Russia's invasion of Ukraine could approach a stalemate

Russia's attempt to conquer Ukraine could be headed towards a stalemate, as heavy casualties and equipment losses affect Russian forces that are unprepared and have so far failed to achieve any of their initial objectives, Western officials and military experts said.

The front lines have moved little in more than a week. Russians are being killed or injured at a rate of up to 1,000 a day, according to Western intelligence estimates.

Videos of burnt tanks and abandoned convoys are constantly broadcast on Ukrainian social media accounts, along with images of dead Russian soldiers, Russian soldiers surrendering, hungry Russian soldiers stealing chickens from local farmers and, increasingly, the shattered bodies of Ukrainian civilians who are killed in missile and artillery attacks.

The ferocity of the Russian assault has only intensified as progress has slowed, with Russia replacing harsh bombing of civilian populations with progress on the battlefield. Ukrainians who live every day in cities surrounded, or partially surrounded, by Russian troops are paying the price of a war effort that began to go wrong in the early hours.

But in the absence of substantial progress on the ground and given the magnitude of the losses inflicted on its ranks, Russia's military campaign could soon become unsustainable, with troops unable to move forward because they lack sufficient manpower, supplies and ammunition, analysts and officials say.

The next two weeks could be critical in determining the outcome of the entire war, they say. Unless Russia can rapidly improve its supply lines, bring reinforcements and reinforce the declining morale of troops on the ground, its objectives may become impossible to achieve.

“I don't think Ukrainian forces can drive Russian forces out of Ukraine, but I don't think Russian forces can take much more from Ukraine either,” said Rob Lee, a former US marine who is now a senior member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

An assessment conducted on Saturday by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) went further. “Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial campaign of this war,” he said. The conflict, he said, has now reached “a stalemate”.

Events on the battlefield could still tilt in a different direction: for example, if the Russians manage to capture the besieged and desperate city of Mariupol, freeing their forces to reinforce their offensive elsewhere.

But in a widely shared article this week, a retired US general and a European military scholar argue that the Russian force is close to reaching what military strategists call the “high point” of its offensive, which means that it will have reached the limits of its ability to wage the war that it has decided to continue.

“The Russian war of conquest in Ukraine is now entering a critical phase; a race to reach the climax of Russia's offensive capability and Ukraine's defensive capability,” wrote retired Lieutenant-General Ben Hodges and Julian Lindley-French, who presides over Alphen, a think tank in the Netherlands. They advocate a sustained effort by the United States and its allies to provide military supplies to Ukraine in the hope that Ukrainian forces can take advantage of this “window of opportunity” to secure concessions at the negotiating table.

“I think Russia doesn't have the time, manpower or ammunition to sustain what they are doing now,” Hodges, who now works at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis, said in an interview. The assessment assumes, he says, that the West continues to increase military support to Ukraine, allowing Ukrainian forces to keep pace with their resistance.

The Russian army still has an overwhelming superiority in terms of number and equipment compared to the smaller and less armed Ukrainian army. Russia could still change the struggle if it is able to replenish its labor and supplies, Lindley-French warned.

“It would be a big mistake to think that Russia cannot sustain this war,” he said. “Now they can't, but they could fix it” by adjusting tactics and bringing in reinforcements.

However, he added, “unless the Russians can really improve their game and start rotating [troop] formations on the front line, this particular force faces a problem.”

US officials refuse to make public predictions about the course of the war, but say there are clear indications that the Russians are struggling to maintain the existing forces they have and are struggling to find reinforcements and resolve their logistical difficulties.

Calls to China for military assistance, a hitherto unsuccessful attempt to recruit Syrians and talk about bringing reinforcements from other parts of Russia and the separatist territory of South Ossetia in Georgia have not yet produced evidence that fresh troops are on the way.

“The very fact that they are talking about resupply and resources tells you that they are beginning to worry,” said a senior US Department of Defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.

“It's quite extraordinary, after three weeks, they still have these same logistical and sustaining problems, and they are considering additional ways to overcome this shortage from outside Ukraine,” the official added.

