Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine is showing all of the signs of turning into a Guerrilla War, and just what is a Guerrilla War?       

In the early morning hours of the 24th of February military forces of the Russian Federation at the orders of their President Vladimir Putin began a full scale assault on the neighboring country of Ukraine. The Russians had taken their time in organizing the attack. More than a month of preparation went into assembling a force of nearly 200,000 men with more than 1,000 tanks along with 2,000 aircraft. Such was the armored firepower of the Russian army that it was widely expected to sweep the much smaller Ukrainian military aside and occupy the capital Kiev along with the county’s other major cities within days.

It hasn’t worked out that way. As I write this post we are twelve days into the Ukraine war and Russian forces are bogged down around on several fronts. The Russian units attacking Kiev are facing stiff resistance and have made no progress for the past week while most other major cities are also still in the hands of the Ukrainian government. Russian President Vladimir Putin has unquestionably overestimated his own strength, underestimated the resolve of the Ukrainian people to resist him while at the same time ignoring the determination of the international community to punish him and Russia for his blatant act of aggression.

Now I do not mean to imply that a Ukrainian victory is coming any time soon. Russian still has enormous forces to bring to bear in this fight and unless Putin is willing to run back home with his tail between his legs this conflict is going to continue and become much more brutal and bloody. There are already signs that the Russians are shifting from a war of decisive battle, i.e. a quick sharp fight with winner takes all, to a war of attrition where the bigger combatant trades casualty for casualty and simply wears down his foe, the most brutal kind of warfare. There are also reports of ever growing numbers of attacks against civilians increasing the casualty figures still higher.

The problem with that is that the longer the war goes on the likelier it is to devolve into a Guerrilla War so that, even after the organized Ukrainian Army is defeated the Ukrainian people continue to fight on in small bands. Such wars, also known as insurgencies, are quite common and although both lengthy and bloody, they often succeed.

The term Guerrilla, which means little warrior in French, comes from Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 where a large, well trained and well supplied French army defeated several smaller Spanish armies, marched straight to the Spanish capital, seizing it and installing Napoleon’s brother Joseph as the new Spanish king. Problem was that most of the Spanish people didn’t accept their defeat and soon peasant farmers were taking potshots at French soldiers on guard duty, small bands made up of Spanish soldiers who never surrendered along with ordinary citizens were attacking French supply wagons. With a year the entire countryside of Spain was a battlefield and with the British smuggling in military supplies and eventually troops to aid the guerrillas by 1814 the French were defeated in what Napoleon referred to as his ‘Spanish Ulcer’.

Since then other big countries have tried to use their powerful military against a presumed weaker opponent only to find themselves bogged down in a guerrilla war. In World War 2 Hitler faced strong partisan resistance in both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Partisans are just another word for guerrillas by the way.

Famously the United States was defeated in a guerrilla war by the Vietnamese and recently by the Afghans. And it’s important to remember that the Russians, back when they called themselves the USSR, were also defeated by Afghan guerrillas during the 1980s, a war that many historians think helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A war that Putin should remember well!

If the fighting in Ukraine continues there is every chance that it will evolve into just such a guerrilla conflict. For one thing the Russians simply do not have enough troops to completely guard the entire country. The US Army War College estimates that in order to really secure a hostile country an occupier must have one soldier for every 50 citizens of that country. To occupy the Ukraine would therefore require an army of somewhere between 800,000 and one million troops, a force that the Russian Federation simply cannot afford. The Russians may hold all of Ukraine’s major cities but any potential Ukrainian guerrillas will have plenty of inadequately guarded forests and marshes in which they can organize or retreat into whenever needed. 

Meanwhile the Ukrainian people are already preparing themselves for a guerrilla war, ordinary citizens are lining up at police stations to receive guns so that they can help fight the Russian invaders. Companies that produced alcoholic beverages are now manufacturing Molotov Cocktails, bottles filled with gasoline to use as primitive grenades. These are other activities are typical of a guerrilla war. Everyday that they succeed in resisting the Russian advance the morale of the Ukrainians grows making them more likely to continue the fight even after organized resistance has ended.

On the other hand the Russian morale was rather poor at the very start of the war. For all of his propaganda President Putin never succeeded in convincing the Russian people that Ukraine was any kind of threat to them and while the majority of his people continue to support him there is a considerable minority who simply loath their president. Thousands of Russians have already been arrested for protesting against their nation’s invasion of its neighbor, not a good way to start a war that could go on for years.

Add to that the damage to the livelihood of ordinary Russians due to the massive sanctions that the international community has placed upon the country and the morale of both Russian troops and the Russian people can only decline still farther. Already the value of the Ruble has dropped by more than a third while imports of critical goods into Russia have simply stopped. The unity that nations and corporations around the world have shown in their effort to make Russia pay for its aggression has been unexpectedly strong even taking China’s determination to pay both sides against each other into account.

The fighting in Ukraine also brings with it a new potential horror. For the first time ever Nuclear Power Plants are on the front lines of the fighting in a major war. On the very first day of their assault Russian forces seized Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident. Fortunately there was little fighting involved and the containment vessel surrounding the damaged reactor was unharmed. Seven days later Russian units attacked and occupied the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. This time the Russians appear to have used more force than necessary and a training building caught fire, raising fears that a nuclear accident could occur.

Ukraine still has three more nuclear power plants and as the fighting grows more intense the possibility of a real nuclear disaster happening cannot be ignored. And even if the Russians do manage to seize and secure all of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities without incident what about the guerrilla war that is almost certain to follow. Partisan units act independently, that is their great strength, but that also means they sometimes act against the wishes of superiors. What if some leader of a guerrilla band convinces himself that a nuclear disaster would be just the thing to spur the Russians into leaving?

All of which means that the fighting over Ukraine has just started, and is likely to get much worse. This war could drag on for years and as far as I can see will only result in terrible harm to both countries that will take decades to repair.

What does Putin hope to accomplish with this war anyway. Well, like Napoleon he hopes to install a government that will be subservient to his will. He hopes to make Ukraine a vassal state to Russia as a way to rebuild the old empire of Russia. But the Ukrainian people will have none of that, after centuries of Russian domination they have tasted independence and like it. And the inspiration that the country is finding in their President Volodymyr Zelensky has fired their courage and resolve while impressing the entire world. In the end Russia simply cannot hold Ukraine, indeed most Russians don’t want to. Only one man is responsible for all of this madness and bloodshed. In the end Vladimir Putin will have achieved nothing with his war against Ukraine except to secure his place in history as just a small and rather inferior version of Adolph Hitler.