For a long time, it seemed that a war of attrition between Ukraine and a Russia with five times its population could only end one way. But the much-vaunted Russian offensive against Kharkiv in the north that started in May is fizzling out. Its advances elsewhere along the line, especially in the Donbas region, have been both strategically trivial and achieved only at huge cost. The question now is less whether Ukraine can stay in the fight and more how long can Russia maintain its current tempo of operations.

How To Outfight Russia: Destroy At Least 4,500 Armored Vehicles A Year For Two Years—And Do It Without America’s Help

The story goes that Philip II of Macedon once called on the Spartans to surrender, sending them the following message: "if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city”. The Spartans, in typical laconic style, sent a reply containing just one word: “If”.

With its economy on a war footing and mothballed factories coming back online, Russia now is generating around 4,500 armored vehicles a year for its 470,000-person invasion force in Ukraine. That’s one finding of a new study from the Royal United Services Institute in London.

4,500 vehicles a year isn’t quite enough vehicles to make good the 10,000 or so tanks, fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers that, according to the analysts at Oryx, Russia has lost in the first two years of its wider war on Ukraine.

But it’s close. And it’s for that reason the Kremlin “believes that it can sustain the current rate of attrition through 2025,” RUSI analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds wrote.

The catch is that, according to Watling and Reynolds, 80 percent of those 4,500 vehicles the Russians generate every year aren’t new vehicles. They’re “refurbished and modernized from Russian war stocks.”

And those stocks, once bursting with leftover Cold War-vintage vehicles, are finite. “The number of systems held in storage means that while Russia can maintain a consistent output through 2024, it will begin to find that vehicles require deeper refurbishment through 2025,” the RUSI analysts wrote.

“By 2026 it will have exhausted most of the available stocks,” they continued.

RUSI’s conclusions are consistent with the conclusions of a recent report from the Estonian defense ministry. In Russia, “production of new equipment is largely giving way to refurbishing equipment from the long-term storage,” the ministry found.

Old war stocks could hold up “for several more years,” the Estonians concluded. Open-source analysts, who scour satellite imagery to count active, destroyed and stored armored vehicles, posit trends that point to Russia’s vehicle reserves running out in 2025 or 2026.

Russia can shift more resources into producing new vehicles, of course. But where refurbishing a vehicles mostly requires a little metalwork, an engine overhaul, replacement of radios and—if the crews are lucky—a few modest upgrades to the optics and armor, from-scratch production is much more labor- and resource intensive.

For the Russians, “significantly improving production quality under international sanctions is likely unrealistic even in the medium term,” the Estonian defense ministry explained. Sanctions “have limited the Russian [military-industrial complex]’s access to high-quality components, especially machine tools, production lines and factory equipment.”

Yes, Russian can import more machinery from China, but Chinese tools might not be as good—or even as available—as the best German tools. “In the short term, the MIC is likely incapable of significantly expanding the production of new armored vehicles.”

“This will necessarily mean a significant decrease in vehicles delivered to the military,” Watling and Reynolds wrote. But not until the old war reserves run out, potentially in a couple of years.

JULY 17, 2024 7:52 PM CET
BY MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG, NETTE NÖSTLINGER, JÜRGEN KLÖCKNER AND JOSHUA POSANERBERLIN — Germany, which overcame its initial reluctance to support Ukraine to become the country’s biggest European supplier of military aid, looks poised to change course as the government plans to slash future assistance by half in order to fulfill other spending priorities, according to a finance ministry document.

The German finance minister on Wednesday detailed his country's preliminary 2025 budget, in which military aid to Ukraine is slated to be cut by half to just €4 billion, according to a draft seen by POLITICO.

Speaking after the cabinet approved the draft budget, Finance Minister Christian Lindner said Ukraine would have to rely more on funds from "European sources" as well as hoped-for income from frozen Russian assets.

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“The many promises of the chancellor and his defense minister to continue to support Ukraine are turning out to be hollow phrases,” Ingo Gädechens, a lawmaker from the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told POLITICO.

Germany's fiscal flexibility is significantly limited by its constitutional debt brake, which restricts the federal deficit to 0.35 percent of GDP, except in times of emergency. Lindner has resisted declaring the war in Ukraine such an emergency.

At the same time, the coalition has been at odds over how to finance its own military needs in order to fulfill Scholz's promises to rebuild Germany's armed forces and meet NATO's annual spending target of 2 percent of GDP.


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New UK government orders review of ‘hollowed out’ armed forces

By Rudy Ruitenberg
Jul 16, 2024 at 07:42 AM

The U.K. Armed Forces face multiple capability shortfalls, according to a parliamentary defense committee report published in February. The country’s former chief of the general staff, Patrick Sanders, has repeatedly warned that defense cuts risk leaving the U.K. unprepared for war and lacking the capability to launch operations such as the 2003 invasion of southern Iraq.

“We need to be clear-eyed about the threats we face, with the world becoming more volatile and technology changing the nature of warfare,” Defence Secretary John Healey said in a statement. “In response, our armed forces need to be better ready to fight, more integrated and more innovative. We need clearer accountability, faster delivery, less waste and better value for money.”

Former NATO secretary-general George Robertson will lead the review, together with foreign-affairs specialist and former U.S. presidential adviser Fiona Hill as well as former commander of the U.K.’s Joint Forces Command, retired Gen. Richard Barrons. The reviewers will consider the threat Britain faces, the capabilities required to meet them, as well as the state of the armed forces.

