Russian Adaptability and the Myths of the Special Military Operation

Professor Alexander Hill of the University of Calgary has long specialised in the history of the Soviet and Russian armed forces.

His recent article examining Russia’s Special Military Operation through a longer historical and cultural lens — reaching back to the Second World War and even Imperial Russia — offers a welcome corrective to the shallow tropes that dominate much Western coverage.

One of the strongest themes that emerges from both his writing and our conversation is Russian adaptability.

Western media still leans heavily on the idea of a rigid, unthinking military that relies on “human wave” tactics and supposedly values its soldiers’ lives less than we do. Neither claim stands up to academic scrutiny.

As Hill notes, early instances of rushed assaults were neither the norm nor long-lasting. Lower-level commanders innovated and found ways to reduce casualties; the army shifted toward the kind of small-scale storm-group tactics that have historical parallels in the Great Patriotic War.

The same pattern appears with drones.

Russia began the war well behind Ukraine and over-reliant on Iranian drones. Grassroots production and local initiative filled the gap until the central system recognised drone development was a priority. Once it did, industrial-scale manufacture followed.

Today Russian forces frequently out-drone their opponents locally and have integrated unmanned systems into combined-arms operations more coherently than Ukraine, which still struggles with a patchwork of different foreign systems.

Hill draws a useful parallel with the Soviet concept of deep battle. The theoretical ideas of the 1930s were ambitious, but only wartime experience turned them into something workable.

The same process is visible today in Ukraine.

Adaptation is often slower at the top of a centralised Russian system, yet once lower-level solutions prove themselves, they are adopted.

The early reliance on battalion tactical groups proved fragile; Russia abandoned them and adapted formations and tactics to the realities of drone-saturated warfare.

On the political side, Hill sees Putin’s core war aims as relatively limited and consistent: the complete liberation of the Donbas, Ukrainian neutrality (no NATO membership and no foreign troops on Ukrainian soil), and the protection of Russian-speaking populations.

Regime change was attempted at the outset, but the more enduring objectives remain.

Crossing the Dnieper in force looks unlikely; securing Donetsk and Luhansk and then battering Ukraine into a political settlement with long-range strikes appears more probable.

The conversation also returned to the deeper origins of the conflict.

NATO expansion, the broken assurances of the 1990s, and the sense of Western betrayal still shape Russian strategic thinking far more than most Western commentary admits.

Professor Jonathan Haslam’s book Hubris documents this history in forensic detail.

The war is not simply about Ukraine; it is the latest chapter in a much longer story of how the post-Cold War order was constructed.

Perhaps the most important strategic observation is that you cannot fight a war by committee. Russia’s more centralised decision-making, for all its flaws, allows sustained political will and industrial mobilisation.

European leaders, by contrast, are constrained by short electoral cycles, fragmented resources, and the need to maintain a narrative of Ukrainian battlefield success that becomes harder to sustain by the month.

Political legitimacy in Berlin, Paris, Brussels and London may well run out before Russian resolve does.

Hill’s analysis is a reminder that serious study of Russian military culture and history still has something valuable to offer. The alternative — recycling 1990s tropes and ignoring adaptation — has already cost Ukraine dearly.

You can watch the full conversation here:

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