Kiev was not Sarajevo, for the moment

On 24 February Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. What was presumed by some to be a blitzkrieg did not turn out to be a blitzkrieg. Although Putin's troops advanced significantly to the gates of Kiev in order to besiege it, as happened in Sarajevo when it was besieged by Bosnian Serb troops in May 1992, the Russian troops have so far failed to achieve their objective. This article, although it reviews the historical parallels between Kiev and Sarajevo, will not go into depth in comparing the war in the two cities due to the existing differences and will be based mainly on the advance of Russian troops to Kiev and the final Russian retreat back to the border with Belarus and the Donbas.

What the two conflicts did coincide in was the high price paid by the civilian population, as we will see below.

Vladimir Putin wrote an article in July 2021 in which he made clear his obsession with the history of Russia and Ukraine as a single whole. For Putin, Ukraine's history had gone through some very important episodes in terms of its contact with what he called the Russian world, a term that encompassed Ukraine. 

Briefly, during the 9th century, the Viking or Rus tribes expanded and settled in Slavic lands. Prince Oleg conquered Kiev in 882 AD, becoming Kievan Rus, making it the capital of all Rus cities and laying the foundations for the first Orthodox state in Eastern Europe, settling in what is now much of the territory of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.

Kievan Rus' thus becomes Putin's paradigm for his biased assertion that Ukraine and Russia are inseparable, making this part of history a casus belli, claiming that Ukraine's past is Russia's past and that therefore 'Russians and Ukrainians were one people, one whole (1)'.

But Putin did not only mention Ukraine in that article, he also criticised Bolshevik leader Lenin's mistake in allowing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) to be created in 1922 as a federation of equal republics "with the right of the republics to freely secede from the Union", which was included in the text of the Declaration on the Creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and later in the USSR constitution of 1924. "In doing so, the authors planted the most dangerous time bomb in the foundations of our state", leading to its collapse in December 1991 with the "parade of sovereignties". 

Putin did not assimilate the partition of the USSR in 1991, let alone the fact that Ukraine became an independent state in December of that year when the Act of Independence was approved in a referendum with 90.3 % of the votes. 

Since then Kiev has seen six presidents of government elected in democratic elections plus an interim president following the Euromaidan events of 2014. The first president was Leonid Kravchuk (1991-1993) whose mandate was characterised by a foreign policy close to the European Union. He was succeeded by Leonid Kuchma (1994-2004), who signed the Budapest Memorandum at the beginning of his term, renouncing nearly 2,000 nuclear warheads and thus nuclear deterrence. Kuchma was succeeded in an eventful election campaign by the pro-European Viktor Yushchenko (2004-2010), whose campaign was marked by attempts to poison him with dioxin. 

. His government was characterised by closeness to the EU, but also by parliamentary instability and corruption. In the 2010 elections, Yushchenko failed to make it past the first round with only 5.45% of the vote, with pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych going on to win the second round against his rival and former minister Yulia Tymoshenko. 

Yanukovych's mandate (2010-2014), originally from the Donbas, was marked by his rapprochement with the Russian regime and his rejection of the EU, which led to great social discontent and major demonstrations, and he was ousted in 2014 due to popular pressure from the Euromaidan pro-European movement.

Yanukovych took refuge in the Russian town of Rostov-on-Don (2), and was replaced in June 2014 by the pro-European Petro Poroshenko (2014-2019), who inherited the serious territorial problem of the Donbas. He was a clear advocate of the EU integration process, signing previous association agreements. In the 2019 elections, a worn-out Poroshenko was defeated by Volodymyr Zelensky with 73% of the vote in the second round. 

Already in government in Kiev, Zelensky and his party never hid their sympathies towards the EU and NATO, given the foreign policy of their Russian neighbour. He held several meetings with President Putin, with the German and French heads of government, Merkel and Macron, acting as mediators in these meetings, but no major progress was made in settling the territorial conflict, all under the cover of the so-called "Minks Agreements" aimed at pacifying the Donbas meeting (3). 

