Ukraine Blog 04 - Russian Army In Depth Assessment

 Dear Friends, family and colleagues,

It’s day 6 of the Russian intervention and the question on everybody’s mind is: when will Putin stop? I don’t think he will stop anymore now. It’s all in for him and although the Russian army has suffered horrible losses, there’s a possibility that they will still even increase the amount of troops and equipment to escalate the fight. Today I will not elaborate so much on events on the ground, but I will explain a couple of aspects that really will help in understanding what’s going on and how it’s going to evolve. So will Putin continue? It’s important to understand two factors here:

1.       Equipment: I’m sure most of you saw at least some footage of sometimes endless columns of burned out, abandoned or captured Russian vehicles. This war has proven to be an absolute meatgrinder for vehicles, arms and men. So, Russia might run out of vehicles one might think. Well, that’s still far from happening. Russia still has an absolutely insane amount of armor and other vehicles available, still left from the Cold War. Just the amount of stored tanks is 12.000 and over 24.000 armored vehicles are in storage. Total amount of vehicles (including jeeps and trucks) available is estimated to be over a million. Ukraine now destroyed a fraction of it. I saw footage today of new massive columns near Kursk and Belgorod and vehicles go on as far as the eye can see. Especially this component makes it absolutely essential that the West keeps on delivering those small portable anti-tank weapons. They are essential in enabling Ukraine to continuously destroy vehicles. Equipment will absolutely not be an issue for Russia. In the worst case they can still deploy a couple of thousand T-55/T-62 tanks from the sixties.

2.       Manpower: So after not even a week, the Russian army lost more than 6.000 combat deaths. To put things in to perspective: this is more than 1/3 the amount of deaths the Soviet Union suffered in 10 years in Afghanistan. To see how long Russian can keep up, I’m going to provide a breakdown of the major available assault force components and I will not include reserve forces:

a.       Ground forces: 280.000 active duty soldiers

b.       The airborne forces (separate armed force branch): 60.000 active duty soldiers

c.       The naval infantry: 12.000 active duty soldiers

d.       Coastal troops: 35.000 active duty soldiers

e.       The Russian National Guard (Rosgvardiya): 350.000 active duty soldiers

Especially this last component is very important but often overlooked. Rosgvardiya is not part of the armed forces, but the Ministry of Interior, like a Gendarmerie. However, it looks and operates almost entirely like a ground army. Lots of them have already been seen in Ukraine, because these are the troops that need to fulfill the role of occupation forces. They are also the forces that suppress for example Navalny protests.

When looking at the numbers above, it’s clear that Russia, without reserves can still mobilize almost a quarter of a million soldiers. In my opinion, Putin has no reason now NOT to send in extra troops. When looking at the total Russian army, those huge losses still constitute only a small part.

And this is where it’s important to understand a cultural difference here. 50 dead soldiers in the Netherlands would mean outrage and the fall of the government. In Putin’s Russia (and most importantly, the Soviet Union) this is just a statistic. So the practice of sending in more men will continue, but at the same time this also leads to the core why the Russian army can’t win this war.

Putin spent huge amounts of money on equipping the Russian armed forces with the most modern equipment. And don’t get me wrong: I think most of that new equipment is indeed super modern and awesome, but you can spend billions on modern goodies, but in case you staff them with soldiers that

1.       Don’t have the proper training

2.       Don’t have the motivation

3.       Don’t have a preparation for the mission

Your war is doomed. And I’m going to use a reverse example to illustrate this. Saudi-Arabia is equipped with state of the art, most modern American weapons. Some of them are so special, that they have only been delivered to Saudi-Arabia. As some of you might know, the Saudi army is fighting for seven! years now against the Houthi militia in Yemen and in those seven years never conquered any significant piece of terrain. The Houthi’s don’t have fancy weapons, only AK’s, rocket launchers and flip-flop’s. Yet still you can find tons of videos where they take out one Saudi tank after another, like a turkey shoot. When you look closely in those video’s, you can see that the Saudi’s have no clue what operational and tactical maneuvering is.

Same is true for Putin’s army. He modernized the tools, but the mentality of the Russian army is still the same as the Soviet army

1.       Field soldiers knew nothing about the coming war and unit commanders only received the orders on the 22^nd of February (so two days before the invasion).

2.       No emphasis was put on preparation for the mission. Why should this be done. How are we going to adapt our training scenario’s to that?

3.       When you go occupying a country for a longer time, you need to be prepared for that: you either need to know about the hearts and minds or you need to know how to fight a counter insurgency war. Russian troops were trained for neither of this. That explains why on videos you see them clueless what to do once they occupy a town. Especially this last element is typical Soviet doctrine.

Based on what I saw so far, I think that in case the United States and Russia go to war, and it only stays conventional, the U.S. can easily defeat the Russian military with deploying four out of 10 carrier strike groups. The U.S. is lightyears ahead in

1.       Logistics

2.       Complex battlefield maneuvering

3.       Battlefield awareness

4.       Communication between soldiers, cross level, cross unit

Just to emphasize here: it’s all about the soldiers. In case you would give those modern Russian weapons the Americans and the American weapons to the Russians, the outcome would still be the same.

Especially with regards to the last point there’s something that puzzled me from the start of the Russian invasion. It was anticipated that the Russians would deploy massive cyber-attacks and Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) over all Ukraine’s territory. This didn’t happen. Even electricity is still functioning. Today I found the answer on one of my Twitter feeds. The Russian’s don’t have an integrated battlefield communication system. They equipped their soldiers with the same walkie-talkies that you can find on Ali-Express. Some units even communicate by cellphone. That’s why the Ukrainian military (and US spy planes) is able to listen to unit communication. I really didn’t saw this amateurism coming. In other words: they can’t deploy massive cyber-attacks and ECM measures, because it would kill their own communication.

Two more topics with regards to the manpower:

1.       It’s reported that Russia flew back 400 Wagner mercenaries from Africa. They have quite a good track record against African insurgents. However, I don’t think they will make a difference in the Ukraine. All of them are ex-military (I would say they still are Russian military) and have been trained and conditioned as such. How weak they are, came to light during one engagement that everybody already forgot during the Trump era: the battle of Khasham in Eastern Syria in 2018. As opposed to all other American president, Trump (not that I’m Trump supporter) was not afraid to fight Russian forces. In this engagement, a minimal of one hundred Russian mercenaries were killed by just 40 Americans. In the transcript in the attached link, one of the Russian mercenaries himself explains what the strengths of the Americans are and what their own weaknesses are.

2.       So like I said, Russia has almost 750.000 active duty soldiers available to deploy, when will the morale be so down that we will see a massive disintegration and/or mutiny? I think this will happen when we will approach the 30.000 death Russians. It will mean that roughly every unit in the Russian army will have suffered casualties with significant unit impact. Especially since urban combat hasn’t even started yet, I think we unfortunately will reach this grim number. And this is where time is really pressing for Putin. He now absolutely needs to finish this within a month or there will be very serious consequences for him.

A little different than the previous updates, but I think very essential in understanding some very important things about the Russian army.

Best regards and "Slava Ukraini!"

Niels