Residents pass a damaged multi-storey apartment building in Kyiv in May, following a drone strike amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Photo / AFP
Russia has unleashed its northern summer offensive in Ukraine’s east and is slowly grinding forward with its advantage in manpower, artillery shells and missiles.
The coming months are crucial in President Vladimir Putin’s bid to force Kyiv’s capitulation.
Yet Russia’s progress over the past two years against Ukraine has been glacial, especially compared with the recent lightning strikes by Israel against a much larger Iran.
The reason, according to experts, is the state of Russia’s military - a long-standing problem.
Independent Russian military analyst Ian Matveev predicts that Russia’s summer offensive won’t lead to a drastic breakthrough but could gain several thousand square kilometres of territory.
He said the military is incapable of conducting complex operations in Ukraine because of weaknesses in intelligence, shortages, corruption, logistical failures, and poor training.
“These [mass assault] tactics are the only thing the Russian military is capable of at the moment.
“And it’s very inhumane because in fact dead people are being traded for territory. What we have in the Russian Army now is a lot of soldiers, but they have no training.”
Russian military bloggers and independent media reports on Telegram in recent months have presented a consistent portrait of a problematic military culture.
It includes generals making false claims about conquering villages, troops being sent on “meat assaults” with little regard for their survival, and poor transport and logistics on the front lines resulting in the deaths of wounded soldiers.
Commanders are often described as corrupt - demanding bribes to spare soldiers from deadly assaults and implementing punishment regimes, including caging soldiers or “zeroing” them out, meaning having them killed or sending them on suicidal assaults.
The result, these bloggers say, is low morale, desertions, and widespread drunkenness and drug abuse among Russian troops.
Ivan Philippov, a Russian author who has tracked Russian military bloggers throughout the war and is writing a book about them, describes the group as aggressively pro-war but still reliable on military problems and setbacks. They carefully avoid criticising Putin.
“The biggest strength is they have direct contact with the Russian military, with people who are anywhere from the trenches to the Ministry of Defence. They can provide information that no one else has access to,” he said.
“The biggest issue that they see is not enough manpower. It’s been a constant topic for at least a year. They have been talking about how the people who want to fight and who sign contracts now are really - and it’s their own words - second-rate citizens.
“People with alcohol problems, people with drug addiction, people with poor health, people who are over the fighting age. Not all of them, but more and more of them.”
Funding for equipment is also a problem, despite Moscow spending 40% of its budget on war and security. Front-line soldiers describe relying on online fundraisers by volunteers to buy drones, bulletproof vests, smartphones, vehicles, first-aid kits, generators, power packs and Starlink units. But increasingly, they complain, Russians are tired of sending money.
“I understand that people are tired of helping the army and tired of the war. I understand why many people have questions about why the army should be helped but I have no answers to those questions,” a Russian military blogger known as “Callsign Ossetian” wrote on June 17, adding that “right now is a turning point” and soldiers “need help”.
Another military blogger, “Philologist in Ambush”, said in a June 24 post that talk of the strength of the army and patriotic rhetoric is falling flat with troops confronted by these daily shortages.
“As long as a soldier is forced to spend half his pay on potatoes, onions and carrots, milk and meat, drones and incubators, bulletproof vests and normal uniforms, guns and cartridges, generators and gasoline for it, Starlinks, and ordinary radio stations and repeaters, he will not accept the ‘patriotism’ that is aggressively forced on him,” he wrote.
Russia is widely seen as holding the upper hand in the war right now with its advantages in manpower, ammunition and missiles.
It has been pounding Ukrainian cities, causing large numbers of civilian casualties, but Russia’s position on the front lines suggests that its summer push for a decisive breakthrough could fail, according to Western military analysts, citing a recent push towards the northern city of Sumy that has stalled.
“It’s not like a monolithic line that’s just a juggernaut advancing,” said military analyst Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.
“They do have those advantages, but the operating environment on the front line is so complicated for both sides. The Russians are still grappling with how do we do large enough assaults where we can make progress without getting intercepted by Ukrainian artillery or [first-person view] drones,” she said, adding that Russian casualties are very high.
One prominent pro-Kremlin blogger, Yuri Podolyaka, wrote recently that Ukrainian forces had succeeded in stabilising their defence of Sumy - one of Russia’s key lines of attack over the past few weeks.
“Without significant reinforcements here, or the withdrawal of enemy units to another part of the front, we will not be able to push the defence of the Armed Forces of Ukraine [back] to the line of the city of Sumy,” he wrote.
The Ukrainian commander in chief, General Oleksandr Syrsky, confirmed last Friday that the Russian assault towards Sumy had been halted.
On January 31, Podolyaka triggered three Russian military investigations when he published footage of a wounded Russian soldier - propped against a tree in a snowy forest thicket - raising a gun and shooting himself in the head after being sent to conquer Novoiehorivka in the Kharkiv region.
The village had been falsely claimed as captured by the Defence Ministry on January 24.
The wounded “shoot themselves, realising that no one will take them, and they will freeze anyway,” he wrote.
Despite the “stupidity and even criminality” of the military order, “they go and die”. The commander, he wrote later, was promoted.
The bloggers complain that false reports of villages being taken mean that when units do move to seize them, they get no air or artillery support because it is thought unnecessary.
In mid-June, military bloggers reported that the military command had falsely claimed Komar village in the Donetsk region.
“Again, a lie, and again because of lies ordinary Russian soldiers will die,” raged military blogger Roman Alyokhin on June 14, complaining that the most effective Russian units were being “driven to correct the lies and mistakes of lying generals”.
Defence Minister Andrei Belousov ordered a rare internal investigation in September after two highly effective Russian drone operators, Dmitry Lysakovsky and Sergei Gritsai of the 87th Separate Rifle Regiment, were killed in a storming operation.
In a last-testament video, they claimed that their commander, Igor Puzik, was profiting from assets seized in the war and drug deals in the regiment and had lied about taking Lysyvka village in Donetsk.
“This situation is not unique. It exists along the entire front. Lies are the absolute norm,” said Lysakovsky, looking sweaty and anxious as he walked in a forest grove, claiming that Puzik and his cronies wanted him and Gritsai to die to prevent them from reporting corruption.
“I am recording this video because there is a very high probability I will not return from this assault,” said Lysakovsky, adding that “the main task that we have now is to survive, and theirs is to make sure that we do not survive”.
The case quickly became a cause célèbre symbolising the ills of the Russian Army, with the video viewed millions of times.
Dozens of videos have emerged on independent media channels on Telegram airing soldiers’ complaints that wounded men have been sent back to the war unfit to fight.
Suleiman Borshchigov of the 353rd Motorised Rifle Regiment recorded a video, published on June 16, in which he claimed that a group including “even one-armed, one-legged people” was forced by the military to fight.
“We were all registered as fully fit. They threw us into the assault squad and now they are sending us to slaughter,” he said.
Some Russian military bloggers say there can be no meaningful advance without a new mobilisation of troops - something the Government has largely avoided for political reasons - or additional North Korean forces.
More than 10,000 North Korean troops helped expel Ukrainian forces from western Russia in March.
Despite the dire conditions for soldiers, Russian recruitment still appears to be surging as a result of high wages and huge sign-up bonuses of more than 3 million roubles, more than US$38,000.
“I would compare it with winning the lottery,” Matveev said. “Propaganda keeps telling them that things are good at the front and, of course, they think, ‘I’ll be all right.’”
- Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.
The blast flattened a four-storey building, throwing workers dozens of metres.