“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.”
“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.”
“The fact that the House of Representatives has not had a vote on aid to Ukraine is the most successful military operation of this war. Nothing compares to the fact that the United States is not voting on giving Ukraine $60 billion of aid, which has passed the Senate and has the president’s approval…That is now shaping the battlefield more than anything else.”