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Time Is Not On Kyiv's Side: Training, Weapons, and Attrition in Ukraine
[Modern War Institute] 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. Posted by: Besoeker 2022-06-28 |
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