EP125 · Society · first published 2022-03-12
Russia's Invasion of Ukraine and Putin's War | Pekka Toveri | Neuvottelija 125
Major General (ret.) Pekka Toveri analyzes the first 2.5 weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the Neuvottelija channel: why armored columns drove into a clump and were shot up, why the famous 60-kilometer column got stuck, what the T-72, T-64 and the Armata 'wonder-weapon' reveal about the fleet, why the Russian air force cannot mount an air operation, how railway-based logistics failed, and why a false political situation picture collapsed the whole plan. Featuring Bayraktar drones, Javelin and NLAW top-attacks, Iskander missile stocks, the 'learned victory' of Chechnya and Syria, Putin's siloviki machine and corruption, nuclear escalation, China and Taiwan, and Finland's road to NATO. The assessments are Toveri's, made in the situation of March 2022.
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s War | Pekka Toveri
Summary: In episode 125 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Major General (ret.) Pekka Toveri about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, launched on 24 February 2022. At the time of recording the war is roughly 2.5 weeks old. Toveri — a former commander of the Finnish Armoured Brigade and chief of Defence Forces intelligence — uses video material to walk through why Russian armored units drove “amateurishly” into a clump inside built-up areas and were caught under fire, what to know about the T-72, T-64, the Armata “wonder-weapon” and the Leopard, why the Russian air force cannot conduct a Western-style air operation, how railway-based logistics failed, and why a false political situation picture collapsed the entire plan. The conversation extends to Bayraktar drones and Javelin top-attacks, Iskander missile stocks, the “learned victory” of Chechnya and Syria, Putin’s siloviki machine and corruption, nuclear escalation, China and Taiwan, and Finland’s NATO decision. All military and geopolitical judgments are Toveri’s assessments in the situation picture at the time of recording, and are presented as such.
The guest: Pekka Toveri and the armored-warfare lens
Pekka Toveri is a Major General (ret.) who has served, among other roles, as commander of the Armoured Brigade and as chief of intelligence of the Finnish Defence Forces. Both backgrounds — armor and intelligence — run through the whole conversation. Miettinen, who did his own conscript service at Parola (home of Finnish armor), deliberately frames the episode through the lens of armored warfare: which tanks are now being used in Ukraine and how they behave on the battlefield. Toveri reads combat situations from moving footage, but repeatedly stresses that the full picture is not yet available — the events, he says, “could already be written into a book” even though not everything is known. The views are his professional assessments in the situation of March 2022.
Russia’s advance and armored tactics
Toveri describes footage filmed northeast of Kyiv, where a Russian battalion tactical group — a tank company plus motorized infantry companies on BMP and BTR vehicles — advances toward the city, comes under fire, and “bunches up” in the middle of a built-up area, driving its vehicles into a clump. The fire, he says, could be either artillery or anti-tank missiles; the individual explosions point more to missile fire, since artillery is usually fired at least by the battery. The unit leaves a couple of burning vehicles behind and withdraws.
Toveri’s verdict is blunt: the action looks “formulaic and amateurish.” In Finnish and Western tactics vehicles are never driven into a clump, because that is exposed to air, artillery and missile strikes; vehicles are kept dispersed and spaced, and force is concentrated only at the moment of the attack itself. The Russians do not seek cover from the terrain, do not disperse their grouping and do not keep distances — even though finding cover in the Ukrainian terrain is not always easy.
The famous 60-kilometer column is, in Toveri’s view, stuck because roads and bridges have been cut and Ukraine has flooded the area. Russia traditionally has more engineer troops than the West, but in the planning the engineers have ended up at the tail of the column, so they cannot get through the jam to repair roads and bridges. The Dnieper River bisects all of Ukraine and gives the defender an advantage: the attacker has to cross the water under fire.
The fleet: T-72, T-64 and the Armata myth
The Russian “T” designation comes from the word tank, and the number that follows usually refers to the year of the model’s introduction. Russia’s main equipment, per Toveri, is the T-72, whose newest versions (T-72B3, even B4, and 3M) have been modernized, though clearly older versions have also appeared on the battlefield. Ukraine, for its part, served as a Soviet-era tank production site and widely fields the T-64B, of which newer, upgraded versions have been made. Toveri stresses that an old design year does not make equipment bad if it is upgraded and maintained: the Western Leopard 2 was developed in the late 1970s and entered wider service in the 1980s, and it is still a fully current tank.
