Four Years Of The Ukraine Invasion: Has Russia’s Military Learned To Fight A Better War?

Prior to Ukraine, the last time Russia all-out invaded another sovereign country was Georgia. Moscow was victorious after the 16-day conflict in 2008, but it was messy and showed that Russia’s armed forces needed a major upgrade.

Four years ago, a semi-reformed Russian military was again put to the test, when hundreds of thousands of troops poured into Ukraine. Judging by the eyewatering casualties -- more than 1.2 million killed and wounded and counting -- it's been even messier. And Moscow still is not victorious.

But Russia's armed forces are learning. The question is how much they've learned since February 24, 2022.

“They're adapting to the battlefield conditions, but the more permanent changes to the force in terms of strategy and operations will come after,” Dara Massicot, a longtime expert on Russia’s armed forces and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told RFE/RL.

“I would characterize what the Russian military has undergone as adaptation rather than reform, given that a lot of it seems to be driven by fairly immediate pressures,” said Nick Reynolds, a land warfare fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank.

“It is not building the ideal force that will be effective to fight in the future. It is solving operational problems and trying to put a good-enough force in place by its own standards to solve the problems in front of it,” he added.

“There has been no ‘reform’ in the Russian sense of the word; the war’s logic makes it impossible,” said Lieutenant Colonel Juha Kukkola, a professor in the Russia Research Group at the Finnish National Defense University.

Russia’s military has been “learning from failures…simultaneously losing previous experienced troops and equipment while learning to survive in the next phase of the war,” he told RFE/RL.

The lessons learned are “fit for the needs of this war, but possibly not transferable to the next war,” he said.

Russian soldiers fire a BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launcher system during military exercises in 2019, three years before the Ukraine invasion.

Between Georgia And Ukraine

After the messy victory in Georgia, then-Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov was tapped to oversee major changes in the military, including shifts away from long-standing Soviet thinking.

He tried to cut the military’s overall size; he reorganized military education; he prioritized more noncommissioned officers such as sergeants; she tried to restructure away from big, lumbering divisions, to smaller, more nimble battalion tactical groups.

Anatoly Serdyukov was sacked by President Vladimir Putin in 2012, amid a corruption scandal. His reforms were unpopular among many top Russian brass.

There were major investments in new tanks, new armored personnel carriers, new missiles, not to mention new communications, which had failed in Georgia.

In 2012, however, he was sacked by President Vladimir Putin, trailed by a cloud of scandal. His replacement, longtime Putin confidant Sergei Shoigu, ignored veteran officers wanting a wholesale rollback, but did little to modernize further.

“The Serdyukov reforms were really about Russia getting better at fighting a local war,” said Katri Pynnоniemi, a professor at the Finnish Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Helsinki. “Then it shifted around 2012. The emphasis became preparing for a larger war…. There was nothing major in reality, but there was this threat perception from the Russian regime that shifted. That stopped the reforms.”

In the years that followed, the Kremlin embarked on a major military endeavor: an expeditionary operation to Syria. There, experts say it gained valuable experience doing things like coordinated air strikes: when soldiers on the ground coordinate directly with pilots in the air to hit specific targets.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, outside observers expected the bigger, better-armed Russian army to roll into Kyiv in a matter of days. That didn’t happen, in part due to Ukrainian pluck, but also bad Russian operations.

Within a year, Ukrainian forces had conducted two counteroffensive operations, rolling back Russian positions: in the southern Kherson region, and in the northeast Kharkiv region.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, cycled through commanders, trying to regain momentum. Until he was caught up in the short-lived June 2023 mutiny by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, General Sergei Surovikin managed to stabilize Russian lines, in part by building vast, multi-layered defenses that came to be known as Surovikin Lines.

Russian commanders also returned to old-school, un-modern Soviet tactics: sending waves of infantry to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses. It typically involved poorly trained and lightly armed men, sometime prison inmates, and came to be known as a “meat-grinder,” due to the extraordinary toll.

More recently, officers have resorted to sending lightly armed men trying to race past Ukrainian defenses, using motorcycles or off-road vehicles, to move fast –- and hope to avoid drones.

The result? Russia has suffered more killed and wounded than all the wars it has fought combined since World War II.

“They've lost the bulk of their armored vehicles, and they don't deploy them on the front line in the same way they did, or in the numbers they did,” Reynolds told RFE/RL. “They aim for bite-and-hold infantry attacks. They accept very high losses. Their ground forces, infantry, armor, is not very capable.”

Frontline units, Massicot said, are also plagued by “rampant and horrific discipline problems.”

“This is why I struggle to use the word reform about what's coming for the Russian military, because reform requires an acknowledgement of problems and wanting to do something about it,” she said. “And I think there is not a willingness at this point to acknowledge these problems on the front line."

On The Electronic Frontier

Among the improvements experts have taken note of: Russia’s artillery tactics and its ability to use electronic warfare -- to jam incoming drones, or aircraft radars -- is formidable.

And then there are drones.

For both Russia and Ukraine, the entire war has been transformed by drones, experts said: kamikaze “Shahed” drones, heavy-lift supply drones, first-person-view drones, drones flown by fiber optic cable. Lagging in its drone capabilities at first, Russia acquired thousands of units and technology from Iran, and then developed its own homegrown production.

Russia’s Rubicon unit has wrought havoc on Ukrainian forces. A hybrid unit that develops and buys new technology, while also testing new tactics and fighting alongside regular units, the Rubicon Center for Advanced Unmanned Technologies is seen as the most successful new initiative that Russia has fielded since 2022.

“As a model, the Russian military leadership really likes it,” Massicott said. “With an appropriate level of state resources it has changed from a research organization to an operational one and now it’s taking on more training roles. That is something they want to replicate in other areas.”

Overwhelmingly, the decisive factor for Russia is simply that it is bigger, Kukkola said:

“In this kind of war, you do not have to be ‘better’ than your opponent, just have more resources, human and material, and time -– if nothing else -- changes the strategic situation,” he said.

But Russia doesn’t have enough resources to start developing its future forces based on what it’s learned in Ukraine, Kukkola added, because it’s losing too many men.

“Militaries which survive a war, sometimes emerge from it stronger and sometimes fail utterly when next tested,” he said.