Armies of Russia's War in Ukraine by Mark Galeotti & Adam Hook

Author:Mark Galeotti & Adam Hook
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472833457
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Command and control

Although a variety of other agencies are also involved, such as the FSB and even the Ministry of Emergency Situations (which has run numerous convoys into the Donbas, notionally delivering humanitarian aid, but which many believe also provide resupply to fighters), overall responsibility for the Russian aspect of the Donbas war rests with the General Staff and the newly built National Defense Control Center in the basement of the Defense Ministry building. That said, it is important to stress that they do not have direct operational command over the militias. Some, at least in the past, have been essentially Russian-run, such as the Vostok Battalion. Some, again, are more beholden to Moscow than others, or are in effect attached to Russian BTGs as local auxiliaries on an operation-by-operation basis. But command and control, and coordination, have been perennial challenges: the Kremlin has traded off operational effectiveness for the sake of deniability.

The formidable TOS-1A Solntsepyok (nicknamed Buratino, “Pinocchio”) is an MLRS firing 24x 220mm thermobaric munitions. While the Russians may have provided some to the DNR forces, by all accounts they maintain close control over their use, even withholding the rockets until they are willing to see them deployed. (Vitaly V. Kuzmin/Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY-SA 4.0)

The Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, capital of the Rostov region and an important seaport and road and rail hub, has become the logistical base for the undeclared war in the Donbas. Not only does it house arsenals and warehouses with weapons and other matériel to support Russian and rebel forces, but the GRU maintains a significant presence there. Potential volunteers and mercenaries for the militias are screened, armed, and mustered in the city, while analysts draw on a network of human and electronic intelligence assets to try to maintain a real-time sense of this messiest of conflicts.

A Russian Spetsnaz operator from the 22nd Special Designation Bde, based in the Rostov region. He carries both a regular assault rifle slung, and an AS Val suppressed rifle. (Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation/Mil.ru/CC-BY-SA 4.0)

The Eighth Guards Army, which was re-formed in 2017, is based south of Rostov-on-Don, at Novorossisk. Although the Twentieth Guards Army at Voronezh to the north certainly also plays a role in the threatening force posture that Moscow presents, the Eighth appears to have been made the operational hub for deployments into the Donbas, while it also poses the main conventional threat to Ukraine. However, its role is complicated by the multiple institutions with a role in the overall mission.

Politically, the Presidential Administration in Moscow is running the show, for most of the time through presidential aide Vladislav Surkov. His is very much a diplomatic and administrative mission, but nonetheless this feeds directly into combat operations – in terms of when to observe and when to ignore ceasefires, when to step up the tempo of fire missions to put pressure on Kyiv, or when to calm them down to appease third parties. Meanwhile, both the GRU and the Federal Security Service (FSB) – which

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