Budget pressures have taken a heavy toll on the British Army, threatening the U.K.’s ability to be a serious partner on NATO’s eastern border, Marion Messmer, senior research fellow in the International Security Programme at Chatham House, wrote in a July 10 note.

The Army is the least modernized of the U.K.’s services and faces an urgent need to invest in equipment, Nick Childs and Ben Barry at the International Institute for Strategic Studies said in a report on July 12. The funding squeeze for the British armed forces has also raised doubts about the Royal Navy’s shipbuilding plans, while identified capability gaps such as integrated missile defense will carry a “considerable price tag,” according to Childs and Barry.

​​​​​​​ “The underlying problem is that U.K. defense was hollowed out at a time when we actually needed to commence recapitalization,” said Nicholas Drummond, a U.K. defense industry analyst and consultant, in a post on the social network X. “The armed forces lack sufficient mass, lethality and resilience to fight a sustained conflict against a peer adversary.”

Drummond said the U.K.’s three services all have too few personnel: While the Navy has too few attack submarines and anti-submarine frigates, the Royal Air Force is short of aircraft and the Army lacks sufficient combat-support assets such as artillery and engineering units

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Ukrainian troops have lost a hard-won position on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, near the southern city of Kherson, after months of bloody fighting to hold on to a piece of land in what some Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts have described as a futile operation.

The Ukrainian military said on Wednesday night that fighting continued on the eastern bank but that most of the main positions in the village of Krynky, where its troops had gained a foothold, “were destroyed by intense, combined and prolonged enemy fire.” The statement came after several Ukrainian news media outlets reported that Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from the village, which now lies in ruins.

The operation to establish a bridgehead on the Russian-controlled eastern bank of the Dnipro had been controversial from the start. Launched last fall, it was seen as an attempt to open a new front in the south that would disrupt Moscow’s logistics and tie down its troops in the area. But military analysts warned that the operation, which consisted of dangerous river crossings, was vulnerable in its logistics and unlikely to lead to rapid breakthroughs.

Ukrainian gains were limited to small pieces of land near the river, of which Krynky was the most notable

Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his government's intention to reach NATO's defense-spending target of 2% of GDP by 2032. Canada's defense spending is expected to be 1.39% of GDP in the 2024-25 fiscal year, according to government projections.

The armed forces are struggling to meet recruitment goals and have been slow to replace outdated equipment.

Last November, the head of the navy said the service was in "a critical state" and might not be able to carry out its basic duties in 2024.

"We're facing many internal challenges such as recruitment and retention," Carignan said. "We know the challenges we face and what we need to do to address them."

Trudeau, who called Carignan "a role model for all Canadians and for the world", has pursued policies designed to boost gender equality since taking office in 2015.

Russian observation drones are operating freely over the battlefield and can call in artillery, air and missile strikes without interference because the Ukrainian Ground Forces have little to shoot them with, Oleksandr Syrsky, commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), said in a statement.

Lt. Gen. Syrsky in comments published on Monday on his personal Telegram channel said that Ukrainian forces are facing a “total shortage” of hand-held anti-aircraft missiles and must find “new ways” to attack the Russian reconnaissance aircraft armed with advanced sensors and muti-spectral cameras. He suggested troops under his command improve jamming techniques and develop tactics for using one-way kamikaze drones to intercept and ram the enemy robot planes.

Camera-toting Russian drones have in the past two weeks flown as much as 50 kilometers into Ukrainian territory and recorded Russian long-range missile strikes in the Kharkiv, Donetsk, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa regions. Ukrainian troop-training bases, airfields, rail hubs, anti-aircraft systems, ammunition storage sites, and equipment warehouses were among the targets, Kyiv Post review of 15 videos published since July 10 showed.

Starting in Spring some Ukrainian air defenders have taken to the skies themselves aboard single-engine training planes, with the passenger armed with an automatic rifle or a shotgun, to hunt down free-flying Russian drones.

Ukrainian forces much prefer to use highly-effect hand-held, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to attack Russian drones, but supplies of those weapons have run short as Ukraine’s main suppliers of such weaponry – the US, Poland, France and the UK – have nearly emptied existing stocks and found local manufacturers unable to gear up quickly to manufacture more weapons.

​​​​​​According to US defense media, in 2023 Raytheon, the manufacturer of highly-successful-in-Ukraine Stinger anti-aircraft missile, called in retired engineers and technicians to restart production lines stopped two decades ago.

A Tuesday statement by the AFU General Staff (AGS) reported the Russian Air Force on Monday set new numerical record with 132 glider bomb strikes against Ukrainian forces, most in support of the main Russian offensive effort toward Pokrovsk.

Skyrsky’s comments on the gap in anti-drone missiles – often called MANPADS (man-portable air-defense systems) in NATO vernacular, followed a two-day visit to front-line formations in the heavily pressed eastern Donbas sector, scene of repeated Russian ground assaults and massed bombardments in past weeks.

“The enemy is ignoring rather high levels of losses and is continuing to push,” Syrsky said. Russian forces currently are embarked on a broad-front offensive, he said, and are launching daily attacks against the Donbas towns and villages of Krasnohorivka, Progres, Zalizny, Stelmakhivka, Makiivka, Ivanovsky, Chasiv Yar, Ivanovsky and Klishchiivka. The Russian strategy is to use massed firepower to reach and capture its key objective, the Donbas transportation hub city of Pokrovsk, Syrsky said.

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