Russia’s mistakes in Ukraine have destroyed its military forces

The Russian Armed Forces were once considered to be the second-greatest military force in the world, but all of that has changed since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. 

“It is definitely no longer the world’s second army,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said of the Russian Armed Forces in August 2022. 

“They have a lot of resources in warehouses and arsenals,” Reznikov continued, adding “those resources are already old” and that they bring T-62s to fight in Ukraine. 

In February, Britain’s Defence Ministry estimated that Russia had likely lost 200,000 troops since the start of the war, a number which revealed the true weakness of Russian forces today. 

Russia hasn’t just lost hundreds of thousands of troops, though. Roughly 9740 pieces of Russian armor and artillery equipment have been destroyed according to Oryx—an independent project that verifies losses in Ukraine—as of their March 20th estimate.

All of Russia’s losses in Ukraine, combined with the fact that the country has also lost roughly 50% of the initial Ukrainian territory that has been taken since the war began, has led many journalists and analysts to question how things have gone so wrong.

“The Russian army that crossed the border into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, has been largely destroyed,” wrote Newsweek’s Michael Wasiura in a March 9th report. 

“Poor planning and execution, combined with a critical inability to adapt to changing combat conditions, have decimated its ranks and depleted its equipment,” Wasiura continued, adding that Moscow’s army was now incapable of sustaining offensives. 

The blame for Putin’s failing army should be laid squarely on the early missteps of the war according to Wasiura, who interviewed The Institute of the Study of War’s George Barros to better understand how Russia’s military forces got to where they are today. 

Barros’ initial insight was that the Russian Armed Forces did not begin the war fighting in the capacity in which its war planners believed it could, and should, fight. 

"Based on Russian military doctrine,” Barros told Newsweek, “we were expecting them to wage an unrelenting, 72-hour air campaign aimed at crippling critical infrastructure and destroying as much of the conventional Ukrainian military as possible.”

"Instead, the air and missile campaign lasted for only around six or seven hours, and they didn't really destroy anything of consequence before sending in ground troops, who in a lot of cases didn't seem to be expecting to meet actual resistance,” Barro added. 

Other major blunders according to Barros included Putin’s political influence over the war and his risk-averse attitude, which did “tangible harm to the Russian war effort.”

"The military situation in May already demanded that, if Russia actually still wanted to achieve its goals, mobilization needed to start going forward," Barros explained.

"Instead, they resorted to ineffective half-measures like trying to get by with volunteers, and the result was the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv " Barros added. 

Barros continued on, explaining that it wasn’t until Putin came to realize that Russia could lose the war that important decisions like the one to mobilize 300,000 new soldiers were made. But the choice to go all in might have come a little too late. 

Russia has been left with a significantly degraded military fighting force, one whose best units—like the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade—have been repeatedly smashed and beaten.

Worst yet for Russia, its commanders seem to still be making the same mistakes according to a March 6th article from Slate’s Fred Kaplan.

“It seems more and more that Russian military officers aren’t correcting the mistakes they made in the early phases of the war against Ukraine—and that they may be incapable of doing so,” Kaplan wrote.

This doesn’t mean Russia is defeated according to George Barros. "They've shown that they can take losses, both in manpower and in territory, and continue to fight.”

“Even if they can't take any more territory, there's every indication that they are going to continue fighting," Barros added, which means we shouldn’t expect the conflict to end even if Russian forces are ground down even further while fighting in Ukraine.