( THIS IS ALL REFLECTIONS AND OPINIONS FROM WESTERN OFFICIALS, NOT ANY SORT OF OBJECTIVE FACT, SORT OUT YOUR FACTS YOURSELVES )
A friend of mine was at the Folk och försvar " People and defence " ( Defence conference in Sweden, including supreme allied commander of Europe and several European statesmen and Jens Stoltenberg, basically a NATO/Western conference ). After the presentations, he talked to a bunch of these people, hearing what general info they know and what they think about the war, this is absolutely not objective fact but the opinion of western commanders about Russia/Ukraine and the war in general. Its machine translated, so take it with a bit of salt
Basically, they say that there is a schism between Wagner and Russia, and that Wagner has proved to be quite competent. Russian retreats from Kherson and Kyiv were devastating strategical wise, but quite well performed tactially, with minimal/average casualties. The Kharkiv rout was disastrous for Russia but was a fluke, Ukraine needs heavy modern platforms from the west to conduct a decisive counter-offensive. This is basically what they're trying to organize, a common European transfer of modern heavy equipment. If they succeed in this, hundreds of tanks could be transfered, with just under at thousand combat vehicles. Russia has about double the amount of casualties, but they have the same amount of wounded as Ukraine. Ukraine has many more wounded than dead, compared to Russia.
No facts, just western observations, Thought it could be interesting to share
1) The people who know everything are the British. Everyone else is several steps behind.
2) Everyone respects the Russian General Surovikin as a professional. He comes from the Air Force, which means he has a brain. In Russia, neanderthals (like Gerasimov) go to the army staff, while intelligence goes to the air force staff. We can count out the navy. Surovikin has been portrayed as an aggressive killing machine ("General Harmaggedon") in the media, but in fact he is a very skilled defensive player. He knows exactly what is at stake and what objective problems Russia faces. He has withdrawn troops where needed, straightened front lines, meaning greater troop presence per kilometre of front, drawn up several lines of defence to counter possible Ukrainian offensives, assembled the VDV into an operational reserve to be deployed where needed. The VDV were embarrassed during the airborne operations at the beginning of the war, but they are nevertheless Russia's best soldiers and fight very well if used as infantry on the ground. They proved this in the interdiction battles at Kherson and are now being deployed at Lyman.
3) Wagner has the best organization in the Russian order of battle and deserves great respect it is generally considered. The organization was not created by Russians (they could never do that), but by - *drum roll* - Brits and South Africans (!) whom Prigozhin attached to him after the mercenary company Executive Outcome was shut down. Currently, there are two Wagners. On the one hand, there is the "New Wagner", made up of prison clients and all manner of rubbish sent out to rake and spot Ukrainian firing positions - these are cannon fodder; but on the other, there is the "Old Wagner", who fight in the Western manner and have been trained by "old Africa hands". They are not to be trifled with and enter "stage three", i.e. after the cannon fodder of the "New Wagner" has exposed Ukrainian positions by being shot to death; whereupon the exposed positions are worked with artillery; whereupon the "Old Wagner" goes in and secures the ground.
4) Since the state of Russia is ruled by an authoritarian leader (Putin), this means that the Russian state is by definition weak. This may sound like a paradox, but the point is that a state and its institutions MUST be weak for the leader to be strong - and vice versa. They cannot exist simultaneously. The consequence is a bit like Hitler's Germany, where the war effort was characterised by anarchy in terms of cohesive leadership. Here there is room for separate "warlords" and organizations to create power for themselves without the capacity of the leader to hold them in the Lord's discipline and admonition. This leads to major problems in terms of power gathering. We see resources being squandered and used inefficiently, as well as recurring examples of situations where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. In countries where the sterna are strong and the leadership is subject to the law (i.e. here in the West), much of what the Russians do seems irrational and "self defeating". Today's situation: there still seems to be no coherent Russian strategy to win this war or to get all the state's resources pulling in the same direction.
5) If at the beginning of the war the Russians were short of manpower, but large quantities of materiel, the situation is now the reverse. In the beginning, they sent armored vehicles to reconnoiter, but without being able to have a screen of infantry to provide flank protection due to a lack of personnel. This meant that armour could be knocked out by small groups of Ukrainian light infantry armed with anti-tank missiles. The loss of combat vehicles and armour is now a real problem for the Russians, so they now have to economise on the mechanised aspect of infantry operations. They are now running, as in the 19th century, on the rhythm of line infantry-artillery-guard troops. Anyone who has been following the Russian casualty figures will see that the number of soldiers killed has run away, while the losses of mechs have fallen. This is due to the fact that they no longer feel they can spare materiel to the extent that was previously possible.
6) Ukrainians are not supermen. AFU is very good at defense, but has a very hard time implementing offenses. The Russian withdrawals from Kiev in April and Kherson in October were not because of Ukrainian excellence, but because of Russian weakness - and both retreats were conducted according to all the rules of the art, with minimal Russian casualties. The Ukrainians could NOT use their superiority to destroy the Russian forces. If there is one thing that Russian troops really master, it is to suddenly disappear from the theatre of war hux flux - as Torkel Knutsson and Napoleon, among others, experienced. The only time we have seen a truly successful Ukrainian offensive was in the Kharkiv region. There, General Syrsky drove completely according to protocol. At Natomanér the units were kept spread out so that the Russians could not observe them, and then there were continuous breakthroughs where the high tempo prevented the Russians from establishing a front line (which the Russians must have to wage war at all). Of course, all this was facilitated by the fact that the Russians had already thinned out their troops by sending them to the Kherson Front. But in sum: what we saw in Kharkiv can never be repeated in this war. To help Ukraine win, the West must add another dimension, namely armour.
7) To win, Ukraine must cut the east-west artery with which Russia supplies the Luhansk Oblast and Kherson Oblast line. With the current composition of forces, Ukraine cannot do such a thing. On the other hand, neither can the Russians carry out an offensive that could mean a strategic breakthrough. If the front is not to be locked at the present stage, the AFU must be provided with new resources. This means tanks and armoured vehicles. The role of armour is by no means obsolete. The reason why Armenia fared so badly in the recent Nagorno Karabakh war and Russia in the rush to Kiev was because it did not have a bubble of lateral flank protection in the form of the combination of mechanised/light infantry and organic air defence, and did not operate in large enough formations. The ideal would have been at the divisional level, but brigades will do. Ukraine fights according to NATO doctrine at brigade level (the US is currently moving to a division-based organisational structure), while the Russians still see the battalion as the primary unit - although in the last six months they have started to combine battalions into larger "battle groups". What the West is now doing (with much kowtowing) is trying to deliver as much combat vehicles and armour as is politically, economically and physically possible, so that a major offensive can be launched from the Ukrainian side sometime this spring. To carry out an offensive through Zaporizhzhia Oblast and cut the land bridge to Kiev would require at least two army corps, which would mean four divisions, which would mean 12 brigades. This would require four armoured brigades, four mechanised brigades and four light brigades, which would mean something like 700 tanks and 1000 combat vehicles for the manoeuvre units. Ukraine currently has about 700 tanks. If there can be a couple of hundred Leo and a few dozen Challengers, then this could probably lead to success for ours.
8. We can assume that about 90,000 Russian soldiers and about 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the period 24 Feb to 31 Dec. Any figures that in any way differ dramatically from this are incorrect. Our opinion is that Ukraine has about 120K casualties ( rhimes well with Ursulas controversial speech ) and Russia about 200K with half dead
