Uncertainty For Russian Army

• Despite setbacks with Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs), Russia could reconstitute its military capabilities post-war, potentially focusing on more effective combined arms formations. Institutional corruption and neglect of personnel remain significant barriers to modernization, but some military leaders are pushing for reforms.

• Russia’s military future depends on addressing these deep-rooted issues while adjusting its doctrine and force structure.

How Russia’s Army May Rebuild and Evolve After the War in Ukraine

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been a bruising debacle for Russia’s ground forces. Despite staving off outright defeat in 2022 and 2023, the quality of its units degraded due to attrition.

Nevertheless, the institution has adapted by varying degrees, and how it reconstitutes itself and modernizes after the current high-intensity period of the war ends is worth considering, for this will shape the threat that Russia poses in the future.

The Russian Army bogged down in the Donbas and the Kursk Oblast, is currently absorbed with recruiting, training, arming, and equipping personnel to replace those it is hemorrhaging through battlefield losses. Operationally, it is for the most part holding ground while exerting pressure along Ukraine’s extended front line. This appears to be taking up the majority of the planning capacity of its senior leadership, and bureaucratic and logistical apparatus.

Despite periodic discussions of the possibility of the Russian state collapsing, the resilience of the war economy and Putin regime has been notable. More likely is that Russia is eventually forced to scale back or cease current high-intensity operations, and must return to other methods of undermining Ukraine. Bar the unlikely possibility that internal problems topple the government, Russia’s conventional forces will restructure and rebuild their capabilities.

It is impossible to predict with any certainty what direction the Russian Army might take. Nevertheless, a necessary question that might shed light on this is what the Russian Army perceives its most important lessons learned to be.

What changes have already taken place are likely to be here to stay. Russia has the benefit of optimizing for a single, clearly understood task, trench warfare, which has shaped its operational force structure and decisions of what new capabilities to invest in, but many of these are either transferable or have obvious and broad utility.

Advances in electronic warfare for force protection, their robust air defense network, the integration of new sensors into a more-developed targeting cycle, and the way that uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) such as Lancet, Orlan, and Shahid are employed have made Russian ground forces more survivable and lethal and have created a deeper and more dangerous battlespace for any enemy facing them.

At a higher level, structural changes such as the split of the Western Military District into the Moscow and Leningrad military districts indicate re-posturing towards a potential war in the Baltic region, a longer-term change in posture indicative of a more confrontational approach to NATO.

More questionable is the shape of future Russian formations. Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs) were essentially abandoned due to ineffectiveness and replaced by a more traditional, hierarchical military structure. Aside from suffering from a shortage of infantry, an essential component for any combined arms formation, Russia’s logistics system had not been adjusted in line with the BTG concept and was not able to support the large number of small and complicated formations that were initially deployed.

The increasing use of assault detachments fit within a long-standing practice of concentrating better-trained and equipped personnel into sub-units dedicated to maneuver and assault while setting low standards and expectations for most of the infantry. Yet the way they are currently used does not scale well, while useful for local tactical actions, they do not help ground forces conduct larger-scale offensive maneuvers.

Likewise, armored forces are not currently competitive against the mix of precise lethal systems that are fielded by both sides in Ukraine, tanks can be held in reserve for fire support and to blunt enemy breakthroughs, but suffer when brought closer to the front line.

Therefore, a future development to watch for is what kind of combined arms formation the Russians design and build once they have sufficient breathing space. This may be a return to a better implementation of the BTG concept, with logistics issues resolved and the balance of capabilities adjusted, or may focus on rebuilding Russia’s brigades.

Russian doctrine is conceptually viable as a way of war. However, due to Russia’s military culture and comprehensive neglect of its personnel, operations are at best unwieldy and more often simply unimplementable with the force available. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether Russia’s military leadership recognizes the need for cultural change in this area.

Where there have been changes are in making corruption and systemic dishonesty less acceptable. These are deep-rooted issues and are also a necessity of a system that forces officers to obfuscate their unit’s readiness assessments. Some within Russia’s military leadership are attempting and this could pave the way for a more effective force in the future, though it faces a great deal of institutional inertia and may be worsened by repression.

These are perhaps the greatest barriers to change and will be the key dynamics to watch when assessing future modernization efforts regardless of what Russia’s senior leaders unveil on paper or in military displays in Moscow.

Nick Reynolds is the Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).