Russian Forces Picked a Dangerous Time to Feud
The counteroffensive is coinciding with peak infighting among the most notorious of the Russian not-quite-regulars — and a nadir of their military strength.
Ukraine on the move.
Photographer: Sergey Shestak/AFP via Getty Images
Previous Russian military action in Ukraine highlighted the contributions of various irregular and semi-regular forces, such as Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries, the Chechen units that are formally part of the Russian national guard but de facto commanded by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, various volunteer units backed by regions, nationalist groups or corporations such as Gazprom. Now that the Ukrainian military has begun its long-awaited counteroffensive, the focus is squarely on regular Russian units.
The gradual launch of the counteroffensive has coincided with a peak of infighting among the most notorious of the Russian not-quite-regulars — and a nadir of their military strength. It is up to common soldiers, the surviving professionals and the recent civilians mobilized last fall, to hold off an onslaught co-planned by NATO strategists and backed up with billions of dollars in Western-made weaponry and training. The Russian military, still second in the world according to the 2023 Global Firepower ranking, is not the underdog in this battle against Ukraine, ranked 15th, but even the first skirmishes show it will be severely taxed. At the same time, controlling the semi-regulars and using them effectively will be harder than ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The Ukrainian military has been keeping its plans quiet. It has even put out a video of soldiers holding a finger to their lips, and when the Russian defense ministry announced that its troops were already trying to beat back the counteroffensive, the Ukrainian command issued a statement accusing the Russians of conducting psychological operations “even if no counterattack is taking place.” What we know about the counteroffensive, then, comes from various Russian Telegram channels, none of them truly independent from the defense ministry or the various private and volunteer units involved in the invasion. Yet the basic set of facts they agree on points to Ukraine’s increasingly active use of its strategic initiative.