WP: It's A Good Time To Increase Pressure On The Kremlin
- 25.05.2025, 22:24
Russia's advantage in the war is waning.
Russia's battlefield advantage in the war against Ukraine is shrinking, and it could face a serious shortage of equipment and manpower by next year. This was reported by The Washington Post on May 25, citing senior U.S. officials in Europe as well as military experts.
According to more than a dozen officials who commented to the publication on the current state of the war and the sensitive political and diplomatic issues surrounding it, the timing for putting pressure on Moscow may be more advantageous now than at any time since the early days of the conflict.
According to forecasts, in the absence of a negotiated or credible settlement, Russia's advantage in the war against Ukraine could be more limited than at any time since the first days of the conflict. This is the subject of an assessment by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency presented to Congress 10 days ago. It notes that Russian gains are slowing and continue to come at the expense of high casualties of personnel and equipment.
In the past year, Russia has seized 0.6 percent of Ukraine's additional territory, at a cost of 1,500 killed or wounded per day, current and former Western officials say. Some officials have estimated Russia's total losses at more than a million.
A senior research fellow at Britain's Royal United Institute for Defense Studies, Jack Watling, said the pace of Russian troop advances has slowed almost to a halt. The expert suggested that this is partly due to the fact that Ukraine has created a 10-mile defensive zone, which is dotted with mines and shot at by drones.
At the start of the war, Russia had 13,000 Soviet tanks stored in warehouses. Western experts estimate they are likely to run out in the next few months. Watling predicts that the occupier's forces will become less and less mechanized over time.
Experts believe that if there is no ceasefire, Russia will step up attacks over the summer in an attempt to break through Ukrainian defenses, but this may be Moscow's last chance. Russia is effectively reaching a climax in its ability to mount an offensive, said Richard Barrons, former head of Britain's Joint Forces Command. He said it is now very unlikely that the Russian military has the equipment, people, training and logistics to mount a successful offensive.
According to Dara Massico, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Eurasia Center in Russia, even if the Russian Federation manages to seize more Ukrainian territory, the Kremlin is unlikely to achieve its stated goal of taking full control of the four regions that were illegally annexed in the fall of 2022: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions.
The dwindling stockpile of Soviet-era equipment will make Russia increasingly dependent on new systems produced from scratch. This, a number of Western officials and experts have said, makes it a good time to impose new sanctions and continue supplying new weapons to Ukraine.