As Russia enters the 14th month of its 72 hour campaign to take Kiev, there are signs that its meat-grinder approach to combat is depleting the exact resources it needs to win.
First up: Anders Puck Nielsen on Russia’s likely manpower shortage:
There is a rule of thumb that is often mentioned, that for every dead soldier there are three wounded. So if we take some round numbers, and remember it’s not actually important if they are a little bit off. It doesn’t change the point that I am getting to if you think real the number is a little lower. But say that on average about 500 Russian soldiers have been killed every day since the mobilization in September, when Russia also really started to have very big attrition numbers. And if we then make a conservative estimate and say that for every dead soldier, there have been two wounded, then we get that the Russian fighting force has been decreased by about 1500 soldiers every day. Then we can divide 300,000 by 1500, and we get that they have soldiers for about 200 days, until the Russian army will have consumed all those mobilized soldiers. This is not exact science. It’s just a rough estimate to illustrate Russia’s manpower problem. Putin announced the mobilization on 21 September, and incidentally 200 days after that is about now. It’s on 9 April 2023.
Second up is a report that both sides are rationing artillery shells in advance of Ukraine’s anticipated counteroffensive.
Artillery units on both sides of the line, despite the continued duels, are reportedly dialing back fire missions to save up ammunition for the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Russian milblogger Alexander Khodakovsky claims that those Russian units not involved in ongoing offensives have had ammunition supplies seriously curtailed. Khodakovsky attributed the rationing to concerns about the potential offensive.
At the same time, a frontline account from the Washington Post highlighted Ukrainian artillery crews similarly conserving shells. While embedded with an artillery platoon in Ukraine’s 56th Motorized Brigade, Isabelle Khurshudyan and Kamila Hrabchuk reported the unit’s 152mm howitzers used to fire more than 20-30 shells a day. That number has dwindled to fewer than three.
The nearby units equipped with NATO 155mm caliber guns are reportedly facing less of a shortage than the Warsaw Pact-era guns. Citing an anonymous Ukrainian military official, the report claimed Ukraine is still firing 7,700 shells a day. Russian shelling reportedly dwarfs even that figure. Ukraine’s incredible artillery consumption remains a concern for NATO as Western production lines struggle to keep supplies moving.
Russia’s grinding style of combat requires a fresh supply of bodies and artillery shells to function, and those are the things (along with money, high tech munitions and global sympathy) that Russia seems to be running short on…
Tags: Alexander Khodakovsky, Anders Puck Nielsen, artillery, Foreign Policy, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine, video
Russian milblogger Alexander Khodakovsky claims that those Russian units not involved in ongoing offensives have had ammunition supplies seriously curtailed. Khodakovsky attributed the rationing to concerns about the potential offensive.
“We’re shooting less” is IMO a lot better than “we’re sending less ammo to units, so they won’t waste it.”
Cool, now you’ve got these stockpiles of ammo behind the lines, where they can be sent where they’re needed.
Except that the Ukrainians have been targeting Russia logistics for the last, what, 9 months? Did the Russians recently get a whole bunch of trucks they can use to carry that ammo where it’s needed once the Ukrainians attack?
Are the Ukrainians going to fail to bomb the roads / rails needed to carry that ammo forward?
If you have the ammo at the forward units, they can use it when the attack kicks off. If you don’t, you’re going to have units overrun because they couldn’t shoot back.
Now, if you do, you’re going to have units overrun with ammo the Ukrainians will capture. Which sucks if you’re Russian
But I’d bet a good deal that the cost of having the ammo way behind lines when the party kicks off is going to be much higher than the cost of having most of it forward deployed
My take on this situation is that Russia is stuck in a military mindset more appropriate to the period between the French Revolution and WWII than what we’re actually in the midst of, right now. Which is a return to the state of things prevalent from the time of Maurice of Nassau to the French Revolution, namely with the ascendency of highly trained professional armies.
History rarely repeats itself, but it does like to rhyme a lot. Today’s military situation is one where you can’t just throw numbers of somewhat trained men and half-ass equipment into the cauldron, and expect to have anything come out of it except a lot of casualties and destroyed equipment.
