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It is clear that the U.S.-Israeli decapitation, airpower-centric, and precision strike campaign are again not enough to bring about the two countries’ strategic goals. The United States still finds itself potentially having to commit land forces into its war with Iran, yet many unknowns lurk, including a fragile ceasefire and a U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Setting aside the question of whether U.S. land forces will be committed to the war, the question that remains unknown is how, and to what degree, they would be employed.
The continued relevance of land forces in the 21st century is a hotly debated topic. The proliferation of drone warfare, long-range precision strike, cyber operations, and sensor networks lends to arguments that the battlefield is increasingly transparent and that employing large, massed armies is no longer viable. As a result, large-scale ground combat is passé. New formations like the U.S. Army’s Multidomain Task Force and Mobile Brigade Combat Team, coupled with a new Multidomain Operations doctrine, have sought to replace traditional land forces and land force operations with high-tech capabilities to win wars via strike instead of close combat.
Hope, best intentions, and current U.S. military thought suggest that any ground combat by U.S. forces would be quick, led by robotics and new technology, and be less deadly and destructive than preceding eras of American ground combat. Despite those rosy views of technology’s impact on ground fighting, realistic assessments and relevant case studies portend a much darker future.
Russia’s Donbas campaign in Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 offers useful insights into ground combat. The campaign — consisting of the sieges of Ilovaisk, Donetsk Airport, and Debal’tseve — illustrates four key ideas in ground combat. First, control of the situation is critical to generate politically decisive outcomes in war. Second, it takes a land force to defeat a land force. Third, to generate strategically decisive outcomes, land forces should fight coherent campaigns. Finally, strategic gain often comes through destruction of the enemy force.
The purpose here is not to glorify Russia, President Vladimir Putin, the Donetsk People’s Army, or the Russian military. Instead, the purpose is to spotlight what an effective and truly decisive military campaign looks like. The Donbas campaign should be taught as an archetype campaign in strategy courses, war colleges, and general staff colleges because of the masterful way in which Russian commanders understood their strategic goals, reacted to fluctuations on the battlefield, and modified their plans to compound their own positive tactical outcomes and amplify Ukraine’s negative outcomes to deliver politically decisive battlefield gains. The Minsk II agreement is the political manifestation of Russia’s gains. The deal helped Russia, hurt Ukraine, and sent the West scrambling to learn the lessons of the war.
In the modern post-industrial age, powers like Iran are too robust and resilient to fall to decapitation strikes or in a single decisive military battle. As U.S. policymakers and senior military leaders consider ground combat in Iran, they should remember the positive causal relationship that exists between the campaign and strategy, and that coherent campaigns often contribute to positive, politically decisive outcomes.
The Donbas campaign was traditional — it was an integrated set of battles that Russia sequenced in time, space, and purpose to advance their strategic aims. Russia’s strategic objectives focused on fracturing Kyiv’s control of Ukraine and inserting itself — formally or informally — as the state’s central authority. Initially reliant on a culturally-aligned proxy network, Moscow quickly transitioned to having the Russian army lead the campaign, with their local proxies in support.
Ukraine, on the other hand, fought a reactionary campaign. Kyiv’s strategic objective was also about control. Although Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty was already violated with Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in February and March 2014, Kyiv’s goal during this period was to retain political and cultural control of the Donbas. Defeating the Russian army, expelling those forces, and disarming the Kremlin’s proxies was the critical path Kyiv had to tightrope to reassert its control of the region.
Siege of Ilovaisk
Through the spring and early summer of 2014, skirmishes occurred throughout the Donbas and the Crimean corridor as well as locations along the Black Sea coast like Odesa. Edward Fishman notes that Ilovaisk was the first major battle of the Donbas campaign. The city, home to the confluence of several vital road and rail networks that linked Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts and the Donbas with eastern Russia, quickly became a flashpoint.
