From Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 20:
Prior to Ukraine, the last time Russia all-out invaded another sovereign country was Georgia. Moscow was victorious after the 16-day conflict in 2008, but it was messy and showed that Russia's armed forces needed a major upgrade.
Four years ago, a semi-reformed Russian military was again put to the test, when hundreds of thousands of troops poured into Ukraine. Judging by the eyewatering casualties -- more than 1.2 million killed and wounded and counting -- it's been even messier. And Moscow still is not victorious.
But Russia's armed forces are learning. The question is how much they've learned since February 24, 2022.
"They're adapting to the battlefield conditions, but the more permanent changes to the force in terms of strategy and operations will come after," Dara Massicot, a longtime expert on Russia's armed forces and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told RFE/RL.
"I would characterize what the Russian military has undergone as adaptation rather than reform, given that a lot of it seems to be driven by fairly immediate pressures," said Nick Reynolds, a land warfare fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank.
"It is not building the ideal force that will be effective to fight in the future. It is solving operational problems and trying to put a good-enough force in place by its own standards to solve the problems in front of it," he added.
"There has been no 'reform' in the Russian sense of the word; the war's logic makes it impossible," said Lieutenant Colonel Juha Kukkola, a professor in the Russia Research Group at the Finnish National Defense University.
Russia's military has been "learning from failures…simultaneously losing previous experienced troops and equipment while learning to survive in the next phase of the war," he told RFE/RL.
The lessons learned are "fit for the needs of this war, but possibly not transferable to the next war," he said....
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