The problem is not weapons. The problem for Ukraine is they are still a Soviet-tier army, operating with Soviet-era tactics. It's not productive to ship them thousands of Abrams and F-16s if they do not understand how to operate these systems in a combined arms fight. They do not, and it takes a long time to become competent at this. So, a King of Battle war of attrition it is until either Ukraine can figure out how to do this or something truly catastrophic happens with Russian supply and morale. Or NATO directly enters.
All of this scramble for weapons is an indicator of Ukraine's military status. Armies don't run on ragtag collections of armaments. They are very careful about this because logistics is the hard part of war.
Ukraine is about to get squashed by Russia and the only meaningful deterrent is the nuclear standoff that can occur in any number of high probability scenarios.
I'm OK with Ukraine being denied the right to point NATO missiles at Russia if the cost of that is nuclear war.
Russia has already been humiliated. The allegedly second strongest army in the world could not defeat a much smaller neighboring country quickly and had to retreat from the proximity of Kyiv and Kharkiv.
They do still have their artillery, though, and they are trying to take Donbass. In a very piecemeal fashion, very slowly. They have learnt something from their spring failures.
The result of this war depends on how fast can the Ukrainians re-arm completely to Western weapons, including artillery. It does not make sense to send tons of heavy Western guns there, if there aren't enough trained soldiers to operate them and enough trained technicians to fix them.
This is the bottleneck, not the raw number of weapons; people tend to treat weapons as magic, but they only work in combination with skilled soldiers and a functioning supply chain.
The Ukrainians are learning fast - people generally learn fast when their country is on fire - but the process will likely take months.
I hope Ukraine can beat Russia and liberate it's territory in 2014 borders, but it's far from a done deal. Currently Russia produces more ammo than all NATO countries combined. Ukraine allies need to open new assembly lines for ammo production, as a successful attack on the pretty well prepared Russian defences will take a ton of artillery shells.
Looks like Russia mobilized over half a million soldiers so far (while officially stating 300K). Their military factories are working on 3 shifts 24/7. When they produce enough equipment and weapons no doubt they'll do a new wave of mobilization. Long term Russia can mobilize more soldiers than Ukraine, so NATO has to compensate by supplying Ukraine with big amount of artillery, tanks, fuel, equipment and most importantly ammo.
According to Soviet military doctrine Putin can't fulfil the objectives he set for this war. Defeating an entrenched enemy requires 3-5x advantage in manpower and materiel and Russia staged less than what Ukraine currently has. The Ukrainian armed forces have retreated to the defendable cities and will counter attack and return occupied land after defeating the Russian attacks. On top of that the attacks are in 3 directions, depriving them from any local advantage.
Chances are Ukraine will win this war, unless Russia stages half a million addional soldiers and the respective gear. I don't think the regime has the support to do something like that, and not for an agressive war against Ukraine. All while Ukraine increases its manpower quickly by calling reservists and volunteers who are already near the battle.
Tricky situation. One can assume that Russia is going to win this war with brute force. Then they will take whatever Ukrainian weapons they can before it's destroyed.
Secondly weapons are useless without trained operators. I imagine Ukrainian military does not have experience operating NATO weaponry.
Ukraine is eating through ammo (mainly 155mm howitzer shells from what I understand) because the war is in a WWI-style stalemate due to the lack of air superiority at the front from either side. All they can do is pound each other over and over again along the front line. There's no way to advance.
Likely if the west provided jets, this would change drastically.
I actually agree Russia is not stupid enough to engage in a direct attack on a NATO nation. They would likely move next against in Transnistria, Georgia, etc. And I don't see what would stop them, if they have success in Ukraine.
But they will engage in hybrid warfare against the west (already were), and they will be twice as emboldened if they are given Ukraine.
This is a country that felt free to unleash radioactive poisons against persons on UK soil, shoot down a civilian airliner, etc. Why do you want to appease them?
Ukraine is currently getting hammered by Russian artillery in Donbas, and suffering 100+ dead soldiers per day (as reportedly is Russia). They will only win with large amounts of ongoing foreign military and economic aid from committed partners.
Why would they try to go to Moscow? They don’t have the logistical capacity to pull it off and it would be in nobody’s interest. Unlike Russia they don’t seem to be ruled by crazy people.
More realistically Ukraine will lose a bit more ground and a few more towns in Donbas before the Russian offensive culminates, and then as more supplies come in they will eventually counter-attack when they get a chance. The Russian military will run out of soldiers and equipment while the Russian economy sputters, and will be slowly pushed out of Ukrainian territory. What happens as a result to domestic policy in Russia will be highly volatile and is hard to predict.
