Ukraine War: Kyiv and the “Grozny Scenario”

Will the Russian army take action in the battle for Kyiv similar to that in the Chechen wars and shell the city massively? Many residents fear that. A military expert sees the Russian army in a tactical dilemma.

The Russian President stated the obvious and there was no reason to contradict him. Grozny looks “simply terrible,” Vladimir Putin said in 2004 after a flight over the Chechen capital. Russia had declared the second war against the Caucasus separatists over, and Putin surveyed a city that had become a modern symbol of Russian warfare. What the residents of Grozny experienced could now also threaten the residents of Kyiv and Kharkiv, it is feared not only in Ukraine.

After two wars, Grozny was largely devastated. During the first Chechen war in 1994/1995, the Russian army besieged the city for weeks and shelled it with artillery for days. Russian forces also attacked the city from the air. It is estimated that 25,000 people died.

In the second, shorter Chechen war from mid-1999, the city was attacked again from the air and with artillery and was taken by Russian troops in early 2000. In 2002, the UN named Grozny the most badly damaged city in the world.

The consequences for the civilian population, says Caucasus expert Uwe Halbach, “were devastating during the massive phases of the war.” Taking both wars together, the death toll is estimated at between 100,000 and nearly 200,000 people. Thus, according to Halbach, “the Chechen wars formed the worst violent events in the post-Soviet region.”

“Brutal Approach”

Do the residents of Kiev now have to adjust to this scenario? “The Russian armed forces are first and foremost an artillery army,” says Viennese military analyst Franz-Stefan Gadys. The Russian army relies “on firepower” which – together with airstrikes and large-scale bombardments – is intended to intimidate the population and pave the way for its own troops. Gadys fears that this “frontal, brutal approach” will also be seen in Kyiv.

The Russian army is primarily concerned with avoiding a lengthy battle in the city, he analyzes – and here the memories of the Chechen wars, but also the Georgian war of 2008, also play a role on the part of the attackers.

Helpless like in Afghanistan

In Chechnya, the Russian army had shown itself to be extremely vulnerable to the guerrilla tactics of the Chechen fighters in the first war. “As in Afghanistan, the Russian army was hardly up to the partisan fight,” recalls Uwe Halbach. In the second Chechen war, from 2001 onwards, they increasingly handed over the fight against the separatists to the local armed forces led by the Kadyrov clan.

In 2008, Gadys says, it showed serious deficits in the conduct of battles, in the security of communications and in the communication between the individual units – at times the smaller Georgian army was superior to the Russian armed forces. In the end, they “overwhelmed the bulk of the Russian armed forces.”

The problems remain

Military observers recognize some of these problems – to their astonishment – even now in the Ukraine war. Former NATO general Hans-Lothar Domröse was amazed Hard but fair about the fact that at the beginning of the war not all branches of the armed forces were coordinated and deployed on a massive scale.

Military analyst Gadys is also surprised that the army has shown itself to be “relatively weak” in this “combined arms battle” and apparently “didn’t learn any more lessons” from past wars. There are indications that the army does not have the experience of fighting “in urban terrain” as one might have expected.

Siege and shoot

From this, Gadys concludes that the Russian armed forces will also choose the brutal approach in Kyiv and develops this scenario: A siege ring could be formed around the city in order to then intimidate the population with targeted bombardments and artillery fire. She would then be given the chance to leave the city via humanitarian corridors “so as not to completely destroy Russia’s international reputation” – but also to facilitate the fight in the urban terrain.

Western military experts agree that the Russian army command cannot be interested in a long inner-city battle. Reference is made throughout to the high motivation of the Ukrainians, the shortcomings of the Russian army and the strategic advantage that even inexperienced fighters have in a defensive position.

Experience has shown that an attacking arm needs up to five fighters for a defender, in a city like Kyiv this ratio can even rise to ten to one. “Russia simply doesn’t have that number of fighters,” Gadys notes.

This, in turn, increases the attacker’s dilemma. Because the Russian army had to rely on increased artillery fire. Destroyed buildings are “perfect defenses”. And the will to fight on the Ukrainian side is very high — perhaps because they don’t even know what fighting in urban terrain really means, which Gadys says is “the most brutal kind of war.”

Chechens as a deterrent?

Perhaps that’s why, even in the first days of the war, rumors were spreading that the Russian army also wanted to use Chechen units in the fight against the Ukrainians. They have been considered particularly unscrupulous since the two wars.

The French Russia and Caucasus expert Jean-François Ratelle sees no signs of this – he considers such rumors to be part of psychological warfare. The point is to “make the Ukrainians believe what happened in Chechnya will also happen in Ukraine: that they will run amok in the city, that there will be looting, raping and killing,” quotes the magazine Foreign Policy French people.

So far, the cities have actually been shelled, sometimes with cluster munitions. Attempts to take metropolises like Kharkiv could initially be repelled. But the attacks are increasing in intensity, increasingly hitting civilians, while Russia continues to increase its troops.

And so the Grozny scenario is also one of the many uncertainties and remains part of the guesswork about Russian plans in this war.