The AK-47 is one of the most famous weapons in the world. Cheap, easy to use and suitable for close combat, the Kalashnikov is also standard equipment for many Russian troops fighting in Ukraine.
Still, the weapon is of little help to Russian conscripts against Ukrainian volunteer soldiers who came into the field equipped with long-range hunting rifles and high-quality telescopic sights, an adviser said. western defence.
The mismatch of weapons is an example of the difficulties Moscow faced in its attempt to invade Ukraine and hold captured territory with a relatively light occupying force – on the apparent Kremlin premise that troops from invasion would be welcome and that the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky would fall into days.
“It is clear that Ukraine has no intention of letting a war end with its occupied lands and will continue to fight to the end and ensure that its country is liberated,” a senior official said. responsible for the EU.
Weapons, defensive equipment and other supplies that have already been delivered or pledged by EU member states are also “useful in terms of resistance”, the official added. “It’s likely to slowly start a new phase of warfare in cities, with guerrilla-type tactics.”
The massive geographical spread of Europe’s largest country only adds to the challenges. Even if Russian forces capture a territory, it does not mean that they actually occupy it.
NATO officials estimated before the invasion that Russia would need 600,000 troops to take and hold all of Ukraine. However, Russia committed about 150 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants to Chechnya in 2003, according to a study by the US Army War College. In Ukraine, that would equate to a force of over 6 million Russian troops.
“The Russians have already understood that they cannot occupy and control major cities even when they have ‘taken’ them,” the Western defense source said. “The city of Kherson may have ‘fallen’, but the Russians only occupy a few buildings and protests continue in the streets.
The Russian military anticipated this problem to some extent, analysts say. In the south and east, they surrounded urban centers such as Kharkiv and Mariupol and bombarded them with heavy artillery fire in an attempt to break the will of resistance of their populations.
But troop convoys have also tended to move past towns and into the underbelly of the country to pursue broader strategic objectives – in particular, to take the capital and establish a land bridge to Crimea and, potentially, the port of Odessa.
The problem, according to officials and analysts, is that Russian forces could then hold many strategic roads and small towns, but they will still be open to counterattack by Ukrainian regular forces and partisan ambushes.
The Nazis faced a similar problem in territories such as France which they occupied during World War II, as did Russia during its occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and Western forces there in course of this century.
“The Russians face the dilemma of all conquering armies: the deeper you take and the deeper you go, the leaner you get,” said Brian Petit, a retired U.S. Army colonel who has both advised and fought resistance forces and is now an adjunct lecturer. at the Joint Special Operations University.
“This is where the Ukrainian resistance forces will hide, like hyenas at the edge of the herd, waiting to strike down the slow and the weak. Ukraine will seek to impose high costs and it has proven that it has the will and the skills to do so,” added Petit.
A strategic alternative to occupying the whole country is for Russian troops to hold a southern strip of coastal land up to Crimea. This could then be used by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a bargaining chip in future negotiations with Ukraine and the West, analysts and defense officials said.
“It would limit the geographic exposure of the Russian military. . . and the forces there could be provided by Russian forces in the Black Sea,” said Sidharth Kaushal, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
How the United States and its NATO allies will continue to supply Ukrainian forces, while staying away from any direct confrontation with Russia, is a crucial question.
NATO has stressed it will not get involved in the conflict, but members of the US-led defense pact have already discussed how they could support an insurgent movement, officials said.
Over the past week, they have delivered more than 17,000 anti-tank weapons in overland convoys driven from the Polish and Romanian borders to Kiev and other major cities, according to The New York Times.
“You could see a Ukrainian resistance movement if Putin took over all of Ukraine, and then you basically engage with [them]said a senior Western defense official. “Is it taboo? No. This has long been evaluated. The question is what is the scenario that we are susceptible to or could face and how do we therefore react to it.