). Between 2021 and the beginning of 2022, Zelensky began to suffer serious warnings from President Putin, who reminded him in several media interviews that NATO should not expand eastwards and that he only envisaged Ukraine as a sovereign state in partnership with Russia (4). But President Zelensky, as president of a sovereign and independent country, ignored the warnings and in mid-February 2022 made it clear that his unconditional and constitutional priority was for Ukraine to join the EU and NATO. 

Putin consumed his warnings and on 24 February began the invasion of Ukraine, his initial aim being to invade the Donbas and then checkmate the Kiev government and replace it with a pro-Russian collaborationist government. Attempts were made to besiege Kiev from the first days of the war by first entering its region, occupying some of the important towns surrounding the capital in order to put pressure on Zelensky and, if that did not work, to try to carry out his assault and thus destroy his government and his president.

But Zelensky made it clear on the morning of 26 February in a video recorded in front of the Presidential Palace that he would never leave the seat of the Ukrainian government, "I am here. We will not lay down our arms. We will defend our state. We will protect our country (5)".

As Russian troops advanced towards Kiev from the West, North and East with the danger of ending up under siege, it was logical to draw a historical parallel with the siege of Sarajevo, the longest in modern history, despite the fundamental differences between the two conflicts. While the war in Bosnia and its capital was framed as an ethnic-religious but also territorial conflict, as the radical Bosnian Serbs did not accept the result of a plebiscite held on 1 March in which the secession of Bosnia from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was approved with 63% of the votes, the war in Ukraine was framed as a territorial and sovereignty conflict, as Putin considered Ukraine and Russia to be a single whole, a single people, while Zelensky made it clear that Ukraine was sovereign and independent to make its own decisions. 

On 5 April 1992 the war began in Sarajevo when several people were killed in a peace demonstration, and the Bosnian Serb troops surrounding the city prepared for the terrible siege, taking the mountain slopes and cutting off the access roads, placing artillery at all the key points, and at the beginning of May the first bombardment of the capital took place.

Sarajevo was a city of 350,000 inhabitants at the time (6), of whom almost 280,000 were Muslims, 12,000 Croats, 1,000 Jews and 60,000 Serbs, including a well-known sniper who fought against the radicals encircling the city and Serb general Jovan Divjak. Both stayed inside the besieged city because they believed in a pluralistic Sarajevo across ethnic lines. 

Continuing the historical parallel between Kiev and Sarajevo, the Russian troops advancing on Kiev underestimated the Ukrainian troops and President Zelensky, who had mobilised the Ukrainian population in defence of his country and called on its inhabitants to resist the Russian offensive so as not to be surrounded. Both civilian and military militias tried to prevent Putin's troops from taking any Kiev neighbourhood that could serve as a spearhead to reach the city centre, as happened in Sarajevo with the Bosnian Serb Army in the spring of 1992 when they managed to penetrate the Grbavica neighbourhood and establish themselves there for more than three years. This was the area from where snipers wreaked havoc among the Bosnian population on the instructions of the radical Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who wanted to split the city into two parts in order to corner the Bosnians in the eastern part of the city (7). 

Turning to the Russian advance on Kiev, Putin's army easily moved from the Belarusian border into the Kiev oblast it bordered, advancing rapidly from the first hours of the invasion, but his units ultimately failed to sustain the offensive as the outnumbered Ukrainian forces were able to overcome a smaller force with a large number of armoured vehicles and air support, but did not know the terrain as well as the Ukrainian units, which were well armed to carry out ambushes, as we shall see below.

In a war with the amount of armour Putin put on the ground, logistical support to the forward units was critical. Supply units came under attack from Ukrainian troops, which led to dozens of armoured vehicles being abandoned for lack of fuel. But if the attack on Russian logistics supporting its most advanced units was key, more important was that the Ukrainian resistance had been receiving armaments from NATO countries before the war broke out (8). 

