Why the Russian military is bogged down by logistics in Ukraine

The Washington Post ^ | March 30, 2022 | Bonnie Berkowitz and Artur Galocha

[MinorityRepublican]

Ambushed convoys and broken tanks. Generals killed close to the front. Expired rations. Frostbite. The Russian military was built for quick and overwhelming firepower, experts say, but its weakness is logistics. And on the roads of Ukraine a month after the first invasion, that weakness is showing.

‘The tyranny of distance’

Many analysts say the Russians assumed they would quickly capture the capital city of Kyiv and force President Volodymyr Zelensky out of power. Whatever the strategy, that outcome did not happen, and Russia has been bedeviled by an inability to keep supplies flowing to troops in a longer ground war.

After weeks of little success except in southeastern Ukraine, despite relentless shelling and thousands of military and civilian casualties, Moscow said during peace negotiations on Tuesday that it would “drastically reduce” military activity in the northern part of the country, near Kyiv and Chernihiv.

After a surprisingly fierce Ukrainian resistance, “we can suspect” that Russians “did not properly organize the logistics necessary for an effective Plan B, which was to have an actual, serious fight in what is the largest country in Europe outside of Russia,” said Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a think tank in Virginia.

The sheer size of Ukraine is a problem.

[Rokke]

“AZOV is estimated to be 1500-2000 strong. It is a small unit and not particularly well armed. If the Russians have not been able to wipe them out in five weeks of fighting, that pretty much shows right there just how bad the Russian invasion has fared to present”

One of almost countless indicators of how badly the Russian military has performed in Ukraine. I’m more amused than surprised that some people still can’t admit how poorly the Russian military is doing. It’s shocking really. And each new embarrassment is treated like “they are just playing 5d chess here.” Today, the Ukrainians have regained control of the Belarus Ukraine border. That would be like the Iraqis pushing our army back into Saudi Arabia in 2003. And people on this website are claiming that was Russia’s plan all along. Shear delusion. You don’t have to support Ukraine to realize they are humiliating the Russian military. It’s just simple fact at this point. At least for people living in reality.

[Tallguy]

Street fighting against a motivated force can is a slow, expensive operation. I’ve read estimates that the forces the Marines faced in Fallujah could have been as few as 500 jihadists.

[Rokke]

“I don’t believe anything we’re being told.”

That’s not true. You currently believe Russian troops are driving rapidly east toward Donbas. Where did you hear that, and why do you believe it? Are they traveling through Ukraine? Being transported clockwise outside the border of Ukraine? How are they getting from point A to point B?

[jntrees]

Exactly!
I’ve been following some OSNIT feeds and The Enforcer on YouTube for good information.
The Russians are being decimated and it’s lovely to see. Feint my ass. They had to retreat (not as a good faith gesture in peace talks) because they were rendered ineffective as a fighting force. Then they had to slaughter innocents on their way out.

The orcs will pay a heavy price for their crimes.

[sauropod]

.

[Rdct29]

I find it almost impossible to know what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. The puff pieces by the mainstream media makes it look like Ukraine is kicking ass. Then there are the videos of Zelensky begging for offensive weapons before it's too late. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.

[BipolarBob]

Everything is going according to plan.

[MinorityRepublican]

The truth is probably what we’ll see is something similar to the Korean War. Eastern Ukraine will end up being occupied by the Russians. The only question is how much.

[DarthVader]

Yep and a lot of dimwits on here are eating it up hook, line and sinker. The truth is Zelensky and his scam are in trouble. When you analyze data you must carefully examine each piece and compare it to the data you know is reliable. The people on here are putting their trust in unreliable NWO propaganda and do not have a clear picture of what is going on. Their world is built on quicksand and it is going to fall down around them.

[Lurker]

It’s because their entire military is a lie. Their equipment is poorly maintained garbage. Anything that was of any value was stolen and sold. Their conscript peasant army isn’t trained but sold into homosexual prostitution. Their field rations are a decade beyond their use date.

Their Non-coms and junior officers spent their time raping their recruits instead of training them.

No wonder their getting their asses handed to them.

And it’s a joy to watch.

