The Soviets would’ve steamrolled present day Ukraine.
In summer of 1945, it took the Soviets 11 days to annihilate a 1 million strong Japanese-Korean army and occupy Manchuko and North Korea. That’s a theatre the size of entire Western Europe and less than a third of time it took the Americans to conquer tiny Iwo Jima defended by a force 50 times smaller.
In manchuria the soviets had three massive advantages:
1. They had recently paid with 11 million lives for, and just received, best lessons which the most tactically proficient land force of the era, the German army, could teach.
2. They had a 3:1 advantage over the japanese in men, vastly greater advantage in tanks, air power and motorized maneuvering capability.
3. they had nearly total strategic surprise, the Japanese did not see the attack coming until the day it occurred.
The Japanese on the other hand, suffered 2 additional massive disadvantages:
1. The japanese army never gained any real modern maneuvering combat experience during all of WWII, thus by 1945 was indisputably, and by some margin, the weakest, least skilled, and most inadequately equipped “modern” army of any combatante in the area large scale maneuvering fiekd battles.
2. Even such as it is, the japanese kwangtung army has been totally hollowed out, with most of its combat units withdrawn to operate in southern china, pulled back to japan for home defense, or distributed in penny pockets to shore up what remained of japanese island defences. The forces that remained consisted largely of military police, security units, railway guards units, administrative troops, and a small smattering of troops withdrawn from other fronts for rest and reequipment. It was the thin hollow shell of the low quality army that faced the Soviets.
As to how the Soviet evaluated their own relative ability to conduct large scale mobile operation in open field battles after war, the Stavka, the Soviets general staff, concluded, under Stalin’s prodding, that the soviet army would be incapable of the duplicating the US army’s 60 division break out from the Normandy beachhead in late August 1944 and push across france to the German border in Sept, because the Soviet army lacked both the organizational skill and quality of staff work required to successfully plan such an operation.
I really doubt the Soviet Union would have stuck to a limited sized operation like this one and would have certainly avoided the whole "brotherly war" without disabling the entirety of the Ukranian communications infraestructure.
Russian tactics aren't even a half-assed attempt at soviet-derivative combined arms tactics. You have tanks going into areas, alone without artillery and air support. That's unthinkable in soviet doctrine.
yes, at least the Soviets would likely have remembered they had no qualitative advantage and would have brought quantity instead.
