The Russian military has too much experience to think a full-scale invasion is a good idea.
Many analysts in the United States and Europe are convinced that an invasion of Ukraine is now the most likely outcome of Russian troop movements near the border. Some have gone further in concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin hopes to impose a Russian military occupation on all or part of Ukraine. They believe the Russian military will try to establish a new social order in Ukraine, replacing the government under President Volodymyr Zelensky with a puppet administration.
There is little doubt that the build-up of what are now around 80 battalion tactical groups, which include tanks, artillery, and around 130,000 troops, represents a profound threat to Ukraine. The apparent presence of airborne military units and amphibious assets indicate how multifaceted any military onslaught could become. Perhaps most worrying are the movements of Rosgvardiya detachments, or Russian National Guard troops, who would be responsible for providing security on territory behind the frontlines, managing prisoners of war and securing logistics. These are all potential signals that a comprehensive plan for occupation may be in place.
Yet any discussion of potential Russian action toward Ukraine needs to take into account the resources available to the Russian state, and the history of previous Russian, Soviet, and other great-power military occupations. And here the picture becomes less clear cut than a lot of speculation over the potential occupation of Ukraine acknowledges.
A vast move to seize and hold large cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, or Odessa, would require enough troops to destroy the Ukrainian army, crush a potential insurgency and back up any permanent security force that can be recruited from local collaborators or hired from outside Ukraine. Kyiv alone has a population of 3 million in a dense urban landscape, while Kharkiv has 1.5 million and Odessa has 1 million. Smaller cities east of the Dnieper River, such as Dnipro or Zaporizhya, have populations in the hundreds of thousands. If Crimea and the parts of the Donbas region occupied by Russia are removed, the population of Ukraine as a whole is still officially 41 million, though recent estimates by the national statistical service that take mass migration into account now place it at 37 million.
The level of manpower that previous occupations at this scale required provide a hint of the challenges Russia would face when occupying all or a large part of Ukraine. The occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which faced no armed resistance, was initiated by a move of nearly 250,000 Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops that in weeks was bolstered to nearly 500,000 in order to hold down a population of 14 million. From 1999 to 2003, during the second Chechen War, the Russian army surged over 90,000 troops into a territory with a population of less than 1 million to brutally suppress an armed insurgency.
During the same period, the United States launched its 2003 invasion of Iraq, a country with a population of 26 million with around 190,000 U.S. and allied forces as well as 60,000 Kurdish Peshmerga auxiliaries in support. Analysts concerned that this force would be too small to stabilize Iraq were proven right as swift victory over Saddam Hussein’s regime on the battlefield slid into multiple insurgencies that shattered U.S. control. For all the strengthening of the Russian military in the past decade and differences in context between these examples, the precedents they set make it more difficult to see how 130,000 Russian troops currently on Ukrainian borders could sustain a stable occupation regime unless their numbers were substantially increased further.
Whatever potential political gains can be achieved by the Russian state in an occupation of Ukraine need to be balanced by consideration of the pressure it would put on the Russian military to hold down large regions while having to fund their economic reconstruction in the long term. The price that Ukrainian society would pay for even moderate resistance in such a scenario, never mind a full insurgency as in Syria, would be brutal in ways that many in the United States or European Union pondering these options should consider more carefully. With such a substantial number of war veterans who are hostile to Russia, at least in some areas of each region in Ukraine, however, a degree of resistance is still a distinct possibility.
Yet in Syria, the Russian military could rely on Wagner mercenaries or Iranian-backed militias to do the dying for it. In Ukraine it would be professional Russian soldiers and even conscripts that would have to shoulder the burden until a local proxy force can emerge. As the Soviets discovered in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Vietnam and Iraq, a commitment that is leapt into quickly can drag out into a struggle to sustain stable outcomes however many tactical victories are won along the way. And Russia in 2022 does not have the military or economic power the United States still has or the Soviet Union once had.
Of course, it is important not to dismiss such worst-case scenarios out of hand. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, great powers have regularly shown a propensity for promising quick results before discovering that realities on the ground did not match their geopolitical fantasies. The article written by Putin last year on relations between Russia and Ukraine indicates a level of wishful thinking that has crossed into delusional realms.
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