Why Russia is losing

 Strategy Page:

The poor performance of Russian troops and weapons in Ukraine has led to more opposition to the war inside Russia. More and more men conscripted or “mobilized '' men refuse to serve. Several million have either left the country or gone into hiding. This includes a lot of essential workers in many businesses, even state-owned ones. The government admits that it has mismanaged the mobilization while also announcing even more mobilizations of Russian men. A growing number of mobilized men refuse to go to Ukraine and sometimes do so violently. The untrained mobilized recruits are usually more of a liability than an asset. Too many of them will flee from a Ukrainian attack, or surrender. Recent efforts to use large units of mobilized me to stop advancing Ukrainians failed Russian commanders in Ukraine are complaining to their superiors, not just the media and these problems have reached senior officials in the government and found that Vladimir Putin continues to order problems fixed without taking into account the months of bad decisions that have eliminated most practical solutions. 

What Russia needs now is for the Ukrainians to slow down their offensive. There’s no change of that because Ukraine knows it has the advantage and is willing and able to take better care of its own troops than the Russians can. Except during the first weeks of the invasion, Ukraine did not send untrained recruits into battle, even though most of these new soldiers were willing to go with minimal training. Ukraine made the effort to train and equip combat troops properly. This meant there were often not enough troops available to take advantage of battlefield opportunities. As the months went by Russian recruits got less training while their Ukrainian counterparts received more. Those two trends have reached the point where Russia faces the risk of larger units collapsing when under pressure from Ukrainian forces. This is happening on a smaller scale more frequently and Russian commanders can do the math. As the proportion of untrained combat troops increases, the units they belong to must be considered unfit for combat duty. All these untrained recruits are good for is providing security in rear areas or for manual labor. 

Even this doesn’t work because Russian supply problems are still critical. That means not enough food, fuel, medical care or cold-weather clothing. These shortages lead to illness among the troops. There are similar problems in Russian defense industries, where the shortages of key components for building new weapons are crippling productions. Threatening to arrest plant officials who cannot solve these problems is a sign of desperation, not determination. Russia has developed some new sources for key components or weapons, but not enough. Even the crude cruise missiles obtained from Iran are slow in arriving. This may be due to the weeks of unrest and anti-government violence in Iran. Another problem is that Iran faces more economic sanctions for supplying Russia with cruise missiles that are used mainly against civilians. All Iran could say was that they did not provide the missiles for use in Ukraine. This is obviously false because Iranian media proudly reports on Iranian weapons proving decisive in Ukraine. Less often mentioned is the need for Iran to send troops to join Russian forces and show them how to use the new missiles correctly. Most of the Iranian missiles are used against civilians, including power plants, water supply facilities and functioning businesses. Iran is having a hard time negotiating its way out of more sanctions because of this.

This is putting a lot of pressure on Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who mistakenly believed that it would be easy to seize all of Ukraine. It wasn’t and now Russia is suffering from increased economic sanctions to the degree that Russian business leaders and government economic officials are pressuring Putin to stop the war, even if it means getting out of Ukraine. The Russian economy was in trouble before 2022 because of sanctions imposed for the 2014 Russian attack on Ukraine. The new sanctions have increased unemployment and the number of Russians living below the official poverty line while Putin’s reaction to losing the war has made things even worse. Putin blames all this on “NATO aggression” but the number of Russians soldiers who have returned from Ukraine, especially the many wounded, contradict that. Russia has suffered heavy and unprecedented personnel and equipment losses in Ukraine and more Russians are realizing that and the fact that their leader has been lying to them and ignoring the economic problems he has caused.

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In the last eight months Russia has lost nearly 4,000 tanks and other armored vehicles in Ukraine as well as nearly a thousand other specialized vehicles, including towed artillery. Over a thousand military trucks have been lost, which are also specialized for military purposes and there weren’t enough of them even at the war’s beginning. Russian was further crippled by the absence of a replaceable item on all Russian railroad cars. While Russia needs its railroad less because of the many businesses shut down by sanctions, the shortage of railroad cars is growing and soon it will disrupt the movements of needed civilian and military cargo. Russia has also used more guided missiles and artillery ammunition than it can replace.

All this has crippled Russian military operations in Ukraine and enabled Ukrainian forces to go on the offensive. Since early September the Ukrainian offensive has been continuous, clearing most of north easter Ukraine of Russian forces and now driving Russian forces out of Donbas and the two provinces north of Crimea. Poor Russian leadership, tactics and training resulted in Russia losing six times as many troops as Ukraine, a country with a population 30 percent the size of Russia’s.
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There is much more.

This is a good analysis of the failure of Russia to achieve its objectives in a war it should never have started.  Ukraine was never a threat to Russia and Putin's rationale of  "denazification" was bogus, to begin with.