Western Experts' New Fear: Russia is Evolving and Adapting

Or is it simply that Western analysts have finally adapted to the truth?

A newly written report by retired Australian Army Major General, Mick Ryan, has sent Western presses into fevered overdrive. He makes the bold assertion that the Russian army is adapting and evolving, and that the old, tired stereotypes of Russians being ‘stupid’ are harmful for Ukraine and should be put to bed. And this follows a spate of such similar sentiments on Ukrainian Twitter, Telegram, and other social media. Alarmed by a wave of recent Russian successes, the new customary take appears to be that Russia is ‘wisening up’, and a new reckoning call amongst the AFU-supporting cognoscenti is taking place.

Mick Ryan’s piece was published right here on Substack:

The Russians Keep Evolving

The Modern War Institute at West Point lists his credentials as follows:

Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan (Australian Army) graduated from the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1989. He has commanded Army units at the Troop, Squadron, Regiment, Task Force, and Brigade levels during his three-decade career.

From 2010 to 2011, Maj. Gen. Ryan worked in the Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell on the US Joint Staff, as the Division Chief for Governance, Development, and Engagement, and subsequently in a new Strategy and Policy Division.  

As a general officer, he has served as the Director General Strategic Plans in Army Headquarters, Commander of the 1st Brigade in Darwin, and as Director General Training and Doctrine for the Australian Army.

I’ve quoted him before in my writeup on Russian BTGs here:

The BTG Is Dead, Long Live The BTG!

To his credit, Mick Ryan appears to be one of the least ‘blustery’ and inanely arrogant of the Western generals commentating on this war. He’s on the opposite end of the spectrum to guys like Ben Hodges who spew hateful drivel disguised as hyperbole and propagandistic rhetoric about Russian military capabilities, charged with emotional language that speaks to a personal vendetta rather than clear-minded rational analysis. On the contrary, Mick Ryan’s handling of the war appears to be more balanced, sensible, and at times erudite, albeit pedantically lacking true insight. But for what it’s worth, let’s see what he has to say, and why so many headlines of alarm are being churned out in the wake of his article.

Firstly, he states that Russia’s improvements and ‘evolution’ has come on the tactical rather than the strategic side. He is also one of the few Western commentators that gives credit to Russia’s professional, large-scale withdrawal from Kherson without casualties or equipment losses, attributing a tactical soundness to the maneuver.

Next, he believes due to previous tactical failings, Russia has switched to an attritional model, utilizing slow-crawl advances under cover of massed artillery fires to prevent the types of flanking maneuvers that Russian forces purportedly fell victim to in the early part of the war. This is a fairly pedantically self-evident insight.

Next is Russia’s focus on utilizing the Wagner group in Bakhmut. Ryan here falters a bit. First he slips back to his instincts in erroneously describing Wagner’s attacks as ‘human wave tactics’, which is for obvious reasons antithetical to the bent of his entire post. But then he quickly catches himself and goes on to specify in more detail that they’re actually ‘sophisticated waves’ of echeloned troops with their own unique, well-honed roles.

Thirdly he brings up the recent trend, of which I wrote at length in the earlier pasted article about BTGs, of Russia switching to small unit tactics focusing on assault/shock units specializing in storming fortifications and trench systems. He references the Ukrainian reserves officer’s Twitter account which I likewise used in my post, who wrote at length about the so-called ‘captured Russian field manual’ which describes the new types of Russian assault units and their configurations. We’ll return to the UA officer shortly.

Lastly, he brings up Russia’s switch to utilizing glide-bombs en masse in order to ‘adapt’ to Ukraine’s air defenses, as well as construct their own vast defensive fortifications, replete with ‘dragon’s teeth’, revetments, and everything in between.

As can be seen, most of these observations are rather basic and pedantic. Most of them do not even constitute Russian ‘evolution’ or ‘adaptation’, as it would be condescending towards the Russian forces to believe such basic approaches are major advancements from previous conduct.

The truth is, one thing I realized is that Western commentators and ‘analysts’ love to disguise their own failed predictions and poisoned narratives with the canard of Russian ‘evolution’. Most of the top Western pundits’ analysis has proven wrong in this war, and so now in order to save face and maintain an air of rectitude they use the false paradigm of a ‘sudden, unexpected’ Russian ‘evolution’ as a sort of cognitive dissonance for their own failings.