The Ukrainian resistance had Javelin anti-tank missiles that could reach a range of 2.5 km and shoot down helicopters, Stinger surface-to-air guided missiles that could reach targets at 5 km, and the latest anti-aircraft version of GROM infrared-guided missiles also reaching five kilometres, as well as highly accurate and effective NLAW anti-tank missiles with a range of 800 metres. Finally, Ukraine acquired the Turkish Bayraktar drone, which is used for reconnaissance and attack with bombs and laser-guided rockets.

In addition to all the weaponry the Ukrainians were receiving from abroad, they also had Ukrainian-made Stugna-P anti-tank guided missiles, which caused havoc with Russian armour, especially in the ambush on 11 March on the M01 highway in Brovary (9). 

All this weaponry enabled the Ukrainians to keep in check not only the Russian ground forces, but also the air forces flying over Kiev, which were harassed by Stinger missiles and Ukrainian fighters which, although outnumbered, managed to shoot down several Russian fighters and thus prevent the Russians from consolidating their air dominance.

Such was the amount of weaponry the Ukrainians had that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin's military ally in Ukraine, made a critical statement on 27 February against Russia's tactics: "The Ukrainians are armed to the teeth with new weapons and ammunition, new-generation heavy artillery, and we are still pinning our hopes on the Ukrainians coming to their senses (10)". As for the weapons available to the Bosnian defence of Sarajevo, it was only with great difficulty and courage that they managed to prevent the assault on Sarajevo, mainly because they suffered from the arms embargo decreed by the UN in April 1992.

The few armoured vehicles, light weapons and grenades, many of them homemade, were insufficient to break the siege, and the Bosnian militias' attempts to break it ended in disaster, as the Bosnian Serb army used its artillery not only against the city centre but also massively against the hillsides at the slightest Bosnian attempt to approach their positions. 

The Russian army did not use artillery massively against the capital, but did use it intermittently, hitting the television tower, which was shelled on 1 March, killing five workers, as well as the Retroville shopping centre in the north of the capital, which was the target of a rocket that killed eight people, and buildings in the Obolon neighbourhood in western Kiev and the Darnytskyi neighbourhood. The Russian army, as mentioned above, wanted its spearhead inside Kiev, as the Serb radicals did in Sarajevo by occupying the Grbavica neighbourhood. Russian troops tried to do so by attacking Victory Avenue, a few kilometres from the centre of Kiev, several buildings in the Obolon district and the Havana Bridge leading to the capital, but were repulsed by Ukrainian troops.

Kiev did not resign itself to being Sarajevo, despite the heavy artillery punishment that the towns near the capital had been suffering since the end of February and the Russian army's conquest of a whole range of towns, as we shall see later, which would endanger the capital's resistance. 

The Ukrainian army, aware of the danger lurking in the capital, fought fiercely to expel the Russian army, as they had the weapons to try and the Russians had not consolidated their air control, and gradually managed to repulse the Russian attack.

This was illustrated by the images taken by a Ukrainian drone that went around the world in early March of the attack on a convoy of Russian armoured cars on the M01 motorway in Skibin in the direction of Brovary, 30 km from Kiev, near the KLO petrol station (Google Maps). The images show the chaos of more than thirty armoured vehicles as several of them were destroyed by Ukrainian artillery (11), driving them back along the same highway in the direction of Velyka Dimerka, then occupied by the Russian army and liberated at the end of March by the Ukrainian army. These images marked a turning point in what was really happening, all framed by the first major defeat of the Russian troops as they retreated from around Kiev in late March and the vulnerability of their armoured vehicles. 

