As Russian troops fled the Kharkov region last week under the pressure of advancing Ukrainian troops, pro-war Russian bloggers knew who to blame—President Vladimir Putin—for their reluctance to mobilize and send more soldiers to Ukraine. Western military experts also point out problems with recruiting Russian units.
“The main thing that the counteroffensive showed was that they [России] real problems with recruiting soldiers. They simply didn’t have enough troops to hold the line there,” says Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
In addition, he said, Russian units have weakened compared to the beginning of the war, when they could boast of the greatest power, while Ukrainian units are becoming stronger. They are replenished with military-trained soldiers and modern weapons supplied by Western countries.
Putin insists that Russia is only conducting a “special military operation,” so, unlike mobilized Ukraine, it is not officially waging war. Therefore, Moscow is not ready to send regular conscripts into the combat zone and is instead trying to fill out the troops with volunteers and rely on other forces, such as units of the Russian Guard.
Also, numerous reports indicate that mercenaries from the Wagner PMC are trying to recruit soldiers in prisons and colonies.
After Russia moved troops south to repel a Ukrainian counteroffensive near Kherson, it did not have enough troops left to form a layered defense in the north, in the Kharkiv region, said Nikolai Beleskov, an analyst at the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Kyiv. After the Ukrainians broke through the defenses around Balakleya, there was no one to stop them.
Beleskov estimates that Russia has sent a total of 200,000 to 250,000 troops to Ukraine. The Pentagon reported that 70,000 to 80,000 of them had been killed or wounded since the invasion began. The front line stretches for 1,300 km, and Russia has too few soldiers to hold it. The Ukrainian armed forces now number about 1 million people.
“Russia lost the best part of its army in the first weeks [войны]and the remaining best units are exhausted and exhausted,” says Dimitri Minich, an expert on the Russian military at the French Institute of International Relations. And the problems, according to him, do not end there: “Things are no better with weapons. Russia has lost too many modern weapons and, unlike the Ukrainian army, is forced to increasingly use old and ineffective weapons, which it has in large quantities.”
Mass conscription for war is carried out only in the separatist Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics. There, men are often captured right on the streets and, after several days of preparation, are sent to the front. The commanders of such units complained that they had to lead into battle people who did not know how to fight, were poorly armed and did not want to fight.
The haste with which Russian units abandoned territories in the Kharkov region, abandoning tanks and other equipment, as well as entire weapons depots, indicates extremely low morale, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) points out. The Ukrainians also successfully used modern weapons obtained from the West, including HILMARS missile systems, to cause serious damage to the logistics of Russian troops, the institute’s experts pointed out.