by Simplicius The Thinker
it’s not looking good for the AFU, and the given reason continues to be due to mass shell hunger and inability to fire artillery. Several new articles evocatively delve into this topic, as well as other revealing matters. One from Politico:
One of the revelations is that the EU will only end up scrounging up 524k total shells of the promised 1M for Ukraine. If you recall, last time they were “on track” for 600k+, but the total number keeps dwindling:
The European Union had promised to send a million shells by March but won’t meet that target. EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said this week that the bloc will ship only 524,000 shells by then, while promising 1.1 million by the end of the year.
The quote of the article goes to this, however:
They repeat the same tired spiel about their FPV usage as replacement for artillery, but one soldier even admits that FPVs can’t entirely do the job. And he’s right, you can go far with them but nothing can totally replace the ‘god of war’.
Another one from Bloomberg hits the panic button:
The common theme with both is that Ukraine has too few ammunition not merely to go on assault or “win”, but even to defend and hold back Russia’s troops:
Recent waves of Russian missile attacks killed dozens in Kyiv and other cities as Ukraine’s air defenses, which rely heavily on expensive interceptors provided by the allies, weren’t able to destroy as many of the incoming weapons as in the past, according to a European diplomat.
The next piece is from Der Spiegel:
Here’s one summary of the article’s most poignant points:
‼️ Soldiers share trenches with the dead, out of 100 company soldiers, only 20 can still fight, – Spiegel about the situation at the front
The Armed Forces of Ukraine do not have enough personnel, and those soldiers who are currently fighting are tired of the fighting and difficult conditions of service.
The wife of a soldier who has been near Bakhmut for more than a year reported that her husband “is sitting in a dirty, cold position, less than 100 meters from the enemy.”
“Sometimes he shares the trench with the dead, because the shelling is so strong that no one can take out the bodies. Once he went to the position and there was no contact with him for 10 days,” said Irina Topinko, a resident of the Zhytomyr region.
The military says that mobilization needs to be strengthened, but now it is taking place “not according to clear criteria developed in public discourse, but secretly, with accusations of arbitrariness and corruption.”
“Anyone who doesn’t have money or connections, or simply doesn’t act quickly enough, can fall victim to increasingly brutal methods. Authorities catch men on the street or at work and drag them to training camps.”
But those who end up at the front this way are often incompetent soldiers.
“There are alcoholics among the recruits, says one of the commanders of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Oleg. They couldn’t even dig trenches, and the military police detained them for drunkenness.”
Therefore, there are “fewer and fewer soldiers” on the front line.
“Soldiers report that out of almost 100 people in their company, only 20 can still fight. There are not enough people in all units,” – Spiegel interlocutors say.
And this is becoming a big theme. Today Rob Lee’s tweet made the rounds, wherein he acknowledged that Ukraine faces a shortage of infantry:
To anyone with a brain, the reason why that is, is obvious.
Putin confirmed something I’ve been long proclaiming: that the POW ratio between Ukraine and Russia is 10:1 in Russia’s favor. From RT:
And here in Putin’s own words:
This is finally official confirmation of what I’ve been solely compiling for a long time, based on official statements from both sides, as well as tracking the actual facilities Ukraine uses to house POWs. The fact is, Ukraine only has a few hundred Russians while Russia has had anywhere between 10,000-15,000 Ukrainian POWs at various points, fluctuating with exchanges.
Given the fact that each category of casualty should scale relatively comparatively, this means we can expect a similar disproportionality to exist between Russian-Ukrainian KIA figures.
Commenting on the above, one analyst wrote:
Putin said that the proportion of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners is approximately 1:10. And why? What does it mean?
Option 1: Does this mean that the ratio of losses between the Russian army and the Ukrainian Armed Forces is 1: 10?
Option 2: Or are the losses comparable, but the morale of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is so much less than the morale of the Russian army that Ukrainian soldiers surrender 10 times more?
My answer is both. The losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are approximately 3 times greater than Russian losses.
But the morale of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is significantly lower, so that prisoners surrender in a proportion 3 times higher than the proportion of losses.
And the third option is tactics. The Russian army surrounded many Ukrainian Armed Forces in Mariupol, the largest city liberated.
His rationale makes sense. The KIA doesn’t have to be exactly 10:1 like the POW ratio owing to, as he states, the disproportionately lower morale of the AFU. However it could still be much closer to the 10:1 than the 3:1 he posits. Either way, we know it means for a fact that Ukraine’s KIA figures are far higher than that of Russia’s, and Putin’s is the highest level confirmation of this.