JRL NEWSWATCH: “Ukraine’s Military Spy Chief Says Russia Will Struggle to Keep Up the Fight” – WSJ
“Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov says Russians ’don’t have the strength’ to achieve goal of seizing two eastern regions this year”
“… Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military-intelligence chief, acknowledged the tough situation for Ukraine’s outnumbered and outgunned forces. But Russia also has problems, he said. Russia’s professional army was largely destroyed in the first year of the invasion, he said, meaning it now throws untrained conscripts into suicidal assaults. It uses more artillery shells than it can produce, and although it fielded hundreds of tanks last year most of them were old models taken from storage and refurbished, while only 178 were new. Missile attacks on Ukrainian cities have subsided in recent weeks as Russian supplies have run down. As a result, Budanov said, Russia will struggle to achieve its main strategic goal of seizing all the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions this year. … [Meanwhile,] Ukraine’s leadership, Western military planners and analysts have raised concerns about a [Ukrainian] lack of equipment and manpower …. Russia has proved able to find recruits …. Budanov said the Russian military had 510,000 military personnel in and around Ukraine and has been able to recruit about 30,000 a month. … Zelensky said in December that Ukraine has some 600,000 serving troops … although military commanders say … not enough … are combat-ready. But Moscow hasn’t used its troops efficiently. Zelensky said … that Russia had managed to advance only marginally, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, by laying waste to small settlements. …”