They talk about the massive use of drones by Russians. “The danger from drones is huge, they see everything and usually immediately open fire,” says a military man named Andrey.
“The enemy sees all our movements. Usually we can only move at night. We need night vision goggles and armored vehicles are also very necessary. The enemy is chasing us with helicopters, planes, anti-tank weapons,” he says.
Both in the south and in the east “the Russian defense is strong”, which causes high losses.
“Anyone who visits Ukrainian hospitals these days can see the price soldiers are paying: countless fighters have lost arms, legs and feet. NATO sources say there have been tens of thousands of them since the start of the war,” the article says.
Ukrainian servicewoman Margarita believes that “the situation is very difficult” and the quick liberation of the territories is “impossible.”
“The situation has always been difficult, and now even more difficult. Behind every centimeter of the liberated territory are the lives of many fighters. There are casualties, heavy fighting. The Russian army does not degrade and fights primitively, some parts fight very effectively and improve, use drones. Their army itself seems weak, but they are improving and trying to keep up with technology,” she says.
It’s honestly quite interesting when you put this into the perspective of an SMO and not a war. First, it makes sense why the front line Ukrainians see a weak army, with low tech, and primitive tactics.
But then this branches into two new material understandings.
First is the obvious one. The Russian military hasn’t deployed its main fighting forces and highest tech materiel and they are expending their oldest and worst equipment in the first waves. A less obvious extension of this first understanding that I hadn’t considered was that Russia is also experimenting with how to enhance and extend the worst of its fighting forces so that in future conflicts it has a much more effective base without needing to upgrade absolutely everything.
The second new understanding, though, is more tragic. The Ukrainian speaking clearly doesn’t account for the fact that Russia isn’t fighting a war with it’s full military. She compares her entire national defense force with a Russian SMO using all of its bottom of the barrel materiel. And this is after the US has provided lethal aid greater than the entire Russian military budget (which I believe includes the nuclear budget) and after the US has provided training, reconnaissance, and other significant supports. The new material understanding for me is that Ukrainian soldiers don’t understand that they are their country’s best fighting against their enemy’s worst.
Yeah, that’s a good perspective on the big picture here. Russia basically hasn’t started much of anything yet, and the west is clearly not able to keep up even with that. Another important aspect is that Russia used the past year to secure economic relations with friendly countries. This puts Russia in a much stronger position going forward while weakening the position of the west. Europe now has significantly higher energy prices, and has lost access to a lot of important commodities from Russia. This affects things such as steel production which directly affect combat effectiveness of NATO. This also puts further strain on US economically as it has to take on further burden to prop up NATO.
I find that I am still incredibly anxious about my ignorance around the North Atlantic’s progress in increasing munitions manufacturing output. Part of my fear is that the US used this conflict for a wide array of objectives, with one of them being a multi-year ramp up of manufacturing in advance of their anticipated war with China. In essence, that this is an appetizer for the hegemon and its vassals.
It’s still comically low, US army plans a “dramatic” increase in shell production going from making 14,000 155mm shells each month to 20,000 by the spring and 40,000 by 2025. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2022/12/05/army-plans-dramatic-ammo-production-boost-as-ukraine-drains-stocks/
How much can these numbers be masked for disinfo purposes? Do we think there’s the potential for future tech energy weapons to operate without ammunition and be a decisive advantage in a war against China?
Not in USA currently, just look at their weapons programs for Zumwalt, started very ambitiously and ended with guns with no ammo.