A former chief commander of Russian forces blasted the Kremlin’s intelligence services last week for their early performance in Ukraine, saying they prompted an unprepared Moscow to launch its full-scale invasion.
The remarks by Vladimir Chirkin, a colonel general who led Russia’s ground forces from 2012 to 2013, are unusually critical for a top Russian military official, even among those no longer serving.
“Everyone, if you recall, started saying in February 2022 that the war would be over in three days. We’ll beat them all now,” said Chirkin in an interview on November 27 with Russian radio outlet RBC.
“But unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. I would give our entire Russian intelligence community a failing grade,” he added. The general’s criticism was highlighted among Ukrainian circles this week by Denis Kazanskyi, a Ukrainian political journalist.
In the RBC interview, Chirkin said that Moscow had “traditionally” miscalculated the balance of power, underestimating its enemy and overestimating the performance of its own forces.
“To be fair, I don’t intend to criticize anyone, but in my opinion, Russia was once again unprepared for war, as it had been in previous years and centuries,” he said.
Chirkin said that Russian leadership had been misled into thinking that 70% of Ukraine’s population supported a pro-Russian government.
“It turned out to be exactly the opposite. 30% for us and 70% against,” he said. “During the first few weeks, we were taught a seriously cruel lesson.”
Chirkin also said Russian forces likely suffered in the early stages of the invasion from the “Tbilisi syndrome,” which describes the situation in which troops are afraid to make tactical decisions without orders from their superiors.
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Chirkin’s assessment aligns largely with Western and Ukrainian analyses of the war’s early months, which found that Russia severely misjudged its ability to seize the Kyiv region. After weeks of confusion among its troops, poor logistics, and a failure to achieve air superiority, the Kremlin withdrew from the capital area in late March.
The general’s candor appeared to surprise even his interviewer, RBC’s Yuri Tamantsev.
“To be honest, I didn’t expect such frankness at the very beginning of our conversation,” Tamantsev said.
Russia has outlawed sharing “false information” about the war in Ukraine, which can carry a sentence of up to 15 years in prison. Human rights groups, however, say the law has been used to punish Russians who protest or criticize the invasion.
Still, Chirkin, whose military rank is the rough equivalent of a three-star general in NATO, stopped short of publicly finding fault with Moscow’s stated premise for invading Ukraine.
The rest of his interview with Tamantsev focused on how Russian warfare has evolved over the last few years and how its troops might achieve Moscow’s vision of victory.
Chirkin was stripped of his rank and command in 2013, when he was accused of bribery. He was convicted in August 2015 of accepting a bribe of 450,000 rubles and sentenced to a labor camp for five years, but the sentence was commuted in December.
The colonel general, who said the bribe was a result of fraud by his subordinates, had his rank reinstated.
