Not only is this war not going according to Russian plans, but a Russian defeat is no longer impossible. It is still necessary to define what a Russian “defeat” would be: increasing immobility of front lines, mutual blocking, depletion of the aggressor’s stocks and troops.
The Russian attempt to conquer Ukraine is at an impasse. Heavy losses, human and material, weigh on a messy army, ill-prepared, unmotivated, with deficient communications, which has so far achieved none of its initial objectives: to immediately take Kharkiv (the country’s second largest city), to melt on kyiv in three days, capturing a vast strip of land from east to west facing the Black Sea.
To the south there is the revolting martyrdom of Mariupol, but Odessa remains virtually untouched. To the north, Kharkiv, stuck on the Russian border and (like Odessa) predominantly Russian-speaking, wanted nothing to do with the supposed “helpful big brother against the Nazi hordes” (Vladimir Putin’s fantasy, which turned out to be a “self -intox” monumental): it resists with all its strength and has not yet fallen, despite the rain of bombs and the extent of the destruction.
Videos of burnt-out tanks and abandoned convoys are flooding Ukrainian social media, alongside images of dead Russian soldiers, surrendering Russian infantrymen (images in principle illegal under the Geneva conventions), starving Russian soldiers stealing chickens to local farmers or looting supermarkets.
(These images, these violations of the laws of war are nothing, it must be said, compared to what we see in Mariupol, Kharkiv or Mikolaiv, whose populations are decimated and buildings destroyed in large numbers. )
If we look closely at the maps, we see that the front lines have hardly moved for seven days. Russian soldiers are killed or wounded at the rate of 1000 per day, according to estimates by Western services (double, according to Ukrainian propaganda). Which would make, as of March 19, some 7,000 Russians dead and 20,000 wounded.
According to military specialists quoted this weekend by the washington postout of the 168 Russian tactical groups… 120 are already fighting in Ukraine, that is approximately 100,000 soldiers (out of the 190,000 dispatched to wage this war, all arms combined).
If these numbers are correct, they mean that Russia has already committed more than two-thirds of its entire ground combat force…and that a significant portion of the Russian military (as a whole) is bogged down in Ukraine.
By making the plausible hypothesis that it is indeed these forces (infantry, mechanized groups) that have suffered the greatest losses, this means that nearly 30% of the Russian army… has already been put out of action. of fight. In less than a month. It is huge and catastrophic.
To put it another way:
– Russia has mobilized a very large part of its entire army in its Ukraine campaign.
“She has already lost almost a third of her strength on the ground.
– This campaign failed to meet its initial objectives.
– This war entails a general strategic weakening of Russia.
This weekend, the use, much publicized by the Russian Defense Ministry, of a “hypersonic” missile (between five and twenty times the speed of sound) against a military target in southern Ukraine does not give necessarily a strategic advantage to whoever uses it. This is a symbolic gesture, a “torso bending” designed to impress the enemy.
We don’t know if the Russian army has many of them (a few hundred? a few tens? a few units only?). The United States has estimated the cost of the best hypersonic missiles at 100 million dollars each: this is fifty times the price per unit, already astronomical, of an American cruise missile!
The use of such an ultra-advanced arsenal, of which Russia boasts like an all-powerful King Kong, can hide the general weakness, even the exhaustion, of all the means of the Russian army in this catastrophic Ukrainian campaign.
The analysis that is “rising” at the moment, among the American, French and British intelligence services, tends to say that the stock of “classic” precision missiles of the Russian army (Iskander, Bulava, etc.) would be in exhausted, after the massive bombardments, often from the Black Sea, against Mariupol or Mikolaiv—or, on the northern front, against Kharkiv or Sumy.
There would therefore remain only a few sinister “super jewels”, which are on display at the moment… and at the other extreme, a good reserve of crude, approximate, non-guided and horribly deadly bombs. Without forgetting, of course, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, which the Russian army, unlike the Ukrainian army (despite the foolish accusations from Moscow), certainly has.
Can such a disaster on the ground bring Vladimir Putin to sit down and really talk? Or on the contrary, will it push it to a desperate escalation, with even more massive and indiscriminate bombardments? Or even… the unthinkable?
The future of the world is partly played out in Vladimir Putin’s brain.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]