In July 2014, Russia’s Donetsk People’s Army took control of Ilovaisk. The Donetsk People’s Army is one of the two major separatist proxy forces that Russian gradually created in eastern Ukraine — the other, less successful one being the Luhansk People’s Army. Reports differ, with some saying that the effort to build the Donetsk People’s Army began during the mid-2000s. Others place it more closely around 2013 to 2014. Nonetheless, the Kremlin tapped into cultural similarities to include ethnicity, language, and religion, as well as criminality, to recruit and build this force. Since the Donbas campaign and the 2022 pseudo-official annexation of Donetsk into Russia, the Kremlin has formally inducted the Donetsk People’s Army into the Russian army as the 1st Army Corps.
On Aug. 10, 2014, several Ukrainian volunteer battalions attacked to retake control of the city, but the Donetsk People’s Army repelled the assault. On Aug. 18, two Ukrainian battalions penetrated the separatist force’s perimeter and established a foothold in Ilovaisk. Four additional Ukrainian battalions came on their heels to help fortify the foothold and oust the Donetsk People’s Army. Russian mechanized forces entered Ukraine on August 24 and linked up with the Donetsk People’s Army at Ilovaisk.
Russian forces and the Donetsk People’s Army then encircled Ilovaisk, trapping the Ukrainian forces and remaining civilians inside. For two days, Russian forces and the Donetsk People’s Army laid siege to the city. The toll was exacting. Ukraine suffered 366 soldiers killed in action, 429 wounded in action, and 300 prisoners of war. In addition, 36 civilians were killed, 600 of the city’s 1,800 homes were destroyed, and an additional 116 buildings were heavily damaged.
The battle’s ferocity and outcome were so alarming that it caused U.S. and European policymakers to intervene and attempt to implement a ceasefire. Ilovaisk was thus, by definition, a decisive battle. Policymakers and intermediaries hammered out a ceasefire — the Minsk Protocol — to put an immediate stop to the fighting and try and find a long-term solution. Despite reaching a deal on Sept. 5, the ceasefire never took hold.
Siege of Donetsk Airport
In late September 2014, likely feeling momentum on their side, the Donetsk People’s Army and Russian forces then moved to seize Donetsk Airport, which Ukrainian forces retook from the Donetsk People’s Army in late May 2014. The Donetsk People’s Army attacked north from the city of Donetsk toward the airport, gradually encircling the facility and severing many of the service roads converging on the airport. Simultaneously, the Donetsk People’s Army penetrated the heart of the airport and fought to control the buildings within the airport facility.
By Oct. 5, the Donetsk People’s Army firmly held the airport’s perimeter and many of the buildings therein. Russian forces and logistics support, meanwhile, flowed to the Donetsk People’s Army. By the end of the month, Ukrainian forces maintained a tenuous hold on the airport’s two terminals and the air traffic control tower. The situation was dire in the newer terminal — the Donetsk People’s Army held the bottom two floors, while Ukrainian forces were isolated on the third floor.
The battle became a siege in November. The Donetsk People’s Army and Russian forces tightened their stranglehold around the airport. A route running to Pisky, a small hamlet adjacent to the airport, allowed Ukrainian forces sporadic logistics, reinforcements, and medical evacuations. Pisky thus also became a target of Donetsk People’s Army and Russian retribution because of Ukrainian basing in the town. The grinding siege of the airport and attacks on Pisky held through December.
The situation changed in the new year. On Jan. 10, the Donetsk People’s Army attacked. The assault sought to eliminate the Ukrainian forces remaining in the terminals and the air traffic control tower. Emblematic of Ukraine’s defense, the tower collapsed on Jan. 12 after months of attacks. It was Ukraine’s last bastion at the airport. Simultaneously, Russian and Donetsk People’s Army cut off Ukrainian access to Pisky. Kyiv’s forces were surrounded and unable to evacuate casualties and get supplies.
In a last-ditch effort to turn the tables on the Donetsk People’s Army and Russian forces, Ukrainian forces attacked on Jan. 17. The attack surprised the Donetsk People’s Army and Russian forces. Early reports indicated that the attack was successful. The reports were premature. The following day, Russia sent another 600 soldiers and special operations forces to reinforce its positions at the airport.
Between Jan. 19 and 21, the Donetsk People’s Army and Russian forces counterattacked. On Jan. 21, the last Ukrainian holdouts were isolated on the terminal’s second floor. Russian special operations forces used explosives to collapse the terminal’s upper floors onto the second floor, killing and injuring more than 50 Ukrainian soldiers. The resulting effect was panic. The surviving Ukrainian defenders scattered. Many were captured as they fled the carnage at airport.
