Vladimir Putin is running out of time to achieve a breakthrough in Ukraine
Vladimir Putin, Putin (Photo: Reuters)
By Bloomberg News
For months, the Russian military has made only limited gains on the battlefield against Ukrainian forces deprived of weapons and ammunition. That is a growing challenge for President Vladimir Putin as his military’s advantage begins to erode.
As Kiev receives billions of dollars in new weapons from its American and European allies, the chances of a Russian breakthrough are diminishing, even as the country continues to fire missiles and drones at Ukrainian cities, including energy infrastructure.
A Russian attempt to open a new front in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region already appears to be stalling without achieving Putin’s goal of creating a buffer zone along the border. Ukraine claims to inflict “very high losses” on Russian forces in fighting around the city of Vovchansk.
Russian forces have made only marginal progress since capturing the strategic eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka in February, at the cost of huge casualties in months of fighting. They have been trying to capture the main settlement of Khasiv Yar in the eastern Donetsk region for weeks.
Russia’s attrition strategy to deplete Ukrainian forces is “very expensive and bloody for the Russian army itself,” said Ruslan Pukhov, head of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. “It could lead to excessive depletion of forces on the Russian side, which in turn would give the Ukrainians an opportunity to counterattack.”
As Russia carries out attacks at several points along the front line, “we have opportunities to change the situation in our favor,” Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Oleksandr Syrskyi said in Telegram on Wednesday.
Putin insists his war objectives remain unchanged and that Russia will fight for as long as it takes to win in Ukraine, regardless of mounting losses in a war that is in its third year with no end in sight. Ukraine and its allies face the challenge of maintaining resistance in a war that has largely reached a stalemate.
As Ukrainian officials raised alarms about the threat of a Russian breakthrough amid months of delays in U.S. arms deliveries, Kiev’s forces largely held the line despite being outscored as much as 10-1 by Moscow’s invading army. With President Joe Biden’s administration sending U.S. weapons to Ukraine after Congress finally approved $61 billion in funding in April, the balance of firepower is beginning to shift.
“Ukraine was in a deep hole because of the delay” in sending U.S. weapons “and they are digging out of that hole,” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday. “We have seen them withstand the Russian attack,” and in a situation that is developing dynamically, “weapons that have arrived on the battlefield on a large scale and in large quantities in recent days and weeks have made a difference,” he said.
European Union countries are also stepping up aid and arms deliveries to strengthen Kiev, even as Hungary’s Russia-friendly government continues to block billions of euros in broader military aid.
Putin is now also dealing with a shift in the attitude of Ukraine’s allies, with the US and Germany joining countries such as Britain in allowing Kiev to use their weapons to attack targets in border areas within Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday he is working to send a coalition of instructors to train thousands of soldiers in Ukraine, despite threats of retaliation from Moscow.
Group of Seven leaders will meet in Italy next week to weigh plans to extend loans to Ukraine, using windfalls from about $280 billion in frozen assets from Russia’s central bank.
“The prospects of Russia winning this year have been greatly reduced due to the resumption of arms deliveries and aid,” said Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Russia may have the largest number of soldiers, but many of their top-of-the-line armored vehicles have been destroyed” and it will take years to bring the military back to 2022 levels, he said.
Putin’s decision last month to appoint Andrei Belousov, an economist, as defense minister instead of his close ally Sergei Shoigu underscored Russia’s need to make more of the scarce resources of an economy that is overheating, even as unprecedented international sanctions have failed to prevent a collapse.
Defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product is approaching levels last reached at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s under the Soviet Union, hampering Russia’s ability to further increase military production is limited.
While Russia has vastly increased production of missiles, artillery, tanks and ammunition since the February 2022 invasion, “building an effective economy for the armed forces is essential today,” Putin told a May 25 meeting with officials from the defense industry. It must “generate a return on every ruble we invest in it.”
It is fair to say that both sides face enormous challenges, especially in recruiting replacements for killed or wounded troops. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a new mobilization law that lowers the age of the bill, although manpower remains a problem for the military.
The Kremlin is determined not to repeat Putin’s September 2022 order to call up 300,000 reservists, a mobilization that shook public support and triggered an exodus of as many as a million Russians from the country. Instead, the country is relying on offering generous rewards and signing bonuses to attract recruits as the Defense Department aims to recruit at least 250,000 more soldiers this year.
While the policy avoids social tensions within Russia over the war, the military is unlikely to be able to muster enough troops for a successful offensive in Ukraine, said Pukhov, the Moscow-based military analyst. “For a real breakthrough, the Kremlin would need many more people,” he said.
Putin said in December that Russia had stationed 617,000 troops in Ukraine. At a meeting with foreign media in St. Petersburg late Wednesday, he appeared to suggest that some 10,000 Russian troops were being killed or wounded every month, claiming the total was five times lower than Ukrainian losses he estimated at 50,000.
Ukraine rejects such estimates of its victims. Zelensky said in February that his army had lost 31,000 soldiers since the start of the war.
In December, the US estimated the number of killed and wounded Russian troops at 315,000, almost 90 percent of the original invasion force. Britain’s Ministry of Defense last week raised its estimate of total Russian casualties to 500,000 and said losses in May stood at 1,200 per day.
Russia has not translated its battlefield advantages into major gains because its commanders “waste manpower in pursuit of their goals and the Ukrainian armed forces are effective in defense when supplied with men and equipment,” said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at Carnegie. Donation for international peace. “There are still meaningful limits to Russian military power.”
First print: June 8, 2024 | 11:08 am IST