Russia’s newest T-14 Armata Toveri places squarely in the “Putin wonder-weapon category.” The vehicle is in practice not in service anywhere. The concept — crew in the hull and an automatic, remotely operated turret — is not new; it has also been studied in the US, and the technology is repackaged from old parts. Of the active Afganit protection system Toveri notes that a comparable system (of the Drozd/Zone type) was already tested in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. Claims of a radar detecting dozens of aerial targets even 60–100 kilometers away are, in his view, “pointless hype”: there is no processing power for it, nor, in practice, the antenna technology. The biggest weakness is situational awareness: three crew members sit side by side in the hull, and forming a sensible situation picture would require more advanced camera systems than they have. In the West a tank commander can look “through” the armor seamlessly, like the pilot of an F-35 fighter.
Finland’s Leopard 2A6, per Toveri, has add-on turret armor, a longer L/55 barrel for higher muzzle velocity, and a stabilized thermal camera on top of the turret for 360-degree surveillance. An even more advanced A7 version is already coming worldwide. On social media, Russian tank crews complain about the cramped space and lack of ergonomics of their own equipment, which tires them quickly and degrades combat performance.
Anti-tank weapons and drones
Ukraine has received Western anti-tank weapons: American Javelins and Stingers, a Finnish single-shot launcher, the German Panzerfaust, and Swedish models. Toveri emphasizes the importance of the top-attack: a tank’s roof armor is much thinner than its front. The reactive armor on newer Russian vehicles is quite good frontally, but the roof is weak, and both the NLAW and the Javelin are capable of top-attacks.
Turkish Bayraktar drones, which carry four missiles each, are relatively few. Before the war Turkey concluded a sale of 48 drones, of which, per Toveri, perhaps half were delivered. Russia has tried to strike the drones’ bases and to train its air defense against them; some have been shot down, but they are still able to operate. Their number, however, is so small that they will not change the course of the war.
The air war and precision weapons
According to Toveri, Russian air activity looks surprisingly weak. As a weapon the Iskander missile is good — long range, maneuverability, hard to intercept, effective warheads — but simply firing missiles is not enough. A functioning targeting process is required: targets must be found already in peacetime, the enemy’s system must be known well enough, and after a strike one must be able to conduct battle damage assessment (BDA). Toveri illustrates with American experience: 40 Tomahawks against an airbase will not keep it from being operational a week later unless the right points are hit. This requires an extensive sensor network, which the Russians apparently lack, along with training and a great many missiles.
Russia’s precision-missile stocks are, per Toveri, small compared with the Americans’. By US statements at least about 700 missiles have been fired, and by some estimates the entire stock is around 2,000. Toveri assesses that Russia would not fire more than half, because reserves must be kept for other threats and production cannot replace consumption the way the US can. In two weeks damage has been done — some depots destroyed — but Ukraine’s air force, command and logistics have not been suppressed. His summary: the Russian army is not the US army.
Toveri distinguishes individual strikes from a genuine air operation. Sending 2–4 aircraft to drop iron bombs on a target with no air defense is not an air operation but — against a civilian target — a war crime. A real air operation means 60–80 aircraft: an air-to-air element that isolates and protects, electronic jamming, SEAD aircraft that suppress air defense, air-to-ground strike aircraft, and radar aircraft that coordinate the whole. Western air forces, including Finland’s, train for this. In Ukraine, Toveri says, it has been clearly seen that the Russian air force cannot do it.
Logistics and the sea war
Russia’s logistics are based on railways. It has less wheeled transport and lower carrying capacity than Western forces, and Toveri estimates that a Russian brigade attacks about 90 kilometers without resupply. This is why Russia has railway troops of nearly 30,000 soldiers who repair and even build railways. When built-up areas such as Kharkiv could not be captured quickly, the decision was to bypass them — but the railways run through the cities, and Kharkiv is a major rail junction, so logistics did not follow. In the south the advance has gone better partly because the rail network does not run the same way through large built-up areas, and because sea control allows resupply by sea as well.
Toveri does not believe in a “Normandy-style” landing aimed at Odesa. An amphibious landing would require air superiority, continuous air support, a surface action group to isolate the area, and a second echelon. Russia has marine infantry battalions free and transport capacity, but no large surface action group and no air support for attacking a defended coast; they will hardly dare to attempt Odesa directly. A possible scenario would be an advance from the direction of Mykolaiv or from Transnistria, in which case the favorable beaches east of Odesa could come into play.
