Putin’s military doctrine: flattening cities when necessary

As Russian troops and tanks converge on Kyiv, the whole world wishes it could read Vladimir Putin’s mind.

After declaring for months he had no intention of going to war, Putin has now launched the largest military offensive on European soil since World War Two.

So, what comes next?

“If he’s determined to keep going, I don’t think anything’s going to stop him,” says Angela Stent, a former U.S. intelligence officer and Russia expert at Georgetown University, who is the author of the book Putin’s World.

For the inhabitants of Ukraine’s capital, the dreaded question is whether Kyiv is about to come under the same kind of bombardment residents have been subjected to in Kharkiv in the north, and Mariupol in the east?

“It’s hard to tell, but I don’t think he wants a frontal attack on Kyiv. It would be hugely costly,” said Erich De La Fuente, an eastern Europe expert at Florida International University. “His goal is to seize it while he bombs and pressures other cities to bring the country to its knees. He probably wants to be able to manage the city, otherwise it will be an all-out civil war,” he added.

The tragic history of Grozny and Aleppo

Recent history is ominous. When the Russian military has previously run into fiercer ground resistance than expected, it has turned to its heavy artillery.

Look no further than the destruction Russian forces brought down on Grozny, when the Russian republic of Chechnya rebelled in the 1990s, or in Syria where Putin intervened in 2015.

When Chechnya declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and Russian forces invaded – twice – in 1994 and 1999. Russian forces laid siege to the city of Grozny – population 400,000 - and intense fighting lasted weeks.

Russian artillery, cluster bombs and air strikes set fire to buildings and reduced the center of Grozny to rubble. It’s population was halved and more than 20 years later has still barely recovered to 300,000.

Veteran war reporter, Jeremy Bowen with the BBC says Grozny back then was one of “the most devastated places I have seen in years of war reporting.”

It was similar story in Syria.

Putin's decision to intervene in Syria saved the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad. In late 2016, ruthless use of Russian firepower was again decisive in overcoming rebel forces holding parts of the ancient city of Aleppo, one of the oldest cities in the world with a population of three million. A month-long aerial bombardment by airplanes and artillery was used to flatten the rebels strongholds. It’s population fell to only 600,000 during the war. It has bounced back since but is still only two thirds what it was before the war.

The siege tactic involved encircling the rebels areas and pounding them from the air and from artillery batteries to exhaust the defenders and any civilians who had not managed to escape. In one month, an estimated 446 civilians died, including 91 children.

Entire neighborhoods were left in ruins. Streets were blocked with mountain ranges of rubble. A major hospital was repeatedly hit, as were search and rescue teams, according to Human Rights Watch. In total, about 30,000 peope died in Aleppo in fighting that stretched form 2012-2016.

“Russian and Syrian aircraft used a variety of air-dropped, unguided munitions including blast, enhanced blast, fragmentation, and concrete-penetrating bombs,” HRW said. Cluster munitions, incendiary weapons and BETAB or FAB-500-series demolition bombs, known as ‘bunker-busting bombs’ were also likely used in the airstrikes, it added.

Is that the ghastly fate that awaits Kyiv?

Before the invasion of Ukraine, military analysts assessed that Russian tanks who easily crush Ukrainian resistance. But Russia's invasion has once again been slowed by logistical mistakes and an army of unmotivated conscripts who weren’t told they were going to war, and never expected to meet such a determined enemy.

Perhaps Putin will be restrained by Kyiv’s Russian Orthodox churches and cultural sites, so central to his own stated belief in the ethnic unity of Russia and Ukraine.

But Grozny and Aleppo were easy by comparison. Kyiv is about the same size as Aleppo, roughly 2.9 million population, though this time Putin is facing resistance across the entire city, not just the east as was the case in Aleppo.

Does Putin plan to conquer all of Ukraine?

The Russian troops are becoming more reckless—for instance hitting the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant on Thursday.

"The Russian playbook is getting increasingly smaller and unimaginative," Gen (Rt) Peter Zwack, the former U.S. military attache in Moscow, told CNN on Monday. "It goes to brute force... They are now massing and trying to finish it because time is not on their side... It’s gruesome that they are paying this price," he added.

Experts say he can’t obliterate the whole country. Ukraine is the largest country in Europe with a population of 44 million – minus the 1.7 million women and children who aid officials say have fled.

Putin's ultimate objective

His ultimate objective appears to be to control Ukraine by putting a pro-Russian government in power.
Last July, Putin published an essay titled ‘ On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.’ The two nations were really “one people- a single whole” sharing a faith, culture and language. In other words, Ukraine doesn’t exist as an independent country, and was wrongly separated from its “historical motherland” following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990.

The “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia,” he wrote, in itself an astonishing negation of the concept of the word sovereignty.

“Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the ‘Russian world.’ He’s basically told us that,” Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution who has studied Putin for decades, told Politico magazine.

“Basically, if Vladimir Putin has his way, Ukraine is not going to exist as the modern-day Ukraine of the last 30 years,” she added.

But his ability to achieve this goal now seems low after his slow military advance, and the mind-boggling displays of courage and national defiance from the Ukrainian military, and its people.

“He couldn’t keep a puppet government in place without a full-scale Russian occupation,” Stent told The Octavian Report, a geopolitical newsletter.

“To occupy a country like Ukraine, with the population waging an insurgency that’s ed by the West, would be a real strain on Russia’s resources,” she added.