Manpower problems, logistics issues and equipment losses could limit Russian President Vladimir Putin from defending the territory in Ukraine he already holds.
The Ukrainian military’s focus will probably shift to Kherson, the occupied city in Ukraine’s south, where Russian forces are defending a vulnerable swath of territory on the eastern side of the Dnieper River. Russia has moved elite units into the area to defend the position, which will make the fight difficult for the Ukrainians, analysts said.
The Russian military was “riven with all kinds of weaknesses that were not apparent to the leadership and probably should have been” at the outset of their Feb. 24 invasion, according to a senior U.S. defense official, who, like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
The Russian open-source military analysis group Conflict Intelligence Team, now in Tbilisi, Georgia, estimated losses of equipment and personnel to be so dire that it downgraded the Russian military’s fighting ability in Ukraine from “capable of attacking” to “capable of limited defense.” The Ukrainian offensive “also revealed that the organizational structure of the 1st Tank Army was completely broken due to a large number of casualties and prolonged participation in hostilities,” Leviev said, adding that losing these two formations is “a serious loss for the Russian army.”Russia’s 1st Guards Tank Army is considered an elite force, “allocated for the defense of Moscow, and intended to lead counterattacks in the case of a war with NATO,” the U.K.
“Russia doesn’t have the capacity anymore to regain the positions it lost to Ukraine,” Leviev added, but CIT noted that Russia may still prove able to defend its existing positions around Kherson.The failures on the battlefield have caused problems for Putin among hard-liners at home. The longtime leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, said that Russia’s undertaking in Ukraine can no longer be called a “special military operation,” the Kremlin’s preferred euphemism for war.
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