Five Months In, Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine Has Substantially Degraded its Military

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Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked, unlawful invasion of Ukraine is not going well almost five months into this war.

Oh sure, the media reports on how Russian troops are grinding out a war of attrition to secure the Donbas region, but at a heavy cost to both sides. The international sanctions are taking hold, Russia must be self-reliant to produce new armaments and amunition that it has exhausted in trying to secure the Donbas region. Ukraine, on the other hand, potentially has an unlimited supply of armaments and amunition from western NATO countries. Ukraine does not have is an unlimited supply of soldiers. But neither does Russia.

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Newsweek reports, Russia Resorting to ‘Obsolete’ Gear, ‘Ad Hoc’ Reinforcements in Ukraine: UK:

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence said Saturday that as the Russian military assembles reinforcements near Ukraine, many of its troops are being placed in “ad hoc groupings,” and have been equipped with “obsolete or inappropriate” gear.

In an intelligence update posted to Twitter, the ministry said that Russia is “moving reserve forces from across the country and assembling them near Ukraine for future offensive operations,” and added that many of the new infantry units are “probably deploying” MT-LB armored vehicles, which Russia “has long considered unsuitable for most front-line infantry transport roles.”

“It was originally designed in the 1950s as a tractor to pull artillery, has very limited armour, and only mounts a machine gun for protection,” the ministry said.

The U.K. Ministry of Defence went on to say that Russia’s “first echelon assault units” by comparison had vehicles with armor “up to 33mm thick,” “powerful” cannons, and anti-tank missile launchers.

“Despite President Putin’s claim on 07 July 2022 that the Russian military ‘has not even started’ its efforts in Ukraine, many of its reinforcements are ad hoc groupings deploying with obsolete or inappropriate equipment,” the ministry concluded.

In a separate intelligence update in May, the U.K. defence ministry claimed that Russia had lost a large number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Ukraine, and added that the country was likely seeing “a shortage” of the vehicles, “which is exacerbated by limitations in its domestic manufacturing capacity resulting from sanctions.”

In late June, the U.K. ministry said that Ukrainian forces “continue to disrupt Russian command and control with successful strikes deep behind Russian lines,” and that Russian armed forces are “increasingly hollowed out.” It also said that the Russian military is accepting “a level of degraded combat effectiveness, which is probably unsustainable in the long term.”

In an editorial last month, John Dobson, a former U.K. Naval attaché to Moscow, argued that Russia’s failures during the war will lead to the “demise” of its arms industry.

“Russia’s general sales pitch for its weapons has always been that they are cheaper and easier to maintain than Western alternatives…But this pitch may no longer be effective for many countries that have seen Russian equipment losses and failures on the battlefield,” Dobson wrote.

He added that experts have estimated Russia has lost roughly 1,000 tanks, 50 helicopters, and 400 artillery pieces.

Russia is also running out of reinforcements, because Putin does not want to resort to a mobilization, which would signal to the Russian public that the war is not goig well. Newsweek further reports, Russia in ‘Quiet Mobilization’ as 22K Vacancies Show Army Losses: Ukraine:

Russia is carrying out a “quiet mobilization” through its regional employment centers, according to a report from Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

According to the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation under the country’s National Security and Defense Council, Russian authorities are continuing to recruit contract workers en masse without announcing war mobilization.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched what he called a “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24, but the leader has not announced mobilization. Declaring all-out war on Ukraine would allow Putin under Russian law to draft conscripts and mobilize reserve forces.

In a post on the Telegram messaging app, the center said it found job vacancies for more than 20,000 Russian contract workers.

“More than 22,200 vacancies for contract servicemen have appeared in regional employment centers of the Russian Federation,” it said.

At least seven units that fought in Ukraine posted vacancies for the recruitment of snipers, gunners, drivers, sanitary instructors and other specialists, the report added.

Some of these units are the 64th Motor Rifle Brigade from the Khabarovsk region (military unit number 51460) and the 104th Guards Air Assault Regiment (military unit number 32515), which Ukraine alleges were involved in the killings and torture of civilians in the city of Bucha, near Kyiv, in April, the report states.

The center also found that the 37th Motor Rifle Brigade (military unit number 69647) from Buryatia, which reportedly has the second-highest number of casualties, is looking to recruit the highest number of Russian contact servicemen.

The Center for Countering Disinformation suggested that these thousands of vacancies indicate the losses of the Russian army, and “the general problem with the recruitment of military personnel.”

Previously, a search by Newsweek on a local recruiting website in May found more than a dozen job adverts hiring recruits in mobilization training and work in wartime.

Multiple job adverts throughout Russia referencing “mobilization training” were posted on the HeadHunter website, with one advert for the Department of Internal Affairs in the north-western district of Moscow, stating that applicants would be required to carry out a range of tasks, including developing and adjusting “mobilization planning documents,” and implementing “special decisions of federal executive bodies in terms of mobilization readiness and mobilization training.”

Another job posting for a “security department employee” for a Moscow federal tax service said that the applicant will be responsible for “mobilization preparation” related to wartime activities and in martial law and a state of emergency.

The Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation cited British intelligence as suggesting that a lack of resources forced Russian troops to take a break shortly after Moscow claimed a major victory in seizing the Luhansk region in Ukraine’s east.

Putin, during a meeting with Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu on July 4, said all units involved in the offensive in Luhansk should rest to “build up strength” and “increase their combat capabilities.”

