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Section four looks at the challenges in the road ahead for Ukraine and its military, including the specter of a full-blown Russian military invasion. First edition; includes 20 photos, map and index. Read more Read less. Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser.

Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Mark Galeotti. Register a free business account. As a leading Russian defense industry and arms trade think tank, CAST regularly provides consultations, analysis and other services to Russian government agencies, defense industry companies, and banks and investment firms. Howard is an eight-year veteran of the United States Marine Corps.

Is it too soon to write anything meaningful of book length about the annexation of Crimea and the Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine? Its nine chapters range from an historical context of the conflict through autopsies of the decay of the Ukrainian armed forces and let s face it, if Kyiv or the local commanders had opted to put up a fight in Crimea, they d have lost, but they might have forestalled the subsequent eastern Ukrainian adventure to detailed assessments of the Russian military.

There s even a useful colour map of respective forces in Crimea. As such, this offers not just an essential basic reference on the conflict, it also places it in the wider picture of Russia s changing force structures and very way of war.

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Much of the Russian military may still be, speaking charitably, only partially reformed, but there is a core of effective, modern and flexible intervention forces that give the Kremlin new options that can offer no great comfort to its neighbors or to a NATO that is having desperately to consider how an alliance built for a big war can respond in an age of blended political-economic-information-military hybrid or non-linear operations. CAST is an outstanding research outfit, and one of the few in Russia that is looking at security issues with genuine independence and acuity.

This book is just more evidence of that. Very highly recommended. Brothers Armed is a great summary of events in Russia s seizure of Crimea last February-March as well as in-depth reference detailing the condition of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. It isn t perfect, but it s good and, most importantly, it s sui generis. It came out quickly and no other book covers these issues. CAST has successfully achieved relative objectivity in its approach, as the introduction by David Glantz notes.

Vasiliy Kashin begins Brothers Armed by examining the history of Crimea s disputed status. He concludes:. Russia clearly recognized Ukraine s territorial integrity within its existing borders [including control of Crimea]. Until the crisis in , Russia had made no attempts to question Ukraine s rights to Crimea. Putin s move on Crimea was opportunistic, not premeditated, according to Kashin. Two chapters then explain how Ukraine neglected its rich inheritance from the Soviet military. In sheer hardware terms, Ukraine suddenly found itself the second most powerful in Europe, and fourth in the world.

The legacy of Soviet defense industry left it with more than military design bureaus and manufacturing plants that developed and made almost every type of modern weaponry.

But without obvious threats and an army too large for its needs and finances, Kyiv focused on downsizing rather than preserving its forces. Following Russia s short war with Georgia in , a snap inspection of the Ukrainian Army s combat readiness yielded very alarming results. In , this inability to react to a rapidly emerging threat resulted in the loss of Crimea. Mikhail Barabanov provides two narratives on Russian military reform before and after the war with Georgia.

He concludes that, although former Defense Minister Serdyukov was despised by the military, he was instrumental in laying the foundations of a genuinely modern Russian Army. Anton Lavrov s section on Russia s military operation in Crimea is the meat of Brothers Armed, and it s a valuable account of what happened on the ground last winter. He points out that, although Kyiv s numbers were superior to Moscow s, its military forces were psychologically, politically, and technically unready to react to the Russian invasion of Crimea. At a point, he writes,.

The final chapter is Vyacheslav Tseluyko s insightful look at where Ukraine s military needs to go now that Russia is giving it a crash course in real warfare.

He concludes Kyiv should focus on its most dangerous threat a Russian invasion of mainland Ukraine and adopt a territorial defense strategy to prevent a foreign occupation. Tseluyko advocates drawing the aggressor into protracted fighting in urban areas, making every Ukrainian soldier an infantryman, and employing anti-armor weapons from light helicopters. Brothers Armed is an object lesson for countries bordering Russia.

They and their armed forces need to be ready immediately to respond to challenges to their sovereignty and territorial integrity from their overweening neighbor to the east. Anything less could be too late. The book is smoothly translated and features good photos. A good map lost in the back might have served better up front Read the full review at russiandefpolicy.

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Russian forces seized Crimea in March before Ukraine s military was able to fire a shot. Pro-Russian forces gathered in Donetsk and Lugansk, and declared their independence from Kiev, again with little effective resistance from Ukraine s military. Then, to the astonishment of all sides, Ukraine s army managed to reverse some of its losses, winning a series of victories against separatist forces over the summer. This summer offensive in Eastern Ukraine proved so effective that it provoked a full scale Russian intervention in August, bolstered separatist forces and led to the shaky cease-fire agreement that was signed in Minsk in September.

The new book Brothers Armed: Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine takes a fresh look at this series of surprises, analyzing why the war began, and how each side s military has performed. Written by a group of Russian and Ukrainian military experts disclosure: I participated in a fellowship program with one of the editors the book provides a unique perspective into the war, with far more detail about mobilization plans and military spending than are found in most analyses of the crisis The book addresses two main questions.

The first is why Ukraine s military has performed so badly. Rarely do countries lose control of entire provinces without firing a single shot in defense, yet that is what happened in Crimea.

The chapter by Anton Lavrov and Aleksey Nikolsky argues against attributing the Ukrainian Army s paralysis solely to the confusion that reigned in the Ukrainian government at the time, or to the pro-Russian sentiment of many Ukrainian service personnel. The real reason, Lavrov and Nikolsky argue, is that during the invasion of Crimea and the beginning of the insurgency in Donetsk, is that the military felt helpless and unable to affect the situation because they were so poorly trained and equipped The book also sheds light on the debate about why the Kremlin decided to seize Crimea, though it reaches no firm conclusions.

Vasily Kashin, who wrote the book s introductory historical essay on Crimea, notes that even after the USSR s collapse, Russia had close ties with Crimea, with the city of Moscow itself directly funding repairs to the Moskva guided missile cruiser, the Black Sea Fleet s flagship, as well as apartments, health clinics, and schools in Sevastopol. More for younger people maybe. It is more on noisy side, but has rather good proportion of expats to locals, around depending on sport events schedule - you will not feel yourself completely lost, but definitely inside locals.

Hi everyone, is there decent attendance at the bars during the week? I'm staying on Velyka Vasylkivska a few blocks from the Opera house. I definitely will be going out tomorrow night Tuesday and seeking adventure. I guess other questions that come to mind, what time do the locals hit the bars? This topic has been closed to new posts due to inactivity. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one.

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