Grinding on and ground down
They don’t fully control the skies, despite possessing one of the world’s most advanced air forces. Their ground assault on the capital has been inching along for days, with a long convoy marooned by supply problems. And all the while, they are taking heavy losses – both in equipment and personnel, as estimates suggest more dead troops than the United States suffered during 20 years of war in Afghanistan.
Two weeks after Russian forces streamed into Ukraine following months of buildup, evidence is mounting that the invasion has not gone to plan – and that Russia’s much-vaunted military may not be the formidable force once feared.
‘‘It’s shocking how incompetent they are in the basics of joint military operations by an advanced country,’’ said Barry Pavel, a former top Pentagon official who is now senior vice-president at the Atlantic Council.
This doesn’t mean Russia won’t ultimately seize the capital, Kyiv, and topple the Ukrainian government. And it doesn’t mean Ukraine won’t pay a horrific price in both military and civilian casualties, as it continues to do daily.
But the stumbling pace of Russia’s assault since President Vladimir Putin ordered troops to invade late last month – marked by apparent confusion among commanders, and viral images of downed Russian planes and tanks set alight – has reset expectations for how the conflict will unfold.
And it probably has raised the
ultimate cost of any eventual Russian victory, especially as Moscow appears to have abandoned plans for a lightning advance, relying instead on shelling besieged cities and launching unguided bombs.
While the invasion has turned into a bloody slog in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance, Russian forces have continued to make slow advances around multiple cities – particularly in the south, where several major cities appear in danger of falling in the coming days. Only one major city, Kherson, has so far been taken.
In the north, progress has been tougher to discern. The British Defence Ministry said Russia appeared to be repositioning its troops north of Kyiv and could soon launch new operations there, after a protracted stretch during which a long column of Russian vehicles had stalled. Satellite images appeared to show the column breaking up into smaller contingents.
Meanwhile, air strikes have targeted sites in western Ukraine, signalling the possible expansion of the war beyond the country’s east and centre.
Assessing the exact number of Russian losses in combat has been complicated by the fog of war and the difficulty of interpreting a steady string of photos and videos flashing across social media that depict weapons and vehicles that were seized by Ukrainian forces, destroyed or abandoned.
The Ukrainian military posted on Facebook this week that the Russians had lost 12,000 people, 526 vehicles, 335 tanks, 123 artillery systems and 81 helicopters.
If those numbers are accurate, the Russians have lost nearly 7 per cent of the 190,000 troops they had arrayed at Ukraine’s border before the invasion began.
‘‘Probably we’re going to start looking at exhaustion of their force in the next several weeks,’’ said Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a think tank outside Washington, DC. ‘‘They’re probably going to reorganise and replenish.’’
‘‘They’ve lost a lot of equipment. But they have a tremendous amount of equipment to begin with, and many of the things they’ve lost are actually pretty replaceable.’’
And with a fight looming against dug-in Ukrainian troops in each of the cities that remain, it is unclear whether Russia has the capacity – or the will – to succeed. Nor, apparently, does Russia have the dominance in the skies that had been widely forecast.
Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director-general of RUSI, a London-based think tank, said he had been surprised at the ‘‘very poor performance’’ of the Russian air force, which has yet to knock out all Ukrainian air assets and defences – something he had thought would take a matter of days.
Still, he cautioned against underplaying Russia’s strength. It may not have taken the skies or advanced quickly on the ground, but it does have the firepower to do immense damage to Ukraine.
‘‘Having painted the Russians as 10 feet tall compared with Ukrainians, now some people are painting them two feet tall,’’ Chalmers said. ‘‘It’s somewhere in between. They are still a formidable adversary.’’