Retired US major general: What it will take for the Ukrainians to win

BERGEN: What did you learn on your trip?

REPASS: One, that Ukraine still needs a lot of help. Two, NATO is moving too slow. Three, we don’t have visibility on what happens to military equipment when it gets into Ukraine.

The military equipment supply business is personalized as opposed to professionalized: The senior leadership establishes the distribution priorities and, from what I could observe, those priorities are not based on an understanding of consumption rates, or of future operations or objective data. It’s based on commander of brigade X or sector Y calling and saying, “Hey, I need 27 Javelin missiles.” So, it’s highly personalized, and that is not how to run wartime logistics. What should be going on is there should be an understanding of what the consumption rates are on important things like fuel, ammunition, batteries.

BERGEN: Is the likely outcome in Ukraine a bloody conflict that just goes on and on and on?

REPASS: The three obvious future scenarios are: Russia has a battlefield decision in their favor, the Ukrainians have a battlefield decision in their favor, or there’s a stalemate. Two out of three of those outcomes give Russia a victory.

In the stalemate scenario, Russia would simply claim victory based on facts on the ground and continue its occupation over expanded terrain in Ukraine into the indeterminate future. This would give Russia a less than total victory over Ukraine, but a victory with significantly expanded terrain under Russian control nonetheless.

So, what are we, the West, collectively doing to ensure that two out of those three possibilities don’t happen? Everybody is thinking about the immediate fight right now, which means we’re running supplies to the Ukrainians. The problem is that the Ukraine’s army needs additional capabilities to be able to drive Russia out of Ukraine.

BERGEN: Why?

REPASS: Because they don’t have enough combat power to do that, meaning enough equipment, firepower and trained soldiers at the moment.

I think there’s a growing realization among NATO countries and the international community that we’re going to have to do something besides resource Ukraine’s current fight. So, there are four things that the US and its allies need to do. First, we need to weaken Russia by strengthening Ukrainian capabilities. Second, we need to further deter Russia by increasing our own and NATO’s capabilities. Third, is degrading Russia’s armed forces and capabilities. Finally, we need to ensure Russia’s defeat in Ukraine, and that is done by building a strategic and operational reserve force for Ukraine that can do offensive operations to kick the Russians out of Ukraine and secure its borders.

BERGEN: What does that look like in practice?

REPASS: You need to have the US, French, Poles, UK and the Germans each build a brigade’s worth of Ukrainian combat power. Those nations have significant military capacity and could generate forces by equipping Ukrainian units and then training them in their own nations. So, that would be five brigades, in five operational sectors. And you would need probably six to eight months to implement that. These five brigades would have Western equipment fighting in Western ways, an integrated air-land battle approach where you have all the means available to you, to include NATO-interoperable tanks, close-air support and air defense.

BERGEN: Five brigades is not a huge number, right?

REPASS: No, it’s not. I think it’s doable in the near term. There are up to 8,000 soldiers or so in a brigade, so that’s up to 40,000 people in five brigades. I believe the Ukrainians are capable of finding that many soldiers given the current national emergency.

BERGEN: Why do the Russians stick to a model that doesn’t really work well?

REPASS: They are hidebound in their ways. Specifically, what they tried to do at the beginning of the war in Ukraine was a coup de main, taking out Kyiv with a rapid strike. That didn’t work. Russian troops got their asses handed to them. So, they brought all their firepower around to the east and to the south by employing massive artillery fires on the objective or along their avenues of approach. Once they have destroyed almost everything in front of them, then they advance their troops methodically. So, it’s not maneuver warfare. It’s attrition warfare by fire. It’s a fire-based army as opposed to what we have in the West, which is a maneuver-based army.

REPASS: He is a dyed-in-the-wool, fire-based, attrition warfare guy. He’s not a maneuver warfare guy. He’s going to do everything that he’s done all his life, which is blow up and destroy everything in his path, and then send the troops in. Those troops will forcefully evacuate Ukrainian citizens to ensure there is no potential for a resistance movement in the land bridge from Russia through Donbas to Crimea.

BERGEN: How would you characterize the state of the war in the east and the south right now? Are the Russians, in their own minds, winning?

REPASS: The state of play today is Russia is making methodical advances both in the north and the south. It’s trying to fix forces defending in the east and envelop the Ukrainian defenders, then defeat them in the south. The Russians also want to encircle Mykolaiv, reduce the defense and destroy the defenders, and then have a free run at Odesa. They can’t get to Odesa until they either envelop or destroy the forces around Mikolaiv.

BERGEN: And Odesa is the prize because?

REPASS: I do take it as a serious threat, and I do think they have their eyes on Moldova. If they can take it, they will. To be specific, they talk about going to Transnistria. If they can build a southern land bridge to Transnistria, they will do it. That will put Russia on Moldova’s doorstep and Moldova won’t be able to effectively defend against a Russian invasion.

BERGEN: Is the Ukraine war widening?

BERGEN: What about all this nuclear saber-rattling? Do you think it’s just mostly posturing?

REPASS: Yes, I think it’s mostly posturing. It would be one thing if Putin said it. To have Foreign Minister Lavrov say it is another thing. I think it’s posturing if it comes from Lavrov. On their nuclear doctrine, they will use so-called tactical nuclear weapons if they feel that there’s a significant threat to the Russian homeland. Those are the kind of circumstances that Russia has communicated to the West where they would use their nuclear weapons.

BERGEN: So, it’s a high threshold.

REPASS: Right.

BERGEN: If you’re Putin today, how are you feeling?

He has no connection to the outside world and all his information is either given to him by his inner circle or by what he reads in the Russia news media, which is, of course, controlled by the state and only puts out state-controlled messages. So he’s in a North Korean-like echo chamber and he is not getting accurate information.

BERGEN: Starting a war, that’s often the easy part. Wars have their own logic. Unfortunately, this war might go on for a year or even two years.

REPASS: I fear that you’re right. This will be a grinding, agonizing war if it lasts more than a year, and I think it’s going to last at least two years. But we can’t let it get into a stalemate. If it gets into a stalemate, Putin’s going to claim success followed by a brutal occupation of the Ukrainian territory that he controls.