Russian lawmakers authorize Putin to use military force outside the country

[Labster]

Oryx, on twitter, has been tracking documented vehicle losses from both sides.

You can find them both below

Russian Vehicle Losses

Ukraine Vehicle Losses

Through battlefield attrition, Ukraine now has more Tanks, AFV's, IFVs, Engineering Vehicles, Towed and Self-Propelled Artillery, and MLRS systems. That's like, a negative rate of attrition - they're actually gaining equipment through war.

Russia has lost unique, high ticket items, including a Naval cruiser and a number of rarerer helicopters, ELINT vehicles and the like - some of which have been captured.

But for a moment, let's focus on the low-ticket items:
Trucks, Vehicles and Jeeps (878, of which destroyed: 540, damaged: 18, abandoned: 63, captured: 257)

Russia doesn't have enough military trucks, and is pretty reliant on rail to supply its troops.  Feeding the Bear: A Closer Look at Russian Army Logistics and the Fait Accompli goes into a lot of detail on this.  The article is 5 months old, so it talks about a theoretical invasion of the Baltics instead of an actual invasion of Ukraine, but the conclusions here seem to have borne out in reality quite well.

The Russian army will be hard-pressed to conduct a ground offensive of more than 90 miles beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union without a logistics pause. For NATO, it means it can worry less about a major Russian invasion of the Baltic states or Poland and a greater focus on exploiting Russian logistic challenges by drawing Russian forces further away from their supply depots and targeting chokepoints in the Russian logistic infrastructure and logistic force in general. It also means that Russia is more likely to seize small parts of enemy territory under its logistically sustainable range of 90 miles rather than a major invasion as part of a fait accompli strategy.

The first sentence is almost right -- you can get rid of that "beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union" part entirely.  Ninety miles is it before they need to consolidate gains.  Still, what we mentioned upthread still seems true: converting to standard gauge in the Baltics would be a security advantage.

But here's an article from a week ago: Russia’s Military Has a Railroad Problem.  It has been like all things in this war, showing that Russian logistics are even worse than we thought.  Russia has not been able to capture any rail hubs -- notably Kharkiv and Mariupol.  Logistics have gotten harder because Belarussians are sabotaging their own rail signals to slow traffic, and destroyed line itself into Ukraine.  So it makes sense that Russia abandoned the northern front -- without even telling the rear guard that they were the rear guard -- because it was too hard to supply.

In aggressive wars, you essentially have all of the time in the world to plan, but once you attack, you're stuck with the army you have.  If your goal was fait accompli, especially so.  But you can't just magick up equipment in the middle of a war, and changing doctrine is even more difficult.  If you're looking for a historical example of that happening in a war, the American Civil War started in the waning days of 1860, and after removing several generals, U.S. Grant finally got command in Virginia in 1864 after having beat down the rebels in the Mississippi Valley -- three long years to implement a winning doctrine.  Ukraine managed to switch to "Western" doctrines in eight years, and we see the results now.  I don't know if Russia has long enough to change before the sanctions really start to bite.

It's all pretty fun in the abstract to talk about Russia losing, but people are suffering right now.  Sieges have always been terrible on civilians -- both those inside the walls with dwindling supplies, and those outside forced to feed the invaders.  I watched a couple videos today.  One was a Russian livestreaming on TikTok after the op about how good of a job they just did on their mission, they only had three injured and *explosion* #deadorc.  Another is drone footage of dropping a grenade on a truck.  After the blast, the video zooms in to show the Russians writhing in pain, dying on the ground.  Even though they're orcs, they're people too.

And their own government has set them up for failure.  Their failures were all predictable by outsiders looking in from across the world.  None of this is the inherent unpredictability of war -- they should have been able to see it coming.  And they didn't care.  I feel sorry for the poor conscripts in that truck, I really do.  But they have to keep striking those trucks, because that's how you kill tanks before they kill you.