The town of Ivankiv, some 50 km northwest of Kiev, witnessed a Russian convoy, mostly logistical, travelling more than 60 km on one of its roads towards the capital. Troops occupied the city on 2 March, attacking it first with artillery and finally taking it with little resistance, with the civilian population paying a heavy price. Russian soldiers retreated from the city towards the Belarusian border in late March, leaving numerous armoured vehicles on the roads due to mechanical breakdowns and the effectiveness of Ukrainian artillery, as well as numerous corpses in the ditches. But there were three locations in north-western Kiev that formed the triangle of death: Hostomel, Bucha and Irpin. 

At Hostomel airport, one of the bloodiest battles of March took place in which both Russians and Ukrainians suffered heavy casualties in the seizure of the airport by Russian paratroopers, later recaptured by the Ukrainians when the Russian troops abandoned the position. 

The Russian withdrawal from the airport and the town of Hostomel was chaotic. The retreating Russian armoured vehicles entered one of the main streets of the town and were ambushed by Ukrainian troops. The terrible images on Sviato-Pokrosvska Street (Google Maps) in Hostomel (12) show several wrecked and smoking Russian armoured vehicles, with dead Russian soldiers on the decks and on the ground.

What is described above is very similar to what happened in Bucha, not to mention the suffering of the civilian population, which is unfortunately the same as Sarajevo. The Russian army retreated from Bucha, leaving a trail of corpses in the streets, as well as wrecked armoured vehicles, also captured in pictures that went around the world.

In Irpin, the troops shelled the town and tried to take it for a month, managing to enter half of the town before finally being repulsed by the Ukrainian resistance at the end of March.

Civilians are being severely punished in all Ukrainian war zones. They have been in Mariupol, Ivankiv, Donetsk, Melitopol, Kharkov. The Kiev region witnessed horrible events like in Sarajevo, here are two examples that show the desperation of the civilian population who want to escape from a war zone to a safe area. 

The first example was in the town of Irpin. Resident Tetiana Perebyinis was trying to escape from the town with her two children because the Russian army was in one part of the town. To do so, they had to cross a bridge that would lead them to the evacuation convoy. A mortar shell exploded near the bridge, hitting all three members of the family, killing them and a volunteer on the spot (13). 

The other example was in Sarajevo in 1993. The young Serbian couple Bosko Brkic and the Muslim Admira Ismic (14), were trying to cross the Vrbanja bridge which crossed the Miljacka river and separated the two war zones, their purpose was to flee the city and reach Belgrade to make a new life. As they tried to do so, they were killed by snipers and their bodies were left clinging to each other for days on the ground until they were recovered one night from the Serbian area of Grbavica.

The Russian army's siege of Kiev failed, and it can be deduced that rather than being a planned attack by the Russian troops, it relied on the lesser organisation and preparation of the Ukrainian army to break it, when everything seemed to indicate that it was preparing for the invasion by receiving large quantities of weapons during the weeks prior to the start of the assault, which ended up calling the Russian war machine into question on the battlefield. 

Russian troops began to suffer heavy casualties in the north and east of the capital. The combination of Ukrainian resilience on the one hand and modern weaponry received from NATO countries prior to the invasion on the other played a major role in this, a lethal combination that was key in ensuring that Russian troops abandoned their intention to reach Kiev for the time being, given the losses of soldiers and materiel they were suffering in nearby towns. 

Putin at the start of his special operation probably thought that his powerful army would crush any Ukrainian armed resistance. During the first hours of the operation, Russian troops entered the Kiev region, targeting the most strategic locations in the north of the region, such as Hostomel and its airport, Irpin, Bucha, Borodyanka, Demydiv, Brovary east of Kiev, and weeks later retreating from their positions towards the Russian and Belarusian border and being redeployed in the Donbas.

In Sarajevo, the defenders had only light weapons, grenades and few armoured vehicles and mortars, but their infantry managed to avoid the assault on the city, taking around six thousand casualties in more than three years of siege, three times as many as the attackers. The late Spanish journalist Julio Fuentes of the newspaper El Mundo, who covered the siege of Sarajevo for three years, wrote in his book about the Bosnian defence: "They had no artillery. In Sarajevo there were only a couple of tanks and some mortars. Everything else was home-made. They were facing the heirs of the most powerful army in Eastern Europe after the Russian army (15)". 

