Report: Russia Is Running Out of Troops As Combat Effectives Drop 25 Percent

The latest assessment is that troops now being deployed in the Donbas are patched up and re-combined remnants of decimated units from Russia's defeat around Kyiv and Kharkiv. They are reported to have little cohesion and are likely at a fraction of their reported theoretical strength. 

Unless Russia is willing to mobilize its entire population - which it has so far refused to do - it has no more manpower to insert into the Donbas battle. JL

Paul Shinkman reports in US News and World Report, image Reuters:

Russia has lost a quarter of its combat effectiveness in Ukraine. “This is across infantry, artillery, aviation - both fixed and rotary - ballistic missiles [and] cruise missiles.” The troops Russia withdrew and redeployed to the Donbas “have, at best, been patched up and filled out with soldiers from other damaged units, and the Russian military has few, if any, cohesive units not previously deployed to Ukraine to funnel into new operations.” The effective combat power of Russian units in eastern Ukraine is a fraction of their on-paper strength of battalion tactical groups. “The Russian offensive in the east is unlikely to be more successful than previous offensives." Russia has lost a quarter of its combat effectiveness in Ukraine, the U.S. assesses, as its troops enter a consequential new phase of its invasion.

A senior defense official said early Tuesday that Russian military capability in Ukraine has dropped to 75% – the latest assessment in its nearly two-month war that has seen stiff resistance from the defending army and a grinding toll on the invaders. The damning assertion comes less than two weeks after the Pentagon similarly assessed Russia’s force in Ukraine was below 85% combat effective.

“This is across all functions,” the official said, “It’s infantry, its artillery, it’s aviation – both fixed and rotary – it’s ballistic missiles [and] cruise missiles.”

Not each of these capabilities has fallen at or below 75%, the official added, noting that the assessment considers Russia’s military capability as a whole – including the battalions of troops it ordered to retreat into Belarus or Russian territory to prepare for its latest invasion into eastern Ukraine, an area known as the Donbas.

And the assessment comes as Russia pivots to a new strategy for its limited resources in Ukraine after it failed at its initial goal to operate as many as six consecutive fronts. The Kremlin had undermined its own previous attempts to seize control simultaneously of city centers from the Donbas – the site of eight years of Russian-backed separatist war – to the capital Kyiv and perhaps farther West due to its own inability to orchestrate troops’ movements and adequately resupply them.

Now its posture has dramatically shifted as the troops it has withdrawn are bearing down on the Donbas, which abuts its own territory and which Moscow intends to seize. Western analysts have not yet concluded whether this new approach will prove more effective for Moscow.

“The Russian offensive in the east is unlikely to be dramatically more successful than previous Russian offensives, but Russian forces may be able to wear down Ukrainian defenders or achieve limited gains,” the Institute for the Study of War, which has tracked Russian movements and combat capabilities, concluded in an analysis note published on Monday.

Analysts with the think tank assess that the troops Russia withdrew and redeployed to the Donbas “have, at best, been patched up and filled out with soldiers from other damaged units, and the Russian military has few, if any, cohesive units not previously deployed to Ukraine to funnel into new operations.” And they note “frequent reports of disastrously low Russian morale and continuing logistics challenges indicate the effective combat power of Russian units in eastern Ukraine is a fraction of their on-paper strength in numbers of battalion tactical groups.

“A sudden and dramatic Russian offensive success remains highly unlikely, however, and Ukrainian tactical losses would not spell the end of the campaign in eastern Ukraine, much less the war as a whole,” the analysts believe.

Russia’s ongoing siege of the strategic port city of Mariupol, however, if successful, would create a land bridge from the Crimean Peninsula – which Moscow likewise annexed in 2014 – to the Donbas and on to Russian territory, achieving what the Pentagon considers Russian President Vladimir Putin’s new goal for the former Soviet state. Success there would also free up troops bogged down in gritty fighting there to move on to other contested positions.

A small holdout of Ukrainian infantry troops along with sheltering women and children remained holed up at a steel and iron facility in Mariupol, considered the last bastion of local forces in the Black Sea coast city.

The U.S. assesses that the fate of Mariupol is not yet certain, and the Biden administration is working to prevent an inevitable Russian occupation there.

Seven flights of U.S. military equipment will land in the region in the following 24 hours for positioning and onward shipment to Ukraine, the official announced, part of $800 million in new U.S. assistance announced last week. The government in Kyiv would ultimately decide where in the conflict zone the equipment would go. The official added that a shipment of U.S. howitzer artillery would similarly arrive in the region “very, very soon” and that American trainers would begin teaching their Ukrainian counterparts how to use them at a yet-undisclosed location.

Russian forces have also – critically – failed to achieve dominance of Ukraine’s skies, forcing its pilots to maintain wariness about operating there for extended periods of time.