Why Does Europe Fear the Russian Army?

There is a wise old saying among European foreign ministries that Russia is never as strong as it appears to be and Russia is never as weak as it appears to be. At present, the tendency is to overestimate Russia’s strength, to the point where European armed forces find themselves under an unexpected shower of gold. That is not a bad thing in itself, but the notion that the Russian army faces Europe with the prospect of invasion is silly.

The fact is, the performance of the Russian army in Ukraine has been wretched, especially on the offensive. It is using infantry tactics that have been obsolete since 1914, throwing masses of men against bullets. Its tanks have performed poorly. The Russian army has long been above all an artillery army, but its superiority over Ukrainian artillary has not let it advance rapidly. That suggests artillery/infantry coordination has been poor.

Part of the reason for the Russian army’s bad performance on the offensive has been the proliferation of drones. Drones, like ground-support aviation in earlier wars, favor the defense because targets that have to move ar much easier to find and hit than are defending units that can remain dug in and camouflaged. There is a reason photographs of the front lines in Ukraine look much like pictures of the Western Front in World War I. The reason is that if you are seen you are hit, and it is seldom possible to attack without being seen. The result is the emptiness of the battlefield.

Beyond these specifics lies the long-term nature of the Russian army. Many decades ago, I visited Professor John Ericson at his university office in Edinburg. The author of Road to Stalingrad and Road to Berlin knew so much about the Russian army that the Soviets sometimes turned to him to explain why they did things the way they did. He said to me, “Do you want to understand the Russian army of today? Ask yourself what it was like under Czar Nicholas I.” Not Nickolas II, Nicholas I, who was Czar during the Crimean War of the 1850s. That army was made up of draftees who did not want to be in there (when a serf was drafted, his village held his funeral). It was poorly supplied, brutally disciplined, incompetently officered, and drunk whenever it could find the alcohal (When the Russian army marched through Brussels in 1814, the soldiers drank the oil in the street lamps).

The way Russia won her wars was by having overwhelming numbers, of men and, in World War II, of equipment. Unlike Western armies, except the German, the Russian army did have a tradition of competence at the operational level of war. By 1944, perhaps 1943, it was as good operationally as the Wehrmacht. But to win at the operational level an army must be able to perform tactically what the plan demands operationally. As we saw in Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine, today’s Russian army can’t do that. And Russia will not have vast numerical superiority over NATO should war again break out in Europe.

The offensive performance of the Russian army in Ukraine has been so poor that I think the Nordic countries alone plus Poland could repel a Russian attack on one of the Baltic states. The Finnish army is both large and high quality. If the Baltic states have been wise, they have large Landwehr units that can wage war not against Russian spearheads but on supply lines that must follow.

When I was in Estonia, an officer told me that during World War II, peasants deep in the countryside would ask Estonian soldiers, “When is the Swedish king coming with his army?” Now, the answer may be “Soon.”