Russia makes incremental progress' in Donbas

 Washington Examiner:

Russia's military is making "incremental progress" in its efforts to capture the Donbas region of Ukraine, a senior U.S. defense official said.

Russia and Ukraine's military are mainly fighting in the Donbas region, which is in the eastern part of Ukraine that borders Russia and where Ukrainians and pro-Russian separatists have engaged in fighting for years. After the Russians failed to conquer the capital of Kyiv, they redirected their attention to the Donbas.

"We would assess that Russian forces are making slow and uneven, and frankly, we would describe it as incremental progress in the Donbas, some advance in east of Izium and to the south a little bit. But there has been continued pushback by the Ukrainians, and so there's a lot of still back and forth in the Donbas in terms of territory gained and or lost by, frankly, both sides," the official told reporters Thursday.

The Russians have 92 “operational battalion tactical groups” within Ukraine and another 20 in Russia, although they started with between 125 and 130, the official said. Each BTG consists of roughly 800-1,000 service members.

Russia is "once again relying on a fresh round of conscripts," the official added. "We have some early indications that while the conscripts start out with high morale because they've been feasting on Russian propaganda, it doesn't take very long before that morale is sapped once they get put into combat and face Ukrainian resistance."

In addition to poor morale, the Pentagon believes the Russians have "not overcome all their logistics and sustainment challenges" that have plagued them since the start of their invasion back on Feb. 24, nine weeks ago. These difficulties have prevented Russian forces from making more than “several kilometers or so progress on any given day, just because they don’t want to run out too far ahead of their logistics and sustainment lines.”

...

I think they are still trying to reconstitute BTG's shattered in their initial attacks in Ukraine.  They appear unable to mount a broad sweeping offensive at this point.  Their military was not very good to begin with and new conscripts with minimal training are unlikely to improve it.  I think they are going through the motions right now trying to keep pressure on the Ukraine forces. 

See, also:

Sanctions Force Closure of Russian Tank and Truck Factories and Hamper Production of Precision Munitions

Note that recent reports say Ukriane now has more tanks than Russia. 

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