the Rus. are clearly outgunning (heavy artillery, tanks,…) the Ukr.
Rus. forces seeking to gain/occupy cities and terrain, shelling everything (cities,…) into dear heaven
the implicit military doctrine is "rus. will try to take land/cities from the ukr. and the ukr. will fight to avoid this
rus. have lots of heavy weapons, designed to take land and hard targets (tanks, artillery all that)
overall, this is so far a fairly “conventional” war with this regards, with the rus. likely to gain control over the terrain.
(so far nothing new here)
now a few thoughts about a new defense doctrine
stop fighting, give the russians all land, thus avoiding to convert Kiev into an 1000km2 piece of rubble
let them and their attack force occupy this vast piece of land
they will be spread extremely thin
declare every russian fighter in ukr. territory “legitimate target to be killed” (they already are, but we want to be extra clear here)
give every ukrainian a weapon
achieve a committment with your people that every ukrainian (man or women) shall/will seek to kill one russian occupier per month - all tactics are legitimate, since we are in a war … (shot in the back, burn by molotov-cocktail, poisoned food,…)
you just changed your doctrine from defending hard targets to ATTACKING soft russian targets
asign a ukr. fighter to every village/small location as the soft-target-coordinator
let us start out slowly and seek 10.000 civil-killings for the first day
we will concentrate in low density areas, (small villages) where only a few russian forces will be and take them out and destroy their equipment like trucks, armored vehicle, etc… optionally those can be tracktored off and stored for some later use.
you never engage them in battle but fire 1 shot out of a bedroom window or from behind a tree - you seek to kill just one, not 100s of them
then move up from small villages to bigger ones and small cities (somewhat of a grassroots aproach)
make sure you keep the killings up higher then the resplenishing rate of the russians, and there will be fewer russian soldiers in Ukr. as time progresses (and they will be even thinner spread)
rinse/repeat
.
NUTSHELL/whats new: give up defending (thus protecting them from artillery) hard targets and start attacking soft targets on your soil
The Russian Army doesn’t need to occupy every major city or hold all of the land. All they need to to is control the majority of infrastructure (electricity, natural gas, major transportation ports and routes) to starve and freeze the 40-odd million Ukrainians who haven’t already fled to the border.
The Red Dawn partisan resistance bullshit in the o.p. sounds great as an elevator pitch for a new Netflix series but the reality is millions of people in desparation, and all of the social media ‘likes’ of a бабуся putting the curse on Russian soldiers by offering them sunflower seeds to be fertilized with their remains is not going to change the fact that if Ukrainian farmers miss the planting season the country is facing mass famine, which brings to mind one of the great but largely forgotten holocausts of the 20th century.
Maybe we can stop with the trite, facile solutions to complex problems?
Um … I’m having a hard time understanding how that is a “defense”. I do agree, however, that they are fast losing the conventional war and will have to revert to the kind of war that Afghanistan fought against the Russian military.
Russia has a population of 146 million, so in less than 3 1/2 months the Ukrainians will have wiped out all of the Russians from the planet. I can’t think of any way in which this could possibly be some wildly unobtainable fantasy.
I think you are unrealistically optimistic here … why did the USA go through all the cost and trouble of var. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if they could have just ruled by running the utilities companies and the Kandahar Express? They didn’t even come close to reaching that goal with 100s of billions worth of military expense and 10s of thousands of boots on the ground.
The Ukrainians will not freeze and starve to death, as they managed to avoid that for the last couple of centuries … with or without the russians …
Worst case they live off their land (grain and meat) and heat with wood (and establish a barter-market for those products). For quite a significant part of the population that would only mean falling back to a lifestyle they had in the 1980ies and 90ies. Also, hungry people might be more agressive to the ones they feel are causing them hunger.
The United States was not just trying to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, and in fact they managed to vanquish the existing governments of both nations within a few months. The majority of cost, effort, and personnel losses were in trying and failing to install US-friendly regimes in those countries and subdue insurgencies being supplied by foreign patrons and in the case of Afghanistan in remote mountain regions with extensive cave systems.
