Since this book was part of the “Red Storm” series, I was interested to see how it would compare to 'Red Storm Rising' by Tom Clancy. I was hoping it would be a more modern take on Clancy’s book.
That hope was sorely disappointed. Throughout the book, the NATO nations, especially the US, are portrayed as incompetent, riddled with spies, and antiquated (in tactics and equipment), just to name a few of their many negative qualities; only the dove politicians are portrayed as intelligent and honest. The pro-EU government in Ukraine is constantly referred to as “fascist” without any definition of the term and is portrayed as weak, ineffective, and brutal. Russia is painted as a victim of NATO aggression, with tacit moral justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The authors attempted a sort of “ripped from the headlines” feel to it, but that ended up coming off more as cheap storytelling than any sort of true “This might happen.” For example, the Russian president “Petrov” was said to have traded off power with his close friend, clearly a direct reference to Putin and Medvedev in real-life Russia. However, then the authors also reversed real-life events, having the pro-EU government fire on unarmed protestors rather than the pro-Russian government doing this. One of the few things that the book actually gets right in its comparison to a real world scenario is that the US forces in the book had adapted to fight insurgents instead of standing armies, which left them less prepared to fight enemy tanks and aircraft.
Overall, (as another reviewer stated) this book feels like it was written by a Russian and will probably be popular there. I don’t know if it was to create tension, but the level of stupidity, arrogance, and incompetence displayed by the US and NATO reached the level of ludicrous. I would dare to say that my 12th grade American Government students could have run the country and military better than the fictional idiots that populate this book. I assume that since the last book in the series is called 'Battlefield Russia' that the US and NATO eventually are able to turn the tide and win, but I have no desire to slog through another book in this series.
I wanted to give this a 1-star rating, but some of the things mentioned (like a “missile swarm” to overwhelm defenses) gave me food for thought, which bumped my rating up to a 2-star. But I would not recommend this book to anyone.