Brian M Downing
Putin’s effort to vanquish Ukraine has failed. The drive on Kyiv was driven back to Belarus and the one in the Donbas has stalled. Ukrainian forces are attritting invading forces with artillery, drones, antitank weapons, and MANPADs. Ukrainians wore down the Nazis in the 1940s and their descendants will do the same to the Russians today.
When the US Special Forces were created in the 1950s, their primary mission was training Europeans to wage guerrilla warfare if Soviet forces overwhelmed their conventional forces. American precursors were World War Two OSS teams and the composite unit popularly known as Merrill’s Marauders which harried Japanese troops in Burma.
In recent years US Special Forces have trained elite units in Iraq and Afghanistan which performed well. After the Russians seized parts of Ukraine in 2014, they’ve taught Ukrainians in both conventional and irregular warfare. The former’s effectiveness is clear, the latter’s soon will be.
Local support
Guerrillas, as Mao put it, operate in enemy areas like fish in the sea. The Ukrainian sea is highly supportive of anti-Russian fighters, more so than in other comparable wars. Mao had unfriendly regions and Nationalist forces to vie with. Many Algerians saw advantages to French rule and rejected the FLN. The Viet Cong encountered indifferent peasants and hostile city-dwellers. The Taliban had to overcome tribal rivalries in the south and ethnic hatred in the north.
The Ukrainian people are more united than any other since WW2. Stalin’s starvation of them, disdain during later Soviet rule, and eight years of looming war from Putin have seen to that. Ukraine prepared for war, professionalizing its army and planning for guerrilla warfare. There are arms caches, hiding places, and supply networks throughout the country.
Operations
Known guerrilla activity hasn’t been as intense as expected. This is because much of it is away from cameras and even drones. More importantly it’s because prewar expectations of substantial Russian gains, including several major cities, haven’t come about. There’s far less Russian-held land to operate in.
Most success is in the Russian-occupied land bridge to Crimea and Kherson. Substantial guerrilla activity is underway northeast of the Crimean peninsula and in Kherson, the largest occupied Ukrainian city. Bridges have been blown and contested swathes established. Russia’s land bridge has unreliable and missing pilings.
Guerrilla activity may support coming counteroffensives to liberate Kherson and Melitopol. Most ominously for Russia, one of its tanks was destroyed near Novoazovsk which is on the Black Sea, 35 miles from Ukrainian positions and only ten miles from Russia.
Guerrillas will become parts of the war of attrition. They will find convoys, supply depots, command posts, and artillery positions and report their coordinates or attack them with small arms. Russians will have to be taken from forward positions to look for them. Russian morale and discipline will worsen. Reprisals in partisan warfare are usually brutal.
Proliferation
Word of guerrilla warfare will spread. Crimean Tatars have been disgruntled since Russia seized the peninsula in 2014. They recall Soviet rule and Stalin’s forced dispersal. Ukrainian special forces are likely in touch.
Bridges have come down in Belarus, which has supported Russian ground and air attack. This was the work of Ukrainian special forces, Belarusian partisans, or both. Scores of other acts of sabotage have been admitted by Minsk authorities. A few hundred Belarusians serve alongside Ukrainians against Russian invaders. They could establish a Free Belarus straddling the border and operate from it.
In Russia itself, aside from courageous protests, scores of small-scale attacks on police stations and induction centers have taken place. Most Russians accept official ideology and support the war. However, some are hostile to Putin, see his repression suddenly rising, and face conscription and deployment into his war. They have friends and neighbors who’ve died in the war. Their 19th-century forbears all but invented terrorist groups, the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) being the most famous – and lethal. Its adherents killed scores of officials and one tsar.
©2022 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to fellow Hoya Susan Ganosellis.