Ukraine war challenges Russian and Western military stamina

The protracted conflict in Ukraine, the biggest in Europe since World War II, has put the military capabilities of the Russian invader and the West, the main guarantor of Kiev’s resistance, to the test.

The human and material losses are enormous, as is the challenge of maintaining the initiative amidst the reduction of arsenals available to the belligerents. As the conflict enters a new year, there are more doubts than certainties about the gas available to both sides.

“The truth is that we know little about how much Vladimir Putin had really prepared for war,” says Russian political scientist Konstantin Frolov, who left Moscow and since May has lived in an Eastern European country he asks not to be named.

The damage to the Russian war machine is, as far as can be seen, enormous. According to the Dutch website Oryx, which conducts military monitoring based on proven photos and videos verified by georeferencing and other methods, Moscow lost 1,573 tanks up to the 15th.

This is equivalent to half of the entire fleet of active, new or modernized armored vehicles, counted by the London-based IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies) in its 2021 balance sheet. As the Oryx account includes models that were in stock, like the T-64, this is not to say that Putin has lost half of his tanks.

But it’s a huge amount, and the count is conservative, even though there’s no way to estimate reinforcements built now. It is even less accurate in the Ukrainian case because, as the losses occur on its soil, it is natural that there are fewer records of images of them.

Says Oryx that Kiev has already lost 435 tanks. Its pre-war inventory was 987 units, and over the course of the war Poland handed over no less than 230 Soviet T-72 models.

The Poles, one of the most bellicose and anti-Russian members of NATO (US military alliance), are the sixth largest donor of military, financial and humanitarian aid to their neighbor, surpassing countries like France in nominal terms.

Warsaw has failed to hand over its fleet of 28 Soviet MiG-29 fighters to the Ukrainians, something Slovakia wants to do, out of Western fear of provoking Moscow. So far, says Oryx, Kiev has lost at least 15 of its 37 models of the type, in addition to 5 of the 34 Su-27, more sophisticated.

It seems small: Russians lost 67 of their 1,391 pre-war fighter jets, compared to 55 of Ukraine’s 124, with more than 10% of its advanced fleet of Su-30 fighters and Su-34 attack aircraft.

According to the Institute for the World Economy in Kiel (Germany), which scrutinizes the transfers, as of December 7 Ukraine had already received US$40.2 billion in weapons and military funding from the West, US$24 billion from the United States. . This is ten times its annual defense budget in 2021.

In isolation, this amount would rank 11th in the ranking of the highest military expenditures last year, organized by the IISS. Brazil, for example, spent little more than half of that amount. “This shows a new world reality, but it also indicates that there will be limits for the West”, says Frolov.

“Until now, the European Union’s support for Ukraine has lagged behind that of the US. That has changed in recent weeks, which is a welcome development given the great role of this war for continental security,” wrote the coordinator of the Kiel institute monitor, Christoph Trebesch.

Altogether, in terms of total aid, Washington has already disbursed US$51 billion for the war, while Brussels has contributed US$55 billion. If that single calculation were a country’s GDP, it would put it alongside nations like Venezuela and Ecuador — and the value still doesn’t compute Joe Biden’s Christmas promise to Volodimir Zelensky of another $ 2 billion in weapons.

There is little doubt that Ukraine, which has demonstrated excellent tactical qualities in the field, would not have withstood the ten months of aggression without military help from the West, which now promises to step up a notch with the supply of American Patriot anti-aircraft batteries.

In the first phase of the war, the US provided about 1/3 of its stockpile of Javelin anti-tank missiles to help contain Russian armored columns, which due to a tactical error did not invade coordinates with infantry and even air support.

Despite this, a recent study by the British think-tank Royal United Services adds nuances to this scenario, basically saying that Kiev did not fall at the opening of the war because it had two infantry battalions working around the clock, exhausting its ammunition stocks.

The analysis, based on data from the Kiev Armed Forces, also downplays the impact that attack drones had on the course of the war — a more relevant role would be given to target observation and reconnaissance.

Another central item is intelligence. It’s no secret that Ukrainians have vital help from satellite data and intelligence gathered by the US and its allies. This has already provoked Russian threats of all sorts, but in practice there is little that can be done.

Artillery and tanks, seen early on as obsolete for war as argued by American analyst Rob Lee, are central to the conflict. Ukraine’s commanding general, General Valeri Zalujni, told British magazine The Economist that his country would not have survived without American Himars precision artillery, and is now begging for more armor, ammunition and anti-aircraft defenses.

From the Russian side, there are mixed signals. After months of relative lull in terms of missile attacks, since October Moscow has launched a brutal campaign against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, aimed at demoralizing the population and troops amid the freezing cold of winter.

For this, it has used precision and ballistic missiles that seemed to have disappeared from the war. A military analyst linked to the Kremlin, who asks not to be named, says that there has been a resupply, and that in fact Russia has been preparing for a long time for the conflict by also stocking Western chips —which have stopped being sold to the country with sanctions applied to the country.

On the other hand, the more intensive use of Iranian suicide drones in the war, weapons that are much cheaper ($20,000 a unit) than a cruise missile ($6.5 million), indicates at the very least that Moscow is thinking in the long run — if it’s not in real trouble, as Western officials say every week.

In favor of Moscow, there is the fact that this is a war of attrition in which artillery is paramount, and the stockpiles of ammunition inherited from the Cold War are immeasurable. Even on old tanks, at the limit usable in combat, there are no less than 10 thousand units in storage.

Westerners are running out of time. “There is no doubt that there is great pressure on the defense industry,” US Under Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl said earlier this month. As contracts in the sector are complex and production lines were used to a slow pace, weapons consumption has exceeded replacement capacity.

Here comes another of Putin’s weapons: the economy. Although almost all the main political actors in the conflict have promised to increase their military budgets, and the market has been agitated in favor of the USA, the fears of a global recession and the uncertainties arising from the clash with Russia in the field of energy prices has cast doubt on the ability to pay the bill.

Not by chance, the US has insisted on a negotiated solution to the war, something far from the visible reality for now. The letter of the use of nuclear weapons, hinted at and denied by Putin, and the risk of a Third World War with NATO never leave the horizon.

Thus, Kiev’s warnings that Russia is far from defeated, as Western propaganda likes to sell, match the indications that there may be a renewed Moscow offensive at the beginning of the year. Today, the fighting is centered in Donbass (east), illegally annexed by Putin.

They stem from the apparent solution to the main problem that afflicted the Russians for much of the war: lack of personnel, despite the fact that there are almost 1 million military personnel in the country. With the mobilization of 320,000 reservists starting in October, these troops are getting ready for use.

And there is always the possibility that Putin will force allied dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko to use Belarusian forces in support. Here, the logic of the Second World War applies: numbers against specific technical superiority.

Nobody knows how many soldiers actually died in the war: Russia stopped disclosing the number in September, when it admitted about 6,000 casualties. Ukraine, for its part, says it has lost 13,000 troops. The US estimates that both sides lost 100,000 men, both dead and wounded, in addition to the deaths of perhaps 40,000 Ukrainian civilians.