Since before the war started, the USSR slowly and often unwillingly gravitated toward the final involvement within Afghanistan. After the Soviets became involved in Afghanistan, what was the next step? Victory was hardly a concrete objective. The overall purpose was to create a lasting communist regime in the Middle East that would give the Soviets leverage against the NATO alliance. The international response to the war was serious. It resulted in a breakdown of the détente and the formal abandonment of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II (SALT II) which were both direct results of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. In addition to international responses, there was also an outcry from within the Soviet Union as well: Information about the war was suppressed by the government (because there wasn't a lot of great news to share), but returning veterans slowly spread information about the conflict. The words of these soldiers were shocking, and these factors compounded problems the Soviet government was already having with the war in Afghanistan.

In country, the Soviet 40th Army had little difficulty holding the primary objectives of the major cities and military bases; however, the rural parts of Afghanistan were a different story. The Mujahedeen were keen warriors when it came to fighting in the mountainous countryside. The Soviet army was usually constrained to roads by armor and supply trucks, which allowed the Mujahedeen to prepare ambushes; make quick, damaging strikes; and retreat to safety before the Soviet infantry could effectively respond. As the war progressed, the Soviets changed their tactics to combat the elusive nature of their enemy. Air support was instrumental. Fixed wing aircraft such as the SU-25 Frogfoot as well as helicopters such as the MI-24 Hind proved to be a more effective response. So the war also shifted from attempting to simply find and destroy Mujahedeen forces and camps to a wider ranging plan to destroy and drive out or kill civilian populations that supported the Mujahedeen. According to historian Geraint Hughes, “the Soviets effectively settled on a strategy described by the anthropologist Louis Dupree as ‘migratory genocide.’ Villages were destroyed, thousands of civilians died in air and artillery bombardments, the rural agricultural infrastructure was wrecked, and many Afghans fled into exile.” This included the extensive use of land mines which continued to be a danger to Afghanis long after the Soviet Union’s departure in 1989.

So how did the individual soldiers feel? One of the best resources I've found is the book Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich. It's a collection of personal memoirs of the Afghantsy (a term used to refer to the men who fought in Afghanistan) and very eye-opening. The accounts of the war bring into sharp and tragic focus the actions and emotions that the individual soldiers were experiencing. A private in a grenadier regiment recounted:

Our company was combing through a village. I was patrolling with another lad. He pushed open a hut door with his leg and was shot point-blank with a machine-gun. Nine rounds. In that situation hatred takes over. We shot everything, right down to the domestic animals. In fact, shooting animals is the worst. I was sorry for them.

Upon returning to the Soviet Union from the war, the Afghantsy were instructed not to speak of their experiences whatsoever. This also had a devastating effect. Whereas veterans of former wars in the Soviet Union were treated as heroes, these men were often given no positive recognition at all.

The Afghantsy also had trouble relating their experience to that of veterans of previous conflicts. Their enemy was elusive. The war lacked a line of battle with clearly defined enemies and objectives. For the soldiers, their individual experience mirrored the very question that the Soviet government had trouble answering: how could the war be won? A 1st Lieutenant, Battery Commander commented on the experience of fighting the Mujahedeen:

War is war and that means killing. We weren’t given real guns to play cops and robbers with. We weren't sent to mend tractors and build houses... You know the word kiriz? It’s the word the Afghans use for the culverts, originally built for irrigation purposes. This was a ‘kiriz war.’ People would come up out of them like ghosts, day and night with a Chinese sub-machine-gun in their hands, or the knife they’d just slaughtered a sheep with, or just a big stone. Quite possibly you’d been haggling with that same ‘ghost’ in the market a few hours before.

These experiences offer a glimpse into how the feelings of the veterans returning from Afghanistan influenced the public opinion of the war, irrespective of the official government line.

As I said at the beginning, within the Soviet Union the war had major negative effects. The attempt to suppress news of the war from being distributed only worked for a little while. The Soviet government spread propaganda that its soldiers were in Afghanistan merely constructing public works in order to build a strong socialist society. Some of this was true, especially in the early years of the war. Soviet specialists constructed extensive farming and irrigation systems outside of Jalalabad. Larry Heinemann wrote in the introduction to Zinky Boys, “Letters were heavily censored and photographs were not permitted. Indeed, so thorough was the censorship that few battlefield photographs by the soldiers survive.” Most of the information about the war came trickling back only through the memories of these veterans. The men who died actually came back in sealed zinc caskets, usually with no explanation to their families as to why or how they had been killed.