Putin Military - "The compliment that we have to pay to Russia is that they are a learning and adaptive force," General Breedlove said. "Every time we see them in conflict, they get a little better and a little better."
The failures prompted a massive shake-up of the Russian armed forces. The Soviet military's prowess at land warfare was revived, with improvements such as revamped artillery technology, according to Mathieu Boulègue, a research fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House in London.
Putin Military
That blended strategy is playing out in the current crisis around Ukraine. Russia is pushing for immediate wide-ranging concessions from the West. Russian troop movements into allied Belarus put a potential invasion force within 100 miles of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
Russian state media is warning that Ukrainian forces are the ones preparing acts of aggression. Yevgeny Prigozhin — a wealthy Russian businessman sometimes known as "Putin's cook" because he first attracted the president's attention through his catering business, and was later linked to the Wagner mercenary group — was included on the E.U.
Sanctions list alongside several members of his family. What is new is not just Russia's upgraded equipment, but the evolving theory of how the Kremlin uses it. The military has honed an approach that Dmitry Adamsky, a scholar of international security at Reichman University in Israel, calls “cross-domain coercion” — blending the real or threatened use of force with diplomacy, cyberattacks and propaganda to achieve political aims.
"Listen to the voice of reason," Mr. Zelensky said in a nationally televised address early Thursday, adding that Kremlin propaganda painting Ukrainians as aggressors was a lie. "The people of Ukraine want peace, the authorities in Ukraine want peace."
He tried to address the main accusations leveled against Ukrainians by the Kremlin. Ukrainians were not Nazis, he said, and his own grandfather had served in the Soviet Army throughout the war. They did not hate Russian culture, he said.
Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes from Washington; Valerie Hopkins from Kyiv, Ukraine; Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels; Michael Schwirtz from Slaviansk, Ukraine; Christoph Koettl from New York; and Haley Willis from London.
Russian forces quickly overwhelmed their much smaller Georgian neighbors, but the war uncovered deep deficiencies in the Russian military. Ground troops were not in radio contact with the Air Force, leading to several serious friendly fire attacks.
Communications were so bad that some officers had to use their personal cellphones. Tanks and armored personnel carriers broke down frequently. It took Russia's military transport planes only hours, for instance, to start ferrying about 2,000 Russian peacekeeping troops, along with heavy armor, to the Southern Caucasus after Mr.
Putin brokered an end to the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Just over a decade later, Russia's tools of electronic warfare, which can be used to intercept or jam enemy communications and knock drones off course and out of the sky, are believed to be far superior to the U.S.
military's, analysts said. "As problems pile up in the country and the army, that the authorities are unable to solve, Putin is more steadily transforming in people's eyes from a great strategist to an ordinary, second-rate dictator," he said.
The list of sanctions imposed on Russia continued to grow, with European leaders expected to hold an emergency summit in Brussels on Thursday to discuss further steps. So far the sanctions have avoided steps that would harm Europe, like targeting the energy sector.
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia declared the start of a "special military operation" in Ukraine on Thursday, after months of speculation about Russia's intentions as it massed tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine's border.
Two prominent individuals on the list were Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, and Margarita Simonyan, who leads the television network RT and has been a vocal cheerleader on social media for Russian intervention in Ukraine.
For all its strides in recent years, Russia's military retains a critical weakness of its Soviet predecessor: the civilian side of the country's economy, nearly devoid of high-tech manufacturing and corporate investment in research and development.
Army expenditures amount to a far higher percentage of the gross domestic product than in most European countries, starving other sectors. More Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine than in all previous wars the country has fought since World War II combined, according to a new analysis by the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
The analysis estimates 60,000 to 70,000 Russian soldiers have died. In Russia itself, celebrating Defenders of the Fatherland Day, a national holiday marking the founding of the Red Army, Mr. Putin reiterated his combative message. Russia's demands for an equitable system of international security "remain unanswered," he said, blaming military activity by the NATO bloc for what he described as "the difficult international situation."
Earlier, Ukraine's Security Council declared a 30-day state of national emergency in response to the threat of a Russian invasion. The government urged Ukrainian citizens in Russia to leave. Russia, in turn, began withdrawing more diplomats from Ukraine.