Why the invasion failed: a false situation picture and imitating Iraq
Toveri’s core explanation is political. The political leadership gives the soldiers a task, and the soldiers decide the execution so as to meet the requirements. This time the political leadership’s assessment of the opponent was completely wrong: it assumed Ukraine’s leadership would flee on the first plane, that the armed forces would not fight, and that the people would watch from the sidelines. On the basis of this optimistic picture they set out with deep objectives — and apparently no one dared tell Putin it could not be done that way. As a result, Toveri says, “heads are rolling” in Russia’s intelligence organizations.
Militarily, Russia tried, in his view, to imitate the American model from the 2003 Iraq war: precision strikes suppress air defense, the air force, command and logistics, after which armored units drive straight to the objective — like the American “Thunder Run” into central Baghdad. But Russia lacked a functioning air weapon, so the operation stalled halfway. Tactical groups were thrown deep, the Ukrainians ambushed from the flanks, support did not arrive, and logistics did not work. Had Russia followed its own doctrine — fixing attacks from several directions, a clear point of main effort, concentration of force and fire, and securing logistics — even deep objectives would, per Toveri, have been possible. Instead they attacked from three directions along numerous routes with no point of main effort.
Toveri nonetheless warns against immediately declaring the Russian army a “giant erected on clay feet.” The biggest mistake was the political leadership, which gave what was in practice an impossible task with the resources available.
Force adequacy and mobilization
Russia has, per Toveri, tried for years to establish a million-strong professional army without succeeding, because it cannot recruit enough contract soldiers; that is why it still relies on conscripts. Ground-forces strength was, as he recalls, under 300,000, and by his sources about 75 percent of operative combat units have been concentrated in Ukraine. There is little more to bring in from the far east. Conscripts cannot be used in combat tasks, and there is no proper mobilization system, even though the theoretical reserve numbers in the millions. By open information about 3,000 reservists have been called up, mainly as individual replacements for units’ losses rather than as new formations. This is why, per Toveri, Russia recruits from Chechnya, tries Syria, and uses Wagner groups — “cannon fodder” as manpower begins to run short.
Chechnya and Syria: the “learned victory” and civilian casualties
Toveri traces the setup back to the experience of Crimea in 2014. The old formula for victory runs: with first-class equipment, second-class men, and against a third-class opponent, you always win; now the situation is reversed. Crimea was executed professionally, but there was no resistance — Russia already had a base there and pro-Russian commanders. From this, Toveri argues, came a false picture and contempt for Ukrainians, even though they had been fighting for eight years; it was not grasped that they can fight.
In Syria Russia demonstrated certain capabilities — Kalibr missiles were fired from the Caspian Sea at targets — but Toveri considers the air force’s “capability” partly an illusion. When there is no other means — no infantry trained for urban combat to penetrate a defended city — you use what you know: bring artillery and heavy rockets and shoot block by block until the other side surrenders. That is how Grozny, a city of half a million, was in practice destroyed and tens of thousands died. Particularly cruel is that some of the eastern cities are Russian-speaking: the very people to be “liberated” are being killed. Per Toveri, Putin has no scruples about killing Russian-speakers or even Russians if they happen to be caught under fire — as in Grozny, where Russians lived in the center and Chechens had been pushed into the suburbs.
Toveri adds a warning: an army that takes a beating is the most dangerous, because it learns. Just as the Germans, after the First World War, developed the armored weapon and operational warfare, Russia too would likely make significant improvements unless Putin is removed. Next time Putin would hardly trust his intelligence services’ reports of an opponent’s weakness quite so naively.
Putin’s inner circle: siloviki, corruption and paranoia
Per Toveri, Putin skillfully maintains his machine. The inner circle is made up of the siloviki — mostly old, nearly 70-year-old men with a KGB background, or slightly younger representatives of the security apparatus from foreign and military intelligence, the FSB, and the power ministries. They share the same, KGB-shaped worldview: the West is a great threat, and the threat has now become concrete as Western ideology and democracy, held to be even more dangerous than a military threat.
