The Soviet Kh-22 Buria missile was designed to destroy aircraft carriers. In Dnipro, on January 14, he gutted a residential building, killing 45 people, including 6 children. Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army has ignored civilian lives. Several dozen were killed in the horrific bombing campaign targeting cities and energy infrastructure. Added to this is the discovery of mass graves over the Ukrainian reconquests, such as Boutcha or Irpin. The victims of the siege of Mariupol could be counted in the tens of thousands.
Armed conflicts are generally accompanied by abuses. But when Moscow takes part, these are systematic and generalized. In Syria, its planes were already carrying out strikes on hospitals and markets. During the two wars in Chechnya, its troops were guilty of multiple executions, as in Afghanistan. In Ukraine, countless investigations are expected to feed the courts with charges for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
For the Russian army, the bankruptcy is not only moral. The world’s second military power imagined sweeping away in a few days a Ukrainian state that its intelligence services considered weak. Instead, it finds itself mired in a bloody conflict, facing a nation determined to defend its existence, with the military and financial support of the West. Since July, Russia has only been able to claim one conquest, contested by kyiv, the modest city of Soledar. This success does not make up for its decline in the regions of Kharkiv and Kherson.
A suffering army
In Ukraine, Moscow records unprecedented military damage since the Second World War. A French military source estimates that there are already more than 40,000 killed, more than the high range of its soldiers who died during the two wars in Chechnya or in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. “The Russian army no longer has nothing to do with what it was before the war, notes Vincent Tourret, associate researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research. Of its elite troops, such as paratroopers, only a few clusters of units remain. It has also lost its best officers, such as its electronic warfare specialist, General Simonov, killed during a strike on a command center.”
The heiress of the Red Army has already wasted thousands of armor, including more than 1,600 tanks, according to the specialized site Oryx. Its stock of ammunition is depleting faster than it is replenished, as evidenced by its current rate of artillery fire, far from the 60,000 rounds on some days in June. It can no longer resort to precision-guided missiles only sporadically and turns to low-cost Iranian technologies, such as the Shahed-136 kamikaze aircraft.
Affected, the Russian army is however far from being sunk. It has not retreated since its withdrawal from Kherson in mid-November. The use in September of 300,000 mobilized soldiers, some of whom are still in training, enabled it to strengthen its lines. Another mobilization could follow, drawing from a considerable reservoir of population (140 million inhabitants, against 40 in Ukraine). “Even if he does not have a very high motivation, the Russian soldier, with an unfortunate trellis and a Kalashnikov, will still go to fight”, predicts General Jérôme Pellistrandi, editor-in-chief of the National Defense Review.
A long-term approach
By shamelessly resorting to this cannon fodder – the bodies are not even recovered from the battlefield – the Kremlin can hope to retain its territorial gains and wear down an adversary with equally considerable losses. “The logic would be that 200,000 Russians may die in total, but 200,000 Ukrainians too. In the long run, this will exhaust Ukrainian human resources”, says Tomas Ries, professor at the National Defense School. from Stockholm.
Behind this long-term approach, a certain improvisation persists. The command of the offensive in Ukraine changes heads regularly and reports, since January 11, to the Chief of Staff, Valeri Guerassimov. In the event of the next counter-offensives, as kyiv fears, he will have to restore order: the Russian fighting forces are not all acting in concert. Sometimes they contradict each other, as in the claim for the capture of Soledar, both by the regular army and by Wagner’s mercenaries.
“What is happening in this sector is a good example of what could happen in the months to come: localized offensives that do not break Ukrainian units, but stabilize and encyst the front,” said Vincent Tourret. These deadly battles seem to be the only ones that the Russian forces manage to fight, at the cost of a continuous supply of shells and men. At least until Ukraine manages to launch new lightning counterattacks.