Stalemate, even with 97% of Russian forces in Ukraine

12 months into Putin’s war, the U.K. is particularly perplexed, wondering why Russia is struggling to make any headway in the conflict.

As reported by the U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, “Russia has assembled almost its entire army in Ukraine, however, it has not been able to amass a single force to punch through Ukraine’s defenses.”

Wallace compared Russia’s efforts to advance to “almost First World War levels of attrition and with success rates of a matter of meters rather than kilometers.”

Ukraine’s Chief of Defense Intelligence, Kyrylo Oleksiyovych Budanov, recently spoke on the stalemate in an interview with the Washington Post Budanovsaid that approximately 326,000 Russian soldiers are currently fighting in Ukraine, but they are still struggling to make an advance.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">&#39;It&#39;s like Verdun&#39;<br><br>The grinding battle for Ukraine&#39;s Bakhmut is the longest of Russia&#39;s invasion, and there is no end in sight to the brutal stalemate<a href="https://t.co/kQCOUgQQHZ">https://t.co/kQCOUgQQHZ</a> <a href="https://t.co/QGK8PcjjDz">pic.twitter.com/QGK8PcjjDz</a></p>&mdash; AFP News Agency (@AFP) <a href="https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1625046950684008450?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 13, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

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To what can we attribute this stalemate?

Putin possibly had secretive intentions and told no one, not even his generals, the true plan for Ukraine invasion. Sam Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation stated, “It’s pretty clear the nature of this operation was kept secret from all but a close handful of people.” Even the invading troops appear to have been kept in the dark. This is not how forces are trained to fight.

Russian troops received almost no training before being sent to Ukraine. Leading up to the invasion, analysts had painted a portrait of a modernized, well-trained Russian military, but that has not been on display in the war’s first days. “Russia has badly mismanaged the planning for this operation,” An official told Defense One, “Their logistics trains are poorly organized, morale is bad, and they are totally unprepared for urban warfare in Ukrainian cities.” Some Russians called up in the September mobilization received so little training that they have described being used as “cannon fodder.”

Russia has held back its airpower and has not deployed its full extent in Ukraine, while the Ukrainians are still able to conduct their own air operations and launch air defense capabilities. A senior defense official told Pentagon reporters, “There’s a certain risk-averse behavior, they are not necessarily willing to take high risks with their own aircraft and their own pilots.” It’s not that the Russians rolled down all these new capabilities, and they turned out not to work. It’s just they haven’t really done that.

Stalemates are expensive

Reports estimate that Russia has spent $89 billion dollars on this campaign. Furthermore, the conflict is estimated to cost the world’s economy $2.8 trillion in trade disruption and devalued stocks. Beyond the financial toll, Ukraine has suffered immeasurable damage to their infrastructure and untold human suffering.

When Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, he was expecting a quick and decisive victory that would cement his place in Russian history and reverse the verdict of 1991 by extinguishing Ukrainian independence once and for all.

The reality has been far different. The invasion has grown into the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. As the year draws to a close, his army is demoralized by successive defeats and Russia’s reputation as a military superpower is in tatters.