World War II Shows How Russia’s Siege Warfare Will Unfold In Ukraine

Modern urban siege warfare, first experienced in World War II, is a grim exercise in human suffering. On one side, participants endeavor to dismantle a city and kill the occupants. On the other, the trapped simply endure, as their living rooms become front-line firing positions.

This is the grim fate awaiting Ukraine’s cities and larger towns. For Ukraine, each city’s mission is to hold out for as long as they can, draining Russian military resources until Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, quits or meets his demise in some other way.

It is no easy endeavor.

The invading Russians might do well to recall their past experiences with urban warfare, remembering how Soviet cities stood tall when invading German forces, stopping at city gates, dug in to let artillery, air power and “terror and hunger” prepare trapped cities for an easy seizure.

Mr. Putin has forgotten that city defense still resonates throughout the eastern portion of the old Soviet Union. Every Ukrainian—and every Russian—knows the great siege stories. Besieged Ukrainian cities know what is coming and have something to measure themselves against. In World War II, St. Petersburg, Sevastopol, Odessa, Volgograd, and many other former Soviet cities stood fast against assault, holding out for months—even years—as they tied down invading armies and helped exhaust the ferocious Axis ground assault.

In World War II, urban resistance carried an enormous price. When Leningrad—now the modern city of St. Petersburg—was cut off, ten times the number of those who died at Hiroshima perished during the 872 day siege. In the end, the cost was worth it. The big urban sieges drained German lives, sapped German momentum in the east, and helped the Soviet Union survive the darkest days of the war.

Holding Out Is Key:

The longer each isolated Ukraine city can hang on, the more Russian forces will be ensnared in the draining routine of an urban siege. With sanctions starting to tighten, each shell, bomb, and tank Russians expend on an encircled city is a hard-to-replace loss, unable to be converted into additional territory and advances into Western Ukraine and beyond.

Modern sieges demand enormous numbers of troops—manpower Russia currently lacks. Mr. Putin should know this. Between late 1999 and early 2000, some 25,000 Russian soldiers needed more than a month to take Grozny, a modestly-sized city of around 200,000 people that was defended by a rag-tag force of 3,000 to 6,000 irregulars.

Against a more numerous and more professional defense, Putin needs far more troops and far more time to take Ukraine’s big cities. If continuously contested, Russia will be hard-pressed to make much progress. Old World War II casualty numbers tell how things may go if the big Ukraine cities fight it out—In 1941, a besieged Odessa fought on for two months against a force of almost 300,000, inflicting over 90,000 casualties before finally succumbing.

Russia’s army—and Russia’s political leadership—simply cannot survive a similar toll.

But it will be a pitiless grind of endurance, and battle of wills for both sides. It is playing out already. Mariupol, a town of over 400,000, has already been under siege for two weeks. Trapped while still relatively unprepared, the city is already running low on food, water, and fuel. But it still holds. If city leaders can continue to mobilize the population, collectively turning the citizenry towards fortifying the city and focusing municipal workers towards scavenging food and organizing community rationing, the city can hold out even longer.

But it will be a brutal, agonizing, and dirty task.

In an urban warfare, nobody emerges unscathed. In besieged cities, morality becomes a luxury and an early casualty of war. Every day, city leaders in besieged towns will face the agonizing challenge of encouraging many of their citizens to keep holding out, and to keep accepting death and suffering. Tricks, traps, and deception are the order of the day, and, to prevent their town’s destruction, leaders of besieged cities will have little mercy for those who break or flag under the strain of fighting a seemingly hopeless battle. In sieges, cities do what they need to do to survive.

For Ukrainian cities, the initial days of privation will be the worst. In a modern siege, the weak, the vulnerable and the medicine-dependent die first, while those who remain slump into lethargy. As hunger bites deeper, the unity and shared purpose that fueled the early days of the war will be strained as once-vibrant communities dwindle down to starving individuals, desperate for their next meal or a sip of fresh water.

