War in Ukraine: Almost a year after the invasion, the Russian army fails Vladimir Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin is calling for tangible results from his military in Ukraine to appear in the crucial state of the nation address, the first he will deliver in nearly two years. But the armed forces have not gotten more than him slight territorial gains.

“We didn’t initiate the military actions, we tried to end them. The hostilities were initiated by nationalists in Ukraine and by those who supported them in 2014,” Putin said, ten days before addressing parliament on February 21.

Putin has had to delay his annual keynote speech several times due to the lack of victories on the battlefield. Even the decision to annex four Ukrainian regions nearly six months ago has not improved Russia’s prospects on the front.

The proximity of the first anniversary of the conflict – February 24 – and Western promises of heavy offensive weapons in Kiev – from tanks to long-range missiles – force it to show its face for the first time since April 2021.

The mercenaries who save the Kremlin

Whether the Kremlin likes it or not, the only good news from the front comes from mercenaries from the Wagner group, who this Sunday said they had taken a new city near Bakhmut in the Donetsk region.

This is the town of Krasna Gora (Red Mountain), ten kilometers from Bakhmut, between Soledar, taken last month, and that vital Ukrainian stronghold.

This means that the Wagners have at hand the road leading to one of the main military locations in Ukraine – Sloviansk.

Wagner’s leader Yevgueni Prigozhin once again fired a poison dart at the army assuring that Moscow has not deployed any regular troops in the area and that the dirty work his soldiers of fortune continue to do so.

“There is no special detachment. Within a radius of about 50 kilometers there are only Wagner soldiers, who will eventually conquer Bakhmut,” he told Telegram.

Prigozhin explained that he no longer recruits detainees, a practice that has put the Russian Defense Ministry in a bad light, which, according to some bloggers, ordered to reduce Wagner’s presence in the media as much as possible.

renewed offensive

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry reported in its daily report the destruction of arsenals along the entire front line from northeastern Kharkov to southern Kherson, via Donetsk and Lugansk, attacks in which Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers would have diedincluding two mechanized brigades in the Kupiansk area (Kharkov) and a detachment in Vuhledar (Donetsk).

According to various Ukrainian and Western sources, these are the first steps in the general offensive ordered by Putin.

In this regard, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksy Danilov, admitted on Saturday that Moscow had already launched this “major offensive”, but that at the beginning it would encounter “big problems”.

“The offensive they were planning is advancing gradually. But it’s not the offensive they expected,” he said, speaking on Ukrainian television.

According to Danilov, Ukrainian forces are putting up a “great resistance”.

The best example would be Avdiivka, on the outskirts of the capital Donetsk, and Vuhledar, where the Russians suffered heavy losses and they still fail to storm the city.

According to Ukrainian sources, in three days (from 8 to 10 February) of assaults against both cities, the Russian army would have lost several thousand men and more than a hundred tanks, armored vehicles and other military means.

Over the past two weeks, according to the British Defense Ministry, which relies on official Ukrainian data, Russia lost an average of 824 men per day, five times more than in July 2022 (170), but still far from the 1,140 daily casualties at the start of the military campaign.

Doubts

Russian military bloggers continue to have serious doubts that the army can conquer all of the annexed territories, while some pro-Russian officers in Donbass even they urge the Russian high command to change strategy.

Even the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) believes that Russia does not have the potential to launch a major mechanized land offensive, even more so after having lost, according to some sources, half of its tanks in the last year.

Prigozhin went even further by assuring that Moscow will need about two years to reach the administrative border of Donetsk.

In turn, this Sunday, Ukrainian military intelligence insisted that “the Russian command does not have sufficient resources to launch large-scale offensive actions” and that it will have to settle for tactical victories.

kyiv points out that the Russian air force and artillery have already expended 80% of their precision missiles and that the military industry has not yet managed to replenish that arsenal.

Source: EFE