Talking about being “unrealistically optimistic”, the notion that the highly urbanized Ukrainians are going to “live off the land (grain and meat) and heat with wood” without significant losses to famine and exposure is absurd on the face. The Ukraine has long been an industrialized nation going back to the Soviet era, and like most modern nations only a tiny fraction of the population has these kinds of skills, nor has vast wild mountain areas to conceal from occupying troops. The notion of a mass of partisans living off the land and fighting a guerrilla war in what is essentially the Nebraska of Eastern Europe is glibly ill-informed
This is not to say that Ukrainians are likely to give in to Russian occupiers; although few are still alive who remember the pre-WWII Soviet-era planned famines, the cultural memory of the Holodomor lives vividly in the Ukrainian national consciousness, and at least in part explains why Ukrainian people are so willing to hold out against nearly hopeless odds. To hold the country indefinitely the Russian Army is going to have to round up masses of Ukrainians and put them in indefinite detention or starve them into submission or death, both of which the Russians know a bit about. The humanitarian crisis of a few million Ukrainian refugees fleeing into Europe is nothing compared to what could come if the Russian Army takes control of energy supplies and blocks aid, and there is little standing in the way of that strategy.
This is still going to be an economically-devastating occupation for Russia in terms of loss of revenue and access to foreign markets (other than perhaps China, which will be happy to purchase Russian gas and oil at as steep discount it can negotiate) which is why I didn’t think Putin would go through with this. That he did so anyway indicates either a deep desperation on his part or just an irrational desire somehow elevate Russia back to world power status. Either way, it will ultimately be a failure for Russia, but not before the deaths of millions of Ukrainians and cultural tragedy unseen in Europe since the end of WWII.
What you are describing here isn’t particularly new or innovative and its basically what every occupied country has done since time immemorial. If you lose the conventional war you start an insurgency. Now your plan of 1) give everyone an AK-47 and 2) request that each civilian try to kill one Russian a month, is just a particular tactic of achieving the overall goal of 1) arm as much of the population as possible and 2) kill as much of the occupying force as possible. If it were as easy as you suggest, Germany would have been kicked out of France by 1940.
You may be right that as Russia steps up the brutality, switching from a conventional war to a insurgent war might make sense, but while you do have control of the main centers of communication, supplies and infrastructure it makes sense to use them to the best of your ability and hold them as long as possible.
Every Ukrainian who kills a Russian, the Russian is trying to do the same thing right back to them. And the Russians have weapons, too. Why does the Ukrainian win, every time, month after month?
As I’ve said elsewhere, I understand the urge to vent, to want solutions, to be optimistic, to bemoan the unchangeable past, and simply to post as a measure of support in lieu of better options.
Even so, this is so far over the line as to venture into drinking bleach to cure COVID territory.
Yeah, I know. Everybody has ideas. Here’s mine. Whenever anyone gets an irresistible urge to help out the Ukrainians by telling them your wonderful, incisive, unprecedented, sure-to-work showerthoughts, click on the Is There a Good Way to Donate to Ukraine? thread instead.
I was pretty much going to make this exact post. Save your infrastructure and buildings and go right to the insurrection because that’s where Russia will lose. It’s a strategic no-brainer but it requires a certain tactical swallowing of one’s pride.
How do you expect to distribute any weapons at all, let alone millions, when the entire territory, per your hypothetical, is completely under Russian military control?
Your plan says every Ukrainian is given a rifle. So the Russians issue a proclamation that all buildings are subject to search at any time. If a rifle is found inside, all the Ukrainians who were inside the building will be locked in and then the building will be burned down with everyone inside it.
Some people hide their rifles really well and manage to shoot a Russian soldier? The Russians issue a proclamation saying that any town where a Russian is killed will be surrounded and the entire town, with every resident, will be burned down.
How many people are going to join the resistance movement when it involves having your entire family killed?
The Russians also announce they are setting up phone lines and websites where you can anonymously send information to the Russians. Don’t want your family to be killed in a reprisal? Contact the Russians and tell them about the guy you know down the street who’s hiding a rifle in his house.
well, a home-made molotov-cocktail can be a perfectly viable weapon as are others like knives- there are “cookbooks” to make weapons on the internet… just be creative … there are probably also private guns in the country
again, the videos of the russian soldier’s abilities so far did not impress me … you are most likely not taking on a navy-seal
will civilians get killed over this? … you bet …
but my point is: your baseline comparison scenario for this insurrection is not “live a long and prosper life in peace-time” but it is "Grozny '99 and being hacked to pieces by shrapnel"