L

[MinorityRepublican]

It’s because their entire military is a lie. Their equipment is poorly maintained garbage. Anything that was of any value was stolen and sold. Their conscript peasant army isn’t trained but sold into homosexual prostitution.

The Soviets were pretty damn formidable with the Red Army and conquered Eastern Europe in 1945 and now they are this pathetic? Did Putin really not know the truth because he was in an Ivory Tower surrounded by "Yes Men"?

[Always A Marine]

I have no dog in this hunt, and I’m not picking fights or calling anyone names. None of us knows for certain what is really happening on the Ukrainian battlefields; we can only deduce opinions from what we see and hear from propagandists on both sides. Sooner or later the truth will make itself evident.

[Zhang Fei]

[They had to retreat (not as a good faith gesture in peace talks) because they were rendered ineffective as a fighting force.]

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Worse than that - they were about to be cut off and destroyed. It was leave or be captured or killed. Thankfully for the men under his command, Putin chose a different fate for these Russian soldiers than the one Hitler chose for the hard-pressed men of the Heer in Stalingrad.

[Lurker]

“Did Putin really not know the truth because he was in an Ivory Tower surrounded by “Yes Men”?

That’s the most likely explanation in my view. Russia doesn’t have a government. It’s like the Five Families of the mafia managed to take over a country. Similar to Iraq under Saddam only bigger.
Oh, and with 6,000 nuclear weapons.

They’re all criminal thugs so everyone lies to everyone else while everyone is stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. And they’re working on the stuff that is nailed down.

So it’s no surprise that when they actually go to war everyone tells the Capo di Tutti Capi that everything is fine. No one dares tell him anything else. The next phase is the finger pointing followed by the executions.

It’s like Goodfellas only in Russian.

L

[mrsmith]

“Did Putin really not know the truth because he was in an Ivory Tower surrounded by “Yes Men”?”

My thought is that he did not know the truth because he was in an Ivory Tower surrounded by Xi’s men.

China’s influence in Russia is much greater then even it’s influence in the US.

China gains so much from this idiocy in Ukraine by both sides.

[Zhang Fei]

[It’s because their entire military is a lie. Their equipment is poorly maintained garbage. Anything that was of any value was stolen and sold. ]

---

I suspect some of it was just the sheer expense of transporting stuff overland across 11 time zones. And then there’s the cost of maintaining mountains of equipment. They simply did not budget for it. There’s a reason old equipment is scrapped. Keeping it in operational shape costs money. Russia has hoarded old crap for ages, and spread its maintenance budget really thin. A little skim here, a little skim there, and pretty soon, you have piles of rust that crumble to the touch.

And logistics - logistics is horrendously expensive. It’s not glamorous, but it costs and costs and costs. Professionals talk logistics? No - wealthy nations talk logistics. During WWII, the US played sugar daddy to Russia, plying it with war-winning quantities of materials.

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https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balance-in-soviet-fight-against-nazi-germany/30599486.html
[Most famously, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin raised a toast to the Lend-Lease program at the November 1943 Tehran conference with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.

“I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war,” Stalin said. “The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.”

Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion.

“If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war,” he wrote in his memoirs. “One-on-one against Hitler’s Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me.”]

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Today, we are supplying to Ukraine a tiny sliver of what we provided to the Russians in WWII. From a material standpoint, Russia is now finding out what it was like to be Germany during WWII (minus the air raids that burned German cities to the ground).

[rolling_stone]

the first thing to die/fall in a war is the truth...

[Zhang Fei]

[The Soviets were pretty damn formidable with the Red Army and conquered Eastern Europe in 1945 and now they are this pathetic?]