The siege lasted 115 days. By destroying the airport, Russian forces removed a piece of strategic terrain from the map, extended their frontlines further into Ukraine, and reduced the amount of Ukrainian territory under Kyiv’s control. With secure lines of communication from the new front line in Donetsk to the Russian border, the loss of the airport had little strategic or operational impact on Russian forces and the Donetsk People’s Army — the loss of the airport was a negative gain for Russia. By grinding Ukraine’s forces at Donetsk Airport, Russia pushed Kyiv toward strategic exhaustion. Furthermore, Russian and Donetsk People’s Army forces shifted control of the political and military situation toward the Kremlin’s strategic objectives. Russia now had the momentum, and it did not waste it.
Siege of Debal’tseve
Debal’tseve — like Ilovaisk — was a major transportation hub. Having been captured by Russia’s proxies in the early days of the campaign, Debal’tseve had been under Ukrainian control since July 2014. Debal’tseve formed a salient protruding eastward into proxy and Russian-controlled territory. Possessing momentum, the Donetsk People’s Army and Russians moved to encircle the city on Jan. 14. Through January, Russian and Donetsk People’s Army combat was a methodical and deliberate process, seeking to mill Ukrainian forces into submission and force them into ceding control of the city.
Flush with reinforcements, Russian forces and the Donetsk People’s Army initiated a fresh assault in February. Ukrainian forces wilted under the offensive. On Feb. 12, officials from the Trilateral Contact Group began drafting what would become the Minsk II agreement, which sought to end the fighting both at Debal’tseve and across eastern Ukraine. Concurrently, Russia again reinforced its forces in Debal’tseve, sending upwards of 100 tanks and other land forces into the area, and Russian and Donetsk People’s Army forces escalated the assault.
Roughly 2,500 Ukrainian forces began to retreat from the city on Feb. 14. The retreat, like those at Ilovaisk and Donetsk Airport, became chaotic. Russian and the Donetsk People’s Army forces exploited their advantage during the retreat. Russian and the Donetsk People’s Army continued to engage the Ukrainians as they fled. Minsk II went into effect on Feb. 15, while Russian and the Donetsk People’s Army mop-up operations continued through Feb. 18. Once the dust settled, Russian and the Donetsk People’s Army forces controlled Debal’tseve. The siege exacted hundreds of killed and wounded on each side and the combat destroyed most of the city.
Debal’tseve marked the end of Russia’s successful Donbas campaign. Although many smaller battles and engagements took place during the campaign, the sieges of Ilovaisk, Donetsk Airport, and Debal’tseve were the defining features.
The 2014 to 2015 Donbas campaign offers military practitioners and policymakers several instructive lessons pertaining to land wars.
First, control of the situation in warfare remains paramount. Control is generated by taking possession of terrain and remaining engaged with an opponent. Terrain impacts the physical factors of winning and losing in war, but it is also a psychological factor. Territorial control in land wars like the Russo-Ukraine War is a physical representation of a political actor’s sovereignty and authority. If an actor is incapable of retaining or retaking its territory from a hostile actor, then that actor loses a degree of legitimacy. Thus, a war might be fought to drive political changes like removing one government and replacing it with another — the control of territory is a key catalyst for generating that political change. This consideration is apparent during the Donbas campaign. It also resurfaced after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Putin sought to unseat Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Western-leaning government and annihilate — or at least subjugate — the Ukrainian state. Control of Ukraine’s territory was — and remains — the primary mechanism Putin uses to drive toward that policy objective.
This dynamic was also key in Iraq and Syria throughout the operations to eliminate the so-called Islamic State. During its short run as a proto-state, the control of terrain was key to its political control in Iraq and Syria. In both countries, the Islamic State expanded its control of terrain to expand its burgeoning control of the politics, people, and economics. Conversely, the U.S.-led counter-Islamic State strategy focused its military operations on retaking control of territory of the land annexed by the caliphate, and returning control of that land to its rightful governments — in the case of Syria, a U.S.-approved alternative political body.