Colonel Pedro Baños, an expert in geostrategy, defence and security, when asked about the differences between the alleged siege of Kiev and Sarajevo, answered the following: "In the case of Kiev, Moscow's attempt was a classic manoeuvre, to reach the capital as quickly as possible and surround it, to put pressure on the Ukrainian government to give in to its pretensions, but they failed, in view of which they withdrew and began another, different phase of the invasion". "Nor did the Russian army ever intend to destroy the Ukrainian capital, which it could easily have done, not only with the means deployed for the invasion, but also with the missiles it would have deployed on the Belarusian border, 150 km from Kiev". 

The article also featured the opinion of military historian David Odalric, who was asked what went wrong with Russia's siege strategy compared to the siege of Sarajevo, and responded: "Putin prepared a ruthless invasion, but was met with a vigorous response on all fronts: The organisation of the Ukrainian government and armed forces, the mobilisation of the civilian population, the solidarity of Europeans with the refugees, the firmness of the EU with sanctions. All this resistance forced Vladimir Putin's army to modify its strategy, with a slower march and the massive use of artillery".

The historian also referred to the so-called "Anaconda Plan" carried out by Russia, aimed at strangling the Ukrainian economy through a total blockade, "The term was first used in the American Civil War, coined by Union General Winfield Scott, as a strategy to defeat the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and consisted of a naval blockade of Confederate ports".

"The most recent application of this strategy was in the war that destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Serb forces in Bosnia used it against the city of Sarajevo, which became the capital city to suffer the longest siege. The danger of a repeat of the Sarajevo tragedy in Ukraine, and of Kiev again being at risk from a possible new Russian offensive, could once again remind us of the causes and consequences of a Sarajevo-like siege of a European city after the end of World War II. The feeling is that Russian tanks were marching towards Kiev to encircle the city. The idea was to imitate the same operation that Putin repeated in Mariupol, where water, food and electricity were already in short supply".

"Putin's idea was clear: it was not about a threat from NATO, nor from the Donbas, it was about conquering all of Ukraine and imposing a puppet government in Kiev, which would ensure their power and influence".

"The Russian military fiasco in Ukraine confirms, on the one hand, that its combat doctrine no longer works (it remains very similar to that of World War II times and oriented to other types of wars and battles), and on the other, that Russia's defence spending is not reflected in military results in Ukraine."

In line with what the historian says, Kiev would not only have been pressured with the "Anaconda Plan" if it could have been besieged. The Russian army would also undoubtedly have multiplied artillery attacks on the capital as a form of pressure on the government and would have subjected the Ukrainian resistance to continuous attrition, as they did in the Azovstal complex in Mariupol until the defenders surrendered due to shortages of ammunition and food. 

More than seven and a half months later the war continues and Ukraine has lost 20% of its territory since 2014. Russia has annexed the Donbas by carrying out a binding consultation with the inhabitants of the occupied areas, resulting in their integration into the Russian Federation, a consultation that will not be recognised by the EU and NATO member states.

Now Kiev is not threatened as it was during the first days of the Russian troops' attack, but the danger has not disappeared. Vladimir Putin, by annexing four Ukrainian regions by referendum without international recognition, warns that these territories are now part of the Russian Federation and will not allow an attack on them because if that happens he threatens to use nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army is advancing in the Donbas, recapturing the strategic town of Lyman in Donetsk Oblast, and experts are wondering whether Putin will be able to carry out his threats when he says he is attacked on Russian territory, knowing that we are facing the most dangerous moment of this war.

Luis Montero Molina is a political scientist and contributor to Sec2Crime. Master in International Geostrategy and Jihadist Terrorism.

