One year on: Analytical successes and failures in assessing Russian and Ukrainian armed forces and the war in Ukraine
Destroyed Russian army vehicles fill a street in Bucha, Ukraine
24 February 2023
CEO Hans Tino Hansen of Risk Intelligence looks back over Risk Intelligence’s analytical successes and failures in assessing the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces and the war in Ukraine
By Hans Tino Hansen, CEO of Risk Intelligence
This article looks at how intelligence analysts generally and in Risk Intelligence specifically looked at Russian and Ukrainian military capability prior to the invasion of Ukraine, how we were wrong, and how we should learn from our mistakes.
The article in Washington Post “Road to war: U.S. struggled to convince allies, and Zelensky, of risk of invasion” by Karen de Young explains the gradual increase in US intelligence, assessment, and conclusions on Russian plans to attack Ukraine and how the US intelligence world went from finding an invasion of Ukraine unlikely to becoming increasingly likely and how difficult it was to convince allies and Ukraine that an invasion was coming.
It is a very interesting read to understand how intelligence analysts and their clients in government think, how expected rational behaviour on behalf of the enemy can lead to misunderstandings when the enemy has a very different form of rational behaviour, how allies due to a sort of “cry wolf” reaction will not trust your intelligence analysis and assessments when other crucial intelligence in the past was more than flawed.
On a much smaller scale it mirrors our own analysis of the situation within Risk Intelligence, where analytical discussions over time changed the assessment of the likelihood of a Russian invasion from unlikely to more likely than unlikely, and then finally to highly likely, and where many discussions within our team and with partner organisations in some way resembled the discussions between the US and its allies.
The analytical requirement for intelligence analysis of Russia and Ukraine started in 2014 with the Russian illegal annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Donbas. We had started a project in March 2021 to measure combat capability of primarily land forces in parts of East- and Northern Europe and as a foundation for the project a relatively detailed order of battle of the land forces in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland was produced and updated with support and assistance from several organisations and individuals. At the same, we started monitoring and assessing the actual deployments of land forces and especially those of Russia using satellite imagery, partners analysis supported by open-source information.
This meant that during the autumn of 2021 we started having a relatively decent picture of the actual organisation, the numbers of available equipment, and deployment of especially Russian forces. This picture was updated during the period leading up to the invasion and provided a clear indication that something was going in the wrong direction to those directly involved in the project, who also happened to have a background from the Cold War.
From October-November 2021, we and our partners started to identify an increasing number of indicators of Russian military activity that was beyond what had been seen previously and we changed the probability of war to “even chance”. By January 2022 we started having a weekly meeting on the situation in Ukraine and the threat from Russia. Initially, the discussions included a sound hesitance on the outlook for war from the other analysts covering Russia and Ukraine or neighbouring areas or elsewhere in the organisation. As with the main European reaction to the US intelligence and conclusion the thought of a Russian invasion did certainly not sound rational to most in the team, while a more limited military operation in Donbas which essentially would be an extension of what had been the reality since 2014 sounded possible, but still not likely.
During the end of January and early February things started to change led by further intelligence and open-source information supported by the increase in US and British public communication described in the article and the people who had worked with the capability project changed their assessment of the likelihood of a Russian invasion from even chance to more likely than unlikely. The build-up of forces was visible on the satellite images and the above-mentioned increased flow of public statements and other open source started to impact on the group and the assessment of each member. By mid-February the sum of all our analysis pointed towards war being highly likely.
Since almost all resources allocated to the capability project had been spent on building, and not least updating the order of battle, the next level of the project with the modelling and analysis of the capability had not yet been launched, which meant that we knew that units were here and there and they had so and so many tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery pieces etc, but we still did not have analysis and measurement of their capability. Therefore, the assessment of capability was based on our experience from the Cold War updated with new Russian military doctrine, reports from exercises, and input from publicly available studies and discussions with partners and other people dealing with the same questions. We did know that while many lessons from the Cold War and World War 2 could be used then there were also a long range of areas where they could not be applied. The impact of technology and Russia’s position as a nuclear armed major regional power was markedly different from the status of the Soviet Union as a superpower with a global reach even if Putin’s Russia in recent years has tried to image itself as one.
If we had succeeded finalising the capability modelling and carried out the planned analysis and assessment, we would most likely - like many other Western analysts - have been quite far from the target based on the performance and litmus test of the Russian forces’ capability in the war in Ukraine. We would have substantially overestimated the capability of the Russian army and not least the capacity of the armed forces to conduct joint operations. At the same time, we underestimated the capability and willingness of the Ukrainian armed forces and not least, their level of mission command and the ability of the field commanders to command in a far superior way to their Russian counterparts.
