KIEV/HELSINKI Denys Yurchenko woke up to air raids and the sounds of anti-aircraft fire when the Russians launched their major invasion of Ukraine in February two years ago.
– My first thought was to get my family out, Yurchenko says.
He helped his pregnant wife pack her and their two-year-old son’s belongings and flee to relatives a couple of hundred kilometers away from their hometown of Kiev
– We were outside in class, and then we had to quickly say goodbye. I thought about what I want my wife to tell our future daughter about me if I didn’t see her, Yurchenko recalls.
“Russia will fight for a long time”
Now the war has lasted almost two years, and Ukraine has reformed the operation of its armed forces according to Western doctrines.
Denys Yurchenko has participated in numerous NATO trainings since Russia occupied Crimea and started a war in the eastern parts of Ukraine in 2014. He has studied Western military doctrine elsewhere, most recently on a NATO course at the Finnish National Defense University.
Yurchenko works in the Security Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and as a researcher at the Latvian National Defense College. His research deals with Russia’s reasons for the attack and different options for ending the war.
According to Yurchenko, Western material aid and NATO training of the armed forces are central to Ukraine’s warfare.
One of the most important reforms made with the help of NATO doctrines is the decentralization of the command system. It means that units make independent decisions to achieve the objective, rather than slavishly following orders from above.
– We see the result of the training. At the front, a young commander can make decisions and not just wait for instructions, says Yurchenko.
– This is a completely different method compared to the strictly hierarchical and centralized way of working of the Soviet army.
According to Yurchenko, adopting the new command system takes time. Some of the soldiers were trained in the Soviet Union, and training is difficult during the war.
According to Yurchenko, however, it is clear that Ukraine cannot win the war with Soviet-era operations.
– A small red army cannot defeat a large red army. Ukraine must be more modern, he states.
By last fall more than 60,000 Ukrainians of the soldier had attended military training in the West. According to Yurchenko, NATO training should take place at all levels of the armed forces so that they can work together. According to Yurchenko, all levels of the armed forces should receive training from NATO so that they can work together.
The Russian army has also changed since the days of the Soviet Union.
– They fight quickly and change tactics. During these two years, they have already changed tactics several times, says Yurchenko.
“Even if Russia is defeated, it will remain dangerous”
Yurchenko has studied different options for how the war could end – including what will happen in Europe if Russia wins. He agrees with many researchers that Russia can attack a NATO country after a possible victory.
– Russia will use Ukraine’s resources to strengthen itself, and after that it will attack another country, possibly a NATO member.
Yurchenko takes the Baltic countries as an example. According to him, they have understood that the war may spread to their territory.
– The Baltic countries have a long history with Russia, and they have no illusions about modern Russia and its goals. Even if Russia is defeated, it will remain dangerous. We must always be on our guard.
Yurchenko believes that Russia will fight for a long time. The expansion of the war is also possible for him.
Why did Russia attack?
And what does Yurchenko’s research reveal about Russia’s reasons for attacking Ukraine? The young officer wanted to get inside the enemy’s head to understand the Russian train of thought.
– In a simplified way, we can say that we forgot who the Russians are. The whole west forgot. We helped Russians to grow, says Yurchenko.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Both Russia and Ukraine emerged from its ruins in the same year. According to Yurchenko’s research, already in the 1990s, Russia began to define the West and NATO as its main opponents.
In that decade, the perception that Ukraine’s independence is wrong and a threat to Russia’s global dominance also took shape in Moscow. Already Boris Yeltsin would have wanted to take back Ukraine, according to Yurchenko’s research, but he did not have enough power to do so.
Yeltsin was the president of Russia from 1991 to 1999. Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999.
Ukraine and Russia signed a friendship treaty in 1997. However, according to Yurchenko’s research, the foreign policy between the two countries in the 90s was a sham. Vladimir Putin after coming to power in 1999, the cooperation went more strongly in the other direction.
“We wanted to believe that Russia wants to cooperate. But Russia only cooperates when it wants something,” Yurchenko writes in his study.
According to Yurchenko, Putin’s world of thought emerges in his claim that “modern Ukraine is entirely a product of the Soviet era”.
In his writings, Putin has emphasized that the ancient kingdom of Kievan Rus, led from Kiev, is the homeland of Russian civilization and claimed that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians are the same people.
– To them, we are just Russians speaking the wrong language, even though we are completely different nations, says Yurchenko.
The last straw for Putin was the Ukrainian revolution in 2014. This is evident from several studies. Putin tried to help the pro-Russian president of Ukraine at the time Viktor Yanukovych to stop the protests, but failed. For Russia, it meant that Ukraine chose the direction of the West.
“The Russian leaders have strongly believed that the West moved deliberately [eri maiden] pro-Russian governments and meddled in Russia’s circles of influence,” Yurtschenko states in his research.
According to Yurchenko, there were indeed signs and official statements of a major Russian attack on Ukraine before February 2022, but there were few who considered such warfare possible in the 2020s.
Fortunately, Yurchenko’s worst fear in his own life did not come true, but he has been able to watch the growth of his daughter, who was born during the war. However, the war continues.
– We have to continue this warfare. The Russians have started a new phase in their history, and if they give up, Russia will end up as it is now, says Yurchenko.