Russia’s Ability as an Occupier Rated Poorly

Russia has advanced more slowly than anticipated after the country invaded Ukraine in late February. The attack has drawn international condemnation because of the Russian military's brutality and also for its attacks on civilian targets like hospitals and buildings used as shelters.

Even if Russia was to succeed in its goal to occupy its much smaller neighbor, which has put up a major defense effort aided by equipment from European allies and the U.S., the country's track record as an occupier is calling into question its ability to hold on to Ukraine in the case of an occupation situation arising. If Russia was to win the war, experts expect the Ukrainian military and other actors to form a resistance force, which would leave the Russian occupiers with an insurgency on their hands. As opposed to a war between two militaries, insurgents are bound by fewer rules, are more flexible and engage in forms of guerrilla fighting, making them harder to beat for traditional armed forces.

Being confronted with these counterinsurgency situations in the past, Russian and Soviet forces have shown a negative track record, a paper by Rand Corporation concludes. The failure of the occupation of Afghanistan in 1992 has even been called a "textbook study of how a major power can fail to win a war against guerrillas" by counterinsurgency expert Anthony James Joes. The Russians’ use of brute force - also called the iron fist approach - is cited by the paper’s authors as a deciding factor of why the country's forces failed repeatedly against insurgents. In the flawed attempt to squash an uprising in the then-breakaway republic of Chechnya in 1994, Russian forces had major problems with strategy, equipment and morale, but even more importantly failed to win the support of the local population and did not pay attention to ways in which they themselves could improve their grievances in order for them to stop supporting the insurgency in the first place.

According to the Rand study, counterinsurgency operations that engaged in non-military means as well were usually much more effective. Those that employed tactics like intimidation, collective punishment, corruption or looting were even more likely to fail.

In the case of the U.S. military, which fought alongside the governments of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos against a communist uprising in the region in the 1960s and ’70s, counterinsurgency failures are rated even more severely. Even the most advanced military in the world could not adapt to fight and conquer Southeast Asian guerrilla forces and famously left defeated in 1975. The British military has a better track record, with some locations of uprisings tied to former colonies of the British Empire but also including the conflict in Northern Ireland. Most British campaigns are also considered iron fist approaches, but at least during the Maoist uprising in Malaysia in 1948 and the IRA activity in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1999, military means were combined with non-military tactics, leading to more positive outcomes.