Yet, there’s still a lot of scope for engaged and enthusiastic amateurs. Witness the effect such people had on the various columns advancing towards Kyiv last spring… So, while it’s not quite true that you have to have a solidly professional army to win, it does help.
I think there needs to be a bit of a “Come to Jesus” realization across a broad swathe of the public, around the world. You want your freedoms, your rights? You have to be ready to resist assholes like Putin when they come calling, and keep a weather eye on the ones like him who’re internal.
I think Russia’s going to lose this one, and lose it big. I don’t quite see how they manage to retain moral authority over everyone inside their little “sphere of influence” when they can’t even manage war on this scale. When and if the various regional governors recognize that they no longer have to worry about the regime preservation troops that have died in job lots inside Ukraine, well… Yeah. The former Russian Federation is likely to take on a lot of the aspects of warlord-era China. Which is going to be muy interesante for everyone else…
So if the Formerly Red Army is lacking both bodies to populate human wave attacks and artillery ammunition to perform monster concentrated artillery barrage attacks sufficient to allow small units to move in and occupy recently flattened areas, they are left with what, massed Fulda-gap style tank assaults? Even if the trains photographed with T-54s and IS-2s moving towards Ukraine are maskirovka, the Russians do appear to be short of the actual mass of tanks required to perform suchlike.
Not sure what that leaves for them except digging more trenches, setting a whole lot of whatever antitank missile systems they have left, and hoping that the UA has somehow not developed doctrine for attacking trenches with intermeshed antitank and MG coverage.
Kirk says “I think Russia’s going to lose this one, and lose it big.”
Since last March I have felt it was impossible for Russia to win this war unless the Ukrainians collapse. Russia lacks the ability to conquer Ukraine.
However, I don’t see a Ukrainian victory unless Russia throws in the towel. My nightmare scenario is Ukraine kicks Russia out of all of pre-2014 Ukraine and Russia then says, “We are not quitting. The war continues.” They then continue to ravage Ukrainian infrastructure until Ukraine collapses.
Not that a Ukrainian collapse is likely in the near-term, but what does Ukraine do then? How do they end the war? They cannot invade Russia. That is what the Russians want them to do. Russia historically sucks at invading countries with competent militaries, but they also historically excel at driving out invaders. Ukraine’s size and geographic proximity is such, that if Russia grinds up and destroys an invading Ukrainian army, Russia can then go on a counteroffensive and gobble up Ukraine.
If an invasion is off the table, then what? Tit-for-tat destruction of Russian infrastructure? That will make the West nervous and has the possibility of touching of a “Mother Russia” response among the Russians. Start a partisan movement in Russia? That allows Putin to clean out any political opposition. Accept stalemate? I think that would leave Ukraine’s civilian population restive.
There has to be a way for Ukraine to force Russia to accept the battlefield results, but I don’t see it.
My nightmare scenario is Ukraine kicks Russia out of all of pre-2014 Ukraine and Russia then says, “We are not quitting. The war continues.” They then continue to ravage Ukrainian infrastructure until Ukraine collapses.
Exactly how do they continue ravishing Ukrainian infrastructure once they’ve been booted out?
And what do they do when Ukraine starts returning the favor?
If enough oligarchs get tired of Putin, he dies
If the sole result of Putin invading in 2021 is that Russia loses all the parts of Ukraine they stole in 2014, including the Crimea, and that parts of Russia are now getting bombed, Putin clinging to getting Russia more bombed is going to get Putin removed
It’ll wind up like the Israelis and the Arabs in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Continual low-level war, until someone gets tired enough to end it decisively.
I honestly don’t see Russia coming out of this intact, however. What’s way, way more likely is that the various regional governors are going to see the ship sinking under their feet, and decide to get out while they can.
