In rare public comments, mimicking Putin’s propaganda, General Gerasimov portrayed Russia as the victim of Western aggression, without explaining his strategy to neutralize the perceived threat. awareness.
“Our country and its armed forces today are practically against the entire Western collective,” he said in an interview with the Russian newspaper Arguments and Facts published on January 24. , adding that NATO is “using Ukraine for a mixed war against our country. “
In seeking to overhaul the Russian military, General Gerasimov advanced the unusual warfare tactics he mistakenly believed the Americans were waging, instead of focusing on what the United States had done well – total armed warfare. combine different military capabilities to create overwhelming force, argues national security expert Seth G. Jones in his book “Three Dangerous Men.”
As a result, the Russian military gained expertise in covert and covert tactics, such as sending Russian Spetsnaz special forces units, without insignia, to Crimea before Russia annexed the peninsula. this in 2014.
But the war in Ukraine required a different kind of maneuver: offensive operations by large numbers of ground forces operating in different areas with the goal of capturing land. There, General Gerasimov was ineffective.
The troops sent to capture Kyiv in the early days of the war lacked even basic supplies and quickly stalled outside the city. He did not hone his army’s ability to move large numbers of different types of troops, by land, air, and sea, but his plans for invasion depended on it. Russian forces were bogged down, and then gutted, in the cities and towns of northern Ukraine.
General Gerasimov himself almost became a victim of bad planning in his army when at the end of April he narrowly escaped death during a Ukrainian attack while visiting the army. Instead, dozens of Russians were killed, in an incident that prompted Moscow to reduce leaders’ visits to the front.