As I said, to believe Russia massively “evolved” into these very basic tactical understandings is to believe that the Russian army’s previous state of operation was some “dumb Mongoloid barbarians” caricature. It’s as if Russia only just now ‘figured out’ that they can outrange enemy air defense with bombs that have greater range. This is in similar fashion to the tropes about “Russians learning how to use indoor plumbing”, etc.

Not a single one of these ‘advancements’ are moments of light-bulb-sparking ‘insight’, but rather very straightforward, logical continuations of Russia’s new objectives following the end of the first phase which attempted to subdue Ukraine bloodlessly by way of pure offensive intimidation. To say that Russia has ‘evolved’ to using their artillery advantage in order to lessen casualties is to basically admit you have never studied Soviet warfare and military doctrines.

With that said, I do believe Russia is very subtly innovating and experimenting, but it is doing so in ways that go over the head of the basic, superficial observations most of these Western analysts are capable of making.

For instance, it is true that Russia is experimenting more with small unit tactics; but it’s obviously something done out of necessity, and it’s not like it’s completely new territory to them. While we can call it a form of ‘adapting’, as I said before, it’s not some rare lucid moment of sudden insight that the mongrel orc horde has been struck with, but rather a direct, logical continuation of the shift in military objectives that occurred last year.

To get back to the previously mentioned UA officer, he has recently posted a new Russian manual claimed to have been captured in the field, which talks about another new type of unit called ‘Storm Z’ that Russia is experimenting with. You can see his Twitter thread on it here:

https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1643832673872363520

The document defines "Storm Z" Company as an independent, joint, tactical, combined-arms company temporarily created outside the regular army corps unit structure for immediate operational use in performing particularly complex combat missions.

These units are reportedly meant to be trialed in motor rifle brigades of the 1st Army Corps, 150th Division, and the 4th, 6th, 7th, 110th, 123rd, and 132nd Separate Motorized Rifle Brigades. Most of these, off the top of my head, appear to be units in the southern direction, around DPR/Donetsk, which would make sense as that’s where assault style operations are currently most prevalent. This is in contrast to the northern front, like Kremennaya, where on average it’s more of a defensive operation with occasional assaults handled by the paratroopers.

He provides a few slides, such as the following:

And states that the goals of these ‘Z Companies’ are as follows:

The goals of the Storm 'Z' company are:

• To conduct combat operations in a city (settlement) or areas with difficult geographical conditions.

• To capture important objects such as strongholds, command posts, communication centers, buildings, structures.

• To carry out sabotage operations in territories controlled by the enemy.

• To search for and destroy sabotage and reconnaissance groups.

• To block structures and eliminate enemy forces within them.

• To adjust artillery fire and air support

In short: they are specialized assault units, which is no different to last time’s ‘captured manual’ which focused more on the actual tactics of new assault groups.

Though once again, there’s no proof that these documents are real, but as last time, there is nothing intrinsically defamatory about them that would lead us to conclude they’re some type of psyop meant to reputationally damage the Russian army.

"Storm Company Z" (100 personnel) structure:

4x Capture Squad (10 personnel each)

4x Fire Support Squad (10 personnel each)

1x Company Command (2 personnel)

1x Combat Engineering Group (5 personnel)

1x Reconnaissance Group (8 personnel)

Here is the part most analysts have missed, where the true innovations of the Russian campaign are happening. It is in the fact that Russia is utilizing PMCs (Private Military Contractors) as experimental test beds for new tactics, given that for obvious reasons PMCs are able to accommodate more ‘risk-taking’ since their losses are mostly off the books and they are in effect ‘expendable’ compared to soldiers of the Russian army proper. I’m not saying Russia actually treats them as expendable, but simply that, if you had the choice between the two, of course you’d do the riskier experimentation with the PMCs.

Russian command is then watching and learning the various prototyped tactics and applying them to the regular army. And recently this has begun to take on a more direct approach as Wagner PMCs are now outright training up to three Russian Motorized Rifle Brigades from mobilized Russian troops, and according to some, even paratroopers.

“Wagner-affiliated sources announced on April 17 that Wagner is training up to three motorized rifle brigades of mobilized personnel to reinforce Wagner‘s flanks in Bakhmut,” the institute said.

Ukraine’s eastern forces spokesman Serhiy Cherevaty confirmed the collaboration between paratroopers and Wagner mercenaries. - Source

You can see a video of Wagner announcing this themselves here: LINK.

And a general greater integration is happening between PMCs and Russian armed forces proper, as Putin just decreed that all PMC and volunteer groups will be eligible for ‘veteran’ status equivalent to that of full Russian army combat troops.

