James Deitch
Russian performance in its war against Ukraine has often been framed as a strategic miscalculation, poor intelligence, or political overreach. Yet beneath those layers lies a more prosaic but decisive failure: logistics. From the opening weeks of the invasion in February 2022, the Russian Armed Forces struggled not only to maneuver and fight but also to feed, fuel, arm, and rotate the forces they had committed. Those failures were not incidental. They flowed from structural weaknesses in Russian military logistics, compounded by human resource deficiencies and a mismatch between operational ambition and sustainment capacity. Ukraine, by contrast, recognized these vulnerabilities early and systematically targeted Russian logistical infrastructure, supply routes, and depots. The result was a campaign in which logistics repeatedly constrained Russian operational art, blunted offensive action, and forced Moscow into a grinding war of attrition it was ill-prepared to sustain.[1]
Russian military doctrine has long emphasized logistics, but in practice, the system entering the 2022 war bore the imprint of a Soviet legacy only partially modernized and poorly adapted to expeditionary conflict. Analysts have noted that Russian reforms after 2008 emphasized brigade- and battalion tactical group (BTG) structures intended for rapid, high-intensity operations, yet did not fully reconfigure the logistical apparatus to support dispersed, maneuver-heavy warfare over extended lines of communication.[2] The Russian system remained heavily reliant on rail transport, centralized depots, and a relatively inflexible supply chain architecture optimized for operations near Russian territory and along prepared routes.[3] When the Kremlin chose to invade a vast neighboring state on multiple axes, with the expectation of rapid regime change, it imposed on this system a set of demands it was never truly designed to meet.
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