It is not the first time that Russian forces have withdrawn in Ukraine, officially, according to Moscow, to consolidate positions, according to the kyiv Government, practically in disarray. Already at the end of May and beginning of April, Moscow had to give up taking the capital, in the face of the considerable material and man losses that it accumulated in little more than a month of war. Now, seven months After the start of the invasion, the Russian military returned to sneak away, One day to another. But in this case it has not been due to the armed resistance they have encountered, but to something more disturbing for their purposes: they have been overcome by the military strategy and weapons of an Army on the inferior role in material and troops. Here we specify some of the reasons.
Russia, the master of disinformation, has seen itself vastly outmatched in this area by its enemy, and has ended up proving a bit of its own medicine. For weeks, the kyiv authorities had announced an inminently offensive on the southern front near Kherson, a town near Crimea, to threaten the peninsula annexed in 2014 and expand the coastal area with the Black Sea under its control. All of this pushed Moscow to reinforce its positions in this area and transfer troops and material from other fronts, including Kharkiv, where the main ukrainian advances. “The announcement of a counter-offensive operation has distanced significant Russian troops from sectors where Ukrainian forces have carried out decisive attacks in recent days,” has verified the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a idea lab specialized in military issues and based in Washington. The result of all this is clearly visible in the embarrassed statements of the person in charge of Vitaly Ganchev, at the head of the occupation authority in the Kharkov region to the same permanent Russian information channel, who openly acknowledged that they had been taken off guard: “I don’t have the data, but speaking of the men that the Ukrainian Army has accumulated, they have exceeded by approximately eight times”.
New weapons shipped by the US make a difference
The US has been reinforcing the Ukrainian Army in recent months with the so-called HIMARS, stands for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or missiles AGM88 HARM, English acronym for High Velocity Anti-Radiation Missile. The first weapon is capable of hitting a target 80 kilometers away with a margin of error of one meter, which has allowed the Ukrainian forces to destroy ammunition depots in the rear and make it extremely difficult to supply them. When the Ukrainian troops have attacked, the Russian soldiers barely had firepower to respond.
In the case of projectiles AGM88 HARM; These have managed to be coupled to Soviet-made Ukrainian MIg-type aircraft, allowing the destruction of radar and anti-aircraft systems and demolishing the supposed supremacy of Russian aviation in the skies. What has happened in the last few days is irrefutable proof that “if you have the right capabilities”, the numerical superiority of the opponent in men and weapons “ceases to be important”, he has valued for EL PERIÓDICO Michael Samusin front of the thinktank ukrainian New Geopolitical Research Network.
The Ukrainian military successes on the battlefield have a reverse: the possibility that Russia, outmatched on the ground in conventional forces but equipped with non-conventional weapons such as chemical or nuclear. “We’re not there yet at that point … and the Russians are trying to establish a position of greater strength,” which increases “somewhat” the possibility of resorting to chemical or nuclear attacks, has underlined John Boltonformer US National Security Advisor, to the LBC station.
The defeat will inevitably have a major effect on the morale of the Russian Army, which at no time since the beginning of the offensive has shown a great conviction on the battlefield but rather quite the opposite: information and details about the true state of mind of his troops follow one another. In Moscow, voices belonging to the so-called co-opted opposition, such as the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), Gennady Zyuganov, has advocated during a session held at the State Duma, the Lower House of Parliament, a general mobilization, something that the Russian president has deliberately avoided because it would blow up his version that the conflict is nothing more than a special military operation. “What I am saying is that there is a war going on, and we have no right to lose it,” the top leader of the KPRF has claimed.