Ukraine test bed for Russia's army

Operations in eastern Ukraine provide an ideal opportunity for Russia to measure the success of its military transformation - and assess how its forces might fare against modern Western armies.

When Russia last went to war, in Georgia in 2008, it looked like an easy victory. But Russia's generals were deeply concerned at how badly their forces performed in some key areas of modern warfare. Since then, Russia has been intensively reorganizing, rearming, reequipping and retraining its forces in order to deal with those deficiencies, and to try and close the capability gap with modern Western armies.

Now, with that work still in progress, Russia has a chance to try out some of its new systems and capabilities under combat conditions. While much of the Russian hardware deployed in Ukraine is not new, and some systems that are compare poorly with Western equivalents, they still represent significant developments in Russian capability.

Two key examples are the use of UAVs − drones − for surveillance and targeting, and the use of electronic warfare (EW). Both of these were identified as areas of weakness in the Russian forces in 2008, and both have been intensively developed since. Now they are in widespread use in eastern Ukraine; Ukrainian forces have not gone through the same intensive modernization process, and are at a strong disadvantage when they come up against newer equipment supplied by Russia.

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