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Can Insurgency Give Ukraine an Edge?

Insurgency has become the world's most common form of warfare, but it rarely offers a path to early victory in a conflict. In fact, these campaigns of resistance have often become endurance contests that take decades to resolve.

But according to RAND's James Dobbins, insurgency could be an effective tool in Ukraine's fight against Russian occupiers—if it is used as a complement to conventional battle. When employed in this manner, insurgency can yield much quicker results by threatening an enemy's lines of communication and drawing off its forces from the main battle.

“Insurgency alone offers, at best, the prospect of distant success at tremendous cost,” Dobbins says. “When combined with a stalemated but still active conventional battle, however, it may provide the defender the decisive edge.”

More RAND Insights on the War in Ukraine

• So far, Ukraine appears to have Russia beat in the information war. But this is not a reason for U.S. leaders to deprioritize investments in informational capabilities, warn RAND's Alyssa Demus and Christopher Paul. Russian disinformation may already be gaining traction among some segments of the American public, and more propaganda is sure to come from Moscow.
• In an interview, Paul discussed Russia's model for disseminating propaganda. Just this week, the Kremlin called footage uncovering horrors in the Ukrainian city of Bucha a “forgery aimed at denigrating the Russian army.” These claims align with Russia's unrelenting use of disinformation to distract, distort, dismay, and obfuscate, says Paul.
• Also this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke remotely at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council. He questioned the international body's lack of action in the face of growing evidence of Russian war crimes. The security council's failure to act should not surprise anyone, says RAND's Rafiq Dossani. It is “merely the latest demonstration of a two-decade-long trend of the growing ineffectiveness of global multilateral institutions.”
• How might the war in Ukraine eventually end? The answer comes down to three “internal clocks,” says RAND's Raphael Cohen. Ukraine's clock revolves around how long it will continue to fight; Russia's clock will keep ticking as long as Putin feels he is securely in power, and if his military can endure its losses; and the West's clock is about whether and when to intervene in the conflict.
• Cohen and coauthor Gian Gentile write that, while history can offer lessons about the war in Ukraine, those who draw on the past would do well to consider how today's conflict differs. They should also resist the temptation to view historical analogies as a “playbook” to divine the future. “Treating them as such can have the opposite effect,” Gentile and Cohen write.