It is a Russian survivor of the battle of Vouhledar, in eastern Ukraine, who says, quoted by the Russian daily 7X7: launched on January 23, the attack on the small mining town of Donbass, was to mark the start of a new offensive by Moscow troops against Ukraine, as February 24 approaches, the first anniversary of this war of invasion. But the scenario would not have gone as planned for the third company of the 155e Marine Brigade of the Pacific Fleet, an elite unit, decimated on the battlefield at the rate of 150 to 300 men per day.
“Those who survived were treated as deserters”, said the soldier who was one of the 8 survivors of this offensive, while explaining the fiasco of the attack by the composition of the troops made up of “80 and 90%” of young recruits freshly mobilized and poorly trained. “It would have been better if I had been captured rather than come back,” he added, referring to the violent attitude of the Russian army command towards him, due to the turn of events.
At the crossroads of the eastern front in the Donetsk region and the southern front in the Zaporijjia region, Vouhledar has been at the heart of Vladimir Putin’s military ambitions for several weeks, in the hope of eradicating a Ukrainian resistance which undermines the Russian supply lines and thus breathes new life into its invasion. But with the heavy losses that the strongman of the Kremlin seems to have suffered there, the city, whose name means “gift of coal” in Ukrainian, is above all becoming the symbol of his inability to support the spring offensive of which he dream for months.
“Russia’s costly military campaign in Ukraine has likely significantly depleted the reserves of Russian equipment and manpower needed to sustain a successful large-scale offensive in eastern Ukraine,” the Institute said on Wednesday. for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based group of independent war analysts, in its latest newsletter. The organization speaks in passing of “Russia’s inability to regenerate exhausted mechanized vehicles in the short term [ce qui] further limits the war and maneuver capabilities of Russian troops.”
On Wednesday, in an interview with the BBC, the English Minister of Defense, Ben Wallace, indicated that the British intelligence services had not seen the Russian forces organizing themselves on the ground in such a way as to attempt a breakthrough of the lines of Ukrainian defense as part of “a major offensive” a few days before the first anniversary of this war. He estimated that Moscow would have brought 97% of its army into the conflict in Ukraine, with losses that would have reduced its combat capability by 40%.
In the current context of the war, these data are difficult to verify, but nevertheless follow the analyzes carried out in recent weeks by several other military intelligence services and independent groups.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimates that Russia has lost around 50% of its T-72B and T-72B3M tanks and many T-80 tanks, forcing its troops to continue their attacks on older equipment. In barely a week, for the conquest of the city of Vouhledar, Moscow would have lost 130 armored vehicles and 36 assault tanks, according to the Ukrainian military staff.
On Thursday, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that despite everything, the Kremlin continued to “introduce a large number of troops” onto the battlefield in Ukraine, but that these new soldiers, “ill-equipped and poorly trained” should continue to be exposed to “significant losses”. “We expect this to continue,” he said at a press conference held in Estonia, where he was visiting.
Tuesday, in an interview with the daily FinancialTimesUS Chief of Staff General Mark Milley said it was “almost impossible for the Russians to achieve their political goals [de soumettre l’Ukraine] by military means” and added that it was still, a year later “unlikely that Russia would invade Ukraine. It just won’t happen,” he said.
The man added that the next few months could however be exhausting for kyiv faced with the strategic complexity now of expelling the Russians from every inch of its occupied territory. “That doesn’t mean it can’t happen… But it’s extraordinarily difficult. And that is going to require essentially the collapse of the Russian military,” he said.
After a failed attempt to take over Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin and its troops have not achieved significant military successes on the ground since last July and the capture of the industrial city of Severodonetsk. Since then, the fierce resistance served by the Ukrainian armies has succeeded in liberating no less than 18,000 square kilometers of its territory.
For the ISW, “Russia’s military failures in Ukraine continue to prevent Vladimir Putin from presenting his military successes to the Russian public” and also make it “unlikely” that the Russian president will “announce measures for a further escalation of the war in Ukraine, new major Russian mobilization initiatives or any other important policy” in a speech he is due to give to the Russian Federal Assembly on February 21.
A scenario fueled in part on Thursday by the leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigojine, who postponed for a few months the prospect of a new Russian victory in Ukraine, particularly around the devastated city of Bakhmout which the Russians have been seeking to encircle since months, but which could not fall, according to him, not before “March or April”, he said in a video posted online. “To take Bakhmout, we must cut off all Ukrainian supply routes”, he said, while accusing the command of the Russian armies, to which he is indirectly linked, of contributing to this other failure of the Russians on the field. of battle.
“I think we would have taken Bakhmout if it weren’t for this monstrous military bureaucracy and if we weren’t being put in the way every day,” Prigojine said, confirming tensions within the Russian camp inherent in the many military disappointments of the Kremlin forces on the ground.
With Agence France-Presse