Russia in a heart beat. The Ukraine is some of the least defendable terrain on the planet. It’s mostly in the Eastern European plain, with flat terrain. The Deniper neatly divides the country into two and unfortunately most of the population and industry are in that region, meaning you have to make a stand there. And the land to the East is open. Of course the Russians can simply outflank any defences in the East by coming in through the North and vice versa.
Notwithstanding the Russians evident expertise in the area, I suspect that the Baltic States - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - would lend a collective and very helpful hand. Estonia and Latvia in particular are said to punch more than their weight in this regard.
Yes. Ukraine’s military appears to be particularly anemic and inept.
How quickly we forget. As recently as 2013 the Ukrainian government was headed by the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich. If he had managed to hang on to power any nuclear weapons that had been retained by Ukraine would be more of a threat to the West than they would be to Russia. His downfall was in large part the trigger for the recent aggressive moves by Russia. If Russia had been threatened with the prospect of a nuclear-armed anti-Russian Ukrainian government it might very well have been prompted to intervene to prop up Yanukovich when he got in trouble. (Yanukovich is now in Russia.)
Belarus and Kazakhstan also had nuclear weapons that they turned over to Russia. Belarus today is probably Russia’s strongest ally. If Belarus hadn’t given up its nukes they would be just as much a threat to the US today as those in Russia. Kazakhstan is a corrupt authoritarian state in the middle of Asia. Would the world be more secure if Kazakhstan were still a nuclear power?
Given the present situation, yeah, a Ukraine with nukes could be more resistant to Russia. But other plausible scenarios since 1990 could well have resulted in them being much more of a threat to US interests.
Except Ukraine was ask to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for “security assurances” from the great powers (US, UK, Russia). Basically an empty promise with nothing backing it up. Russia respects nukes a lot more than a peice of paper saying the US will defend Ukraine. You won’t see Israel giving up its nukes because someone asked them to.
The United Kingdom and the United States have stated they have lived up to the agreement. The agreement said they would not attack Ukraine and they have not done so. Russia also said it would not attack Ukraine and it obviously has broken that promise. But the UK and US have said that the agreement was not a defensive alliance; there was no agreement that they would intervene if one of the parties to the agreement broke it.
The Russian argument is that they didn’t technically break the agreement. They said they signed the agreement with the old government of Ukraine in 1994 and that the government that existed in 2014 was the result of a revolution and therefore Ukraine should be considered a different country. And they had no agreement with this new country not to invade it.
I believe this is the current official Russian position. But there have been others. Russia has also claimed at various times that there were no troops in Ukraine; that the troops who were in Ukraine weren’t Russian; that the people where the Russian troops were had formed their own separate country so it wasn’t part of Ukraine anymore; that they had only promised not to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine so other kinds of attacks don’t count; and that the United States had attacked Ukraine first so the Russian troops were actually there to defend Ukraine from the Americans.
Spending is only a hint since so much else comes into play. For defense spending using Purchasing Power Parity makes a lot of sense. It makes more sense for countries with large military industrial complexes that are mostly building their own weapons. Their purchasing power tends to more reflective of the internal pricing where PPP is relevant. For Russia, that’s probably a better estimate. For Ukraine, it’s a less relevant conversion. One major piece of spending is personnel costs; in the US it tends to fall a bit under a third of the total budget. For nations that rely on conscription that can skew pricing even lower since they don’t have to pay market costs. Russia has moved to a mixed system where a lot of their enlisted are now volunteer professional troops.* Ukraine was a volunteer military but reimplemented conscription in 2014.
2017 PPP conversion factors from the World Bank - US is the standard 1.0, Russia is 24.11, Ukraine is 8.10
Nominal military spending in US Dollars for 2017 (data pulled from spreadsheet compiled by SIPRI here ) ** - US spent 609.8, Russia spent $66.3 billion, Ukraine spent $3.6 billion
Applying PPP conversion factors for comparison:
- Russia 1.6 trillion USD
- US 609.8 billion USD
- Ukraine 29.2 billion USD
At PPP Russian spending is more than double what the one world superpower spends. It’s almost 55 times what Ukraine spends. Russia’s also been making a major military reform and modernization effort since 2008 significantly narrowing the technical gap between their military and the US.
The disparity in spending is massive and Russia currently has a very large and modern military. Would we even think to question the United States’ ability to swiftly defeat Ukraine if it shared a land border? Unless Russian reforms and spending have been very poorly managed the capability difference should be at that level of disparity.
