Ukraine war challenges Russia's superpower status

 Bloomberg:

Six months into President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the war has upended fundamental assumptions about Russia’s military and economy.

When the US warned of impending war earlier this year, officials and analysts in Washington and Europe alike assumed Russia’s much larger and better equipped military would quickly dominate Ukraine’s forces. They also believed Putin would find himself constrained by a weak domestic economy.

US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley even warned Congress that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of an invasion being launched. President Joe Biden said he would turn the ruble to “rubble.” In the Kremlin, meanwhile, Putin and his closest advisers saw Ukraine as a nation divided with incompetent leaders that would lack the will to fight.

Yet those expectations have proved drastically wrong.

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What this eventually will mean as Ukraine marks a half year of war and continued independence is as uncertain as the conflict’s outcome. What’s clear is that rather than reassert Moscow as a global military power as Putin hoped, his decision to invade Ukraine has launched a profound rethink of Russia’s conventional capabilities. It also prompted further expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with hitherto neutral Finland and Sweden resolving to join the military alliance.

Russia “is not a peer military to the US” or even smaller NATO forces, said Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The war showed it “is not able to run complex operations in the way the British or French or Israelis can do, so in those terms it isn’t even a second tier military power.”
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One reason for Russian under performance is that only since the war has it become clear its military was over counting to hide its underinvestment in personnel, according to Michael Kofman, director of Russia Studies at CNA, a Washington think tank.

As Russia gathered troops around Ukraine for the invasion, estimates for the scale of the force were based on a count of so-called Battalion Tactical Groups, or BTGs — maneuverable units with their own artillery, air defense, logistics and about 50 tanks and armored vehicles — assumed to include 700-900 troops each. That suggested an invasion force of about 150,000.

In reality, the average BTG had 600 personnel or fewer, and the total force may have included just 90,000 regular Russian troops, Kofman said in a recent pod cast with West Point’s Modern War Institute. With the bulk of personnel cuts coming to infantry, “they were essentially going to war and there was nobody in the vehicles.”

That had a huge impact on the war, explaining Russian difficulties in getting off roads, engaging effectively in urban warfare and taking territory, according to Kofman. Still, he remains cautious about drawing conclusions, recalling the difficulties encountered by the US against vastly inferior militaries in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Under performance of the Russian air force and air defenses has also led to questions over the quality of the equipment itself, as well as the training of Russian pilots and soldiers that operate them.

Russia’s ability to produce technologically advanced weapons is likely to be further eroded as sanctions hamper imports. A study of Russian equipment captured or destroyed on Ukraine’s battlefields found 450 foreign-made components in 27 Russian critical arms systems, including drones, missiles and communications equipment.

The majority of those parts were made by US companies, with the remainder coming mainly from Ukraine’s supporters. While smuggling and espionage can fill some of the void, “Russia and its armed forces remain highly vulnerable to multilateral efforts to choke off these component flows and raise the costs of its aggression in Ukraine,” said the Aug. 8 report by the Royal United Services Institute in the UK.

At the same time the motivation and ability of Ukrainian forces to innovate, out think Russian commanders in the field and deploy unfamiliar NATO standard weaponry has surprised many, with some analysts — and according to one August opinion poll, 98% of Ukrainians — now convinced they can win the war.
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There is more.

While the war has exposed the deficiencies of the Russian conventional war-making ability it may also hamper its nuclear arsenal which also needs tech parts from the states imposing sanctions on the regime.  

European weakness has also been exposed by its reliance on Russian energy supplies.  This is a weakness that Trump discussed with Europe as he tried to get them to use US LNG instead.  Biden reversed that policy by reducing US energy production and replacing it with Russian oil and gas.  That mistake strengthened Putin and his reducing the supply helped Putin finance his war.