The Empire The Russians Left Behind
Exiting Ukraine they walked away from one-third of their war-making capacity - including aerospace innovation.
When Soviet troops drove out of Ukraine for the last time as it separated from Russia in 1991, they left a lot behind.
Specifically, they left about one-third of Russia’s war-making capacity.
Ukrainians have always made up a disproportionate amount of the USSR’s military force. The WW2-era USSR had an ethnic Russian population of 83% - but Russians only made up 50% of the Soviet army. Fully 34% of the army came from Ukraine, which only made up 20% of the Russian population.
By the time they left in 1991 the Russians could have seen in their rear-view mirror some 750 defence industry factories, 140 scientific institutions, and one million defence industry workers. Ukraine had a disproportionately large number of educated and skilled staff.
The Soviet exit broke apart an integrated defence community. It took the Ukrainian defence industry a decade to rebuild to an employment of 250,000 people. But Russia lost even more: they lost expertise in key areas like rocket and missile technology.
Focusing on that field because it is such an unrecognized achievement for Ukraine: few know that in some ways Ukraine has been responsible for Russia’s first big international science achievement: space flight. In fact, Ukraine has been a major player in the world's space industry since the 1950s.
Sergey Korolyev was the mystery figure behind the early Soviet successes in the Cold War era space race. He was born in Ukraine and studied in Kyiv at the Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, named after another famous native, legendary helicopter designer Igor Sikorski. Helicopters as well as space rockets were designed first in Ukraine.
One of my favorite books is “Sputnik: The Shock Of The Century”, by Paul Dickson. He recreates that moment when the Ukrainian-inspired rocket launched the first man-made object into space. As “Leave It To Beaver” premiered on American television, Dickson records that this bombshell hit the newsrooms:
“On a fall Friday afternoon in 1957, five bells rang ominously on noisy teletype machines in newsrooms across Washington, D.C., as a news wire brought word of Sputnik’s launch: LONDON, OCT 4 (AP) - MOSCOW RADIO SAID TONIGHT THAT THE SOVIET UNION HAS LAUNCHED AN EARTH SATELLITE.”
There was no mention of the region of Russia that provided the man and the environment for its creation, and at the time most Westerners would not have cared much. Nor, apparently, did the USSR.
But in leaving Ukraine they left intact the social and academic environment that inspired the launch of Sputnik.
That environment made Ukraine into one of the largest suppliers of ICBMs to the Soviet nuclear forces. The break-up of the USSR re-directed all that energy to more productive paths. Most of Russia warheads today are delivered by rockets which were entirely produced or designed by factories in Soviet-era Ukraine or contain key components from them…. more than half of the components of ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) can be traced back to Ukraine and these rockets carry over 80 percent of Russia's warheads.
Now Russia has to maintain that fleet without the knowledge of the experts who built the rockets. With Russia’s record of maintenance – looking at abandoned aircraft carriers for instance – the world has reason to worry.
If we were prone to conspiracy, we would wonder whether any Ukrainian scientist was able to use their intimate knowledge of Russian rockets to – say – ensure that they exploded on launch. It would be horrible, of course. I’m glad no one is working on it…
The essential Ukrainian rocket components include targeting and control systems, most importantly for Russia's keystone ICBM, the RS-20B Voyevoda, known by NATO as the SS-18 Satan. The guidance system was produced in Kharkiv at a factory known as "Elektropribor" in the Soviet era and as "Khatron" today.
The former chief of staff of the Strategic Missile Forces, Viktor Esin, recently acknowledged that "there would be difficulties, because the documentation is in Ukraine, but the problem is solvable."
The danger of losing the industries could add fuel to Moscow's desire to have a loyal government in Kyiv, no matter the price. Ukraine long has possessed one of the biggest rocket industries in Europe.
The Soviet-era Yuzhmash rocket factory in Dnipro for example is one of the largest rocket-manufacturing facilities in the world. Until recently, it supplied first stages for Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket which goes to the International Space Station. It has also made parts of Europe’s Vega rocket. Interestingly Dnipro hosts the Menorah Center, the world’s largest Jewish complex, illustrating Ukraine’s aptitude for embracing all cultures.
Over 16,000 people are employed in the state-run space enterprises managed by the State Space Agency of Ukraine, about as many as work for NASA. But the commercial space-tech startup scene was only just beginning to emerge when the war began, as the state was only taking the first steps to loosen its grip over the space industry.
