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36 I Cover story bne July 2024
producing the deadly First Person
View (FPV) drones that have made the no-man’s land on the front line a kill- zone that prevents Russian troops from infantry assaults and which have gone a long way to make up for Ukraine’s lack of artillery shells.
The only effective defence against
the glide bombs is to shoot down the Russian jets that launch them, but without the promised F-16 jet fighters Ukraine has lost control of the skies. And despite repeated promises the F-16s are only expected to arrive in 2025 in any numbers, if then.
Ukraine’s biggest challenge is that the West doesn’t have any concrete war goals. Zelenskiy has very clear war goals: to defeat Russia and expel it from all Ukraine’s territory – including the Crimea. But despite the oft repeated nebulous rhetoric of a Ukrainian “victory”, the only concrete comment the Biden administration has made
is to “put Ukraine into the strongest possible position for the inevitable negotiations.”
That point has already passed. The successful Kharkiv counter-offensive
in 2022 was an opportunity to start talks that was not taken. Since then, Ukraine’s position has deteriorated
and since the start of this year that deterioration has accelerated. Western support for Ukraine has gone from putting Ukraine into a stronger position to simply avoiding a humiliating defeat.
Part of Zelenskiy’s calculation for his new peace plan this autumn must be an assessment of how far the energy sector repairs have progressed before the first snows fall.
And the efforts to rebuild the destroyed power generation capacity – which remains under constant attack by Russia – have already become snarled up in bureaucracy that is preventing allocation of funding for important projects, Ekonomichna Pravda reported on July 4, citing sources familiar with the situation. Ukraine's government has not distributed €150mn worth
of funding for four months due to
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snafus and its building only 20% of the declared 1 GW of energy capacity needed for the winter. Currently, about 150 cogeneration plants are being constructed, which generate a mere 1.5 MW each. Another 100 projects are sitting idle.
And Zelenskiy’s course of action also depends on how Ukraine’s AFU is holding up against the FAB glide bombs from ongoing Russian onslaught. The good news that might keep him in the game is that the outlook for Ukraine’s resupply of arms and ammo in 2025
is already considerably brighter. As bne IntelliNews reported at the start
of this year, 2024 was always going to be extremely difficult thanks to the growing ammo crisis, but Europe and America has finally started to invest into beefing up their arms production capacities and these new facilities are expected to start coming online next year. The caveat is whether the West will agree to send Ukraine the more powerful weapons it has been calling for or continue to follow its de facto policy of arming Ukraine not to lose, not arming it to win.
Nevertheless, that must be set against Russia's rapidly and extensively expanding its own arms production, putting Ukraine at a serious and ever- growing munitions disadvantage. Russia is currently producing more arms than all of Europe combined after Moscow managed to ramp up the production of key weapons – artillery rounds, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and drones – to fuel its war against Ukraine, according to a new report by a London-based think-
tank, with just the key artillery shell production having gone from 1.7mn a year pre-war to 2.2mn last year. It will be over 4mn at the end of this year, according to Putin.
The lack of men
Zelenskiy said during a trip to Lunenburg to celebrate the formal start of the EU accession negotiations that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) was killing six Russians for every dead Ukrainian solder. If this is true – and casualty figures are a closely guarded
secret for both armies – then Ukraine is winning the war as Russia has three- times as many people, not six.
But even if Ukraine’s kill-ratio is that high, the other factor in this calculus of death is how many new recruits each side can raise to replenish losses at the front. Putin said in a speech earlier
this year that Russia now has 700,000 servicemen and has creditably claimed it is raising some 30,000 new recruits
a month as volunteers by offering sky-high wages – a claim backed up by an independent study into the rapidly rising retail banking deposits, statistics of which are still reported by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR).
Russian mortality data suggest over 64,000 troops killed fighting in Ukraine, according to a report by independent Russian media outlets Meduza and Mediazona on June 28, but this estimate is based on published official mortality data and the true number must be at least two or three times higher. Nevertheless, the size of Russia’s army appears to be stable, or even growing slowly. However, there
is no clarity on how Ukraine’s push to recruit more men is going, but the AFU is clearly desperate for new personnel.
Kyiv needs to call up about 200,000 people to address troop shortages, Germany’s Die Welt newspaper reported in July. According to the paper, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian servicemen have been killed or wounded since February 2022; however, Die Welt does not provide the exact figure.
To keep the army’s size stable, Kyiv needs to recruit at least 50,000 people per quarter, but is missing this target, Western intelligence agencies told the newspaper. A new mobilisation bill passed on May 18 saw 2,800 convicts being sent to the combat zone in the past two months, but that is far short of what is needed.
From the estimated 6mn Ukrainian refugees that fled to EU countries, approximately 600,000 are men of military age. However, Kyiv’s efforts to exert pressure on EU countries to rescind