It should be noted that we're not seeing large russian infantry formations walking around safely while the tanks and other armored vehicles are sitting ducks. Yes, tanks aren't invulnerable, but anti tank missiles are expensive, bulky, and require some advanced training. With advances in technology and western support, Ukraine is fielding more anti-tank weapons than the russians anticipated, but it still is nothing compared to the number of more traditional weapons like machine guns or mortars it could have pulled out of cold war stockpiles. The russians decided to send in mechanized units with minimal to no infantry support because 1) they needed to advance quickly since their logistics could not support a prolonged war, and 2) any russian walking through Ukraine's flat and open terrain without a few inches of armor around them is a dead man. It's Zap Brannigan logic - a Ukrainian squad can only carry a limited number of anti-tank munitions so you just need to keep sending tanks until they reach their kill count and shut down. This turned out to be a bad strategy which mostly has just resulted in lots of destroyed tanks with few strategic gains, but had they done things differently odds are there would just be a lot of dead infantrymen around those destroyed tanks.
As for unmanned tanks, these have been explored time and again but they don't really work well. Truly autonomous tanks are extremely difficult to implement compared to say UAVs because it's very difficult to navigate. Remote control relies on reliable communication which is pretty difficult to achieve, especially if your adversary is being supported by a more technologically advanced superpower. You basically need a tank crew in another armored vehicle very nearby. This armored vehicle is still vulnerable so you're risking soldiers lives and those soldiers are basically doing twice the work operating and maintaining two vehicles instead of one, plus consuming twice the fuel, without doubling the firepower.
Why change tactics when things are working out for NATO
The longer and more devastating the war, the better. Ukraine doesn't have to win for a NATO victory, russia just has to be damaged militarily and fanatically.
It seems NATO needs to either go all out and give Ukraine as much weapons as possible in the hopes of attaining a Russian defeat before winter or let Russia do as it wants in Ukraine. The Germans in particular have been tepid in giving Ukraine weapons (judge by actual deliveries and not public promises) and I wonder how long before they either fully support a Russian defeat or abandon Ukraine.
Ukraines military has changed drastically since the war that started in 2014. They have made many changes, moving away from the old Soviet style system and to a more western system for the military along with upping military pay and training. I also don't think that Ukraines military is overly 'ill-equipped' but its more that its fighting an army much bigger then itself, and one so incompetent that its going through ATGM's and MANPAD's so fast that its literally impossible to keep up.
It's just what Putin wants it to be... There is no reason Ukraine can't push Russians back except the willingness of the West to supply Ukraine with heavy artillery, SAM systems, tanks and fighter jets — it's the only limiting factor.
Ukraine has way bigger army than Russian's (up to 1 mln mobilized, vs. 200k) but severely lacks in firepower. And the latter is what could be easily fixed, if only allies allowed it to happen.
Truth is, many Western politicians are secretly scared of the perspective of Ukraine winning over Russia. They don't want Ukraine to actually win (as in to take its territory back), all they want is to just stop Russia from expanding further. That's why the supply of the critical weapons (long-range rocket systems, IFVs, tanks, fighter jets) is abysmally small — just enough to stop Russia from making progress, but not enough for Ukrainians to make any real progress towards ending the war on their own terms.
I don't think the concern is some sort of cold war era major offensive where Russian tanks storm forward and take territory. The modern approach seems to be stirring up local trouble/guerrilla warfare/slow escalation/bringing in some (elite?) forces to bear locally to make progress. Generally with some local support.
If the author's point is something along the lines of Russia isn't set up right now for a major offensive to conquer the entire Ukraine in a week that's sort of a moot point I think? They don't need that to completely destabilize things, saw some chaos, and eventually in the medium term take over without resorting to a full scale attack.
There's plenty of examples of Russia being able to shift resources around pretty quickly. How much does it really take to destabilize Ukraine to the point where they'll get invited in?
Russia's summarily failed at every strategic goal it's tried to achieve in this war, which is the reason this has turned into a war of attrition.
- The original Russian push into Ukraine somewhat looked like blitzkrieg tactics -- a fast move across the countryside from the northeastern UA/RU border, which ended up turning into an overextension with a substantially failed retreat caused by difficult terrain.
- VDV troops were dropped into Hostomel and around the Kyiv region within the first few days of the war. If the 3-day figure wasn't official (I'm having trouble finding original Russian-language video or audio which confirms this), then certainly, taking Kyiv within the first days of the war was the plan, going off the moves RU made.
- Russian losses have so far, by conservative estimates, exceeded Ukrainian losses for both personnel and equipment, though I'll grant you that this is the kind of figure that gets manipulated during a conflict and we likely won't have truly reliable, hard-to-dispute numbers until long after the war ends. One thing's almost certain, though -- Russian equipment losses have been much more substantial than those of their western counterparts.