Tereza Pultarova noted in ‘Via Satellite’ that when Putin invaded, the rocket companies turned to making weapons. Kyiv-based Lunar Research Services had developed a 3D-printable educational nanosatellite kit called MySat and was about to begin shipping its first products to backers on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Instead, the company’s engineers disassembled those kits to scavenge parts that could be used by the military, and apologized to its Kickstarter followers. The company then reprogrammed its 3D printers to make simple parts to upgrade machine guns and tank periscopes.
Roman Malkevych, who led a team of engineers that in 2020 won NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge, also refocused his efforts. “People have switched to completely different technologies. It’s not that they’re finding military uses for the ideas they had been developing before. They are doing completely different things.”
Kurs Orbital, the company behind the docking station for the Soyuz spacecraft, stayed in Ukraine after Putin pounced. They are now working on programs managed by the European Space Agency and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The legacy of skilled entrepreneurs is one of the reasons for the rise of dozens of garage startups have sprung up all over Ukraine building drones, aerostats, anti-drone systems and other technologies. They can be immediately tested and improved in the battlefield - another unwitting Putin bonus.
Entrepreneur Andryi Dovbenko explains that “Ukraine is a country of engineers. We have a very strong legacy of engineers from the old era, and we are also very strong with software development. When the war started, people with these different skills started coming together and working together to help the war effort.”
He estimated that there may be up to 10 times as many small tech companies now than before the war.
One rocket spin-off which is of interest to me is the Cylcone 4-M, which has announced plans to work with its partner in Canada Maritime Launch Services. It will launch payload service rockets from Cape Breton, close to my area.
When the Soviet army quit Ukraine in 1991, it left behind as many as 500 Tochka conventional ballistic missiles.
Their solid fuel engines deteriorated over time - until six months after Putin invaded, when the Tochkas began firing again! They were produced in the Yuzhmash—a.k.a., Pivdenmash—complex in Dnipro. Yuzhmash had no problem building its own Tochka parts when needed. Yuzhmash can produce heavy engines for high-stakes space-launches, so building an evolved version of a Tochka was not a problem.
According to UkraineInvest, the country still has a full cycle of design, production and operation of advanced civil, military and cargo aircraft, as well as supplying space technology. They are proud to claim that Ukraine still produces “some of the most advanced aircraft, satellites and rocket engines in the world.”
This includes ultralight aircraft from Aeroprakt, which was recently used to bombard Russian drone factory more than 1,000 km from its launch point.
Ukraine has always had a substantial arms industry, and a substantial "heavy" industrial sector useful more-generally for the production of arms. The bulk of this industry is located in eastern Ukraine and quite vulnerable to Russian military attack. Ukraine’ domestic arms industry at the start of 2024 produces a higher volume of weapons than it did prior to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2021.
This year, for example, Ukraine will both extend the range of its R-360 Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles to 1000km, and increase production tenfold.
Much of the current equipment in use by the Russian troops now in Crimea was in fact produced by Kyiv's military industry. The equipment includes the motors that keep all of Russia's combat helicopters flying and many of the engines that power Russian naval ships (the ones still afloat – the sinkings are courtesy of a new Ukrainian endeavor in sea drones. It also includes about half of the air-to-air missiles carried by Russian fighter planes.
RFE/RL Russian Service's military correspondent Vladimir Voronov argues that severing ties with Ukraine would have a far more dramatic impact on Russia's defense program than any Western sanctions restricting sales of Western military hardware. In other words, Western sanctions won’t hurt Russia as much as the self-imposed wound of cutting off Ukrainian suppliers.
Voronov notes that the two countries' military industrial complexes are so integrated that any end to cooperation with Ukraine would seriously jeopardize the Russian army's ambitious modernization program.
This has happened because back in the days of the Soviet Union, Moscow planners deliberately located key manufacturing plants in various Soviet republics to strengthen national unity.
The Ukrainian facilities which are most important for Russia's military are Motor Sich in Zaporizhzhya, which produces helicopter engines, Yuzhmash in Dnipropetrovsk, which manufactures rockets and missiles, and the Russian company Antonov's plant in Kyiv, which makes planes.
Without cooperation with the Ukrainian military-industrial complex, the entire ambitious program of rearmament of the Russian army will collapse.
So severing ties with Ukraine will ultimately be a more serious blow to the Russian military-industrial complex than any Western sanctions. And the army's rearmament program will simply be terminated.
