The War in Ukraine and Russian Security Policy: The Strategy of the Chevauchee
The Ukraine War has been widely perceived as an echo of the mass conflicts of the 20th century. WWI in particular has been often used as an analogy and the Ukraine War has been associated with images of muddy trenches, grinding attritional warfare and human wave attacks. These comparisons are not fundamentally inaccurate, but they do not capture what the war is likely to mean for the future of Russian strategy. In Ukraine, Russia’s military is increasingly shifting from a reliance on mass and frontal assaults towards an approach centred around raiding – smaller scale operations, with heavy use of drones and light vehicles, paired with disruptive strikes aimed at the Ukrainian rear. This type of warfare is likely to dominate the NATO-Russia rivalry in the coming decades.
RAIDING IN RUSSIAN STRATEGY
Prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, discussions of Russian security policy have focused on the notion of hybrid warfare. Russia has long been seen as using a mixture of influence operations, informational warfare and small-scale, often covert force deployments to achieve its strategic goals, preferring indirect means to large-scale use of conventional kinetic force. In a 2018 article for War on the Rocks, Michael Kofman argues that under Putin, the Kremlin’s strategy has been based around recognizing the imbalance in military capabilities and economic potential between Russia and the West and circumventing it through asymmetric approaches. Kofman rejects neologisms such as hybrid warfare and instead conceptualizes Russia’s strategy as a form of raiding, characterized by using limited force to disrupt and destabilize the enemy, while avoiding a decisive confrontation. Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 or its intervention in Syria in 2017 fit into this pattern – limited-scale raids, intended to extend Russia’s strategic interests, without provoking a direct response from NATO.
The historical precedent for Russia’s post-1991 does not lie in the Red Army of WWI, WWII or the Cold War. Alexander Clarkson notes that to locate the origins of Russia’s raiding strategy, one must go deeper into history to the way of war of the early modern Cossacks or the Central Asian horse archers, who have dominated the Russian geographic space in the medieval period. The Middle Ages provide the best framework for examining Russia’s approach to geopolitical competition. The term chevauchee gained prominence during the Hundred Years War between England and France. The conflict saw sporadic battles interspersed with prolonged periods of chevauchee’s – raids, launched not with the aim of holding territory, but to undercut the enemy’s military potential, while avoiding a decisive confrontation. According to Clarkson, Russia has extended these principles to the context of 21st warfare and turned them into the cornerstone of its strategy.
THE UKRAINE WAR AS A STRATEGIC PIVOT?
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the February of 2022 seemingly marked a deviation from its chevauchee strategy, with conventional, mass warfare displacing raiding and asymmetry. The media landscape has been dominated by reports and images of large tank columns charging over open ground and of waves of poorly trained conscripts flooding Ukrainian trenches. After long years of relying on small-scale attacks, covert operations and non-kinetic tools, Russia appears to have fallen back upon Soviet-era doctrine.
However, large-scale, conventional warfare is not inherently antithetical to a raiding-focused strategy. In the Hundred Years War, both England and France occasionally resorted to decisive battle in an attempt to tip the scales of the conflict. Similarly, post-Soviet Russia has pursued larger force deployments, as in the invasion of Georgia in 2008 or in its intervention in the Donbass War of 2014, when Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border to avert the imminent collapse of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022 was envisioned as a force deployment similar to these – a high-intensity burst of kinetic force, intended to rapidly and decisively shift the strategic balance between Russia and NATO in the Kremlin’s favour. The invasion was supposed to entail a swift decapitating strike towards Kyiv, eliminating Ukraine’s leadership and circumventing the main centres of resistance. The descent into a protracted, mass conflict resulted from the unexpectedly stiff resistance of the UAF and the poor strategic judgement of top-level Russian leadership.
The reliance on frontal assaults and human wave tactics is reflective of the incompetence of the Russian command, which proved itself ill-prepared for waging a large-scale, conventional war. Russian military leadership has fallen back upon crude mass after it has failed to execute the kind of high-technology war of movement envisioned in its initial war plans. As the conflict has gone on, frontline troops have widely adopted raiding-oriented approaches. Instead of massed, frontal assaults, Russia has relied heavily on a combination of drones and lightly armoured vehicles to launch limited-scale attacks, gradually chipping away at Ukrainian defences. These attacks have been combined with long-range strikes against critical infrastructure, intended to cripple Ukraine’s economy, and economic and informational warfare, aimed at eroding Western support for Kyiv. The Ukraine War has seen a maturation of Russia’s raiding strategy and its deployment on a large scale. The conflict has not marked a departure from pre-war trends in Russian doctrine, but their logical progression.
THE FUTURE OF CONTAINMENT
The development of the Russian strategy of the chevauchee on the battlefields of Ukraine has major implications for the security policy of the collective West and NATO-aligned countries. The war has not fundamentally altered Russia’s strategic calculus. NATO still holds a strong edge in resources, technology and military capabilities; indeed, the imbalance has grown as a result of the exhaustion of Russia’s military in Ukraine. Russia’s prospects of winning a symmetric confrontation with NATO are slimmer than ever. This does not rule the risk of a strategic miscalculation on the Kremlin’s part leading to escalation, but in the future, raiding is likely to remain Russia’s primary instrument in its geopolitical competition with the West.
The lessons of the Ukraine War stretch beyond the immediate context of the conflict. Russia’s reliance on raiding is in many ways a symptom of the limitations of the Russian Army – its inability to break the stalemate and shift the war into a mobile stage; however, it is also a result of broader technological developments. The improvements in reconnaissance capabilities, driven in major part by the widespread proliferation of cheap drones, have not been matched by increased survivability and camouflage, leading to an increase in the legibility of the battlefield. Concentrating force for a large-scale breakthrough has become increasingly difficult, making raiding strategies more relevant. To effectively contain Russia, the West should not merely prepare for the threat of full-scale war; it should seek to counter Russia’s chevauchee strategy across the full spectrum of escalation and develop greater capacity for limited-scale raiding operations.
The Ukraine War provides an opportunity to test these approaches. To contain Russia and ensure Ukraine’s final victory in its defensive war, the West should seek to bolster the UAF’s capacity to mimic Russia’s raiding tactics, both on the battlefields and with covert operations and long-range strikes, aimed at Russian infrastructure and the sources of its economic power. The involvement of Ukrainian SOF operators in attacks on Kremlin-aligned military contractors in Africa or the drone strikes aimed at oil extraction facilities inside Russia mark the first hopeful steps in this direction. The answer to curbing Russia’s strategy of raiding lies in meeting and beating the Kremlin on its own terms.
SOURCES
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Image Source: Hodge, Nathan (2022). “Russia says its military is regrouping. A ramped-up assault on eastern Ukraine could be next.”. Accessed 30 September, 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/31/europe/ukraine-russia-troops-regrouping-intl-cmd/index.html.
Written by Matyáš Knol
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