Too many people miss the inherent imperialism in the Russian system; everything is run from Moscow. There’s no actual power rising up from underneath, supported by the masses. It’s all centralized in Moscow and whoever is the head man there at the time. When the Tsar ran the show, it was him; when it was Lenin or Stalin, the same. The Russians have a mental model of what authority in Russia is supposed to look like, and they force whatever system they have into this mold. The benevolent despot “Little Father” of Imperial times morphed over into Lenin, then Stalin, now Putin. They can’t conceive of any other way of doing it.
When that fails, finally, which it must, then we’ll see some fireworks. I suspect that this period we’re in will be looked at, eventually, as the last gasp of Imperialism.
How? Missiles missiles missiles, cruise to ballistic to hypersonic to throwaway styrofoam-with-RDX prop jobs, likely with increasingly Iranian technical content, lobbed at anything that makes life better for Ukrainians, day and night. Basically creating the worlds largest live fire SAM/AAA/frickin-laser proving ground.
The response? In addition to building up countrywide air defenses, I don’t doubt some missiles will fly in the other direction, especially towards launch asset locations, but I also expect to slowly hear about a lot more mysterious Russian military industrial plant and design bureau high rise fires, widespread railroad switchbox combustion, and other snake-eater type unclaimed sabotage stuff across Russia and into Iran.
I’d also expect there will be a fair amount of cross-border commando raid activities in both directions along the lines of the most active post-hot-war periods in Korea.
The main actual trigger seems to me to be “foreign army on REAL mother Russian soil” so I highly doubt any armored drive north on Moscow would be even momentarily contemplated, in spite of the historical claims of the Kievan Rus. Aside from the obvious reasons, one thing Iraq and Afghanistan have proven is the applicability to military occupations of the “you broke it, you own it” rule, and I don’t think Kiev wants to own any fraction of fixing the mess that would be post-collapse Russia.
The Ukrainians aren’t going to tolerate a situation like the Israelis have going between them and the Arabs.
Where that ends? No idea. Don’t look for a “Bleeding Kansas” sort of situation to arise, either.
I’m not at all sure that Russia can survive the ego and emotional blow of being beaten on the ground in Ukraine. Not as the collection of ethnicities and races that is the Russian Federation; the disproportionate number of non-Russian ethnics who’ve been sent to die, and then actually died? That’s going to have a lot of people asking “Why are we part of Russia…?”, and then where that goes?
Putin has to know “Après moi, le déluge“, and the fact that he can’t pull his hands out of Ukraine’s B’rer Rabbit tar baby has a lot to do with it.
I expect that much of the 2020s is going to consist of watching from the sidelines as the Russian Federation devolves into chaos, and with much of the ethnic republics peeling off. Also, look for a hell of a lot of ethnic Russians self-repatriating in an echo of the German “cleansings” after WWII. You can already see the outlines of where a lot of this is going, and anyone who thinks Russia is coming out of this even remotely intact is seriously at odds with the probabilities.
I honestly don’t like it, but that’s the way it looks to me. A world absent Russia as it is will be a much more unstable place, and with their nukes potentially going up for highest bid? Yikes.
Xi smiles. Whatever Russia gets from China will be paid for dearly. Dearly.
Why is no one mentioning nukes? Does no one think that Putin and/or the oligarchs are never going to be willing to use them?
1. Russia swears Ukrainian territory is your own, and it makes no sense to nuke “yourself.”
2. Put know that he and anyone close to him would perish in a nuke exchange with the U.S.
3. Nuking a NATO country providing aid is only slightly less suicidal.
That doesn’t leave any suitable targets…even assuming Russian nuke haven’t decayed as severely as other parts of its corrupt military has.
How much credence do y’all give to Peter Zeihan’s claim yesterday, in Russia Moves Nukes to Belarus :
… Zeihan goes on to explain expanding Russia’s “nuclear footprint” into Belarus would require so much additional security – and be such a major proliferation hazard – that they’d be better off leaving all the equipment in the crates unopened but heavily guarded.
As is usual with PZ, this is a very reassuring narrative on both counts – one, that Putin launching a nuke would result in pinpoint surgical retaliation on his physical person and anyone in that postal code, so he’s been thoroughly deterred – and two, even expanding to Belarus can’t really be done effectively.
