This painful experience and the continuing Russian threat pushed the political leadership in Kyiv to launch an ambitious restructuring of the national armed forces. Ukraine’s decision to establish a Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as a separate service branch came at the end of 2015 following a string of military setbacks in the south-eastern region of Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists exploited the structural deficiencies and unpreparedness of the Ukrainian military and took control of large swathes of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, which were proclaimed the “People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk” (DPR and LPR) in the spring of 2014. The Ukrainian special operations forces at a glance While many Russian military affairs experts have rightly attributed these shortcomings to poor battle planning, troops’ unpreparedness, and technical breakdowns, the effectiveness of Ukrainian forces should also be noted - they have mounted a stiff and clever resistance aimed at disrupting Russian logistics and lines of communication, with notable results.Īgainst this backdrop, Ukrainian special operations forces (SOF) are emerging as a pivotal component of the Kyiv government’s strategy to erode the sustainability of the Russian invasion by raising its human and materiel costs through a combination of guerrilla tactics, mobile defense, and ad-hoc counterattacks. The infamous kilometers-long Russian convoy stuck northwest of Kyiv being only one of many cases of bumbling behavior.
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