Second, control results from possessing the capacity to overwhelm an adversary with firepower and manpower at the place and time of need. Duration also matters. Overwhelming firepower and manpower must be persistent. The persistent combination of firepower and manpower compounds the effect of each over time and can generate larger, strategically meaningful success. As the Donbas campaign illustrates, each time Russia and the Donetsk People’s Army understood their control of the situation was slipping, they supplemented their forces with additional firepower and manpower. In doing so, they fended off defeat, regained the initiative, and routed Ukrainian forces.
The Donbas campaign reveals a pattern. Operations organized around four factors can help gain and maintain control of the situation and create strategically relevant battlefield outcomes. Those factors include organizing operations around a guiding purpose, sequencing in space and time, resourcing with firepower and manpower, and systematized to not wither upon contact with an adversary. Russian and Donetsk People’s Army operations in the Donbas in 2014 and 2015 make this clear.
Land forces exploit emerging opportunities created by multidomain and joint force capabilities. Correspondingly, land forces consolidate the gains afforded by those opportunities. Russia’s capacity to quickly dispatch additional forces into each of the Donbas campaign’s three major battles clearly illustrate this point. Large, powerful, and mobile land forces are critical to exploit success, prevent defeat, and contribute to controlling the situation. In short, it takes a land force to defeat a land force. Other services and cross-domain capabilities enable and enhance — but do not replace — a land force and the critical functions it provides.
Furthermore, a robust land force contributes to greater situational awareness. It provides policymakers and military leaders with information about spatial and temporal opportunities, and it develops the situation. Land forces provide real-time, bottom-up refinement to information gathered by modern information communications technology and the vast array of sensors on the ground, in the air, in space, and in cyberspace. Often those non-human means are controlled at levels well above that of formations in need of timely information, quick decisions, and rapid movement. A robust land force — in addition to top-down, high-tech sensors — should be the way in which military forces seek to enhance their access to timely information, instead of parting with close combat forces to acquire high-technology systems.
Third, campaigns should remain at the fore of defeating an adversary’s land forces. Campaigns are the purposeful sequence of battles and operations in time and space anchored to strategic objectives. The Donbas campaign could be considered an emergent campaign. Though the Russian military did not intend to conduct the campaign as a sequenced set of operations in time and space, Russia’s military commanders in eastern Ukraine instinctively understood their purpose: first, control the situation in the Donbas by eliminating Ukrainian forces in the region; second, gain territorial and political control throughout the area; and third, thereby allow the Kremlin to unofficially annex the territory into the Russian Federation at the conclusion of the campaign, and formally in the months following its February 2022 full-scale invasion.
Russian commanders likely recognized the impact of their success at Ilovaisk and understood the seriousness of Ukraine’s strategic situation and its ability to continue with major combat operations. Russian military leaders sought to heighten the negative impact on Ukraine’s government and military, while compounding the positive impact for Russia by taking Donetsk Airport. As Russia’s success at the airport became clear, the pattern of situational recognition and exploitation repeated. Consequently, Russian forces moved on to Debal’tseve. Degraded by the losses at Ilovaisk and Donetsk airport, the siege of Debal’tseve finally broke Kyiv’s ability to continue resisting. Consequently, Ukraine came back to the negotiating table and ended the conflict on terms favorable to Moscow.
Fourth, the campaign illustrates the importance of setting aside the notions of rational and irrational actors, economic decision making, and normative warfare and embracing the concept of positive aims and negative goals. Positive aims reflect rational, economic, and norms-based decision-making. Negative goals, however, are the opposite. As the physical destruction of cities and infrastructure during the Donbas campaign demonstrated, an actor can gain by destroying an object if that destruction makes the object worthless to their adversary.
By destroying Donetsk Airport, for example, Russian forces and the Donetsk People’s Army rendered a valuable aerial node worthless. Thus, aside from the symbolic value of the airport, its destruction made it pointless to try and retake it in any subsequent operation. As a result, the airport’s destruction denied both sides an airfield — typically a high-value commodity in war. By defeating the Ukrainians at the airport, destroying the facility, advancing their front lines to that location, and further reinforcing those lines, Russia improved its strategic position relative to its policy goals and those of Ukraine. Though not discussed in this article, the same pattern occurred at Luhansk airport in July and August 2014 and several times after Russia’s 2022 invasion.
