Forty thousand Russian soldiers died in less than six months of war. The startling claim that the Ukrainian military made on Wednesday is unverifiable and far exceeds the estimates of the United States and its Western allies.
But it aligns with the Western assessment that the war has taken a toll on the Russian military and underscores the central question at this point in a conflict in which both sides have suffered traumatic losses.
Maybe Russia is approaching the point of exhaustion?
While Ukraine’s Western allies give lower estimates of the number of Russians killed – with the most recent Pentagon estimate at 15,000 and Britain saying it could be closer to 25,000 – there is a agreed that their losses were deeply reduced.
Ben Barry, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: “Russia has assembled what I call a steam plane, when it comes to its military might, especially the Artillery. “We don’t know when Russia will run out of power.”
Often, success on the battlefield is measured in terms of territorial gains and relative casualty figures. By seizing territory, Moscow has been in a position since April, when Russian President Vladimir V. Putin made the eastern Donbas region the focus of his election campaign. The city of Lysychansk, Ukraine’s last stronghold in Donbas, Luhansk province, fell this month.
The key question, Mr. Barry said, is whether Moscow has reached a “climax” – the point at which “an attack runs out of supplies or suffers so many casualties that it becomes unsustainable”.
There is some evidence that such a time may be approaching.
Russia’s offensive operations in eastern Ukraine have not achieved significant strategic benefit for weeks. And after losing control of much of the area south of Kherson in the first weeks of the war, the Ukrainian army has now liberated 44 towns and villages along the border area, accounting for about 15% of the territory, according to the military governor of the region.
It is possible that Moscow is deliberately attacking slowly, but Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at St. Andrews in Scotland, says the pace of their artillery attacks in Donetsk province has also slowed. Data from NASA satellites that detect fires and thermal anomalies around the globe “shows that Russia’s long-range fires are greatly diminishing,” he said in a recent interview. Twitter thread.
One possible explanation for this decline is the impact of recently deployed long-range weapons, and in particular HIMARS, truck-mounted multiple rocket launchers supplied by the United States. Ukraine has repeatedly claimed since the deployment to have attacked Russian ammunition dumps in the rear of the front lines.
Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said Ukrainian forces destroyed 50 Russian ammunition depots using new weapons on Monday. At the same time, Ukraine’s moves to the south are forcing Russia to turn more attention there, and Moscow has picked up the pace with long-range missile strikes aimed at disrupting Ukraine’s efforts to launch a military strike. counterattack.
The accuracy of this claim could not be verified, but the Chairman of the Army Chiefs of Staff, General Mark A. Milley, said at a press conference last week that the airstrikes were “decreasing gradually. ability to supply the Russian military. command and control their forces. “
A recent report by the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based research group, argues that frontline developments are less important in the long term than the latent power of an adversary’s war machine. Issues such as training, logistics and supplies will ultimately determine the outcome of the conflict. The Ukrainian army has fought a brutal battle and their forces are also in danger of exhaustion.
“It is necessary to ensure that the Ukrainian war effort can be sustained,” the report said. The alternative is “a symmetrical stalemate that can only lead to a negative conflict, which risks draining Ukraine.”
What could be a major test for both militaries seems to be fast approaching. Ukrainian forces are army masses around the Kherson area for a counterattack that could be the country’s most ambitious attempt to date to regain territory. For Moscow, the battle will prove a test of its existential strength.
