Putin Reaches For Two More Armies — Again
“Russian is not as strong as you might think” — NATO chief
Russia’s defense minister Sergei Shoigu finally got around to announcing the creation of the two additional armies announced in 2023, plus a plan to boost Russia’s conventional military capabilities.
Former British defense attaché to Moscow and Kyiv John Foreman stated that “Shoigu’s statement yesterday was not new and does not presage a Russian attack on NATO. It was a reiteration of previously announced plans to enlarge and reshape the Russian Army as a strategically defensive measure in response to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
“Shoigu was typically opaque on the details. I don’t believe Russia — currently — has the ability to man, train, and equip these new larger formations given its ongoing struggles in Ukraine, ongoing losses, severe pressures on the military-industrial complex, and destruction of huge amounts of armor and equipment.”
On paper, the increase comes to 300–400,000 soldiers.
It doesn’t even replace the Russian loses from 2023. Within a few months, in fact, Russian loses since the start of Putin’s war will total more than 500,000 men — about twice the size of the entire army with which Russia started the war.
Ukraine is on the cusp of adding 500,000 more troops to its armed forces. Its demographic resources give it the capacity to call them up, according to a Harvard study. It has 900,000 reservists to call on. To pay for another 500,000 salaries Ukraine will have to spend $15.7-billion annually. This fits within president Zelensky’s budge estimate. It could be paid for by the funds that Europe has seized from Russia in the last month, as a penalty for starting the war. An initial payment in terms of bridge funding of $4.9-billion is already on its way, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The Ukrainian recruits will be more motivated than their Russian counterparts, given that the former defend their homeland, while the latter know they are fighting for the territory of another state, even if the Kremlin tells them this territory is all historic Russian land.
Further, to make soldiers, one has to have weapons. Otherwise, these are only meat cubes.
The Russians have been scrapping the bottom of the Cold War weapons pool for a year now, whereas Europe and America are ramping up.
Russia’s current manufacturing rate and troop quality are about as high as they’re ever going to get. A review of economic and social data also shows that serious vulnerabilities plague Russia’s personnel and materiel pipelines.
“The quality has decreased since (2022),” said Kirill Mikhailov, a researcher with the Conflict Intelligence Team in reference to Russia’s troops.
The Kremlin makes up for the lack of skilled and experienced soldiers with numbers, which is likely to endure only as long as it can continue its oil exports, which are being squeezed by Ukrainian drone activity. Russia’s military expenditures have already tripled since the start of the war, eating 40% of its budget and up to 10% of its GDP.
Russia actually struggles to predict its military budgets a year in advance, according to Russia expert Pavel Luzin — military spending was 50% higher than planned in 2023.
Russia claimed that in 2023 its military received 1,500 tanks, 3,700 vehicles, 22,000 drones and over 500 missiles.
The details sound less impressive. To start with, the tanks range from modern T-90Ms to World War II era T-55s, Mikhailov said. Swedish defense research agency FOI estimated that Russia makes 520 tanks per year, of which only 62 are T-90Ms and 62 are T-90As, an earlier modification. The rest of the tanks are older models most of which have been refurbished from older chasses.
“The supplies of arms and their components from the storage bases (including the cannibalizing of systems in storage) remain the main source of filling the needs of the Russian armed forces,” Jamestown Foundation wrote.
“These trends will likely follow into 2024 and will affect Russia’s performance in Ukraine and other conflicts.”
With production hitting the ceiling, Russia was forced to turn to Iran and North Korea for missiles and artillery shells. Ukraine’s General Staff and military intelligence said the North Korean ammunition is decades old and a lot of it is defective, either failing to fire or exploding inside the barrel. Testimonials on Telegram channels purported to be Russian seem to agree.
As for Russia’s much-hyped, next-generation T-14 tank, it won’t be showing up to the Ukrainian battlefield after all, because Russia can’t actually afford it as a fighting vehicle. A few made a brief appearance on the front line last year and then withdrew.
Then there is the small matter to Russia of having to face a far more united front from the EU and NATO than they have seen before.
Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, the chair of the NATO Military Committee, visited Kyiv on March 21, the first time a NATO military delegation has visited Kyiv since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
Bauer gave a speech at the Kyiv Security Forum, in which he said that his visit “is testament to the fact that NATO and Ukraine are closer than they have ever been.”
“The Swedish flag will not be the only blue and yellow flag at the NATO headquarters,” Bauer said.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine has never been about any real security threat coming from either Ukraine or NATO. This war is about President (Vladimir) Putin fearing something much more powerful than any physical weapon on earth: democracy.”
His sentiments were echoed by German chancellor Scholz: “We will support Ukraine for however long it is necessary. We will see that NATO is not becoming an war party in this conflict. We will not allow Russia to dictate the conditions of peace with Ukraine.
“If the Russian president believes he just needs to sit this war out and our support will fumble he miscalculated. Russia is not strong, it cannot speculate we will lower our support. We will support for however long it is necessary. Russia is not as strong as you might think.”
Bauer followed that up and cautioned against excessive pessimism about Ukraine’s ability to win the war and urged the world to further support Kyiv.
Bauer stressed that no wars are ever won by pessimists.
“But while the world may have been overly optimistic in 2023, we should not make the same mistake by becoming overly pessimistic in 2024,” he said.
Bauer emphasised that based on the facts, they had every reason to be confident in Ukraine’s ability to succeed.
“NATO Allies, and many other nations around the world, are providing unprecedented support to Ukraine and it has made a real difference. But Ukraine needs even more support,” Bauer stated.