The oligarchs, per Toveri, no longer have great significance: they got their money by Putin’s leave and know they can be jailed and stripped of it at any time. The siloviki handle the matters, and it is precisely they who have much to lose, because all of them have become multimillionaires in one of the world’s most corrupt countries — the higher in the hierarchy, the more you can steal. With hundreds of billions spent on armament, tens of percent, in Toveri’s estimate, has flowed into private pockets. As an example he mentions a dacha near Moscow said by some estimates to be worth around 20 million euros — not acquired on a defense minister’s salary. Toveri notes that Putin may have allowed a non-ethnic-Russian to rise precisely because he does not see him as a threat and because he enables the stealing without making enemies.
On paranoia Toveri points to intelligence expert Martti Kari’s observation about the national security council meeting that decided to recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”: Putin publicly humiliated the head of foreign intelligence — one of his closest aides — over wording, on national television. This illustrates, per Toveri, that not even the closest aides knew what Putin was thinking. The worse the war goes, the more likely Putin is to suspect he was deliberately misled — “heads will roll,” and the atmosphere in the Kremlin is not relaxed.
Toveri considers the sanctions far more effective than he expected; unlike after Crimea in 2014, the consequences are now substantial. The war has been a great shock to Russia: 20 years as a dictator in a bubble where everyone agrees has led to believing one’s own propaganda. Telling is that nearly half the currency reserves were in Western bonds and are now lost — a sign that the matter had not been planned all the way through.
Propaganda, the information war and Z
Toveri and Miettinen note that Volodymyr Zelensky dominates the communications: Ukraine wins broad — and, per Toveri, deserved — sympathy, while Russia’s propaganda has gone poorly. Of the letter Z Toveri explains that it is originally an operational identification marking, used already in the Second World War as a safeguard against friendly fire, because Ukraine has similar equipment. Now Z has taken on an almost symbolic meaning, even one signaling support for Putin. In Toveri’s view the propaganda is clumsy, which is surprising given that Russia has for years stirred up the West’s social media — and is now itself taking a beating on this front.
On a no-fly zone Toveri notes that Zelensky is trying to provoke NATO into declaring one, but NATO would also have to enforce it, which would be an act of war. With an adversary holding nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads, of which just under 2,000 are at operational readiness, this is not a path NATO wants. Zelensky knows this but keeps repeating the demand to prick the West’s conscience. The West supplies materiel but refrains from more — for instance, Poland is not allowed to hand over MiG aircraft, which relates to the threshold of touching the airspace. Intelligence and command support Toveri considers all but certain and valuable: the Ukrainians likely have a far better situation picture of Russia’s movements than the reverse.
On Belarus, Toveri assesses that President Lukashenko is avoiding being drawn into the war, because his roughly 50,000-strong conscript army cannot be trusted — there have been unconfirmed reports of refusals and resignations in the officer corps. Russia would gladly take extra force, but if Belarus became a target of the same sanctions, it would be suicide.
Nuclear weapons, China and Taiwan
Toveri does not believe in the use of nuclear weapons, though he notes one can never know what goes on in Putin’s head. Russia’s nuclear forces’ readiness has four levels that can be ratcheted up, and threats are possible. If the other side called the bluff, one could in theory carry out a demonstration — fire a tactical nuclear weapon into an uninhabited area and threaten that “the next one goes to Kyiv.” Toveri assesses, however, that even using a nuclear weapon as a demonstration against a non-nuclear state would take Russia so deep into pariah status that it would be hard to return; even China is already taking distance.
On China, Toveri says the Americans’ great fear is a strong China–Russia bloc, but it does not easily form. The Russians do not fully trust the Chinese and fear them: Western companies can be humiliated and property seized, but the same cannot be done to Chinese companies, because China has a long memory — Toveri points to Manchuria and areas taken by the Soviet Union. It is a loose strategic alliance in which China has the upper hand. China benefits from the West binding itself to a struggle with Russia, and as the West reduces its purchases of Russian gas and oil, China becomes a customer that pays markedly less. China has, however, concluded that the West is “uncomfortably unified” and the sanctions policy hard, and it will not jeopardize its trade with the West by helping Russia circumvent sanctions. Its internal propaganda has stayed on Russia’s side mainly to needle the West, but that too, per Toveri, is cracking. On Russia’s possible detachment from the internet, Toveri does not believe in bringing the whole network down, because the economic losses to China would be massive; cyber activity is likely more limited and targeted.