- Without going to look and cite, IIRC Russian Lieutenant Colonels still get paid a little less than the lowest paid members of the US military, E1s with less than four months of service. That’s a pretty stark example of why PPP makes for a better point of comparison.
** Measurement can be hard even with relatively accurate reporting since what counts in a budget is open to interpretation. It’s easy to find different estimates. I used the same relatively well-respected international source to at least avoid differing methodologies.
As Little Nemo has pointed out, the US never made a commitment to “defend Ukraine.” And as I have said, even if Ukraine still had nukes an entirely plausible scenario would be Russia installing a puppet pro-Russian regime under someone like Yanukovich. Your assumption that nukes would have been of value to Ukraine is based on a very narrow and short-term assessment of the situation since 2014. I think it is just or even more likely that if Ukraine had been left in control of nukes in the 1990s they would be directed at the West today rather than used as a deterrent against Russia.
Well, I haven’t looked deeply into Ukraine’s OOB lately, but my WAG on this is that it would be more an economic and logistical issue for Russia than a purely military one. That said, Ukraine would be fighting on the defensive with some relatively ‘modern’ (Soviet era crap) systems and it’s a lot of territory for Russia to have to both invade then hold and their own military capabilities aren’t all that great these days either. It would probably strap Russia to the max to undertake an actual forced entry invasion and a series of set piece battles and then occupations, tapping heavily their on call resources and manpower and available stocks of weapons and munitions and would be a bitch on their already strapped military budget. I think they COULD do it and without ‘very high casualties’, whatever that means in actual terms, but I don’t think they could afford to do it. And this leaves aside the international costs of doing something like that, which would be staggering. They are under heavy sanctions now for just dipping their toe in the Ukraine and their Crimean adventure…a full out invasion I think would make them a pariah to everyone but, perhaps, North Korea and China and a few other outlier nations.
The piece of paper didn’t say that the US would “defend” Ukraine. We (and Russia) promised to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” That Russia decided to renege doesn’t obligate us to confront them. We’re still meeting our obligations under the Budapest Memorandum.
Also consider that there was absolutely no way that the United States would have entered a defensive alliance with a part of the former Soviet Union in 1990. The USSR had just broken apart, and there was no guarantee that the dissolution would stick. We weren’t going to commit to World War III to protect Ukraine.
We promised to never attack Ukraine if they gave up nuclear weapons, and we have not attacked them. We never promised to defend them.
To get back to the original question, there’s a big difference between a military victory, an economic victory, and a political victory.
Yes, Russian tanks can roll through Ukraine, and Russian bombers can flatten the cities.
And then what? What’s the goal here? To return Ukraine as a productive part of the Russian Empire, surely. And will invading and occupying Ukraine accomplish that? The direct cost of the invasion and occupation would be tremendous, and those costs would pale in comparison to the indirect costs of additional sanctions, economic disruption, and the strengthening of anti-Russian alliances. And then how do you pacify Ukraine and make it productive again, to pay for the costs of annexing it?
In any case, an outright midnight invasion doesn’t seem like the Russian style. The much more likely scenario is to engineer a pro-Russian coup, and then the shaky new pro-Russian government invites in the Russian military as advisers. Ukrainian regime troops are the ones on the streets suppressing the riots and demonstrations, while the Russian troops hang back as an arms-length threat.
Engineering that pro-Russian coup is going to take some work, though.
I agree. I think it would be tougher for Russia to roll tanks through the Ukraine than you seem to imply, or flatten their cities with Russian bombers, but that they could do it is pretty much a yes. However, there is a cost to benefit here that would be missing. In addition, while I expect the Russian colonized eastern parts of Ukraine would be ok with being under the Russian thumb again, I seriously doubt the western parts would. There is a LOT of rancor between the two groups, especially how that Russian colonization happened and what happened to a lot of the native Ukrainians. You have a ton of very grim history there that people who haven’t looked into this much lose, context wise.
And, as I said, you have the international political blow back. Russia is already on thin ice, internationally, for it’s recent antics. A full on invasion of Ukraine would probably rile just about everyone up against them and make them on par with a lot of the pariah regimes like Iran and North Korea…which they definitely don’t want. Plus, the cost to their military would be staggering, especially considering that a large percentage of their ground forces are conscripts. They have very little really modern weapons systems, and losing any of that would be a huge blow. Plus there is the blow of their image, prestige wise if they do have some setbacks, which they are almost certain to have.
