Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

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Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Tor Bukkvoll, author of “Russian Special Operations Forces in Crimea and Donbas,” featured in Parameters’ 2016 summer issue. Bukkvoll is a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. He’s a specialist on Russia and Ukraine, particularly in the areas of defense and security policy.

The guests in speaking order on this episode are:(Guest 1: Tor Bukkvoll)

(Host)Thank you so much for joining me, Tor. I'm really glad you're here. We're here to talk about your 2016 article, which opens with this sentence: “This article investigates the roles special operations forces (SOF) have fulfilled in Russian warfare against Ukraine—both in Crimea and in Donbas.” Please give us some background. Russian Special Operations Forces in Ukraine in the past—what do we need to understand here?

(Bukkvoll)So what we need to understand, in terms of the role these forces have played in Russian policy towards Ukraine, is that they played a major—maybe the most important—role in the annexation of Crimea. And then, secondly, they played an important (but not so important) role in the warfare in Donbas. There may have been Russian Special Operations Forces in Ukraine, also, prior to the events of 2014. But I think it makes sense to start with the annexation of Crimea, because these forces played such an important role there. And that was, first of all, in terms of the so-called SSO, which in Russian stands for Sil Spetsial’nykh Operatsiy. This is a relatively new Russian special operations force that was firmly established in 2013 but had been built up for a number of years before that.

What you should know is that in Soviet times, special operations forces tended to be more like what in the West would be called light elite infantry. So, the famous Spetsnaz forces that we heard so much about, they are more like the US (Army) Rangers than the US special operations forces like (First US Special Forces Operational Detachment) Delta and the (US Navy) SEALs and so on. But this new force, SSO, was particularly built on the example—or was supposed to be—the Russian “Delta Force.” Specifically, the Russian military referred to “Delta” when they talked about SSO.

And in Crimea, this SSO force, they started their annexation by taking over the buildings or the parliament and the government in Crimea. And then they occupied those buildings for 24 hours—basically, it seems to me, from the sources I’ve seen, to check out what the Ukrainians would do at that time. Would they try to stop the annexation, or would they not? And the Ukrainians, for a number of reasons, did nothing or very little. And that became the first step in the annexation of the whole peninsula.

And the SSO continue to play a big role here in cooperation with Spetsnaz GRU, which is the special operations forces of the Russian military intelligence. These are the “Rangers” forces I talked about before that then worked in tandem with the SSO to take over most of the Ukrainian military infrastructure on that peninsula. So this operation, taking place on 27th of February 2014, is today one of the most important operations that Russian Special Operations Forces have ever done. And President (Vladimir) Putin even named the 27th of February as the day of special operations ...

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