QUOTES

1- DIAZ VILLANUEVA Fernando. La Contra crónica (24 de febrero de 2022). Sobre la unidad histórica de rusos y ucranianos. https://diazvillanueva.com/sobre-la-unidad-historica-de-rusos-y- ucranianos/

2- Agencias. Diario El Mundo (28 de febrero de 2014). Yanukovich llega a la ciudad de rusa Rostov del Don escoltado por cazas. https://www.elmundo.es/internacional/2014/02/27/530f6cd422601de85e8b457a.html

3- Ministerio para Europa y de Asuntos Exteriores. Francia Diplomacia. Situación de Ucrania desde 2014. https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/es/fichas-de-paises/ucrania/situacion- en-ucrania-que-hace/article/situacion-de-ucrania-desde- 2014#sommaire_3

4- PUTIN Vladimir. Kremlin (12 de julio de 2021). Sobre la unidad histórica de rusos y ucranianos. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181

5- FERNÁNDEZ J. El Diario Montañés (26 de febrero de 2022). Zelenski desmiente en un nuevo vídeo que se haya rendido y pide a los ucranianos que resistan. https://www.eldiariomontanes.es/internacional/zelenski-desmiente- nuevo-20220226151143-nt.html

6- ARMADA Alfonso. Diario El País (15 de diciembre de 1992). Sarajevo sigue a la espera de corredores humanitarios. https://elpais.com/diario/1992/12/15/internacional/724374004_850215. html

7- ARMADA Alfonso. Diario El País (27 de septiembre de 1992). El sitio de Sarajevo. https://elpais.com/diario/1992/09/27/internacional/717544817_850215. html

8- HILLE Peter. Diario DW (11 de febrero de 2022). ¿Qué países envían armas a Ucrania, y de qué armas se trata? https://www.dw.com/es/qu%C3%A9-pa%C3%ADses-env%C3%ADan- armas-a-ucrania-y-de-qu%C3%A9-armas-se-trata/a-60751494

9- KRAMER Andrew y ADDARIO Lynsey. Diario The New York Times (21 de marzo de 2022). La lucha de Kiev se perfila como un conflicto prolongado y sangriento. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/world/europe/kyiv-ukraine-russia-war.amp.html

10-INFOBAE (27 de febrero de 2022). El líder checheno, aliado de Rusia en su invasión a Ucrania, criticó la táctica militar de Putin. (Declaraciones de Kadirov en su canal de Telegram, capturada por el periodista Max Seddon, corresponsal de Financial Times. https://www.infobae.com/america/mundo/2022/02/27/el-lider- checheno-aliado-de-rusia-en-su-invasion-a-ucrania-critico-la-tactica- militar-de-putin/

11-SABBAGH Dan. El Diario.es (11 de marzo de 2022). Un impactante vídeo grabado con un dron muestra la emboscada al convoy de tanques rusos cerca de Kiev. https://www.eldiario.es/internacional/theguardian/impactante-video- grabado-dron-muestra-emboscada-convoy-tanques-rusos-cerca- kiev_1_8821579.html

12-OK Diario. 04 de febrero de 2022. Ucrania propina un duro castigo a la infantería infantería rusa en la batalla por el control de Hostomel. https://okdiario.com/internacional/ucrania-propina-duro-castigoinfanteria-rusa-batalla-control-hostomel-8680069

13-KESSLEN Ben. New York Post (8 de marzo de 2022). Ukrainian mom killed by Russians with her two kids identified. https://nypost.com/2022/03/08/ukraine-mom-killed-by-russiansidentified-as-tatiana-perebeynos/

14-ECKARDT Andy and BANIC Vladimir. NBC News. Bosnian War Anniversary: Sarajevo's 'Romeo and Juliet' Still Resonate. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/bosnian-war-anniversary- sarajevo-s-romeo-juliet-still-resonate-n723681

15-FUENTES Julio. Sarajevo Juicio Final.1997. Plaza & Janes