the inflexible, top-heavy style of the great Soviet war of the 1940s.
“Give us the weapons we need and no doubt we could push Russia back to the border,” Sergo insisted.
Listen to him, President Biden. He is correct.