To underline the point, we can look at an assessment from December of 2012, when a group of experts from the Public Council under the Military-Industrial Commission of the Russian government presented a report. It showed that the creation of a fully autonomous military-industrial complex in Russia is impossible in principle. One of the reasons is the overload of Russian design bureaus and enterprises.
"Our design bureaus are now overloaded with work," Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees Russia's military-industrial complex, admitted in December 2013. “We don't even have time to do what the Defense Ministry orders."
Stretched as it was, the most significant point was that in a number of spheres - rocket and space, aviation and shipbuilding – Russia’s dependence on cooperation with Ukraine was truly critical. This is directly confirmed by the sharply increased nervousness of the same Dmitry Rogozin. In recent days, he has held a series of meetings with the leadership of major Russian military concerns on how to minimize the consequences of such sanctions imposed by Ukraine itself, rather than on how to circumvent possible Western sanctions.
"The Ukrainian footprint can be "fixed" in more than 51-52 percent of land-based ICBMs, which in turn are the delivery vehicles for more than 82-83 percent of warheads.”
In other words, about half of the Ukrainian footprint in ICBMs cannot be “fixed”.
It is thus Russia’s military potential, not Ukraine’s, that is being degraded fastest.
Russia’s once-formidable navy is mired in an increasingly dire strategic situation in the Black Sea. Ukraine has used its advantages in long-range precision targeting to inflict serious damage on the Russian fleet and Russian maritime military infrastructure, damage that Russia has struggled to respond to effectively. Russia has lost as much as a fifth of its Black Sea Fleet since summer 2023, including some of its most sophisticated ships.
In the skies above Ukraine, things aren’t going much better for Russia, with its air force unable to leverage much of its potential power. The growing density and sophistication of Ukrainian air defenses have greatly constrained Russia’s ability to operate its heaviest bombers beyond its forward line of troops.
Russia has tried to overcome this problem by relying on air-launched cruise missiles and glide bombs that can be dispatched from the safety of Russian airspace. But these weapons are significantly more expensive and difficult for Russia to manufacture than is its much larger and less used supply of gravity bombs.
Russia will ensure an ample supply of cruise missiles and glide bombs for the duration of the war, but doing so will impose high costs on Russian industry. Bombardments massive enough to overcome Ukrainian air defenses can cost hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to conduct, greatly adding to state spending, likely making it unsustainable over the long term.
For all the expense, none of these massive bombardments has yielded any decisive results in degrading Ukrainian military potential. This is largely because Ukraine’s strategic depth is not in Ukraine. Stocks of Ukrainian arms and ammunition and the facilities that produce them are shielded beneath the American nuclear umbrella in Europe and the United States. Russia as a combatant in the conflict does not enjoy this advantage. Ukraine has increasingly threatened Russian industry through its acquisition and development of longer-range missiles and its expanding sabotage operations.
The cumulative effects of the past several months of stepped-up Ukrainian attacks on Russian logistics, air defenses, and artillery have been devastating for the Russian military. On the ground, Russia’s rate of artillery fire has fallen dramatically, from a high of 45,000−80,000 shells per day during Russia’s summer offensive in 2022 to 10,000−15,000 shells per day by the beginning of fall 2023. This is a serious problem for the Russian military as artillery units have arguably been its most effective fighting force, responsible for inflicting as many as 70 percent of all Ukrainian casualties.
Russian forces have continued to resist Ukrainian advances behind a formidable defensive network and in some cases have even advanced. But even these positive results for the Russian military have come at a tremendous cost, with the total number of Russian casualties passing one million and growing rapidly. The ongoing offensive Russia launched around Avdiivka closely resembles its disastrous operations in Vuhledar and its pyrrhic victory in Bakhmut in the spring of 2023. The ongoing strategy of throwing away huge numbers of lives and equipment to achieve meager ends is degrading morale and leadership and shows that the Russian military is either unwilling or unable to learn from past mistakes. None of these explanations bodes well for Russia’s prospects in a long war.
Russia’s continued underperformance suggests that it lacks the ability to make full use of its theoretically greater military potential.
Russia has more manpower than Ukraine, but it is unlikely to make full use of that advantage. Regardless of what any poll may say, the war is self-evidently unpopular among Russians of military age, who have fled the country by the hundreds of thousands since the beginning of the war. Previous attempts to mobilize recruits have greatly accelerated human capital flight. Russian leaders routinely claim that incredible numbers of patriotic volunteers are entering military service, but these boasts are undercut by steps that reek of desperation for manpower, such as greatly lowering standards for citizenship to attract military recruits from abroad.