The concept of gaining through destruction, though deplorable to a normative perspective, cannot be ignored or forgotten because of its moral repugnance. This oversight often leads to serious strategic, operational, and tactical missteps in crisis, conflict, and war.
The 2014 to 2015 Donbas campaign provides a powerful lesson about ground combat in large-scale combat operations. Furthermore, the campaign demands respect within the pantheon of great campaigns like Napoleon’s Ulm-Austerlitz campaign and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign during the U.S. Civil War. Russia’s handling of the situation is a masterful example of capitalizing on emerging situations to construct a politically decisive military campaign.
Russia’s campaign was indeed decisive — it forced political decisions in Minsk II that contributed to Putin’s Ukraine policy. Russian gains included destabilizing Ukraine, interfering with the Ukraine-NATO partnership, legitimizing the coercive power of the Russian military and the Russian way of war as an instrument of Russian foreign policy, providing forward positioned access, basing, and resourcing to support follow-on operations in Ukraine, and allowing additional time to prepare for such operations.
At the same time, the campaign alerted U.S. and European political and military leaders to Russian military capabilities. Russia’s effective coupling of reconnaissance, communications, and long-range strike with mechanized operations at the operational and tactical levels demonstrated the importance of combined arms warfare to operations being fought over the control of territory. Additionally, the campaign illustrated the role that properly led and integrated proxy forces can fulfil in traditional military campaigns. Russia’s ability to infest the Donbas with a mix of land forces from its own forces and those of the Donetsk People’s Army created an insurmountable problem for the much smaller Ukrainian armed forces. The issue of manpower, in turn, has become a central sticking point inhibiting Ukraine from turning the tide against Russia in the ongoing war.
Conversely, some of Russia’s gains also proved beneficial for Ukraine, Europe, and the United States. Russia’s perceived military dominance and strategic deftness caused the United States, many European countries, and NATO to heavily invest in the Ukrainian security sector, developing measures, weapon systems, and communications processes to offset or defeat Russian capabilities and capacity.
Moreover, instead of fracturing NATO-Ukraine relations, the 2014 invasion accelerated the partnership. NATO established a Comprehensive Assistance Package for Ukraine in 2016 to enhance Kyiv’s capacity to fight and defend itself. Likewise, the United States developed its own strategic partnership with Ukraine, including establishing the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine — a train, advise, and assist formation — in Yavoriv, Ukraine in 2015. When coupled with Ukraine’s dogged resistance and Zelensky’s determined leadership, these two considerations — though certainly not the only international contributions to bolster Ukrainian security — were two important catalysts for the country’s staunch resistance to the 2022 invasion. Additionally, these factors continue to vex Putin’s policy ambitions for Ukraine.
At this point, the lasting strategic impact of the Donbas campaign remains to be seen. As the current phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War flows through its fourth year, the war continues with no end in sight. If Ukraine prevails, the campaign can be seen as a great campaign within a lost war. It could be seen as the spark to a Euro-Atlantic political and military awakening that led to Russia’s geostrategic weakening in Europe and in international politics. However, if Russia wins the conflict, maintains control of the territory it has taken from Ukraine, and uses it for yet another springboard for continued attempts to destroy Ukraine, the Donbas campaign could be seen as a latent inflection point for Russian dominance in European security. The campaign might also be seen by a host of states as further justification for the maintenance of cultural proxies in neighboring states in which shared culture bleeds across international boundaries to maintain strategic leverage in those states. Nonetheless, the Donbas campaign, largely hidden within the litany of conflict that has consumed the world in the ensuing years, is a classic campaign worthy of recognition, reflection, and continued study.
Amos C. Fox, Ph.D., is professor of practice at Arizona State University’s Future Security Initiative and a contributing editor with War on the Rocks. He is also managing editor of Small Wars Journal, host of the Revolution in Military Affairs podcast, and a retired U.S. Army officer.
Image: Mstyslav Chernov via Wikimedia Commons
