The war against Ukraine through the prism of Russian military thought

Krisztián Jójárt

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Introduction

The experience of the war in Ukraine will profoundly shape Russian military thinking in the next decades. This is not just because it is the largest war that Russia has fought since the Great Patriotic War (1941–5), but also because the Russian military elite sees it as a testing ground for NATO weaponry and doctrines.Footnote1 Despite this, few scholarly works have been written about the Russian military scientific discussion on the strategic and operational lessons of the war so far. Among those that exist is McDermott and Bartles’ study on the initial period of war, which concluded that Russian operational planning has completely disregarded this key concept of Russian military thought. Instead, the idea of the ‘special military operation’ did not assume a need to fight a large-scale war against a peer adversary, the context in which the initial period of war is understood.Footnote2