After Congress this week approved $61 billion in long-delayed U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Russia gloated that advanced Western weapons would not turn the tide on the battlefield.
More than at any time since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine two years ago, Russia’s president appears “very confident and happy” in recent months, said a person who knows him well. “Let’s see if military aid changes that.”
As Ukraine ran out of Western aid and struggled to rotate its depleted troops, Russia took advantage of its superior fire and manpower and gradually advanced across the front line.
Two senior Ukrainian intelligence officials described Russia’s recent attacks along key front lines, as well as missile and drone strikes on Kharkiv and similarly key cities, as softening the battlefield ahead of a major offensive.
The officials said they expected Russia to launch a new major offensive in late May or June.
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But with U.S. aid finally on the way, Western defense officials and analysts say Ukraine could be exposing the flaws inherent in Russia’s attempts to overwhelm the country with low-quality ammunition and a large but poorly trained army.
A Western official said that while Russia may make some tactical breakthroughs on the front lines, it remains an ineffective army characterized by old equipment and poorly trained soldiers and will not “overrun” Ukraine, they added.
“In February 2022, Russia had a far better equipped and trained army,” the official said, referring to Russia’s first invasion and subsequent defeat in northern Ukraine. “I just can’t imagine it being any better now.”
After its first blitzkrieg failed, Russia sought to wear Ukraine down by favoring quantity over quality on the battlefield.
According to Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies the Russian military, Russia fires five shells for every returning volley from Ukrainian forces, while the ratio is even higher at some hot spots along the line of contact.
“The aid will not negate Russian advantages this year, but it will allow Ukrainian forces to defend their positions with counter-battery fire and can be used to slow or stop Russian advances,” Massicot said.
Thanks to record defense spending this year of Rbs 10.8 trillion ($118.5 billion) – six percent of gross domestic product – Russia’s defense industry has increased production many times over, with factories operating around the clock, according to official figures operation.
Sergei Chemezov, head of state defense corporation Rostec, said last November that Russia was building 2.5 times more artillery and multiple-launch systems than before, while increasing production of some types of ammunition by more than 60 times.
But these sheer numbers obscure Moscow’s inability to convert that firepower into a significant breakthrough – something Russian experts say would only be possible with more advanced weaponry.
According to Ruslan Pukhov, Western sanctions have made it harder for Russia to obtain the components it needs for drones, loitering munitions, guided bombs and high-precision missiles, forcing it to rely on lower-technology weapons that it can more easily mass-produce , head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow defense think tank.
Pukhov said: “The most crucial systems on the battlefield in Ukraine are directly dependent on sanctions. Expanding it means leaders at all levels must think creatively and understand the key trends and likely outcomes of the war.”
Despite Moscow’s larger arsenal, its army “does not have a radical advantage over Ukraine in artillery and ammunition,” he added. “At least the people fighting on the Russian side don’t see it.”
Instead, the Kremlin is deploying more low-tech weapons such as highly destructive glide bombs and modernized Soviet weapons, while deploying its troops on motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles.
“If it works, it works – low-tech or not,” Massicot said.
However, even that is not enough to sustain the enormous rate of fire that Russia rained down on Ukraine in the first six months of the war, according to Pavel Luzin, a non-resident senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis.
Russia fired up to 60,000 shells per day by fall 2022 – a figure that has fallen to about 10,000 per day and includes supplies from North Korea and Iran.
These lower rates of fire reflect that the intensity of the fighting exceeds what Russia can replenish even at this higher level of production – and is slowing a larger advance.
According to a report released this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russia would need to produce 3.6 million shells a year to maintain the current rate of fire.
However, the Defense Ministry has admitted that it can produce at most half of the 4 million 152mm caliber shells and the 1.6 million 122mm caliber shells that Putin’s military estimates are needed to achieve the breakthrough.
And as Russia fires more and more shells, its artillery tubes are wearing out faster than it can make new ones — forcing it to replace them with Soviet-era tubes instead.
The U.S. aid does not address what Ukrainian and Western officials say is Kiev’s biggest problem: its inability to keep up with the enormous numbers of men Russia has called up to fight.
Christopher Cavoli, the NATO allied commander for Europe, told lawmakers at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in April that Russia is recruiting 30,000 soldiers a month, increasing its front-line troops to 470,000 from 360,000 a year ago.
To raise these men, the army is offering financial incentives, including salaries starting from Rbs 200,000 – five times the average wage in some of Russia’s poorer regions – and bonuses ranging from Rbs 300,000 to Rbs 1 million, according to a report by the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service.
Soldiers can receive additional bonuses for their exploits on the battlefield or for wounding, while their families receive generous compensation if they are killed in battle.
That prospect is not far off: 315,000 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded in the war, Cavoli said, increasing pressure on the army to increase its units.
This commercial approach allows Russia to recruit enough recruits from people for whom the fight is financially attractive while avoiding mobilization – a move that caused hundreds of thousands of men to flee the country in the fall of 2022.
“The main approach at the moment is to buy blood from the Russian underclass,” said Luzin of the Center for European Policy Analysis.
But a summer offensive would require Putin to call for another round of mobilization, said Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“If the Kremlin has ambitions for Kharkiv or something even more difficult like southern Ukraine, it will have to field a very large force, probably well over 100,000 men for both, plus equipment,” Massicot said.
Even if Russia drafted more men, the sheer numbers would not be enough to make up for the lack of training, Luzin said. “We all talk about mobilization, but where are the commanders, NCOs and lieutenants who would command the mobilized soldiers?”