Here's an interesting twitter thread that goes into some detail about the organizational failings of the Russian forces.
A big part of the problem is that Russia has several very different organizationally distinct armed forces in Ukraine that don't coordinate together well.
The most combat-effective might be Wagner. There are only 3,000 to 5,000 of them, but they are increasingly well equipped, including SU-25 jets taken from the Russian Air Force and flown by contract pilots. Wagner's boss Progozhin answers directly to Putin. So does he even listen to the generals? Who are generals to him? Wagner operates independently in Ukraine.
The next most effective are the regular Russian military forces. These are commanded by the whole military command structure with all the generals and bureaucracy, not all of which play well together. The tweet opines that the best Russian military units suffered big losses in the initial battles around Kyiv and today's Russian forces are mostly secondary units. These handle the artillery bombardments, while the remaining elite airborne forces handle the direct infantry combat.
The tweet doesn't mention it, but to my own eye the coordination between the Army and the Air Force is abysmal. Russia has the second or third largest air force in the world, behind only the US and (maybe) China. But Russian aircraft are few and far between over Ukraine, unable to silence the much smaller Ukrainian air force, which is still flying. There has been little or no effective air support of ground troops and the Ukrainian forces operate seemingly unconcerned about air attack. Perhaps this is why Putin has given air force jets to Wagner, so that they might be used more effectively.
Then there is the Rosgvardia, a para-military Russian internal security force completely separate from the Russian military with its own command structure. These forces are often motivated, but are only equipped with light riot-police-style weaponry that isn't a match for the Ukrainians. Part of the reason that the Kharkiv fron't collapsed so quickly is that it was defended in part by Rosgvardia troops who weren't up to the job of combat against a modern military force.
Finally there are the militaries of the separatist "Luhansk People's Republic" and the "Donetsk People's Republic". These are often young men seized off the street by press-gangs, given minimal training and sometimes forced to fight without socks with uniforms and helmets provided by private donations. They complain that the Russians move them far away from their respective "republics" and often consider them little more than expendable cannon-fodder. So their morale is terrible and there are stories of whole units surrendering en-masse or running away from the Ukrainians.
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1...7775291392
Sep 18, 2022 03:23 AM
(This post was last modified: Sep 18, 2022 04:18 AM by Yazata.)
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