For Russia, the numbers are catastrophic.
From Wednesday to Sunday, Vladimir Putin’s military forces saw at least 338 pieces of key military equipment – from fighter jets to tanks and trucks – destroyed, damaged or captured, according to figures from the open-source intelligence website Oryx, as the forces Ukrainians advanced. Territory controlled by the Russians in an offensive that surprised them in its speed and breadth.
Ukraine’s top military commander said on Sunday that more than 3,000 square kilometers of territory had been retaken by his country’s forces since the beginning of September. And for more perspective, just “since Wednesday, Ukraine has recaptured territory at least twice the size of Greater London,” the British Defense Ministry said on Monday.
Ukrainian reports say Putin’s troops are fleeing east, to the Russian border, in whatever transport they can find, even taking civilian cars into the areas they have captured since the war began in February.
In their wake, they leave hundreds of pieces of the Russian war machine, which since the start of Putin’s so-called “special military operation” has not come close to fulfilling its pre-war billing as one of the world’s great powers.
These Russian losses are the accumulation of a multitude of existing problems that are now colliding head-on with a Ukrainian army that has been patient, methodical and infused with billions of dollars in Western military equipment that Russia cannot match. And without drastic and potentially unconventional intervention by Putin, Ukrainian victories are likely to accelerate, analysts say.
Many of Russia’s problems – poor and inflexible leadership, sour troop morale, inadequate logistics and hardware hampered by maintenance issues – were evident from the early stages of the war more than seven months ago.
The hollow core of the Russian military — including tanks that were easy prey for Ukrainian ground troops and trucks that didn’t have the right tires to traverse Ukraine’s landscape — was quickly exposed by inadequate tactics for the blitzkrieg that Putin had planned.
Remember that 64 kilometer convoy that stopped on the way to the capital Kyiv and was destroyed by Ukrainian defenders? As the convoy came to a halt, reports filtered in that Russian troops had significant morale issues – some did not even know they were in Ukraine or, if they did, why they were there. As fighting intensified, Ukrainian forces attacked the Russian leadership, killing generals and colonels who were supposed to rally Russian forces. And the Russians certainly needed stronger leadership to believe the reports of troop difficulties.
Pavel Filatyev, a Russian paratrooper who fought against his army’s capture of the Ukrainian town of Kherson at the start of the war, told CNN last month that his unit lacked even the basics during the operation. “Several days after we surrounded Kherson, many of us didn’t have food, water or sleeping bags,” he said.
“As it was very cold at night, we couldn’t even sleep. We would find some junk, some rags, just to wrap ourselves up to keep warm.” And their weapons were of inferior quality, he said. “All our weapons are from the Afghan era,” where Russian forces fought from 1979 to 1989, he said.
The Impact of Western Gun Donations
Meanwhile, Western weapons flowed into Ukraine, among them powerful advanced artillery systems like the HIMARS, or High Mobility Rocket Artillery Systems.
Wheeled HIMARS offer what American manufacturer Lockheed Martion calls “fire and run capability” – they can fire highly accurate rockets at targets around 70 to 80 kilometers away and then move quickly to avoid any counterattacks. .
Ukraine used them to devastating effect on Russian supply lines, ammunition depots and command posts.
“Ukraine’s armed forces employed HIMARS and other Western systems to attack Russian land lines of communication in Kharkiv and Kherson Oblasts, setting conditions for the success of this operation,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in a blog post. blog on Sunday.
The blow applied by the Ukrainian HIMARS deployed to Russian supply lines has been relentless, according to Western analysts.
“Ukrainian long-range artillery is likely hitting Dnipro (river) crossings so often that Russia cannot carry out repairs to damaged road bridges,” the UK Ministry of Defense said on Monday.
Trent Telenko, a former quality assurance auditor at the US Defense Contract Management Agency who has studied Russian logistics, said Ukrainian forces used precision rockets fired from HIMARS batteries to eliminate key Russian weapons depots near rail lines well behind the front lines.
That meant Russia had to use trucks to disperse artillery pieces and ammunition to smaller depots, making distribution difficult, Telenko said.
When Ukraine began its lightning offensive, Russia was unable to bring in adequate firepower to stop the Ukrainian advance because its artillery was too dispersed, he said. But HIMARS and other powerful Western artillery systems should not be given all the credit, the ISW said.
