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Russian Military Blog - 1/10 FILE - A member of the Ukrainian Territorial Guard holds an NLAW anti-tank weapon on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)1 of 10 FILE - A member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces holds an NLAW anti-tank weapon on the outskirts of Kiev , Ukraine, March 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) – There are many signs that Ukraine has thwarted Vladimir Putin's hopes for a quick victory and that Russia's military has proven far from combat-ready.

Russian Military Blog

A truck with Russian troops falls, its door is opened by a rocket-propelled grenade. Foreign-supplied drones target Russian command posts. Orthodox priests in loincloths demonstrate the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag in the occupied city of Berdyansk in defiance of their Russian captors.

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Russia has lost hundreds of tanks, many of them charred or abandoned by the roadside, and the death toll is higher than that of the country's military campaigns in recent years.

But more than three weeks into the war, with Putin's initial goal of simply changing the government in Kiev long gone, the Russian military still has a strong hand. Military analysts say Russian forces, with their increased might and stockpile of city-destroying munitions, can fight whatever the Russian president plans next, whether it's a negotiated settlement or brutal destruction.

Despite the determination of the Ukrainian people, all the losses of the Russian forces and the mistakes of the Kremlin leaders, there are no signs that the war will be over any time soon. Even if Putin fails to bring his neighbor under control, he can continue with punitive attacks on its cities and people. The Ukrainian president said that Russia is trying to starve Ukrainian cities and Putin is deliberately creating a "humanitarian disaster".

"His instinct is always to double down because he's run into a terrible mess, a huge strategic error," said Michael Clarke, former head of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense think tank.

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"And I don't think it's in his character to try to take it back, unless you keep going, you're going forward," he said.

Putin's forces are conducting Russia's largest and most complex combined military campaign since the capture of Berlin in 1945. His initial goal, which he announced in a televised address on February 24 after the invasion began, was to "demilitarize" Ukraine and save its people. neo-Nazis” — a false description of the Ukrainian government led by a Jewish president.

Putin fatally underestimated the national pride and battlefield skills Ukrainians have built up over the past eight years fighting Russian-backed separatists in the country's east.

At first, the Russians thought "they were going to install, you know, some sort of pro-Russian government and declare victory," said Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russian security researcher at the CNA think tank in Virginia. "It was kind of a plan A, and as far as we can tell, they didn't really have a plan B."

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Russia's first apparent plan - to attack key Ukrainian military targets and quickly reach the capital, Kiev - failed immediately. It was thwarted by Ukrainian defenses and countless mistakes and organizational failures by Russian forces who were told they were being mobilized only for military exercises.

British researcher Clarke told stories of Russian troops selling communications equipment and fuel from military vehicles to local residents during weeks of waiting at the Ukrainian border.

Unaccepted by friendly populations, Russian forces in Syria and Chechnya reverted to the tactics of their previous offensives – dropping bombs and rockets on cities and towns, sending millions of men, women and children fleeing.

Putin's forces are able to capture the besieged port city of Mariupol. Broadly speaking, the Russians now appear to be fighting for three goals: encircling Kiev, encircling scattered Ukrainian fighters in the east and pushing into the major port city of Odessa in the west, Russia expert Michael Kofman said. CNA military and program director.

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Kofman warns that much of the information about the war comes from the Ukrainians or their Americans or other allies. This makes a partial image distorted and a complete image impossible.

A senior US defense official said on Friday that the Russians have fired more than 1,080 missiles since the start of the war and are maintaining about 90 percent of the combat power they deployed around Ukraine at the start of the invasion.

The US believes the airspace over Ukraine remains contested, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss military assessments. The Air Force of Ukraine continues to fly aircraft and use air and anti-missile defense.

"Just look at the map and see how little progress the Russians have made," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said recently.

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Estimates of Russian deaths vary widely. But even conservative numbers run into the thousands. This is a much faster pace than previous Russian offensives, threatening support for the war among ordinary Russians. In Russia, 64 people were killed in the war with Georgia in 2008 within five days. It lost about 15,000 people in 10 years in Afghanistan and more than 11,000 in the years of fighting in Chechnya.

Gorenburg said Russian casualties in Ukraine are approaching 10 percent, indicating that combat effectiveness has declined. He said the battlefield deaths of four Russian generals - out of an estimated 20 in combat - indicated a breakdown in leadership.

Researchers who track only those Russian equipment losses that have been photographed or videotaped say Russia has lost more than 1,500 tanks, trucks, mounted equipment and other heavy equipment. Two of the three were captured or abandoned, signaling the failure of Russian forces to release them.

At the same time, Russia must limit its use of long-range smart missiles in case they are needed in a larger war with NATO, military analysts say. Russia's military said on Saturday it had used its latest hypersonic missile in combat for the first time, claiming the Kinzhal, which has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,250 miles), destroyed an underground storage facility that housed Ukrainian missiles. missiles and ammunition.

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When it comes to capturing and holding cities, conventional military metrics show Russia needs a 5-to-1 edge in urban combat, analysts say. Meanwhile, the formula for managing a restive territory under armed opposition is 20 fighters for every 1,000 people, or 800,000 Russian troops for more than 40 million Ukrainians, Clarke notes. That's almost as many as all 900,000 military personnel on active duty in Russia.

On the ground, this means that controlling any significant part of Ukrainian territory in the long term would require more resources than Russia might expect.

Other Russian options are possible, including a negotiated settlement. Moscow is demanding that Ukraine formally adopt neutrality, renouncing any alliance with NATO, and recognize the independence of separatist regions in the east and Russian sovereignty over Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Russia's other options include a relentless air campaign in which it bombs and destroys cities such as those in Chechnya and Syria. US officials also warn of the threat of Russian chemical attacks and the risk of escalation into nuclear war.

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"Unless the Russians go full-on genocide — they can level all the major cities and the Ukrainians rise up against the Russian occupation — then the remaining Russian forces will be in constant guerilla warfare," Clarke said. Obviously, Ukraine is not the only one. a country that Russia has been planning to invade in recent years. In the summer of 2020, Russia allegedly developed a detailed plan to invade and occupy Belarus, according to information released by Ukrainian military intelligence.

"After the falsification of the presidential elections in Belarus, the Russian Federation developed a plan to invade and suppress popular protests," the General Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine announced on April 19. In support of its claim, Ukrainian intelligence has released what it says is a secret Russian military document outlining the rationale and plan for the invasion of Belarus.

The document states the "tense" situation in Belarus after the presidential elections on August 9, 2020, which had deep flaws. It cited the "subversive activities" of exiled Lithuanian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and said a "massive information campaign" was underway to build consensus on violent regime change in Belarus. The document claims that, if not prevented, Russia could end up in a full-scale war with NATO.

The document described "a plan to concentrate formations and military units of the First Tank Army in the vicinity of the mission" in order to invade Belarus. According to the plan, the troops would go under the guise of participating in a joint exercise with the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus.

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The authenticity of the information published by Ukraine could not be independently verified. If true, Ukrainian intelligence claims suggest that a full-scale invasion of Belarus in the summer of 2020 was a very real possibility.