Would
the military offensive conducted for a week in Ukraine would be poorly adjusted to the reality of the terrain? The Russian army, yet rebuilt and modernized since 2008, showed surprising gaps in the first phase of its operation.
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The menacing Russian military convoy rushing on Kiev on February 28 has turned into a vast traffic jam. Vehicles, down or short of gasoline, according to American intelligence, blocked the road, stopping the dazzling penetration of land troops desired by Moscow to the Ukrainian capital.
No hazardous to predict his defeat, nothing allows you to announce a victory. But would the Russian army be less powerful than dreaded? The military offensive has been conducting for a week by Vladimir Putin, this tsar whom we say totally isolated, would it be badly adjusted to the reality of the ground? First progress is acquired – the city of Kherson, 300,000 inhabitants in southern Ukraine, fell on Thursday, March 3, while Kharkiv and Maroupol undergo blind bombings. But very few images have been addressed to the Western public by the Kremlin. No announcements of “victory” took place, with the significant difference in frenetic communication deployed during the intervention in Syria in 2015. And the Russian army, yet rebuilt and modernized since 2008 by several successive plans, showed gaps in the first phase of its operation, to the point of surprising observers.
According to the TASS agency, which withdrew this data from its site almost immediately after publishing them, its material losses amounted from the first three days to 27 aircraft, 26 helicopters, 146 tanks, 706 mild armored vehicles … Spokesperson for the Russian army, General Igor Konachenkov, acknowledged victims, Wednesday: “Unfortunately there were losses among our comrades participating in the special military operation [official name of invasion maneuvers]: 498 Russian soldiers lost their lives in the performance of their duties, and 1,597 of our comrades were wounded. “A senior officer, Colonel Viktor Isaikine, 40, is part of the killed. The day before, the images of a meeting of the Minister Sergei Choïgou with the commanders of the armed forces, from the War Room, were broadcast with a message of realism: “Issues of access to medical care for military personnel were discussed. “
A first point of weakness seems to be the morale of Russian soldiers, who face the galvanization of their cousins of Ukraine, members of a “same nation”, according to Putin, but on which they must draw. Actual or arranged by Ukrainian propaganda, images of very young recruits with empty fatigue, those of tanks, surrounded by a hostile crowd in cities, circulate. In Belarus, where the units stationed before the start of the offensive, “I saw troops that had no idea that they were going to launch such an operation and were not prepared at all, including The officers, reported Michael Kofman, from the Washington Center for Naval Analysis (CNA). The morale is low, nothing is organized, the soldiers do not want to fight. “
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