The extreme use and loss of Russian weapons in Ukraine, along with harsh sanctions in the West, will limit Russia’s military power in the coming years.
“We want to weaken Russia to the point that it can no longer do what it did during the invasion of Ukraine. They have already lost a lot of military capability and we want them not to be able to copy that very quickly.” , “Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said after a visit to Kyiv.
Since the invasion of Ukraine began, Russia has lost nearly 22,000 soldiers and about a quarter of the equipment that crossed our border.
The Wall Street Journal reflects on whether the aggressor country will compensate for these losses.
Bankruptcy + penalties
Russia’s heavy use and loss of weapons in Ukraine, along with harsh sanctions on the West, will limit its military power and profitable arms exports in the coming years, hindering the ability to produce everything from to new weapon systems up to spare parts for existing weapons.
Now, in the ninth week of what is intended to be a rapid military operation, Russia has deployed most of its arsenal, including some of its most advanced equipment. Analysts say it fired large numbers of rockets, rockets and artillery shells and severely reduced the latest precision-guided munitions.
Russia has also lost more than 3,000 major combat vehicles, according to Oryx, an open source intelligence tracking system. It includes more than 500 main battle tanks, 300 armored fighting vehicles, 20 jet fighters and 30 helicopters.
Russia produces about 250 tanks and 150 aircraft a year in recent years, according to Mark Kanzian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington. It means Ukrainian forces destroyed tanks made in Russia for at least two years in two months.
The U.S. believes Russia as a whole has lost about a quarter of the combat force it originally intended to use in the invasion of Ukraine, a senior Pentagon official said last week, without elaborating.
Time against Russia
Right now, Russia’s aggression forces can use large stocks of equipment, so their depletion is unlikely to quickly affect the course of the war. Russia’s official equipment lists include thousands of ground combat vehicles. But many of them require maintenance or repair, and are unlikely to work and are only available as spare parts, say analysts who monitor the situation in the Russian army. How many old machines are actually available is unknown.
If the war lasts for months, the consumption and destruction of Russian equipment, along with Western financial sanctions and export restrictions, will prevent Moscow from providing troops with better equipment, he said. of analysts. It will also be difficult for Russia’s defense contractors to meet demand from both Moscow and foreign customers, or invest in research and development of new products, according to Western officials and analysts.
Russia, and the former Soviet Union, built military strategies based on a wide range of simple enough weapons to defeat the enemy. Analysts say Moscow is sometimes willing to make heavy losses to achieve its goals, relying on its stockpiles of most Soviet -era weapons and many of the components needed to produce them. . This approach is in contrast to the West, which focuses on developing smaller but more advanced weapons that are more resistant to combat.
Russia’s missing state-of-the-art combat aircraft and helicopters cost hundreds of millions of dollars to replace, and Western sanctions are designed to prevent re-supply.
Although less advanced ground vehicles can be a problem for Russian defense companies, which have not undertaken large -scale modernization of production systems since the Soviet era and are heavily dependent on foreign equipment, machine tools and precision parts such as electronics and bearings, which are now being supplied. prohibited by penalties. Russia’s military-industrial sector has shrunk from its Soviet size, making it more difficult to boost production as in World War II.
Sales problems
Russia’s struggle, in addition to depleting its arsenal, could hurt export sales. The massive destruction of Russia’s military equipment by Ukrainian forces using modern Western drones, artillery and man-portable rocket launchers is damaging Moscow’s weapons reputation, said Scott Boston, senior military analyst at Rand Corp.
“When they show that their weapons are exploding everywhere, there’s a general feeling that maybe this equipment isn’t very good,” he said.
A hit on defense exports would damage its trade balance even more. Arms-exporting countries and companies rely on foreign sales to subsidize the development and production of new weapons systems for their armed forces. If Russia’s arms do not generate export revenue, it may be difficult for Russian manufacturers to innovate and remain competitive in a rapidly modernizing sector.
Source: korrespondent