Government efforts to bolster the appeal of military service face a long-term uphill battle as the number of Russian casualties mounts. Maimed veterans will increasingly become the face of the war in Russia: Russian officials have suggested that as many as half of all soldiers wounded in Ukraine sustained at least one limb amputation.
The biggest army the Russians can put into the field may not be all that much bigger than what it has already deployed. Russia struggles to execute combined arms operations with the army’s present size. Attempts by Russia to gain an advantage by putting an even larger army in the field without addressing these institutional problems may just result in more poorly coordinated and disorganized human wave attacks.
Russia may have gained control of 18 percent of Ukraine, but doing so has cost nearly eighteen years of military modernization and has exposed serious institutional weaknesses. If Ukraine maintains its determination and retains external support, it can win a war of attrition. The continued battering of both the Russian military and the Russian economy will eventually force Moscow to choose between an indecisive end to the war or risk Russia losing its place as a major power as the West slowly but massively re-arms over the next several years.
Ian Stubbs, military advisor to the UK, says that the war thus far demonstrates a spectacular lack of Russian military competence. It has had a devastating impact on Russia’s own people, Russia’s military prestige and Russia’s reputation – one which will last for generations. Russia’s military leaders have: sacrificed military units, equipment and soldiers; squandered strategic resources for small tactical gains; and doubled-down on flawed strategy and tactics in desperate attempts to save face. Everyone can see the truth. Russia’s military and its defence industry are failing in Ukraine.
Ukraine possesses several advantageous factors, according to Forbes. Foremost, Ukraine already has a fairly large defense industrial base. “Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited approximately 30 percent of the former Soviet facilities and workforce…. Ukraine does have the infrastructure, albeit outdated and war-torn, necessary to build up a robust defense industrial base. More importantly, they have people with the expertise in the specialized niche fields associated with military equipment.”
Prior to 2014, Ukraine's export-oriented arms industry had reached the status of world's 4th largest arms exporter in 2012. It was responsible for 17% of Soviet defense production and 25% of its scientific research. As noted, Soviet ICBMs were built at the Yuzhmash plant. Russia's only aircraft carrier was also built in the Ukrainian SSR, as well as a number of other Russian military ships.
At the time of its independence in 1991, the country had 1,840 defense enterprises and research centers that employed close to 2.7 million people.
The main part of their work involved high-tech products such as guided anti-tank missiles.
These are the people that Putin left behind; these are the brains he will never tap.
Further, the brains that were in Russia are leaving as well. In the IT sector, one of the most valued fields is the occupation of ‘software developer’. A study by the National Library of Medicine shows that in the first year of the war 11.1% of Russian developers list a new country as their location, and another 13.2% of Russian developers obscured their location. The implication is that almost one-quarter of Russia’s software developers have left the ship.
Even if – which I do not believe – Putin is able to retain the area he has thus far squatted on, none of those brilliant people are going to contribute to his Russia ever again.
In fact, they will be working against him.
He will never be able to draw on the intellects that launched the world’s first satellite.
Today, Russia’s prosecution of the war depends on artillery shells from North Korea and drones from Iran. Its oil production window is closing as Ukraine has hit more than a dozen refineries since the start of 2024 alone, which has disrupted at least 10 percent of Russian oil refinery capacity. Tomorrow, Russia will be a client state supplying oil to China and India. When President Xi said that the future belongs to two nations, he meant China and America…Russia was not part of his equation.
Putin blamed former president Mikhail Gorbachev for letting the Soviet Union disintegrate. Now he himself is finishing the job, throwing away the skills and intellectual capital he needed to have Russia regain some strength.
Who knows what ingenious projects are in the works in the schools and factories of Ukraine – what the new equivalents of Sputnik might be – but it is a certainty that Putin left it all behind with his senseless war.
And now it might come crashing down on his head, instead of helping to propel his nation forward.
In the West, we have a word for that special kind of genius.
Loser.
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Great info and insight as always, Barry! It's no wonder Putin wants those key parts of Ukraine - Kyiv for the past Russian capital glory, Dnipro for the military engineering human resource and Zaporizhia for the biggest nuclear facility in Europe. He couldn't care less for the number of people he throws in the grinder to get and keep these key areas. But as a true KGB product he only knows how to get stuff by force. And by force you only get land, not people. Too bad so many Ukrainians have to die in the process. So much lost potential!
Repubs are still spreading the lies that Ukraine is losing the war. Aargh! Thanks for continuing to give an alternative viewpoint.