Ukraine’s Hybrid War
By: The Washington Times
Ukraine’s Hybrid War by Wesley Clark and Jack Keane - Washington Times
Four years ago this week, Moscow launched its hybrid war against Ukraine and seized Crimea. Six weeks later, it began its not-so covert military operation in Donbas. One of the great, if unheralded stories of this war has been the largely successful effort of Ukraine to defend itself against this hybrid war in the east.
Ukraine has been on the front lines of a new generation of warfare where Russia blurs the lines between peace and war. Moscow’s aggression began with the seizure and then annexation of Crimea in February and March, and then the not so-covert war in Donbas in April.
While the Kremlin has claimed that this was an uprising of Donbas’ ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers against the government in Kyiv, the truth is that this has been a war led, financed and armed from Moscow. Thousands of regular Russian troops stopped Kyiv from retaking the entire Donbas in the late summer of 2014 and thousands of Russian troops remain in the occupied territories today. Moscow controls the military activity of the so-called separatist forces.
We have watched carefully the evolution of Ukraine’s armed forces since the war began and it is impressive…