- Russia's personnel losses have also been at least substantial enough to warrant the implementation of multiple rounds of mobilization as well as penal battalions, and all accounts from both returned Ukrainian POWs, captured Russian POWs, and Russian defectors have been that the battlefield conditions on the Russian side are awful (notably; awful in the context of it being a shooting war).
- Russian advances and Ukrainian advances are effectively at a stalemate, with Russia repelling Ukraine's moves mostly through sheer volume of artillery fire. It's alleged that Russia's nearly burned through their artillery shell and rocket stockpile, and their military is resorting to dealing with North Korea to secure a supply for the coming winter. Any gains from now on will be pretty marginal barring either asymmetric depletion of resources or one side suddenly gaining a wonder weapon of some kind.
- Ukraine has been effectively employing both maritime and airborne drones to strike within Russian-held territory, both in Ukraine (see the recent strikes within the port of Sevastopol) as well as within Russia's borders proper (multiple strikes on military installations in the Rostov and Voronezh oblasts).
- Russia has also been responsible for striking indiscriminately at civilians, from cyberattacks on key pieces of civilian infrastructure (especially earlier in the war) to outright bombing of civilian locations which weren't being used to house UA armed forces.
- Last (in this comment) but certainly not least -- Russia also imposed mass deportation on people in Russian-held Ukrainian territory, which was documented by the UN earlier in the war. Those who stayed behind are reportedly being drafted into the AFRF.
This war is going poorly for all involved, but right now it seems like Russia's going to much more desperate measures at the time.
I'm personally hoping for quick regime change in Russia leading to the end of the war, withdrawal of Russian troops from all of Ukraine's territory, and criminal prosecution of those responsible for the (frankly, at this point, countless) atrocities committed in this war. Realistically, I know this is unlikely to happen, since by all accounts this war remains popular in large parts of Russia.
At a minimum, I do hope that Ukraine comes out of this alive, and that it becomes eligible to join NATO and the EU down the line, since Russia clearly can't be held at their word after promising to respect the territorial sovereignty of other nations (as they did in Budapest, Minsk, and later Minsk II after the initial 2014 invasion).
What I find interesting specifically with Russia-Ukraine is that the Russian Offensive is NOT producing a modern capable military. They are just throwing bodies.
Ukraine however, will have the second best trained and seasoned military in the world with top NATO weaponry, and is building a national identity. It may be wringing corruption and ineffectual leadership from the civilian government, will have DEEP ties with elite western militaries from training relationships, and will prove themselves as a good investment for Western foreign aid.
Ukraine may or may not get all its territory back, but Russia has, strategically, utterly lost this war. THey wanted a buffer satellite state, and instead have the second most capable NATO military a couple hundred miles from their capital.
Also, I suspect that Belarus will flip to a similar relationship with the West in the next 10 years / when Putin dies. It will be surrounded by Ukraine and the Baltic states, and Lukashenko is already in a tenuous position.
Russia doesn't even have air superiority yet. Ukrainian air force is blowing up elite paratroopers before they even have a chance to reach the front lines.
This entire invasion is already a disaster. Russia still has an advantage but they're taking unnecessary losses already.
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No Ukrainian city is encircled yet either. Kyiv can't run out of food when it's still safe for supplies to come into the city.
Russia needs to establish the basics, and haven't even done that yet.
EDIT: it's been like 3 days. It's too soon to expect Russia's military to have a big success yet. Russia's superior weaponry should have a relatively easy time but... Russia is basically trying to perform 4 or 5 simultaneous 'Battle of Fallujah's here simultaneously.
Just going all in on major cities around the country simultaneously, where most people in those cities really hate Russians right now.
Ukraine was always going to lose, going up against Russia, as would most nations. Lose-lose is a better option for the people of Ukraine, if you accept they are desiring to defend themselves (which will entail a higher death toll); the other scenario is Russia wins (taking no losses) and Ukraine loses (nearly everything).
Ukraine can make Russia suffer if the West has given them enough weapons to do so. I'm skeptical that they did in time. They had seven years after Crimea to help Ukraine, and waited far too long to do it to a great enough degree.
Ukraine is fighting with the open support of pretty much every advanced military in the developed world. They've got armed drones from Turkey, Javelins from the US/UK, the freaking EU of all organizations is saying they'll send them fighter jets. Even Germany is sending weapons.
Combine that with the apparent intense Ukrainian morale and Russian military incompetence/lack of will, Ukraine winning is not entirely out of the question. Even if they lose they seem fully prepared to commit to an insurgency, which given said international support and direct borders with NATO would be the best equipped insurgency in history.
Never mind the potential effects of the sanctions, which are truly massive in scope.
Ukraine could very well be the rock that breaks Russia's teeth.
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