The experience of the Syrian campaign played a “cruel joke” with the Russian military command in the preparation of the military operation in Ukraine. Such a review in the Russian media program “What was it?!” Express military expert, director of the Moscow Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) Ruslan Pukhov.
According to him, “it can be said with great probability” that when preparing for a military operation in Ukraine, the Russian command was also inspired by the Soviet operation “Danube” in 1968, when Moscow sent troops in Czechoslovakia. However, notes the expert, there are “several significant differences” between the two events.
First, he noted, the Soviet Union entered Czechoslovakia with a much larger contingent than Russia entered Ukraine. Secondly, at that time, in addition to the USSR, the Poles and Germans from Gdrov took part in the operation on the Danube. Russia, on the other hand, acts alone in Ukraine, recalled Poukhov: the same Belarus “provided its territory only for transit”.
“One more moment. The Czechoslovak army was a peacetime army, and it was in garrison. And the Ukrainian army was a war army that was already fully deployed, moreover, it actually fought for eight years, so it was somewhere at the top of its game,” the expert added.
He noted that “during the eight years of the war with the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk”, Ukraine led its entire regular army and a significant number of reservists, as well as territorial defense, through what it was originally called an “anti-terrorist campaign”. operation, then a special area.
“And we basically rested on our laurels because we had the false impression that we had won in Syria,” Pukhov said.
According to him, in Syria, Russian troops really carried out a “successful operation”, after which the regime of Bashar al-Assad survived. However, unlike Ukraine, in this conflict Russia acted as an “ally of one of the parties to the civil war”.
Moreover, a very limited contingent of Russian troops was involved in Syria, “mainly special forces, the air force and a small number of fleets”. Therefore, the expert described the conditions of the Syrian campaign as “close to range”, in particular because the enemy did not use “any air defense system, except for a small number of systems portable anti-aircraft missiles”.
“Overall, MANPADS were used on us about five or six times, that is, the aviation worked on training grounds, and then we managed to lose a number of planes. Therefore, a number of lessons from Syria played a cruel joke on us, and we had to pay a high price for those lessons,” he said.
The Russian operation in Syria began in the fall of 2015. In the spring of 2016, Vladimir Putin ordered the bulk of the group of Russian troops to start withdrawing from there, announcing the completion of the task. In December 2017, Putin visited Khmeimim Airbase and gave the order to start withdrawing the group to its permanent deployment points.
In 2019, the Kremlin explained that Russia’s only objective in Syria was to ensure the territorial integrity and sovereignty of this country. In Syria, the Khmeimim military air base and the naval logistics center at the port of Tartous are still functioning. Military police units and air defense systems are also located there.
Read the Latest Ukraine War News on The Eastern Herald.