Russian troops that initially broke into Ukraine from at least four directions expected to be received as liberators and were not ready for a long struggle, officials and experts say. Instead, the Russians encountered fierce resistance, and are now scattered on multiple fronts, bogged down in labor-intensive sieges and without previously planned supply lines to sustain a protracted war, officials and experts say.

The current map of the battlefield points to the scale of the difficulties, Lee said.

It was clear from the way Russian forces moved in the early hours of the war, he said, that their key objectives were to seize Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, unite the occupied Donbas region with the port city of Odessa along southern Ukraine and, most importantly, capture the capital Kiev with a lightning advance from the north.

More than three weeks later, Russian troops have not yet achieved any of these goals.

They have not managed to completely surround the northeastern city of Kharkiv, despite the fact that it is only a few miles from the Russian border. Its drive to seize the port city of Odessa has been halted by fierce Ukrainian resistance at the gates of Mykolaiv. His effort to unite the Russian-annexed territory of Crimea has been engulfed by the increasingly bloody siege in Mariupol.

Russians have been making progress in the east, in the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, which Russia recognized as independent republics on the eve of the war and which have been partially occupied by Russian-backed forces since 2014. But those advances fall short of the invasion's ambitious initial objective.

The Russians' hopes of surrounding Kiev, let alone capture it, are beginning to fade, Lee said. Russian forces remain trapped about 15 miles outside the city, and although US officials say Russia is moving the rear forces to the front in anticipation of a new momentum in the capital, the front line has not moved.

Meanwhile, Russians are dying at an increasingly unsustainable rate, Lee said. Although Russia still has vast reserves of manpower, it has already committed most of its combat-ready forces, and it is almost certain that they bear the brunt of the casualties, he said.

There are no confirmed casualties, and Russia has not updated the 498 death toll it announced a week after the start of the war. But of the 168 tactical battalion groups of the Russian army, 120 are already fighting on the ground, which represents about 100,000 soldiers out of the 190,000 total sent to Ukraine. That means that Russia has already committed 75% of its combat-ready force, US officials say.

Western intelligence estimates say that at least 7,000 Russians are likely to have been killed and as many as 20,000 injured, and assuming combat forces are the hardest hit, that could mean that up to a third of the main combat force is now out of action, Lee said.

“That's a big loss, and it can't be easily replaced,” he said. Russia may bring in new recruits or call more reservists, but that will dilute the capabilities of the force in general, “and that is not in Russia's interest,” he said.

Ukrainian forces have also suffered casualties, although it is not publicly known how many because they have not published any numbers either. The longer the war continues, the more dangerous its position will also be and the greater the chances that Russia will overcome its initial mistakes, said Jack Watling of the London-based Royal United Services Institute.

But, he noted, Ukrainian forces seem to remain highly motivated, while there are clear signs that morale continues to decline among Russian troops, he said. Russian forces continue to surrender, abandon their vehicles and show little sign of initiative in the areas they control, signs “that this is not a well-motivated force,” he said.

As Russia's offensive capabilities diminish, the risk of increasing civilian casualties is high. The stalemate is likely to become “very violent and bloody,” the ISW assessment said, because Russian troops are more likely to rely on bombing cities to exert pressure.

There are signs that Russia is running out of precision missiles, say US officials, which means that Russian forces will also increasingly resort to the use of so-called dumb bombs dropped indiscriminately on civilian areas in an effort to subdue them.

Ukraine is unlikely to have the ability to expel Russia from the territory it has taken so far, officials and analysts say. But the current difficulties faced by the Russians open up the possibility that Ukrainians could at least fight them to a halt, thus putting pressure on Russia to accept a negotiated solution.

The main question has now passed from how long it would take for the Russians to conquer Ukraine to “can Ukraine fight Russia to a standstill?” , said a Western official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They're doing pretty well right now.”

“The next two weeks are going to be quite decisive,” Watling said. The war will not end in two weeks, he predicted, and all signs from Moscow suggest that Russians are more likely to double rather than go down, making the war more lethal for Ukrainians even as it proceeds at a slower pace.

“The odds are very much in favor of the Russians. This is your war to lose. The reason they are not achieving their goal is largely because of their own incompetence, their lack of coordination,” he said.

“What this really boils down to is whether the Russians are going to act together.”

(c) 2022, The Washington Post

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