1 Institute for the Study of War & AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2022
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 25
Mason Clark, Fredrick W. Kagan, and George Barros
March 25, 5:00 pm ET
The Russian General Staff issued a fictitious report on the first month of the Russian
invasion of Ukraine on March 25 claiming Russia’s primary objective is to capture the
entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Sergei Rudskoi, first deputy chief of the Russian
General Staff, gave a briefing to Russian press summing up the first month of the Russian invasion on
March 25.
Rudskoi inaccurately claimed Russian forces have completed “the main tasks of the first
stage of the operation,” falsely asserting that Russia has heavily degraded the Ukrainian military,
enabling Russia to focus on the “main goal” of capturing Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
Rudskoi’s comments were likely aimed mainly at a domestic Russian audience and do
not accurately or completely capture current Russian war aims and planned operations.
Russia’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine from the outset was the fictitious threat Moscow
claimed Ukrainian forces posed to the people in Russian-occupied Donbas. The Kremlin has reiterated
this justification for the war frequently as part of efforts to explain the invasion to its people and build
or sustain public support for Putin and the war. Rudskoi’s framing of the capture of the rest of Donetsk
and Luhansk oblasts as the “main goal” of the operation is in line with this ongoing information
operation.
Rudskoi’s assertion that securing the unoccupied portions of Donetsk and Luhansk
Oblasts was always the main objective of Russia’s invasion is false. The Kremlin’s initial
campaign aimed to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and
other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine.
Rudskoi’s comments could
indicate that Russia has scaled back its aims and would now be satisfied with controlling the entirety of
Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, but that reading is likely inaccurate. Russian forces elsewhere in Ukraine
have not stopped fighting and have not entirely stopped attempting to advance and seize more territory.
They are also attacking and destroying Ukrainian towns and cities, conducting operations and
committing war crimes that do not accord with the objectives Rudskoi claims Russia is pursuing.
Russia continues efforts to rebuild combat power and commit it to the fight to encircle
and/or assault Kyiv and take Mariupol and other targets, despite repeated failures and
setbacks and continuing Ukrainian counter-attacks. The Ukrainian General Staff reports that
the Russian military is building “consolidated units,” likely comprised of individuals or small units
drawn from a number of different battalions, brigades, and regiments, to replace combat losses and
deploying them on the west bank of the Dnipro near the Chernobyl exclusion zone, among other
locations. Russian forces continue their grinding and likely costly advance in Mariupol as well.
The absence of significant Russian offensive operations throughout most of Ukraine
likely reflects the inability of the Russian military to generate sufficient combat power to
attack rather than any decision in Moscow to change Russia’s war aims or concentrate
on the east. Rudskoi’s comments are likely an attempt to gloss the Russian military’s failures for a
domestic audience and focus attention on the only part of the theater in which Russian troops are
making any progress at this point. The West should not over-read this obvious messaging
embedded in a piece of propaganda that continued very few true statements.
Key Takeaways