Everyone who risks his life today protecting our country during the course of the SVO [special military operation] should have an equal status as a combat veteran, should be assured that the government will take care of him and his family regardless of whether he was a soldier, an officer, a volunteer, or anyone who participated in carrying out the SVO.

As I mentioned, it’s too risky to ‘experiment’ with assault tactics in particular while utilizing regular troops whose losses have major political consequences that can sway the tenor of the conflict. But utilizing PMCs to first experiment with different structures, tactics, etc., during high-casualty-prone assault maneuvers is ideal. Then passing that gained knowledge down to the actual Russian forces by way of a greater integration of the two is the clearly logical step, and is exactly what Russia is currently doing.

And by the way, there is one last major admission the Western “analysts” have yet to make, that has gone completely over their heads. Arguably the single biggest critique every Western analyst has made against Russian armed forces is the so-called infamous “small unit leadership” canard. It is the oft-repeated stereotype I’ve written at length about before, that Russia supposedly lacks an NCO corps and a ‘leadership-driven’ focus on troop training at the unit level, which leaves them stuck in hoary ‘Soviet-style’ centralized command structures.

But this very topic proves the contrary. The field manual the UA officer himself claims to have uncovered shows that Russia is constructing self-sufficient units at company level and below capable of functioning independently. And Mick Ryan’s own expostulations on the topic further underline this point. The specific sector of Russian improvement he praises most is at the tactical level of operations. He praises Russia’s new shock troop and assault capabilities, and these are the very areas under the auspice of decentralized, smaller-unit command style structures.

In fact, everything Russia has been doing recently has flown in the face of that most popular of Western tropes—that Russia is a highly centralized Soviet-style force. That is nonsense. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, Russian units likely have much more autonomy than equivalent NATO ones. And the last time I said this, I was actually messaged by two separate ex-servicemen from U.S./NATO militaries who wanted to express their agreement with that sentiment.

I’ve spoken many times before about most people’s absolute lack of understanding when it comes to Wagner and its role in the conflict. Some have seemingly viewed it as a sort of self-contained singleton, with Prigozhin as chief commander and military strategist. In reality, Prigozhin of course is not the actual ‘commander’ of the forces. He has no military background to speak of and likely knows next to nothing about military tactics/strategy. He’s merely the public face of the group, the spokesman and mouthpiece.

The real commander of Wagner is argued to be one codename Lotus, or Lotos in Russian:

Lotus, born Anton Yelizarov in Rostov, Russia, was a Russian reserve officer and graduated from several prestigious Russian military academies in the ‘90s, including the elite paratrooper Suvorov Military Guards Ulyanovsk School and Ryazan Airborne School. He went on to serve in the Southern Military District as a Platoon and Company Commander in the elite 7th Airborne Assault Mountain Division. He was then reportedly promoted to the 10th Separate GRU Special Forces Brigade.

He later transferred to Wagner and was said to serve in Syria where he was injured, as well as an instructor in the Central African Republic, and then as commander in Libya.

In short: this guy has one hell of a career, and active conflict experience that’s second to none.

Prigozhin himself introduced Lotus as the man who single handedly commanded the capture of Soledar in only two weeks. Now, it’s speculated that Lotus is likely the true commander of the entire Bakhmut theater of operations.

Lotus has recently given media interviews like this one, where he described the AFU’s casualties in Soledar/Bakhmut as being in a 7:1 ratio to that of Wagner’s: VIDEO LINK. And he’s always seen by Prigozhin’s side everytime Prigozhin steps foot into Bakhmut.

He is seen here decorated with the gold star medals of 'Hero of Russia', 'Hero of DPR', and 'Hero of LPR'

My point in highlighting him is to make it clear that Russia’s integration into Wagner is much more intimate than most people are aware. And given the fact that ‘Lotus’ was a GRU officer, it is likely he is still reporting and under direct command of the Kremlin. You know what they say about the CIA: once an agent, always an agent. You never leave that type of service.

Proxy forces are generally always controlled by a high ranking intelligence officer. Of course, it’s common knowledge the entire Donbass conflict kicked off with FSB officer Strelkov at the helm, though it’s debated to this day whether he went rogue or was still under orders at that time.

Also, it was to prove a claim I’ve made many times before, that Wagner is in fact commanded top-to-bottom by actual Russian military commanders, many of whom were merely ‘laterally’ transferred to Wagner, rather than the standard conception some casuals have of Wagner being some purely convict force, with prisoner-commanders running the show.

