471 DOI: 10.4324/9781003354635-36 32 RUSSIA’S ‘SPECIAL MILITARY OPERATION’ IN UKRAINE Military Successes and Failures during 2022 Alexander Hill The Aims of the ‘Special Military Operation’ On 24 February 2022, Russian forces launched what Vladimir Putin described as a ‘Special Mili- tary Operation (SVO)’ in Ukraine. The operation was launched in the light of failure to find a dip- lomatic solution to what in Russian government eyes were the problems of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) eastward expansion and the right of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine – and specifically in the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics – to a meaningful degree of self-determination. The ‘SVO’ as launched can be seen to have had four key aims as identifiable in Russian govern- ment sources of the time: 1 To protect and sustain the territorial integrities of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics – a key element to which is to assist them in gaining control of all the territory they claim in the Donbass region. To those two regions were later added two more – the Kherson and Zapor- izhzhia regions; 2 To guarantee the security of Crimea from future Ukrainian attempts to reincorporate it into Ukraine; 3 To halt the eastward expansion of NATO – and in particular the incorporation of Ukraine into the NATO alliance; 4 To ‘demilitarise and denazify’ Ukraine – a vague ambition that seemed as a minimum to require the ejection of Ukrainian forces from eastern Ukraine but certainly seems also to have sug- gested imposing a government on Ukraine favourable to Russia. 1 Such aims clearly required either the Ukrainian government to be brought to its knees and be willing to negotiate on the above to Russian satisfaction or for Russian forces to overrun a suf- ficiently large proportion of Ukrainian territory in the eastern part of the country to satisfy points one and two above and make three and four moot. During the initial phases of the ‘SVO’, Russian forces, lacking overwhelming numerical superi- ority, overran considerable territory in a short space of time, but did not have the resources to hold some of it in the face of not only stubborn enemy opposition but also a far more robust Western