Y’all’s thoughts?
I don’t think anyone has a handle on what’s going on in Putin’s mind, right now. Probably not even Putin…
I also rather doubt that there are responsible adults in charge on our side, or that they have any clue at all about what is going on.
I think the last time we had this level of incompetence and mendacity running things at the international level, it was right before WWI and WWII. There seems to be a generational thing with it all… You get two generations away from major wars, and everyone forgets the lessons of the last time we f*cked up that badly, and they start repeating the stupidities.
That said, I don’t think it’s a good idea to let Putin get Ukraine because he’s scaring everyone with the nukes. That sets some rather nasty precedents, ones I don’t think anyone wants to be dealing with, over any term in the future, near, mid, or long.
Let’s face it: We got here because of fecklessness, and a failure to comprehend the nature of things. That’s an essential flaw that will have to play out, and play out, it will. I would suggest, however, that if you happen to live near a likely nuclear target, that you take precautions. If you’re an American under threat of Russian nukes, well… I don’t know that anywhere is particularly safe, given the less-than-stellar accuracy that Russian weapons will likely demonstrate.
I’m cultivating a sense of the absurd, and expecting nothing but more idiocy and folly from these people. Particularly the Russians, who seem hell-bent on running themselves into the wall.
The stat I found much more interesting was the ~20,000 confirmed burials in Russia, exclusive of DPR/LPR, Wagner, and Chechens. We can only guess at the multiplier, but very clearly the Russians have not put a high priority on recovering personnel from the battlefield and transporting them back home; if anything, I’d bet those losses are heavily skewed towards soldiers who returned to base and died of their wounds. Those are basically the losses that can’t be hidden – so what is the actual number likely to be?
I know that there are refrigerated train cars in Ukraine full of bodies they’ve recovered and which the Russians won’t accept for transfer.
My guess is that the number of Russian casualties will likely never be known; Putin has killed more men in one year than the Brezhnev-era Communists managed in ten years in Afghanistan. That’s an incredibly bad level of performance, given the amount of ground he’s traded those lives for.
I’m going to guess that once the implications of all this start to sink in with the Russian ethnic groups that are paying most of the price for this crap, there’s going to be a lot more unrest than Putin ever planned on. I’d also wager that many of the regional governors who’ve been all-in on this thing, supporting Putin and helping conscript their own people are going to be forced to answer some viciously pertinent questions by those they supposedly represent. That’s not likely to work out too well.
Russia has been steadily centralizing things since Putin took over. There’s been more and more concentration of power in Moscow, and if you look at exactly who most of these regional governors are, they’re parachuted in from Moscow. There’s very limited actual regional representation; the government resembles rather more of an “imposed from the center” sort of affair than anything at all organically growing up from the countryside. This means that the regime is extremely brittle, just as the Imperial Russian government was. Remove what the Chinese refer to as the “Mandate of Heaven”, and that whole system just goes… Poof. Rather like it did back during the Russian Revolution. I think Putin has put the shotgun in the Russian Federation’s mouth, and he’s easing back on the trigger as we speak.
20,000 burials inside Russia right now speaks to there being a lot more coming. Those piles of dead bodies you see stacked up outside Bakhmut? Those are all sons and husbands who won’t be going back home, who have families that are innocently expecting to see them again. It won’t be pretty once it’s all realized just how high the losses were.
If I were a Ukrainian intel guy, I’d establish a website called “Help us identify your dead…”, and have photos and whatever else they can come up with for every body they’ve recovered and dealt with. Make it available on multiple networks such that the Russians can’t block it, and watch the fireworks as people start realizing that Ivan and Misha aren’t coming home. Ever.
Right now, all too many Russians are fantasizing about their sons and husbands being on a farm somewhere, frolicking in the sun, chasing balls thrown by the farmer’s little boys. The reality is, someone put a bullet in their head. They need to see that, and work out the consequences of the lies they’ve all been told.