Ukraine’s armed forces say about 37,300 Russian troops have been killed since the war began, although Russia has not confirmed those figures. On March 25, a Russian general told state media that 1,351 soldiers had been killed and 3,825 were wounded.

So what is the West’s end game here? Simply to avoid a Ukraine defeat? Or victory as the Ukrainians want?

Ishaan Tharoor writes at the Washington Post, The West wants to save Ukraine from defeat. But what about victory?:

Last week at the NATO summit in Madrid, President Biden extolled the unity of the moment. Russian President Vladimir Putin “thought he could break the transatlantic alliance,” Biden told reporters, before pointing to how the Russian invasion of Ukraine had only galvanized the West and led to NATO’s imminent expansion with two new Nordic entrants.

“We are going to stick with Ukraine,” he added, “and all of the alliance is going to stick with Ukraine as long as it takes to, in fact, make sure that they are not defeated.”

That was a statement of intent and commitment to the government in Kyiv, one echoed by Biden’s European counterparts. Yet nestled within his remarks was an open question: The United States and its allies may be doing what they can to prevent Ukrainian defeat, but what about facilitating Ukrainian victory?

The Biden administration and its European allies have already poured billions of dollars worth of military aid into Ukraine. They have sourced Soviet-era munitions and equipment best suited for Ukrainian capabilities, flooded the nation with vital tactical arms like antitank Javelin missiles and fast-tracked Ukraine’s military modernization with top-of-the-line artillery and rocket launchers. They have also placed tremendous new pressures on the Russian economy through sanctions.

But some officials in Kyiv and Washington argue it’s far from enough. For months, the overriding message from Ukrainians and their Eastern European brethren has been simple: Give Ukraine weapons, and if in doubt, give Ukraine more weapons. They have lamented delays in deliveries and insisted the West could send greater volumes of materiel than is currently being dispatched.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday said he was relieved that Western artillery was finally “working very powerfully” for his country’s armed forces, and hitting key Russian weapons depots and fuel storage facilities with precision. But his country was still lacking sophisticated air-defense systems to protect Ukrainian cities from Russian missile strikes, he said. Those systems are taking longer to procure.

While Russia’s campaigns have exposed the rust and creakiness of the Kremlin’s war machine, Ukraine remains outmanned and outgunned on numerous fronts, especially in the south and east of the country where Russia is gobbling more territory. Russian forces are slowly, but steadily, expanding their grip over the eastern Donbas region, whose total control is one of the Kremlin’s stated war goals.

“They use artillery en masse and, unfortunately, they have a tenfold fire advantage,” Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, said of the Russians in a Telegram post last month. “Despite everything, we keep holding our positions. Every meter of Ukrainian land there is spilled with blood, not only ours but also the occupier’s.”

The Russian gains and the seeming intractable nature of the conflict have given U.S. onlookers cause for concern. While few in Washington’s foreign policy community want to push Kyiv to make concessions to Russia, they fear that the longer the war drags on, the more Ukraine may have to lose. Some hawkish Republican critics of Biden argue that doing just enough to prevent Ukrainian defeat may be tantamount to defeat.

“If you are just giving weapons to fight to a stalemate, that’s not a good situation and that has consequences,” Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) told my colleague Josh Rogin. “We need to be in or out. And if we are in, we need to give them what they need to win.”

Needing to win implicitly means a profound humbling of Russia. Rather than preventing Ukrainian defeat, the U.S. goal, wrote Eliot Cohen of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, should be “to ensure Russia’s defeat — the thwarting of its aims to conquer yet more of Ukrainian territory, the smashing of its armed forces, and the doing of both in a convincing, public, and, yes, therefore humiliating way.”

By way of analogy, Cohen invoked the brutal logic of Al Capone-era mafia wars, an escalation of measures that fundamentally enfeebles Russia and dissuades it from retaliatory action.

Yet Putin is happy to trade in such rhetoric, too. “We are not rejecting peace talks but those who are should know that the further it goes, the harder it will be to reach agreement with us,” Putin said Thursday. As ever, he cast the ongoing fighting as a battle with NATO proxy forces. “We have heard many times that the West wants to fight us to the last Ukrainian,” he added. “This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people, but it seems that everything is heading toward this.”

Some U.S. analysts believe that because Putin is engaged in his own game of brinkmanship over Ukraine — and because rolling back Russian advances may require considerably more Western investment — the United States and its NATO allies need to think about finding an off-ramp and forcing a settlement.

“The leadership in Kyiv and its Western backers must now face the sobering realities that diplomacy and a negotiated settlement may be the only way to prevent even more Ukrainian territory from falling to Russia,” wrote Daniel Davis, a retired U.S. Army colonel and frequent commentator on right-wing Fox News.

That sort of settlement is a non-starter for Kyiv — Ukrainian officials insist that the war is existential and their goal must be the full reclamation of lost territory, including even annexed Crimea. But in Washington, there are influential figures among the Republicans, let alone the less influential antiwar left, who argue that a protracted war in Ukraine is a distraction from American priorities at home and abroad — namely, the need to confront China.

Eleven Senate Republicans and fifty-seven House Republicans — comprising the bill’s entire opposition — voted against a $40 billion Ukraine aid package in May. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said at the time that such expenditure was “not in America’s interests” and allowed “Europe to freeload.” [The GQP’s Pro-Putin Caucus.]

Foreign Affairs has a lengthy analysis on How Ukraine Will Win.





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