E.U. officials described their sanctions list — nearly 600 pages that included travel bans and asset freezes — as just a first step toward punishing those involved in Russia's recognition on Monday of the so-called republics of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, a move that allowed their
leaders to request Russian military assistance on Wednesday. Not all the forces arrayed along the Ukrainian border are Russia's most advanced. The ones amassed in the north have older weaponry and are mostly there to intimidate and stretch Ukrainian resources, said Oleksiy Arestovych, a former Ukrainian military intelligence officer who is now a political and military analyst.
"Our command has replenished our unit with new mobilized six times now. This is evidence of the incompetence of our superiors and of the whole unit," a Russian soldier says in a video obtained and translated by CNN.
The faces of the soldiers in the video are hidden. The operation's goal, Mr. Putin said, was "to defend people who for eight years are suffering persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime," citing the false accusation that Ukrainian forces had been carrying out ethnic cleansing in separatist regions of eastern Ukraine.
In Mr. Zelensky's speech, delivered in Russian, he conceded that his appeal would probably not be heard in Russia, where the media is largely state controlled, and said that an attempt to call Mr. Putin was directly met with silence.
It is Mr. Putin's highest-stakes use of the military to muscle Russia back into the global relevance it lost with the end of the Cold War. Mr. Putin laid out that doctrine in 2018, when he used his annual state-of-the-nation speech to unveil new nuclear weapons that could fly 20 times the speed of sound.
"Our military is obviously going to weigh all of the options. So far, you know, they've held the city, but, if need be, they will strategically pull back because we're not going to second guess all of our people.
just for nothing," he said. Russia's ambassador to the United States responded defiantly, saying that the country was used to living under such sanctions from the West and that the new penalties would hurt global financial and energy markets as well as Americans.
When Ukraine's military shot down Russian reconnaissance drones, for example, they discovered electronics and motors bought from hobby drone companies in Western Europe, according to a report published in November by Conflict Armament Research, a company based in Britain that specializes in tracing weaponry.
The modernized military has emerged as a key tool of Mr. Putin's foreign policy: capturing Crimea, intervening in Syria, keeping the peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan and, just this month, propping up a Russia-friendly leader in Kazakhstan.
Now it is in the middle of its most ambitious — and most ominous — operation yet: using threats and potentially, many fear, force, to bring Ukraine back into Moscow's sphere of influence. But individual weapons systems are less important than the military's innovative use of knowledge gained in each of the engagements of Mr.
Putin's tenure, said General Philip M. Breedlove, who was NATO commander when war broke out in Ukraine in 2014. In the last decade, the Russian air force has acquired more than 1,000 new aircraft, according to a 2020 article by Aleksei Krivoruchko, a deputy defense minister.
This includes the country's most advanced fighters, the SU-35S; A squadron of these has been deployed to Belarus ahead of joint military exercises next month. Mr. Putin was only a few months into his first presidential term when he faced a military catastrophe.
On Aug. 12, 2000, a torpedo exploded inside the nuclear submarine Kursk, sending it to the Barents Sea floor with 118 sailors. The Russian Navy's failed rescue mission, leading to the deaths of all aboard and an uncharacteristic mea culpa from Mr.
Putin, underlined the military's ineptitude. But as the Kremlin's rhetoric increasingly casts Russia as locked in an existential conflict with the West, little expense was spared. The investment in the military was accompanied by a militarization of Russian society under Mr.
Putin, entrenching the concept of a motherland surrounded by enemies and the possibility of a coming war. The commandos, with experience fighting in Syria and Libya, were flown into Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Russia after sending in troops in 2014, and have since trickled into the rebel-held territories covertly in civilian clothes, the officials said.
Russia used the war in Syria, experts say, as a laboratory to refine tactics and weaponry, and to gain combat experience for much of its force. More responsibility was delegated to lower-level officers, a degree of autonomy that contrasts with the civilian government structure in the Putin era.
Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu said last month that all ground troop commanders, 92 percent of air force pilots and 62 percent of the Navy had combat experience.
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