Mye bra informasjon her, men de tegner et dystert bilde:
In some fighting zones in the Donbas, Russian commanders have sent in fresh troops every day to replace those on the front. “One soldier advances two metres, and then another comes to push farther,” Tarnavsky said. In areas where battles have been the most intense, Russia has had, by his count, a five-to-one manpower advantage. Tarnavsky also estimated that Russia has an advantage of up to seven-to-one in artillery batteries and a similarly large stockpile of munitions. As a result, Russian forces can rely on wave after wave of indiscriminate fire from large-calibre artillery, along with missile and air strikes, to soften Ukraine’s defenses, inflicting large casualties before they advance.
I heard multiple stories of Russia’s disproportionate reliance on heavy weaponry. A ten-member Ukrainian reconnaissance unit was spotted during a mission and then fired upon by three Tochka-U ballistic missiles, a munition hefty enough to take out a bridge or an entire command post. Tarnavsky told me of individual Ukrainian artillery systems targeted by Iskander missiles, which cost an estimated five million dollars a shot. “That’s a very expensive pleasure,” he said. “You have to be very rich, or very desperate.”
The toll on Ukrainian forces in recent weeks has been immense. The country’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said that as many as a hundred soldiers are killed each day, and five hundred wounded. On a highway in the Donbas, I passed a convoy of trucks with signs that read “Cargo-200” on their windshields, military parlance for soldiers killed in action. Still, Ukraine’s military doesn’t lack soldiers; mass mobilization efforts and an influx of volunteers have doubled the ranks of the armed forces since February. The more pressing shortfalls, Tarnavskiy told me, are of experience and skill. “A lot of regular military personnel have been killed,” he said. “They are replaced by doctors and mechanics. We have manpower, but much of this core”—those with combat experience who could lead and motivate new recruits—“is either dead or wounded.”