My point was to show the close integration of the two forces, and how Russian command actually uses Wagner and other PMCs as laboratories to effect real, direct innovation into their own standard assault units. As we’ve discussed here many times before, no country in the world has yet had to deal with assaults in the types of peer-level contested environments that we see in Ukraine. So Russia is forced to innovate on the spot, as is the AFU itself—just not in the simplistic, surface-level ways that some of these ‘analysts’ have described.

The true innovations are much more finely-grained, multi-modal in nature; i.e. the general optimization of kill-chains and OODA loops and the smoothening out of combined arms and branch integration so that, for instance, airforce and artillery can better coordinate with ground units, particularly during assaults.

Things like the earlier mentioned glide-bombs are not ‘adaptations’ of some backward army to threats they hadn’t known about or couldn’t foresee. They’re simply a direct result of the increased productive capacities of Russia’s arms suppliers. The proof is in the fact that most of these weapons already existed, just not in large enough number to make a difference on a battlefield as large as Ukraine’s.

The only exception being the new ‘planning’ glide bomb, which does appear to be an adhoc improvisation, but only for the sake of being a stopgap, alleviating the shortages of other ‘proper’ guided bombs which Russia had already possessed, but in much fewer number.

So, ultimately, is Russia ‘adapting’ and ‘evolving’? Sure, if that makes one sleep better at night, you can say that it is. Certainly at the ‘micro’ scale when it comes to drone warfare, Russia can be said to have adapted and ‘evolved’ greatly, though for some reason this wasn’t amongst the mentioned bullet points in Mick Ryan’s manifesto.

In the end, I stand by the belief that, despite having almost no truly groundbreaking, thought-provoking, or innovative material, the MSM headlines have pounced on General Ryan’s declaration for the very reason that it gives them a face-saving out from their previous narrative lines. Now they can say, “See, we were accurate in our assessments of Russia being an amateurish, second rate force, but now the calculus has changed, they have “evolved and adapted”—which should absolve us of our previous opinions!”

No, it doesn’t absolve them. The fact is all Western thought on Russia’s SMO has been premised on an endless parade of critically flawed and horridly inaccurate—and often racist—stereotypes, and now they want us to forget just how wrong they were. Anyone who actually understands military strategy would know that the ‘dumb Russians’ have not had a ‘magical lightbulb moment’, but rather have stuck to mostly sound military principles which have led to some misconceptions of their inadequacy only due to the great disparity in total force numbers that existed up to the point of Russia’s mobilization. But now that Russia has evened up those forces, there is no ‘magical lightbulbs’ but simply classical Russian military doctrine taking over, at least for the most part.

As an example, in Mick Ryan’s own exordium, he contrasts Russia’s newfound “evolution” as being diametrical to the opening of the SMO, where Russia supposedly suffered massive losses, losing 80% of its equipment. This is what I was referring to, when I said earlier that most Western analyst’s have highly flawed arguments because their information is premised on completely false and fraudulent data. The output is garbage because the input is completely wrong.

Just to give an example of this, it’s now accepted as gospel that Russia’s opening battles around Bucha, Irpin, Gostomel, etc., saw the VDV Airborne incur “massive” losses, all because of one or two deliberately misleading photos, utilizing perspective tricks, of a Bucha street which appear to show a huge amount of destroyed VDV BMDs and BMPs. It’s now common to see Western ‘analysts’ claim that the VDV lost thousands of men, or 70-90% of their forces, etc., like the laughable recent figure that Russia lost 95% of its GRU forces:

But do you know how many actual total casualties MediaZona found in that early, highly intense combat period in late February?

That’s right: a whopping total 88 confirmed Airborne deaths in that huge assault. This is precisely what I mean when I speak of the faulty premises being like a rotted foundation on which these analysts build their homes.

In the end, the ultimate arbiter will be how well Russia does in their future larger-scale offensives. This will show us how truly ‘adaptive’ the Russian army has become in terms of the more important larger operational environment. But for now, we can at least take comfort in the fact that this new trend of giving respect to the Russian military is a stark acknowledgement of Western analysts’ gross incompetence up to this point, and perhaps marks a new beginning in more sensible evaluations of the conflict.

Ultimately, rather than the barbarous Russians ‘evolving’ to our civilized level, it appears it was actually the dimwitted, backward Western MSM and analysts who ‘evolved’ and ‘adapted’ to the realities long obvious to the rest of us.

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