As Vladimir Putin turns his focus to Ukraine’s Donbas region, Russia has “been forced to merge and redeploy depleted and disparate units” already weary from Moscow’s failed offensives near Kyiv, the UK government has claimed.
In an intelligence update on Saturday morning, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) suggested that the Kremlin was seeking to “rectify” the tactical and logistical issues which have hampered its invasion of Ukraine to date.
Moscow is hoping to achieve this by “geographically concentrating combat power, shortening supply lines and simplifying command and control”, the MoD said.
But the ministry claimed that Mr Putin’s forces “still face considerable challenges” and that “shortcomings in Russian tactical co-ordination remain”.
Many of the units redeployed in Moscow’s eastern offensive – following Mr Putin’s retreat from northern Ukraine – are “likely suffering from weakened morale”, while “a lack of unit-level skills and inconsistent air support have left Russia unable to fully leverage its combat mass, even despite localised improvements”, according to the MoD.
The UK’s assessment appears to echo beliefs in Washington that Mr Putin’s forces have made only minor gains in Donbas in the month since Russia announced it would focus its military strength in the region.
As Russian troops try to move north out of the devastated city of Mariupol in order to advance on Ukrainian forces from the south, their progress has been “slow and uneven and certainly not decisive,” an unnamed US defence official told the Associated Press.
In part because of the tenacity of the Ukrainian resistance, the US believes the Russians are “at least several days behind where they wanted to be”, the official said.
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