Putin's Ukraine folly

 Joel Gehrke:

Russia doesn’t have enough cruise missiles to wage a scorched-earth campaign against Ukrainian civilians while fending off a Ukrainian counteroffensive to liberate occupied territory in the east, Western officials and analysts said.

“We know that they are running out of these cruise missiles, which is by the way the only precision, long-range weapon they still have,” a senior European military official told the Washington Examiner. “Soon, so early 2023, they will run out of it because that's something the defense industry in Russia cannot produce anymore.”

Those estimates bode poorly for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ability to sustain the blistering barrage that Russian forces unleashed this week. The bombardment targeted energy infrastructure and other civilian targets across the country in an apparent effort to cripple “the entire chain of supply” of electricity, according to Ukrainian energy officials.

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“They will not make strategic or operational difference, these strikes, because the determination of the Ukrainian population will not be changed by harsh winter or by more bombing by the Russians,” the senior European military official said. “And it has no impact on the front line, what's happening on the front line.”

The strategy favored by Aksenov and other hard-liners may fail to account for the depletion of Russia’s missile stockpiles over the last several months.

"There are signs that he's running short in precision-guided munitions,” a second senior European official said this week. “I would argue that yesterday's cruel and violent show of force was quite expensive, not only in terms of monetary value but also in terms of the effect on the Russian stocks of long-range precision-guided ammunition.”

President Joe Biden’s administration aspires to strangle Moscow’s military capacity through the imposition of economic sanctions that deprive Russia of access to materials needed for manufacturing key weapons.

“We are constraining Russia’s strategic economic sectors, including defense and aerospace, and we will continue to counter Russia’s attempts to weaken and destabilize sovereign nations and undermine multilateral institutions,” as the newly released White House National Security Strategy put it. “We have joined with allies and partners in Europe and around the globe to impose sanctions and export controls that will degrade Russia’s ability to wage future wars of aggression.”

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Russia no longer has access to the chips needed to make more precision weapons.   It is now peeing away the strategic assets it has left in its arsenal in a futile attempt to save its ridiculous war in Ukraine.  Its fictional snipe hunt for Nazis was just a pretext for aggression and in the process, Putin has made Russia a much weaker country.