Our expectation was that the Russians first of all would follow their own doctrine and launch massive cyber-attacks followed by electronic warfare and direct fires from artillery and rocket launchers supported by air strikes with warplanes and missiles until the defences were sufficiently degraded. Then airborne attacks would take place in the rear of the Ukrainian forces and at airfields simultaneously with deep armoured penetration of Ukrainian lines, which would link up with the airborne forces. At the same time follow up forces would attack all remaining Ukrainian positions and seek to encircle their formations.
As everyone well know this did not happen and we along with many other analysts could hardly believe what we witnessed almost live. There has already been some good analysis on the why’s including the massive impact of corruption and kleptocracy on the armed forces, but the future will provide us with more detailed analysis of the reasons behind the Russian failure to obtain their strategic objectives.
Even after the Russians had realized their strategy had failed, changed their strategy, dropped the battalion tactical group as its primary formation, and slowly started following their original operational doctrine, Russia has so far only been able to achieve initial tactical successes in Donbas and seem to have reached the maximum of their operational limit, which already had been substantially degraded by massive losses during the first phase of the war. The successful Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv region was met with a stop-gap mobilization that have stalled Ukrainian advances and been used to wear down Ukrainian defences. However, on a capability-level, the Russian army is nowhere near what had been expected prior to the war.
So why did we and many other people end up there being so wrong? One of the main reasons seem to be confirmation bias, where we and perhaps many others were driven by the apparent capability legacy of the Cold War Soviet Armed forces supported by an almost face value adoption of what now seem to have been Russian propaganda about the new Russian Army. The modernization of the Russian Army from Yeltsin’s largely demoralised, corrupt, and underfunded post-Soviet army to Putin’s new army seems to largely have been an excellent PR campaign for both external and internal consumption rather than actual capability building, development, and modernization. Confirmation bias also meant that we wanted to see and probably unknowingly actively seek for confirmation of what we already believed the Russian army should be. The carefully orchestrated presentation of new Russian military equipment, modernization of doctrines and a long range of formations being re-established was exactly what we were looking for. Confirming our expectations and bias. In addition, we, who were coming from a Western NATO-based culture may have expected a combined arms and joint operations operational skill set that was not and probably never has been part of Russian military doctrine and culture. Finally, capability assessments were probably also driven by a priority of equipment over people.
This is a classic analytical mistake that should be avoided, if possible, at all. The problem in this case being that it would have been like stopping an avalanche of analysis only going in one direction.
So why did we underestimate the capability and willingness of the Ukrainian armed forces? While we knew that training and capability development programmes had improved the general level of the Ukrainian army and especially personal since 2014, the equipment had largely been the same post-Soviet army legacy equipment as before and the structure and organisation of formations had not changed much. The only plausible explanation is people, technology, and innovation.
It turned out that the Ukrainian soldiers’ willingness and determination to fight and defend their country was on a much higher level than anticipated and to a large extent made up for or even more than compensated some of the other deficiencies. At the same time, it was part of a reaction of an entire population, who stood together as a nation and supported the troops at the front lines in all possible ways and provided volunteers at a very critical moment.
The use of technology and innovation in how to use new technology in an operational context had a massive impact especially during the first phase of the war when Ukrainian Bayraktar drones could be used for deep strikes and commercial drones were used for reconnaissance and artillery fire direction. The Ukrainian special forces and long-range reconnaissance or commando-type units could operate in the Russian rear and target Russian logistics, electronic warfare, air defence and headquarters much thanks to new doctrine, technology and determined people. Innovation has since continued to be one of the main drivers in Ukrainian capability.
Effectively it meant that an army equipped with Soviet legacy equipment could outsmart a bigger and theoretically stronger Russia army with more modern versions of Soviet equipment based on people, technology, innovation, and a fundamentally different command system. This is a lesson, which is not entirely new in history of war that was not observed by us and probably by many others. At the same time the Russian military is learning and while many of its mistakes earlier in the war with severe degradation of combat formations will hamper its revival, we will most likely see an increased capability again.
In the end we were right in forecasting the war, but we were wrong in the assessment of the Russian and Ukrainian capability, determination, and willingness, which is obviously better than the opposite in real terms.
We will need to sharpen our pen and address the analytical failures to learn from these and seek to improve and open intelligence analysis thinking.
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