Kamil Galeev, a Russian-born journalist and researcher at the Wilson Center, explains why the war in Ukraine is “very soft” from Russia’s point of view.

Galeyev argues that people who think the war being waged by Vladimir Putin’s forces in Ukraine is “crazy” or “unbelievable” are either Westerners who don’t know how the Russian military operates, or Russians who are lying.

“Russia’s war in Ukraine is going extremely smoothly,” he notes, citing as an example a post on his Telegram channel by Anatoly Dremov, a former Russian soldier who later became one of Russia’s most famous military bloggers.

Dremov declares that the last attack of the armed forces of the Russian Federation on the city of Kharkiv was of “measured force”.

“This war has already exhausted everyone. Instead of two weeks, this war was extended for 6 months. It is time to take radical measures. Killing civilians can hurt Kyiv and help us win this war. God is with us!”, Dremov urged in Telegram.

A mistake made by Ukraine in the 90s

Galeev mentions that the Soviet Union had the most extensive air defense system in the world. It was primarily designed to counter United States air superiority.

“Do you have great aviation? Okay, we’re going to build a big, awesome air defense system. And they did,” Kamil Galeev explains the reasoning of Soviet military planners.

After the collapse of the USSR, a large part of the Soviet military arsenal was inherited by Russia. But Ukraine also retains much of it, including its air defenses (and its nuclear arsenal, which it abandoned in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union).

However, the researcher notes that in the 1990s and 2000s, Ukraine’s air defense systems were neglected, and in 2014, when Russia decided to annex Crimea and start a separatist war in the east of the country, officials in Kyiv ruled a demilitarized state with a defunct army.

After the loss of Crimea and the beginning of the war in Donbas, the Ukrainian armed forces were significantly improved, including in the field of air defense, the old Soviet systems that remained in working condition were modernized with digital equipment and software complexes.

How Russian troops behaved in other wars

Next, a researcher from the Wilson Center, one of the most authoritative US think tanks, mentions the wars that Russia waged from 1991 to 2014 against countries that had no air defense at all.

“Therefore, it resorted to indiscriminate use of its air force, bombing cities such as Grozny and Aleppo. Neither the Chechens nor the Syrians could do anything against the planes that turned their cities into dust,” he explains.

Galeyev notes that the last conflict in which Russia took part before the start of the “special military operation” on February 24 – in Syria – perfectly shows how the Russians conduct wars and what consequences arise from this.

“The war in Syria was much worse than the war in Iraq or Afghanistan,” he says, giving an example of a graph showing the evolution of the populations of the three countries.

The researcher notes that if Ukraine did not have air defense, Russia could resort to the same indiscriminate use of its air force as in Syria or Chechnya.

“But he can’t. The deep air defense system made the use of aviation very risky and complicated, Russia would lose its aviation,” he explains.

As an example, he cites the shelling of the village of Pisky in the Donetsk region from thermobaric salvo systems, and not from bombers. “Why? Because Ukraine has air defense.”

The Russian army is the “embodiment of evil”

Galeyev says that by Russian standards, the war in Ukraine is not a war, but “very soft”, precisely because Ukraine can defend itself, which previous victims of Russian aggression could not.

“The way Russia conducts wars is the epitome of evil,” says Kamil Galeyev, also noting that public opinion in Russia prefers to ignore it until Russians are personally affected by hostilities.

“Russia is a large and powerful military machine without any ethical or humanitarian problems. In Syria, it depopulated a large country in its own way. Public opinion in Russia ignores or supports it,” says the Russian-born researcher.

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