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According to Western intelligence and military experts, the Russian military will soon run out of combat capabilities and will be forced to stop its offensive in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass.
“There will come a time when the little progress that Russia is making will become unsustainable in light of the costs, and they will need a significant pause to regain their capabilities,” said a senior Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
The estimates come despite continued Russian progress against superior Ukrainian forces, including the capture on Friday of the city of Severodonetsk, the largest urban center captured by Russia in the east since the last offensive in Donbass nearly three months ago.
Now the Russians are approaching the neighboring town of Lisichank, on the opposite bank of the Donetsk River. The takeover of the city will give Russia almost complete control over the Luhansk region, one of the two districts or provinces that include the Donbass region. Control of Donbass is the publicly announced target of Russia’s “special military operation,” although the invasion of several fronts, launched in February, made it clear that Moscow’s initial ambitions were far broader.
The conquest of Lisichank is a challenge, as it stands higher and the Donetsk River hinders Russian progress from the east. Instead, Russian troops appear to intend to encircle the city from the west, pushing southeast of Izyum and northeast of Popasna on the west bank of the river.
According to talks on Russian telegram channels and Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Anna Malyar, the Russian army is under pressure to put all of Luhansk under Russian control by Sunday, which may explain the increased momentum over the past week.
But “creeping” progress depends almost entirely on the use of huge amounts of ammunition, especially artillery shells that are fired at speeds that almost no army in the world could last long, a senior Western official said.
Russia, meanwhile, continues to suffer heavy losses of equipment and people, questioning how much longer it can stay in the attack, the official said.
Officials have refused to offer a time frame, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, citing British intelligence estimates, said this week that Russia would only be able to fight in the “next few months”. “Russia may then reach a point where it is no longer making progress because it has exhausted its resources,” he told the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
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Russian commentators also noted the challenges, highlighting chronic labor shortages. “Russia does not have enough physical force in the area of the special military operation in Ukraine … given the nearly 1,000-kilometer (or more) line of confrontation,” Russian military blogger Yuri Kotenok wrote in his Telegram profile. He estimated that Russia would need 500,000 troops to achieve its goals, which would only be possible with large-scale military mobilization, a potentially risky and unpopular move that President Vladimir Putin has so far refrained from taking.
Russia’s offensive has already surpassed predictions that Russia’s offensive capabilities will peak by summer. The aggressive recruitment of contract soldiers and reservists has helped generate up to 40,000 to 50,000 troops to replenish lost or incapacitated personnel in the first weeks of fighting, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia is withdrawing ancient tanks from warehouses and away from bases in the vast country to dump them on the Ukrainian front line.
The Russians still have an advantage over the Ukrainian forces, which are also suffering. Ukrainian authorities estimate the number of their soldiers killed in combat at 200 a day. Ukrainians have also almost completely exhausted the Soviet-era ammunition on which their own weapons systems rely, and are still in the process of switching to Western systems.
Ukraine is running out of ammunition as the prospects on the battlefield are bleak
But conditions for Ukrainian troops are likely to improve only with the arrival of more sophisticated Western weapons, while those of Russian forces can be expected to deteriorate as they dig deeper into their stockpiles of old, obsolete equipment, the retired general said. Ben Hodges, a former commander of US forces in Europe who is now at the Center for European Policy Analysis. At some point in the coming months, Ukrainians will receive enough Western weapons to go on the counter-offensive and reverse the course of the war, he said.
“I remain very optimistic that Ukraine will win and that by the end of this year Russia will be pushed back to the line on February 24,” he said, referring to the borders of the Russian-occupied areas of Crimea and occupied Donbass during the 2014 fighting. and 2015. “It sucks right now to be the recipient of all this Russian artillery. But my assessment is that things will develop in favor of the Ukrainians in the next few weeks.
There are already indications that the supply of Western weapons is gaining momentum. The newly arrived French howitzers CAESAR were videotaped in action on the battlefield last week, followed this week by German howitzers Panzerhaubitze 2000, the first of the heavy weapons promised by Germany to be delivered.
The first of the long-awaited US HIMARS systems, which will allow Ukrainians to strike up to 50 miles behind Russian lines, has also been delivered to Ukraine in recent days, according to US officials, although these weapons have not yet been reported for use. lines.
It is difficult to predict the future because not much is known about the conditions and strength of Ukrainian forces, said Matthias Neles, a German political analyst who studies Ukraine. Ukrainians maintain a high level of operational secrecy, which makes it difficult to understand, for example, how many soldiers still have in the Lisichansk area or the true percentage of casualties, he said.
Another unknown is the extent of Russia’s artillery stockpiles, which Western intelligence estimates initially underestimated, the Western official said. In anticipation of a brief war in which Ukrainian forces are rapidly shrinking, the Russians have made no effort to increase production before the invasion, and although they have probably already done so, their defense industrial complex does not have the capacity to cope with the “huge” rate at which Russia spends artillery shells. said the Western official. “Their supply is not endless,” he said.
And although Ukrainian forces are having a hard time right now, they don’t look threatened with collapse, said expert Michael Coffman, director of Russian research at the Center for Naval Analysis, in a podcast on the Silverado Policy Accelerator, Geopolitics Decanted.
Ukrainians continue to harass Russian forces north of Kharkov and have made limited profits in a small offensive outside the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, helping to divert Russian resources away from the Donbass front.
The insignificant territorial gains that Russia is currently making are less significant than the overall balance of power on the battlefield, Coffman said.
“The most important part of the war is not these geographical points, because now it is a race of the will, but also a material race for who will be the first to finish in terms of equipment and ammunition and their best units,” he said. “Both forces will probably run out in the summer and then there will be an operational break.”
At this point, assuming that enough weapons and ammunition have arrived, the hope is that Ukraine will be able to go on the counter-offensive and start sending Russian troops back, Ukrainian authorities said.
If not, both sides will bury themselves to defend their positions and a stalemate will ensue, ruling out the unlikely prospect of a diplomatic breakthrough, the Western official said.
“You will have two countries that are not looking for a territorial advantage, but an operational pause focused on supplying and easing the front line, at which point you are in a protracted conflict,” he said.
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