The official noted that Ukrainian forces have led in the development of many aspects of modern warfare. Ukrainian use of battlefield drones is setting the pace for offensive war. Ukraine has more than 60 private companies innovating and producing drones. These drones can lead a land attack or sink a navy.
“Confronted with a combination of World War One trenches and artillery barrages and 21st century drone warfare and artificial intelligence, you have quickly adapted and fought back. You are pioneering with innovation, using combinations of Soviet style equipment with modern Western materiel,” Bauer explained.
“The number of [Russian] forces that have been going into Ukraine has increased over the last two and a half years, but qualitatively it is going down in terms of the land domain — and that is both in their capabilities and in the personnel capabilities,” said Bauer.
“It has more people, but it’s less trained than when they started the war in the land domain. They lost a lot of tanks, a lot of armoured vehicles, they’ve lost airplanes, they lost helicopters … a lot of equipment.”
Russia is bleeding men and equipment because of a fundamentally flawed strategy.
I will quote from an article I wrote at the beginning of the war, which is proving accurate today:
Hitler earmarked three million German troops to invade Russia. Approximately one million attacked the Ukraine area. They had 19 panzer divisions with 3,000 tanks, plus 2,500 aircraft, and 7,000 artillery pieces They captured it in two months, three weeks and five days.
It took 29-million Russian fighters to finally eject the German troops. That’s almost a ten-to-one ratio of Russians needed to eject Germans.
This is not a comment on Russian courage, merely on the lack of Russian skill. When your big tactic is attacking in waves across the open ground, you will bleed a lot.
So assume that you, as a Russian leader, know you need ten Russian soldiers to fight each single enemy soldier. Fast forward to February, 2022.
Putin used an invading army of 200,000. Ukraine had some 500,000 troops at that time, well trained after their humiliating loss of Crimea, and very highly motivated.
In fact, as soon as the Russians invaded, more than half the Ukrainian population volunteered for the army.
It now numbers more than a million servicepeople — substantially outnumbering the Russian forces.
Ukrainian civilians now have huge social cohesion, with more than 90% of them trusting the President. They are self-organizing; 1500 NGOs have emerged in the crises.
And 98% of Ukrainians believe in Ukraine’s victory.
Back to basics: to beat 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers (before their numbers skyrocketed) Putin needed 4-million men.
Four. Million. Men.
Just to invade the place.
Ant that is the real reason Russia is losing.
His armies, at the start of the offensive, should have been so large that they formed a line of tanks, trucks, and armoured cars stretching back into Russia for 200 kilometres.
Even if this army wins, Putin then has to occupy Ukraine. Based on the occupation ratio of American troops in Germany after the victory over Hitler, of one soldier for every 40 civilians, Russia should have counted on one million soldiers to occupy Ukraine, which has roughly 40 million people.
So: four million to invade, and one million to occupy.
I had earlier estimated that three million Russians would be needed. I had to revise that when a restricted report titled “Conclusions of the war with NATO in Ukraine” came out. The military and political command of Russia stated that 5 million Russian troops must be deployed in order for Russia to win.
So I figure that my new number of 4 million is about right — it splits the difference.
As I put it eloquently in a previous article: I am surprised that few people out there seem to be pointing out the elementary, historical math that unveils the obvious: WTF were you thinking, you borsch-guzzling moron?
Back to present, and another analyst: Robert Service is among the world’s most authoritative historians of Soviet and Russian history and the author of many books on the subject. He says that Putin failed massively on his interpretation of Ukrainian history and created a NATO “disaster” all for himself.
“It’s a more brittle future, I think, than many suppose. The very fact that Putin has manipulated the constitution and distorted the politics and imposed extreme authoritarian rule and personalized it to such an extreme degree means he is exposing himself to the possibility of different methods to get rid of him.
“An explosion of popular discontent or an eruption of elite discontent — both of these are possibilities. By personalizing his dominance, his elitarian dominance, he’s taking more of a risk than I think most commentators have allowed for.”
Then there is the US. American Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said his country will continue to back Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s unprovoked invasion even though a critical $60-billion military aid package remains stuck in the U.S. House of Representatives. “The United States will not let Ukraine fail,” Austin told representatives from some 50 allies of Ukraine on March 19 at the start of a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG).
Finally, there are signs that European soldiers will soon have ‘boots on the ground’ in Ukraine. France has been leading a swelling group of European nations who are pledging to put combat soldiers into the fray. For Europe, fighting Russia via the Ukraine is a bonus over having to fight Russia by themselves on their own ground some day…a prospect that Putin’s rhetoric seems to invite.
A concluding thought takes a look into the history of Russian results.
When Russia stands alone it loses.
It beat Napoleon because Russia was allied with England; all the Russians had to do was keep retreating until winter set in. It beat Hitler because the U.S. and England supplied its armies.
The truth is that Russia has almost always been a weak ‘great power’. It lost the Crimean War of 1853–56, it lost the 1905 war against Japan, it lost WW1, and it lost the Cold War.
Putin thought he could beat Ukraine by attacking suddenly from across the border. He has lost more than half (54%) of the land that Russia initially took. And he has lost the armies he took it with.
He is doubling down to replace his losses. The prospects for the new soldiers is about the same as their grave-born predecessors.
And the alliances against him continue to grow.
It is all a matter of time, for Putin…and it’s running out.
Written by Barry Gander
A Canadian from Connecticut: 2 strikes against me! I'm a top writer, looking for the Meaning under the headlines. Follow me on Mastodon @Barry