You think they’ve narrowed the gap? I don’t.
Since 2008, the US military has acquired an additional few dozen F-22s, a couple hundred F-35s, a few hundred V-22s, more than a dozen Arleigh Burke DDGs, 11 Virginia-class SSNs, CVN-77 & 78, various cruisers, litoral combat ships, and amphibious assault ships, they’ve launched the X-37B into orbit several times, put into operation their first directed-energy weapon, introduced new stealthy and sophisticated missiles and bombs, etc.
What has Russia done in this time that compares?
They’ve managed to commission a dozen corvettes, a half-dozen frigates, three Borei-class SSBNs, one SSN, a half-dozen or so SSKs. Yes, they’ve acquired some new rotorcraft and jets, but their “5th-generation” fighter jet, the SU-57 is still in the prototype stage, and their shiny new T-14 main battle tank (which they seem to have only ordered a handful of) broke down during a parade.
They have a few really, really good systems. Their anti-aircraft missile systems are considered the best in the world (things like the S-400). The T-14 is a lot better than you seem to think (one of them had an issue in an early parade, but didn’t actually break down). Their SU-57 is a good, solid 5th gen aircraft that doesn’t have all of the integration capabilities that the US 5th gen fighters do, but has a lot more maneuver capabilities than ours does. The problem is, they don’t have a lot of any of this new stuff, so the majority of what they have is conscripts using old (or new built old designs) Soviet era crap. So, no, they haven’t closed the gap with the US except in a very few narrow areas with a very few really top of the line weapons systems used and operated by a very small elite number of very good troops and pilots.
China is pretty much in the same boat, though they have a much larger budget to play with. That said though, they have a hell of a lot more systemic issues that sucks at that budget and they have a boat load more internal fires going on that folks seem to think.
I agree with what you said. I was just trying to highlight the fact that they’ve only ordered a dozen SU-57s. It’s not clear to me how many T-14s they actually have on hand, but it does seem that they’re drastically scaling-back their purchase from the initial reports.
This seems to be a bit of a pattern with Russian defense industry: announce some cool new vaporware system, Russia makes a big show about plans to procure tons of them, then later quietly scales down the purchase significantly (to a number that’s not really very impressive) when they find out the cost. This seems to have happened with the SU-57, the T-14, and the Yasen-class submarines.
It’s more a matter of their shinny new toys just aren’t affordable to them in large numbers. They aren’t vaporware though…they are good, solid systems from what I’ve read or listened to. But their annual military budget just isn’t there to buy more than a handful of the things, and a large part of that budget is spread out trying to maintain their old crap and very large conscript army. What they SHOULD do is remodel their entire military along the lines of countries like the UK, instead of trying to compete with the US or even China, who’s annual budget dwarfs their own, but then they would have to admit that they aren’t a global superpower anymore.
Which is another reason why they won’t directly invade the Ukraine, to bring this back to the OP. Because by doing so they would demonstrate (again) that the emperor has no clothes…
- Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Jan 2018, commenting after the release of the 2018 National Defense Strategy
SECDEF wasn’t even stating something new or all that controversial. The gap narrowing has been a common theme coming out of DOD and among outside security professionals for several years now.
The DOD always believes the gap is narrowing and more funds are needed. You could allocate every dollar in the budget to defense and the refrain would remain the same. IMHO such reports should always be taken with a grain or fifty of salt.
It’s not that they are outright lying necessarily, but what would to me read as a trivial downgrade relative to projected foreign opponents to them could be taken as a dire decline that forebodes disaster. I’m sure the navy would love to get back to a 600* ship count again, but that isn’t going to( and IMHO shouldn’t )happen. The United States is the only super-power in the world at the moment**. I don’t think that is likely to change anytime soon and when and if it does, I’m not inclined to think Russia with its slightly precarious economy is going be the next in line to vie for that status.
*Well, 594.
**We’ll put aside whether the existence of such an entity is even desirable in the first place.
NPR had a military expert recently who said that while Russia could in theory defeat Ukraine militarily, Russia’s military is in such a shoddy state it would largely be a Pyrrhic victory since they would pretty much have no actual competent forces left afterwards. The strain of both Ukraine and Syria based operations stressed the Russian military immensely and that wasn’t even full scale warfare in either sector. Taking Ukraine would basically leave them unable to do anything else global for quite some time.