TIME IS NOT ON KYIV’S SIDE: TRAINING, WEAPONS, AND ATTRITION IN UKRAINE
The battalion commander shrugged helplessly when we advised him that five days was a completely inadequate amount of time in which to train his soldiers. “This is all we have—they are needed on the front,” he replied with grim finality. A few days later, on a separate course that we were running for his medics, half of our class disappeared on the second day. “We have had casualties,” was the only explanation we received. Even in units that fall within the Ukrainian special operations command, most soldiers are sent to the front line with very little training. In one such unit, we estimated that just 20 percent had even fired a weapon before heading to combat.
On May 3, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law that allows territorial defense units—the country’s home guard—to be deployed to combat outside their home regions. These units are manned by local volunteers who typically have received very little preparation. We were soon swamped by requests for training courses. In the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, a town hall meeting to explain the new policy to local territorial defense volunteers was
disrupted by wives alarmed at the prospect of their part-time soldier husbands deploying to the front.
Each anecdote by itself a data point, but together they tell a story that belies the relentless optimism that has pervaded Ukrainian representation of the war from the outset. After four months of grinding attrition, the Ukrainian army is facing a manpower shortage.
Every day in the current fighting, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
said earlier this month, around sixty to one hundred Ukrainian soldiers are killed and another five hundred wounded in combat. A more recent
New York Times article puts that figure much higher—at one hundred to two hundred deaths a day. To put that in context, during the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, one of the bloodiest periods of the war, US deaths were roughly two hundred a week—and among a force almost twice the size of the Ukrainian army.
Aside from Zelenskyy’s admission, the Ukrainian government has been largely reticent about releasing casualty figures and Western governments have offered few of their own assessments, but grim reports from the front line indicate that Ukrainian casualties are high—and perhaps in the long term unsustainable. “My friend’s son is in a company with just thirty soldiers left,” down from the 120 personnel typically in a company, one senior Ukrainian officer told me.
Every day last week, while evacuating civilians from areas in the east under bombardment by the Russians, as we drove to the front we passed a succession of ambulances going the other way. As they passed, my interpreter read aloud the signs displayed on their front bumpers: “three times 300s” or “four times 200s,” using the Ukrainian military terms for wounded and dead. By the end of the week, the figures in their aggregate, for just one section of the front we observed, seemed staggeringly high.
Of course, the Russians continue to take even higher casualties, but with their vastly greater pool of manpower, it is unlikely that these losses will have a significant impact—at least not in the short term.
And as news of the war slides from prominence in the news cycle, the way it is being fought has changed significantly. Ukraine’s troops now face a Russian force that has shifted strategy from the hasty, single-axis attacks that characterized the early weeks of the war. Now there are no more attempts at pincer movements but instead slow but inexorable advances, preceded by massive artillery bombardments—a few kilometers every day all along the front from Izyum in the north to Zaporizhzhia in the south, tightening the noose on a fragile Ukrainian salient protecting the road network that links Kyiv to the east.
In between artillery barrages, the Russians probe Ukrainian lines with small packets of armored vehicles accompanied by infantry and supported by vehicle-mounted heavy machine guns. All the while, artillery shells are launched at regular intervals in the general direction of Ukrainian forces and along their supply routes, a technique known in the US military as harassment and interdiction fire. The Russians are also practicing movement to contact—a form of reconnaissance in which the idea is to identify Ukrainian positions by drawing fire, thus enabling Russian artillery to pound new targets with
precision.