Russian Morale

As winter sets in along the war front in Ukraine news reports are full of stories about how the war is going nowhere and the Ukrainians and Russians are at a stalemate or the Ukrainians are being slowly ground down.

A report from Strategy Page has a different take, however. To be sure, there are no quick victories on the horizon, but it seems, if SP is correct, that it's the Russians who are being ground down.

Here's an excerpt:

January 8, 2024: The morale and willingness to fight among Russian troops continues to plummet. One reason for this is the heavy losses, about 350,000 dead, Russia has suffered in Ukraine so far.

Since late 2023 Ukrainian troops have increasingly encountered Russian troops who would surrender at the first opportunity and often do it in a dramatic fashion. This included dropping their weapons during their first encounter with Ukrainian soldiers. In other cases, Russian troops were encountered who had already dropped their weapons and were looking for someone to surrender to.

While troops can be motivated or compelled to fight, they are often ineffective. That means they suffer a lot of casualties while still unable to gain much ground.

Russian commanders are aware of this and had orders to do something to prevent these surrenders and efforts to avoid combat. That proved to be an impossible order to comply with. Physical punishments did not improve morale and willingness to fight.

The main problem was that troops had no confidence in their commanders (assuming they had any at all). These officers were often just as dismayed at the situations they faced on the battlefield. The government was often not supplying food, ammunition, and medical care for the troops.

It is now winter in Ukraine and once more the government has not supplied enough cold weather clothing and equipment for the troops. Worse, the clothes and equipment were often almost useless cheap imitations instead of purported standard issue.

There's much more at the link. The Russians have superior numbers and firepower, but morale counts for far more than either of those. Troops who are hungry, cold and sick, fighting in a war that none of them really understands, aren't usually eager to give their all for a government which they have good reason to believe is betraying them.

Toward the end of their report SP adds this:

Numerous veterans are no longer in the military because they refused to renew their contracts. Many more soldiers remained in the army but refused to return to Ukraine and got away with it.

Putin ordered that these soldiers be officially described, in their military records and military ID, as unreliable and unwilling to fight. In any other country a soldier who refuses to fight during wartime is subject to severe punishment, often execution.

That still happens to reluctant Russian soldiers inside Ukraine where officers have the authority to shoot reluctant troops.

Initially, as Russian casualties grew and progress was nonexistent, some officers did shoot troops refusing to fight. That soon changed as the troops threatened to and sometimes did shoot back or, in at least one known case, ran over an insistent officer with a tank. Not to mention troops sometimes shooting undesirable officers first.

Ukrainian forces have provided additional confirmation of this violence and collapsing morale within Russian units. Many Russian troops will surrender to the Ukrainians at the first opportunity and admit it to Ukrainian, Russian, and foreign journalists. This prompted Ukraine to equip some of its quadcopters to notify and lead surrendering Russian troops safely to Ukrainian front-line forces.

One wishes our administration would stop dithering on the matter of the kind and quantity of assistance we provide to Ukraine and enable them to drive the Russians back across their borders into Russia.