They were combined with Ukrainian feints and ingenuity. Last week, Russia redeployed forces south to bolster its ranks ahead of a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Kherson region, according to Ukrainian officials and footage of equipment passing through Crimea. This opened the door for Ukrainian forces further north.
“The long Kyiv discussion and the announcement of a counter-offensive operation targeting the Kherson Oblast have moved substantial Russian troops away from sectors where Ukrainian forces have carried out decisive attacks in recent days,” the ISW said.
After those Russian forces moved, the Ukrainian military investigated weaknesses in Russian lines, said Mark Hertling, a CNN analyst and former US Army general.
“What they were able to do was conduct reconnaissance with a small force to figure out where to conduct a much larger advance, pushing tanks and artillery through the holes on the Russian front and then entering the Russian rear areas,” Hertling said.
Supplies for Ukraine to fuel its advance
The rapid Russian withdrawal has allowed Ukraine to capture Russian weapons, ammunition, fuel and supplies in these rear areas, Telenko said, adding that the addition of trucks and trains to the Ukrainian inventory will allow Kyiv to “overload” its advances.
Analysts also noted the lack of Russian air support. Richard Hooker Jr., a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said last month that Ukraine had assembled a force of older anti-aircraft systems already in its inventory with supplies of American and German equipment and had “largely marginalized Russian air power.” ”.
“Ukraine has been extremely successful in denying Russia’s air supremacy with extremely effective air defense and an ‘air denial’ strategy,” Hooper wrote on the Atlantic Council’s “Ukraine Alert” blog.
And Russian setbacks are just fuel for even more trouble ahead, a losing spiral that may be beyond Moscow’s ability to stop.
Mick Ryan, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former general in the Australian Army, calls this a “cascade failure” in a Twitter post. “Each loss and retreat on the battlefield leads to more failures,” he said.
As the options dwindle, so will the embattled Russian morale.
As retreating forces retreat, they bring stories of their retreat with them.
It will be nearly impossible for the Kremlin to prevent these stories from spreading within its forces and even to its relatives back home.
The territory that Russia captured in Ukraine over seven months, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian casualties, was lost within a week. And Russia’s generals apparently have no immediate response.
Even as Putin’s forces advanced, those advances were slow and exhausting. And at the start of the war, Ukraine’s defenders never fled like Russian troops did last week.
“The already limited trust that deployed troops have in Russia’s senior military leadership is likely to deteriorate further,” the British Defense Ministry said on Monday. The ministry report said Ukrainian attacks made it difficult for Russia to move replacement troops to the front lines.
Where does Moscow find replacements?
The big question is whether Russia has new troops trained to move forward.
In July, CNN reported that the call had been made across Russia for more than 30,000 volunteers to join the war effort in Ukraine.
The attraction was big cash bonuses and no experience was required.
But Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russian researcher at the ISW, said these new recruits would likely be of little help on the battlefield, as there would not be enough time to train them.
For example, training a tank crew can take at least several months and sometimes more than a year, experts say.
“Short-term training is unlikely to turn volunteers with no prior experience into effective soldiers in any unit,” Stepanenko said. And those more than 300 pieces of Russian hardware that have been destroyed, damaged or abandoned on the battlefield in recent days won’t be easy to replace either.
Russian industry has been crippled by Western sanctions.
Russian weapons depots have already been raided to replace previous losses. And while large numbers of weapons may remain in these depots, they are likely old and in need of repair or refurbishment, said Jakub Janovsky, a military analyst who contributes to the Oryx blog.
“In practice, replacements are often much older vehicles – they likely suffer from reliability issues and are less effective in combat,” he said. Moscow retains manufacturing capacity but lacks the best components for what it can produce, Janovsky said.
“Due to sanctions, they may have to replace sensors and electronics with inferior alternatives – and the amount they can produce in the short term is a fraction of what they are losing. These material losses… are not sustainable,” he said.
So enjoy Ukraine, at least in the short term. But Ryan, the former Australian general, remains cautious.
“It is too early to speak in overly triumphant terms. The Russians still have the ability to respond. The south and east are still occupied by the Russians. The Ukrainians have won a significant victory, but there is still a war to be won,” he tweeted.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
