“Russia’s military has suffered severe losses in Ukraine, but it appears to be bouncing back to what it was before it invaded, says Gen. Chris Cavoli, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander and the head of US European Command.
“They’ve grown back to what they were before,” Cavoli said in a House Armed Services Committee Hearing on Thursday. “They’ve got some gaps that have been produced by this war, but their overall capacity is very significant still, and they intend to make it go higher.”
The commander’s comments lent support to Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell’s April 3 statement that Russia “almost completely reconstituted militarily.”
The war has cost Russia thousands of tanks and seen the military suffer at least 300,000 casualties, by some estimates, yet Russia, the general explained, has been particularly successful in building back its ground forces, most notably by refurbishing, repairing, and producing tanks.
“They still have as many tanks functioning inside Ukraine as they introduced at the beginning of the war,” Cavoli said.
In addition to tanks, Russia’s army has also grown in size by 15 percent, and the country is currently on the path to “command the largest military on the continent,” he said. The size of Russia’s army has exceeded the size it was when it had first invaded Ukraine in 2022. There are questions of capability and quality though.”
“China has surged sales to Russia of machine tools, microelectronics and other technology that Moscow in turn is using to produce missiles, tanks, aircraft and other weaponry for use in its war against Ukraine, according to a U.S. assessment.”
“The need for such defenses is all too clear for residents of Kyiv. Just an hour before Kuleba sat down with POLITICO at the foreign ministry on Monday, in broad, mid-morning daylight, the Ukrainian capital came under attack from Russian ballistic missiles.
A couple of loud blasts rang out just moments after air raid sirens blared across the city. Kuleba was in the city’s botanical gardens to make a video for an upcoming trip at the time.
The missiles were intercepted by Patriot air defenses. But nine people, including a teenage girl, were still injured from falling debris, including in the district near to where Kuleba was filming.
The foreign minister’s demand comes at a fraught moment for Ukraine in its attempt to repel Vladimir Putin’s invading forces. Western support, strong at the start of the invasion two years ago, has weakened in recent months, with a major new U.S. aid package held up by partisan divisions in Congress.
European allies have struggled to plug the gap in the supply of funding and arms that Kyiv so badly needs. Ukraine’s war of self-preservation is precariously placed. Russia is making advances on the battlefield and Putin, fresh from a distorted election victory, is leaping on every opportunity to intensify the Russian assault.”
“Because of the problem with American ammunition and the shortage at a really crucial moment when they were making inroads…they haven’t been able to push that much further…most of the marines..spend all their time in the basements hiding from heavy artillery fire.”
“The US has long placed its faith in expensive weapons as the key to victory in conflicts, but the Ukraine war is forcing it to revise its assumptions, The Washington Post has reported.
Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, told the outlet the conflict had challenged long-held ideas that expensive, precision-guided weapons were key to winning US wars.
US-made Himars or Excalibur shells, which are guided to their targets using GPS, have proven vulnerable to Russian electronic-warfare units, which scramble their signals and send them off course.”
“Russia is entering its third year of war in Ukraine with an unprecedented amount of cash in government coffers, bolstered by a record $37 billion of crude oil sales to India last year, according to new analysis, which concludes that some of the crude was refined by India and then exported to the United States as oil products worth more than $1 billion.
This flow of payments, ultimately to Moscow’s benefit, comes from India increasing its purchases of Russian crude by over 13 times its pre-war amounts, according to the analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), exclusively shared with CNN. It amounts to US strategic partner New Delhi stepping in to replace crude purchases by Western buyers, reduced by sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the analysis said.”