Ukraine military leaders are already facing agonizing decisions over prioritizing ammunition resupply instead of food, and struggle to divert weakening military resources from defensive positions to maintain fragile evacuation cordons for increasingly weak occupants.

Tight blockades can force cities into submission rather quickly. But with far too few soldiers mobilized, Russia will be unable to fully lock down most of the large besieged cities. Supplies will cross Russia’s leaky cordons, slipping through Russia’s impoverished and increasingly easily-bribed gangs of armed brigands.

Prepare Or Die:

As Ukraine sieges play out, morale and city organization will be critical factors. It is one of the reasons why Russian forces are now targeting mayors and other municipal leaders. While Ukraine communities are mobilizing on a vast scale to defend larger cities, and Ukraine civilians are working to support community needs for fuel and other things, active civil leaders are pushing to get more done. But those vibrant municipal bosses—from Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on down—need to occasionally look up from their pressing work and consider their successors. Every leader must have viable succession plans, and they must give alternative leaders opportunities to gain the public profile and experience they need to seamlessly take over the reigns from a dead—or disappeared—president, mayor or other leader.

In the cities, food and water will be critical. With Russian forces now hunting and hitting large food storage sites and preparation centers, Ukrainians must collect rations and distribute food storage and food preparation facilities throughout their endangered urban areas. Once the city is cut off, rationing, making food distribution as fair as possible, will be tremendously important in keeping the urban areas united and going.

City-dwellers will also need help collecting, purifying and storing water. As water supply systems collapse, municipal doctors must be ready to treat waterborne disease as desperate citizens turn to whatever water sources they can find.

Just like food and water, ammunition is life for a besieged city. By now, every person entering a Ukrainian city should be carrying in as much ammunition as they can—small-arms magazines need to be taped under every vehicle and explosives carried in every handbag. Transportation routes for guns, anti-tank weapons and other gear need to be arranged and tested.

Evacuation of the young, the weak, and the medicine-dependent must move forward with greater urgency. In the larger cities, citizens that simply cannot survive a siege must be evacuated west now, before they are stuck behind the lines.

To keep up morale, Ukraine’s central government must constantly explain why seemingly hopeless citizen sacrifice in the besieged cities matters. It is a hard message to get across, but Russia is making this task far easier than it could be. With Russia’s impoverished and militarized brigands roughing up occupied cities, looting, kidnapping and shooting occupied Ukrainians, publicizing Mr. Putin’s reign of terror in the occupied cites only reinforces the message that, for Ukraine, time means freedom and survival.

Every extra day a city holds out, Russia’s conscript-powered army exhausts itself, while other Ukraine cities get more time to prepare, organizing themselves to try and outlast Mr. Putin’s viability as Russia’s leader.

The Clock Is Ticking:

While diplomats tend to the delicate business of finding “off-ramps” for Putin to back out of his disastrous invasion, there are few “off-ramps” for a besieged city. The only options are capitulation, death or survival.

The clock is ticking. The longer Ukraine cities suffer, standing tall against Russian aggression, pressure will build both within Russia and within civilized nations to “do something.”

Mr. Putin, as he races to break Ukrainian will before his boyars revolt, may decide make an example of a defeated city—extracting massive reprisals or wiping a particularly irksome town off of the map. In turn, Mr. Putin could get desperate, lashing out at NATO or turning to chemical or nuclear weaponry to kill Ukraine’s top leadership and break entrenched city resistance.

But other clocks are ticking as well. Civilized countries, unused to the brutality of modern urban warfare, will face increasing pressure to intervene directly, resisting Russia’s ongoing effort to impose a nihilistic “Putinism” on the free world. And as Ukraine’s fighting cities continue to reveal the Russian Army is made more of paper than of tiger, patience in the face of Mr. Putin’s constant stream of threats and provocations will get old and wear dangerously thin.