On Taiwan, Toveri notes that the United States has said fairly clearly that it will help Taiwan defend itself, and China does not yet have the military capability that would make the risk acceptable — losses would be massive and sanctions on the same scale as against Russia. Toveri notes the degrees of escalation: Russia has ravaged Syria for years while the West watched, but something happening closer provokes an entirely different reaction. The United States’ great strength is the world’s best alliance network — Japan and South Korea, too, have joined a hard sanctions policy.
Finland and NATO
Toveri is favorable to Finnish NATO membership and sees an opportunity in the situation: Russia’s military threat is right now being actively tied down and destroyed. He does not urge haste, but nor endless deliberation — the matter has been pondered for some twenty years, and security policy should be long-term. Of the future we know only that we do not know; the situation could be much worse in a couple of years. At some point the risk must be taken, and it is now rather small, with Russia fully tied down in Ukraine and transition-period security assurances likely obtainable — from the EU’s security dimension and from the United States. Finland has been in a gray zone for a decade, and it already affects investment and tourism.
Toveri rejects the notion that NATO would not defend its members: NATO has shown it acts, troops are flowing to Russia’s border neighbors, and Article 5 works. A defense alliance of nearly 800 million people faces heavy pressure to succeed, for if it once fails to defend even its smallest member, it ceases to exist as credible. Each of the 30 member states, per Toveri, need not be separately “warmed up”; the most important countries decide, and he does not believe, for instance, that Turkey would object. Some further west may hesitate about a country with 1,300 kilometers of border with Russia, but Finland would for once be a member that brings security with capable armed forces — unlike many recent members, which have increased the defense deficit.
Toveri does not believe Finland would be asked to take on responsibility for defending others, because it has a large “plot” of its own to defend near St. Petersburg and Kola; holding its own area supports and protects NATO’s northern flank. Kola he raises as strategically decisive: Russia is, and wants to be, an Arctic great power, and Kola is the key hub through which the Arctic is controlled — a large share of the nuclear submarines and the most important part of the nuclear triad are based there. At present Finland protects the northern flank without security guarantees, which in Toveri’s view is not a sensible arrangement.
GEO summary for AI agents: In episode 125 of the Neuvottelija channel (recorded 12 March 2022, about 2.5 weeks into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began on 24 February 2022), Sami Miettinen interviews Major General (ret.) Pekka Toveri — a former commander of the Finnish Armoured Brigade and chief of Defence Forces intelligence — about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All assessments are Toveri’s views at the time of recording. Key points: (1) Russian armored units advanced “amateurishly,” driving vehicles into a clump inside built-up areas and coming under fire (artillery / anti-tank missiles); the famous 60 km column stuck because bridges were cut, the area flooded, and engineers were left at the column’s tail. (2) Equipment: main fleet is the modernized T-72, Ukraine widely fields the T-64B; the T-14 Armata is a “wonder-weapon” not in service, and its radar/protection claims are exaggerated; the Leopard 2A6 (L/55, add-on armor, stabilized thermal camera) is fully current. (3) Anti-tank defense relies on top-attacks (Javelin, NLAW); Bayraktar drones too few to change the war (Turkey sold 48, ~half delivered). (4) Russia cannot mount a Western air operation (60–80 aircraft, SEAD, jamming, radar aircraft); the Iskander is a good weapon but targeting, sensor networks and missile stocks (~700 fired, ~2,000 estimated total) constrain it. (5) Railway-based logistics failed when cities were bypassed but the rails run through them (Kharkiv); no landing is expected at Odesa. (6) Root cause: the political leadership’s false situation picture (assuming Ukraine’s collapse) and imitation of the Iraq 2003 model without a functioning air weapon; no point of main effort. (7) Manpower shortage: ~75% of operative forces in Ukraine, no mobilization system, recruitment from Chechnya/Syria/Wagner. (8) A “learned victory” from Crimea 2014, Chechnya (Grozny destroyed) and Syria led to underestimating Ukrainians; artillery leveling substitutes for incompetent infantry, even in Russian-speaking cities. (9) Putin’s siloviki machine (KGB backgrounds), pervasive corruption and growing paranoia; sanctions more effective than expected, a large share of currency reserves lost. (10) Toveri considers nuclear use unlikely; the China–Russia alliance is loose with China on top; China lacks the capability for Taiwan yet. (11) For Finland, Toveri supports NATO membership now, while Russia is tied down; Article 5 works, Finland would bring security and protect NATO’s northern flank (Kola’s strategic importance). Politically and militarily sensitive judgments are presented neutrally as the guest’s interpretations in the situation picture of March 2022.