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At the end, they were on their last legs. Patton was probably right - invading Russia would have been like pushing on an open door. The problem was that no one wanted to open that particular can of worms. There’s a ton of myth-making re just about every aspect of every battle, and that applies to WWII. One account had Khalkin Gol as this complete wipeout of the Japanese units involved. In reality, Soviet archives, opened up for a time, until Putin ended that access, described a more sobering truth, that Russian losses exceeded their Japanese counterparts despite overwhelming Russian numerical, equipment and supply advantages:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Soviet_assessment
[Following the battle, the Soviets generally found the results unsatisfactory, despite their victory. Though the Soviet forces in the Far East in 1939 were not plagued by fundamental issues to the same extent as those in Europe during the 1941 campaigns, their generals were still unimpressed by their army’s performance. As noted by Pyotr Grigorenko, the Red Army went in with a very large advantage in technology, numbers, and firepower, yet still suffered huge losses, which he blamed on poor leadership.[29]

Although their victory and the subsequent negotiation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact secured the Far East for the duration of the Soviet-German War, the Red Army always remained cautious about the possibility of another, larger Japanese incursion as late as early 1944. In December 1943, when the American military mission proposed a logistics base be set up east of Lake Baikal, the Red Army authorities were according to Coox “shocked by the idea and literally turned white”.[73] Due to this caution, the Red Army kept a large force in the Far East even during the bleakest days of the war in Europe. For example, on July 1, 1942, Soviet forces in the Far East consisted of 1,446,012 troops, 11,759 artillery pieces, 2,589 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 3,178 combat aircraft.[74] Despite this, the Soviet operations chief of the Far Eastern Front, General A. K. Kazakovtsev, was not confident in his army group’s ability to stop an invasion if the Japanese committed to it (at least in 1941–1942), commenting: “If the Japanese enter the war on Hitler’s side ... our cause is hopeless.”[75]]

[Rokke]

That’s fair. Personally, I don’t like Russia or Ukraine. This is similar to what it would be like to watch Iran duke it out with Pakistan for me.

I quit watching MSM years ago. I haven’t seen a single news report on what is going on in Ukraine. But I spent enough time in the operational world of the military to be able to read signs of a war plan going well, and a war plan falling apart. Here’s things I’m noticing.

1. Russia still has not gained air supremacy in Ukraine. They just had another fighter shot down today. An SU-35 and yes there are lots of pictures to prove it. Amazingly, some of those pictures were taken from the air. Also, the pilot was captured. Most of their shot down pilots who survive the ejection have been captured. That’s an indicator in and of itself. They don’t have the assets available to recover their own pilots. Or even establish a CAP over the crash site to destroy or recover the asset.

2. There is equipment Russia has that Ukraine doesn’t have. So when you see that equipment destroyed on the battlefield, you know who it belongs to. Think about our recent adventures in Iraq. Any ideas how many M-1s we lost in the First Gulf War? None. How about in the decades after? I think the total is 40. But when we lost something like an MBT, we bent over backwards to recover it. Even more importantly, if we had KIAs or WIA, we moved Heaven and earth to recover them. So what does that tell you when you see pictures of destroyed Russian equipment surrounded by dead Russian soldiers. Either, they don’t care or they don’t have the capability for recovery. Neither sign is good for a modern army in the midst of heavy combat.

3. Russia committed a massive amount of assets in an effort encircle Kiev. Call it a feint if you want, but it ultimately cost them a fortune in men and equipment. Fuel alone. And now that they are withdrawing, they are giving Zelensky and the Ukrainian people a very nice rallying point. Also allowing new propaganda opportunities like what is being reported in what the Russians have left in their wake. Does that sound like a winning battle plan? Forfeit men and equipment you need elsewhere to take land you don’t intend to hold, and withdraw so that your enemy can celebrate the victory of defending their Capitol?

I could go on, but you get the point. But I’m still curious, where are you getting your info that the Russians are quickly moving all their equipment from around Kiev to the Donbas region? And why do you believe it? Remember that before their invasion, Russia already controlled a significant portion of Donbas as well as Crimea. Now it has been over a month and they are still fighting to maintain gains they’ve made in the southeast of Ukraine. That’s not very impressive given what they already controlled, and they actually border the part of Ukraine they are currently fighting for.

[marktwain]

For any theory, a sufficiently complicated answer can always be constructed.

I doubt Russia intended to lose hundreds of armored vehicles and tens of thousands of casualties in a feint.

But hey, I am not a dictator worth 200 billion dollars, with ambitions to be another Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible.