Russia’s Iciness Offensive & The War in Ukraine – The Initiative, losses, & air, sea & land campaigns

While global attention has been dragged it feels, from one crisis to the next, the war in Ukraine has continued with unabated intensity. The transition into winter has brought snows and plunging temperatures, but as in winters past, military action has remained intense and continuous. As in late 2022, Russia held the initiative after the culmination of a Ukrainian offensive, and appears to have decided to use that opening to do basically what they did last time. Launching a series of offensive actions at multiple points along the front. The fighting that followed has varied from sustained ground battles around places like Avdiivka, through to the drone and missile attacks that exemplify the struggle for the Black Sea.

Today I want to give a broad update on some of those campaigns. Asking what both sides have achieved, what we can observe about the fighting, and how well placed both sides are to continue their efforts through 2024. So to do that I'll start with an overview of some of the recent fighting, looking at some of the major battlefields like Avdiivka, our estimates around visually confirmed losses, and a few observations around changing patterns in the fighting, as well as technical and tactical observations. Then I'll look at two other campaigns, the naval effort in the Black Sea, and what we've seen from the broad air war, Russian missile campaign and Ukrainian drone strikes.

Finally, as I often do, I'll pivot to asking some questions about long-term sustainability. Including some of the known and unknowns around future Western support for Ukraine this year and beyond. OK, so I'll start with a quick overview of where some of the serious fighting is taking place in Ukraine right now and how the Russian winter offensive has developed since we last talked about it. I want to stress I won't be dwelling too much on the fine detail here. Both because there are plenty of sources that cover those finer day-to-day movements, and also because if we want to get to some wider observations about the war as a whole, what we really need here is the big picture.

As a quick refresher, in our last episode on this topic in 2023 we observed that with the Ukrainian offensive in Zaporizhzhia petering out, the initiative and choice of next move had broadly passed to Moscow. In a sense the circumstances had some parallels to the end of 2022. At that point Russia had mobilised and somewhat stabilised the front after a Ukrainian offensive, they presumably had a choice between focusing on regeneration or going on the attack, and chose the latter. The 22/23 winter offensive did take some territory, but it also expended tremendous amounts of Russian materiel and offensive potential.

A decision, which all else being equal, probably weakened the Russian position in 2023 more broadly. So a year later in the closing stages of 2023, after the culmination of another Ukrainian offensive, the Russian military apparently opted to just do what it had done last time, one presumes expecting a different result. Understanding the why of that decision probably comes back to understanding stated Russian objectives. We often talk about how much internationally recognised Ukrainian territory is currently under Russian occupation, but it's important to remember that as far as Russian law and stated war aims are concerned there's still a huge amount.

Of what they claim to be Russian territory under Ukrainian control. As far as the vast majority of the world (including countries like China) are concerned, Putin cannot in fact draw a line on the map, put on his best Darth Sidious impression and then declare that he will make it legal. But as far as the Russian system is concerned those lines are law. To control all the territory it claims to have annexed, Russia would have to re-cross the Dnipro, take Kherson, take Zaporizhzhia and its region, and of course the entire Donbas. And given that as recently as 20 December last year Putin came out and said.

That the Special Military Operation will absolutely achieve all of its set goals, you can understand how much pressure there might be on the Russian military establishment to push forward towards those territorial objectives. So far though, their offensive hasn't really got them closer. Instead, while the fighting has generally been very costly and stressed forces on both sides, significant Russian offensive efforts at multiple points along the front line have only resulted in very incremental territorial changes. What you can see on screen there for example are the results of almost 2 months of heavy fighting, with the 1st of December on the left and 23rd of January on the right.

At a zoomed out level, the winter fighting has very much been a matter of metres, months and munitions. And a quick look at some of the key battlefields should probably give you a sense of the broader endeavour. At Avdiivka, a city which has basically been on the front line since 2014, Russian offensive actions really started to scale up in October. And while attacks have waxed and waned, the offensive is still very much ongoing as I record this. When we last talked about the battle, a lot of the focus had been on the Russian efforts towards the north of the town where they had successfully seized a giant waste pile, but had been unsuccessful in moving into the industrial area just slightly further south. You probably also remember that at the time there was plenty of coverage.

Saying that Avdiivka would fall any day now. Suffice to say it hasn't. Over the last nearly 3 months of fighting the industrial areas of Avdiivka have generally held. Instead the Russians have turned to largely incremental advances in a number of areas. Moving further north west along the railroad, turning the village of Stepovoe into an apparent grey zone arena where the recent duel between those two Bradleys and a T-90M took place like something out of Solaris 7. While in the south and south east, with the broader efforts to encircle Avdiivka so far failing, the Russians have started staging incremental advances into the city's residential areas. What you see here is some imagery, courtesy of the team at Frontelligence Insight,.

That may help illustrate part of how those incremental advances are achieved. Defensible positions are flattened by artillery, larger defensible structures are demolished by air delivered bombs, and eventually the defensible position can be degraded enough that the attackers might be able to move forward. This sort of approach is very slow and materially intensive. But if enough force is consistently applied it can work. Overall the situation for Ukrainians in Avdiivka actively defending it is probably very difficult. Reportedly the Ukrainian artillery is not receiving the shells it needs to fight it its most effective,.

And for various reasons there are only so many reinforcements available. But for now overall Avdiivka is still holding. And as we'll see a little later in the loss statistics, applying this sort of pressure to Avdiivka appears to have cost the Russian forces dearly. Further to the north is Bakhmut, and for much of the war this place had become synonymous with slow, miserable, trench-based positional fighting. And so far over the winter Bakhmut has remained true to form, consuming combat power and offensive potential for very little movement. The line that had been pushing towards Yahidne has been straightened out,.

While the villages of Klischiivka and Andriivka are still assessed as being in Ukrainian hands. Although frankly there's not much of them left. Similarly in Marinka, which was already basically flattened a year ago, months spent have translated into metres or block gained. A wider or more successful push in the area by the Russians might raise some concerns for the Ukrainians, but at the same time the way the fighting here has progressed might give us some clues as to things to come. The ruins of Marinka were eventually taken. But when taking an objective like this requires months, or even years of effort in this case,.

There's probably going to be plenty of time for an opponent to prepare new defensive positions one or two terrain features back. And so the fall of Marinka, as we saw with Robotyne and Bakhmut, hasn't so far led to some fast-moving deep breakthrough. Instead the fighting has just lurched forward to the next trench, the next tree line, or the next town. Looking up at Kharkiv, you are again seeing basically positional advances. With the Russians still being a long, long way from being able to anchor a front along the Oskil River, which is where they had originally tried to stabilise during the Kharkiv counter offensive. In the interest of time I probably can't pay the fighting here, or on any of these fronts, their entire due.

But it's important to understand that even in the cases where those lines don't move, the reason they have stayed static is often not due to a lack of activity, but rather the result of some often very heavy fighting. More difficult from an analytics perspective has been the fighting around Krynky. This is the tiny Ukrainian bridgehead across the Dnipro River that we've talked about before. And while over the last few months the Russians have been able to squeeze and shrink the bridgehead, they haven't been able to eliminate it. And the result has been a battle that defies easy classification. For the Ukrainian Marines fighting on the left bank of the Dnipro, this battle is probably peak misery.

The difficulty in getting heavy equipment across the river means those Marines will almost always be heavily outnumbered, and usually operating with small arms and minimal supplies. But the Russian forces on the left bank are probably in a worse logistical position than the Ukrainians on the right. And as we'll see in a moment, numerous failed Russian mechanised attacks to try and eliminate that bridgehead have fallen victim to things like Ukrainian artillery and drones resulting in significant visually confirmed equipment losses. And for a while now that appears to have been the steady state the battle has settled into.

The Russians can't completely and permanently evict the Ukrainian bridgeheads, and have taken very significant losses every time they try. But the outnumbered and out-gunned Ukrainian Marines in the bridgehead have no real prospect of breaking out. For Ukraine the battle probably ties down significant Russian forces, drives the allocation of Russian aerospace forces which have been used very heavily in the region, and allows them to engage in an area where broadly their logistics network is up to the challenge. But it's probably doing so at great cost and uncertainty for the small units holding that bridgehead on the other side of the Dnipro.

The overall picture however is that while it is still very much ongoing, the Russian offensive hasn't really gone anywhere. There is still a major threat to Avdiivka's supply lines and a number of other locations. But for the most part the results have been very, very positional. And while Ukraine's gains in Zaporizhzhia were likewise very positional, I'd argue there might be a distinction here. Because theoretically, Ukraine didn't have to go that far to have a major strategic impact. If Tokmak could be taken, the rail link to the west severed, and then some tragic accident befell the Crimean Bridge,.

Then a 20 kilometre advance might have had implications for vast areas of occupied territory. The Russians presumably understood that, which helps explain the massive prepared defences. But in Russia's case there's no real equivalent jugular to aim at. There might be places they could take which might require other withdrawals along the front, but for the most part taking a position probably just means preparing to take the next one. And so while Ukraine is obviously still a long way away from its objective of throwing Russian forces out of their country, Russia is likewise still a very long way away from achieving theirs. And if the goal of this offensive has been to get Russia materially closer.

To those target borders, then it has dramatically fail to do so, at least so far. However I'd argue that just because the fighting is often a matter of metres that doesn't mean either that the war is locked in a perpetual stalemate, or that the armies aren't consuming a prodigious amount of equipment and ammunition fighting for those metres. Obviously materiel consumption isn't the only factor in how the war is going or will continue to go. The importance of factors like casualties, politics and economics all has to be acknowledged. But at the same time, things like equipment and ammunition availability have obviously been key inputs to the ability of both sides to fight.

Infantry supported by IFVs and tanks are going to perform better than infantry fighting alone. A force trying to breach a minefield is going to need breaching equipment. And both of these armies have proven they fight by far their best when adequately supported by artillery and other fires. What losses do then is act as one of the factors that will change how the equipment balance between the two sides changes over time. And Ukraine has relied on a loss disparity acting in their favour. The Ukrainians just generally receive fewer tanks, fewer armoured vehicles, fewer artillery pieces and shells.

Than their Russian adversary can pull out of storage or manufacture from scratch. So to prevent the Russian materiel advantage compounding over time, or even moving the balance in their favour, what Ukraine probably needs in that sense, as ugly and costly as it is in terms of casualties, is to fight hard battles (probably defensive ones) where they can inflict disproportionate equipment attrition on Russia. Fortunately for Ukraine, costly repeated attacks into prepared defensive positions are a Russian speciality. And when it comes to losing massive amounts of materiel at shockingly disproportionate loss rates, Valery Gerasimov probably stands proud at the top of the podium.

As best as we can tell, visually confirmed armoured vehicle destruction and abandonment rates around Avdiivka have been some of the most shockingly one-sided of the war. The Ukrainians have of course lost some particularly valuable pieces of equipment, but as at time of recording, the Russians have burned through more than 150 main battle tanks, and are pushing towards 300 armoured fighting vehicles. And that's after I removed all damaged targets from this data set because I often consider the category too ambiguous. To put that into perspective, if you were to take every American Bradley and Swedish CV90 the Ukrainians are believed to have received so far during this entire war.

It would not be enough to cover Russia's visually confirmed AFV losses just since October, just around Avdiivka. The situation in the Krynky zone has been broadly similar, but much more polarised by category. Here Russian and Ukrainian artillery losses (excluding MLRS systems) are much closer together, with many of those Ukrainian losses being as a result of Lancet strikes or the use of glide bombs. But given that Ukraine hasn't been able to push armoured vehicles across the river, while Russia has thrown several armoured assaults against the Ukrainian bridgehead, the battle has given us some of the most shockingly uneven MBT and AFV loss ratios of the entire war. For tanks 1:18, for armoured fighting vehicles 1:51,.

And in some categories a healthy divide by zero error. Now of course even though a lot of work goes into these visually confirmed loss databases, and often they're some of the best available information that we have, I always like to test that sort of data against Russian sources where it's practical to do so. In the case of Krynky, we do actually have something that might serve for a sort of apples to apples comparison. LostArmour is a Russian website publishing claimed Ukrainian losses, and they have a list of claimed Ukrainian artillery losses supporting the bridgehead at Krynky complete with claimed visual evidence.

Now at first it seems like there's a great clash between this data and the data I just showed you. The first set had 10 Ukrainian artillery losses, the LostArmour database has 51. Part of that disparity can probably be solved straight away, the LostArmour database includes both damaged and destroyed equipment whereas that 10 from before was just destroyed equipment. Revise it up to damaged as well and we instead have 21 versus 51. Closer, but still very much not in agreement. My second thought was because there is no universal set of rules on how you should classify a particular set of losses,.

It might be that the LostArmour set was over claiming in some way, or at least including materiel that wouldn't be included according to the evidentiary standards of the first set. So both because accuracy matters, and because who wouldn't want to spend a chunk of their afternoon auditing drone footage, I ran through a sample of the list starting top to bottom (something you can also do if you are so inclined) and, yeah, there were a couple of things that stood out. Firstly duplicate footage, with this video of a Lancet strike for example being marked both against a 2S1 entry at one set of coordinates and an M109 entry at another set. This video is used both for a Lancet strike on an unknown self-propelled gun,.

Which is what it appears to be labelled as, but is also included two entries later as evidence for a glide bomb strike against a Zuzana 2. Which is interesting because I would have expected more visual difference in blast effect between a 3-5 kilo warhead and a 500+ kilogram bomb. Now to be fair here, it's entirely possible that this is just an uploading error. That there is an accurate video somewhere and it just hasn't been uploaded and listed correctly. But hopefully you'll understand when I say I don't think I can count a loss as evidenced if the evidence basically amounts to “Trust me bro, I promise I have the video, I just left it at home.” If at any point these listings are amended I'll be happy to take another look.

But in calling out the duplicates thing, I've sort of skipped over one of the other more common issues. And because I've shown off a couple of examples from the first 10, I will jump to the sample of the final 5 that I looked at. And that's the fact that (at least to my viewing) a lot of these videos seem very, very inconclusive, and wouldn't, or at least shouldn't, make it into a database like this. Make no mistake, on this list there are some very clear, very crisp entries that clearly show what they claim to show. But there are also heaps of cases, particularly when it comes to glide bombing attacks, where seriously I have seen more convincing footage of Bigfoot.

To avoid any accusations of cherry picking, these are literally the first two entries I looked at at the bottom of the list. And in one case that blue circle is original, in the second I've added my own just for clarity. Because clearly and unambiguously what you are looking at here, just in case you couldn't figure it out, is the destruction of a self-propelled gun in the top image, and the destruction of another artillery target on the bottom. A cynic might suggest that given Russian glide bombs are not the most accurate systems on the planet, that one editing technique might simply be to take a video, circle an area where you know the bomb is going to land,.

Show the bomb landing where you circled and declare victory. Because anyone on the planet can be a perfectly accurate marksman if you get to call your shot after you have already made it. Now obviously it is possible that in amongst those blobs and smudges there is a target that is being destroyed. But if you're going to set a standard for what counts as visual confirmation, if a Ukrainian source submitted a close-up like this one, I'd hope that in the absence of other evidence it would be classified as inconclusive and we'd all move on. Which brings us to the next entry and another war-footage favourite,.

This being the ambiguous edit or time skip. This video includes some good footage of what appears to be a Ukrainian armoured vehicle entering the right hand side of this building. Then you get a cut forward to video of a bomb appearing to impact the left hand side of the building and a second strike that appears to potentially miss entirely and land out front. That's probably enough evidence to conclude that the building was struck, but different databases are going to apply different standards on whether or not it's proof that a vehicle was inside and destroyed or damaged. I could go on, but the goal here is not to beat down on any.

Particular source, but rather to make a broader point. Different sources don't just have different levels of credibility, they also apply different standards. And often those [standards] might go some way towards explaining how different sources came to very different conclusions. For example, I would probably classify what is claimed to be a Lancet missing an armoured vehicle by several metres to be a miss. But according to the standards applied here it is being included as a claimed loss. Because armoured vehicles are famously incapable of surviving the shrapnel that might be thrown up by a small loitering munition warhead landing several metres away.

Ultimately, looking at loss data we need to have a degree of comfort with the uncertainty involved. But at least in this case, having had an opportunity to look at some potentially contradictory information, I'm generally pretty happy continuing to use the WarSpotting and Oryx data as a sort of floor. And so with that caveat in place, what does the equipment loss picture look like when you bring together some of the major engagements of 2023 and early 2024? For Ukraine the equipment loss ratio during the Zaporizhzhia offensive was probably not sustainable. As you can see on screen there, losses in things like main battle tanks and armoured fighting vehicles were uncomfortably even. And in some categories like engineering vehicles,.

Ukraine actually lost more visually confirmed than the Russians. If the Russians then had simply held and remained on the defensive, their greater rate of equipment production and reactivation would, all else being equal, have left them more and more materially advantaged over time. Instead in battles like Avdiivka and against the Ukrainian foothold across the Dnipro, the Russians once again threw away massive amounts of metal without sufficient countervailing losses on the Ukrainian side. Pushing the cumulative losses across those engagements in things like tanks and AFVs back to those more familiar 2.5:1 or 3:1 ratios.

Estimates also suggest a similar reversion to the mean on things like artillery ammunition consumption. And while we could dig more into the broader picture across the entire front, and I will do so in the future, there is a sort of broad observation I want to make here. And that's at least in terms of equipment and as far as the data shows, as painful as it almost certainly is for the Ukrainian troops fighting many of these defensive battles, the Russian winter offensive so far, especially when you are talking about battles like Avdiivka, have been exactly the kind of thing the Ukrainian force needs in order to address the balance of hardware attrition. With the limited support they've been receiving from their allies.

Ukraine cannot afford to trade equipment on a 1:1 basis. And so to keep the overall balance in check and to make sure Ukraine can take risks on operations where it might take severe hardware attrition, they probably also need battles where the Russians will take half a storage yard of old tanks and armoured vehicles and run them straight through the grinder. And if it had been Ukraine launching the offensive at Avdiivka suffering the same losses the Russians have, we would probably be describing it as an incomprehensible catastrophic Ukrainian failure. But for Russia, with its larger equipment reserves, we've just kind of got used to it.

In 2022 that was the battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv. During the previous Russian offensives it was battles like Vuhledar. And as the year rolls over to 2024, it is probably battles like Avdiivka. So the next question then is are there any general observations we can make about the nature of the fighting on the ground? How things have shifted in recent months, and how they may continue to shift going forward? Observation one is that the relative rate of artillery fire between Russia and Ukraine has probably shifted yet again. In the lead-up to their 2023 offensive Ukraine stockpiled aggressively.

They are also believed to have received a very large shipment of artillery ammunition that originally came from the Republic of Korea. In that context it seems that, at least on certain sections of the front, Ukraine was temporarily able to get to a point where it was firing more shells per day than the Russians. Given the scale of the Russian defensive positions and minefields, you can imagine that having an advantage in artillery fire was incredibly useful if not a complete prerequisite for Ukraine's efforts to move forward at all during that southern push. But cut forward to January 2024 and things are different.

The stocks accumulated for the offensive have probably been expended. American military aid, which supplied a lot of Ukraine's artillery ammunition, has been paralysed for months now. And Russia received a massive infusion, potentially of millions of main calibre artillery shells from North Korea. The results (per a number of estimates I've seen) is that Russia is once again enjoying something like a 5:1 advantage in unguided shellfire at many points along the front. And at a local level the disparity in fire and Ukrainian shell hunger might be even more acute. Now obviously quantity isn't all that matters, and there is an extent to which.

It's not the size of your artillery park but how you use it. The accuracy of both your systems and your calls for fire, the reliability and effect of your munitions, the nature of the targets you are firing at, the tactics of employment, the balance between ISR and concealment, and a range of other factors that govern how effectively shells can be converted into meaningful and often damaging effect. But based on those figures there's still probably reason for both sides to be concerned. The Ukrainians, because of the shortfall in ammunition supply, and the possibility that Russia will continue to adapt and improve its tactics. While a worrying observation for the Russians might be that this is what the force can achieve.

When it is able to expend five times more munitions than the Ukrainians can. If you need to expend far more munitions than your opponent does in order to achieve not much, then the concern might be just how much are you going to need to accomplish anything meaningful? Put another way, saying your industry could supply 30,000 artillery rounds per day is a flex. Saying that your military needs to fire 30,000 rounds a day for 5 months in order to take a town is not. Observation two is that from the strategic right down to the tactical level drones continue to play a more and more important role in this fighting. And within that overarching point there are a couple of sub elements. Firstly we've seen greater and greater use of things like FPV drones.

To partially offset an absence of conventional munitions. The armies here might see a target that they want to service with artillery, but the artillery is scarce or not available, and so a drone has to do the job instead. And we see this not just in terms of some of the longer range more specialised missions (for example Lancet being used by Russia for the counter-battery role) taking some of the pressure off conventional artillery, but also right down to the level of individual platoon or even sub-platoon elements fighting at a local level. And so to help conserve those munitions they decide to drop them from drones instead.

Because that on average enables you to have a far greater accuracy and effect with each individual munition (to the point where I have read about units that don't have enough ammunition for their automatic grenade launchers) than you could if you let rip with an AGS-17 on full automatic. Anti-tank FPVs can sometimes serve as an imperfect substitute for ATGMs, or indirect fires, or having some other heavy anti-armour asset of your own. In a permissive electronic warfare environment there may be no more munition-effective way to clear a trench than by using drones.

That second point around a permissive electronic warfare environment though highlights another aspect of the evolution, namely the arms race between EW and drone operators is constant, rapid and vicious. If you are dependent on a certain frequency or set of frequencies and your opponent rolls out the right EW equipment, then your effectiveness can crater overnight. On the other hand if you roll out all those EW systems and your opponent then counter-adapts then they might (temporarily at least) enjoy a degree of freedom in operation. There isn't a static relationship between the sword and the shield, the hunter and the hunted.

I mean you do get videos like the one on screen there which literally shows a cheap drone being used to destroy a counter-drone system. Which is at once both deeply ironic but also, taking into account they decided to film it and publish it, arguably the unmanned warfare equivalent of teabagging your opponent and then publishing the replay. And if you try to take the drone forces from January 2023 and operate them in January 2024, then your best hope might be that your opponent feels genuinely sorry for you with your outdated equipment and tactics before they wipe out you and your unit for less than the cost of a family car.

Partially related to this is that a lot of the engagements we've seen have got very, very small. There was some famous footage to come out of Avdiivka recently of a duel between two Bradleys and a T-90M in the ruins of Stepovoe. But that's far from the first time we've seen individual or pairs of armoured vehicles seemingly operating without any nearby support. In terms of doctrine for most forces, that's pretty weird. Most of the time you'd expect to see multiple vehicles supporting each other and/or supporting or being supported by infantry. But in Ukraine you see plenty of examples of individual tanks.

Or individual infantry fighting vehicles operating, whether that means leading an attack, operating from an ambush position, or stalking the streets of a grey zone looking for their next victim. Now any answer to the question of why is obviously going to be anecdotal, but from those I've either spoken to or seen commenting on the issue, at least part of the answer seems to be, ironically enough, survivability. Both sides have some incredibly dangerous artillery and other systems available to them. But no one, not even the Russians, has enough that they can use it without restraint. So the more vehicles you concentrate in one place the more valuable a target you present,.

And the more likely your opponent is to decide that, yes, you are worth the ammo. One Russian tank might be the job for an FPV operator. Concentrate 4 tanks backing BMPs and a bunch of dismounts, and your local weather forecast is going to suddenly shift towards showing a 90% chance of high explosive rain. And so it might be in some cases that units are deciding that the extra survivability you get from having multiple vehicles that can mutually support each other, is actually outweighed by the reduced survivability you get due to the increased amount of shit you attract.

It's an interesting tactical problem that I'm probably going to leave to the uniformed experts. But it seems like in Ukraine you still often want to be able to concentrate force in order to do something like overcome a defensive position. But on a very transparent battlefield with drones and artillery everywhere, concentrating too much or for too long might be an open invitation for a mass casualty event. To move away from the grinding fight on land then, let's talk about the battle for the Black Sea. It's a naval contest between a country with the world's third largest navy in tonnage terms, and an opponent that doesn't really have a navy left. And yet in the latter part of 2023 going to 2024,.

The Black Sea and Crimea were probably Ukraine's best theatre. Russia's goals for the area likely included making Ukraine's Black Sea supply line untenable, launching or enabling effective strikes against Ukrainian ground targets, and protecting their supply lines to Crimea. Ukraine's goals by contrast were probably the direct opposite. Protect the Black Sea supply line, inhibit Russian Black Sea operations, and pressure Crimea and its supply lines. And while the forces available to both sides were completely asymmetric, I'd argue the results probably speak for themselves.

Ukraine's ability to transport cargo on the Black Sea is probably essential to its long-term economic viability. This is how historically a majority of the country's grain exports get out, and how a lot of the country's imports arrive. After the collapse of the grain deal there was no longer an agreement with Russia protecting these shipments. But Russia also lost their rights under that agreement which had enabled them to do things like inspect cargoes and influence volumes. And given the choice between accepting new Russian conditions.

Or trying to carry on regardless, Ukraine chose the latter course. And the result is that in December it's reported that Ukraine was able to export 4.8 million tons of food via the Black Sea, which exceeds the best record set during the grain deal and is also getting close to the pre-war average of about 6 million tons per month. That actually means as a percentage of normal levels, you could argue that the Houthis, who are being actively bombed by the United States and allies, have been more effective in shutting down shipping through the Red Sea using some Iranian drones and missiles, a helicopter or two and a couple of speedboats,.

Than the Russians have been in suppressing Ukrainian trade on the Black Sea. In part that's probably a result of a couple of factors which complicate Russian decision making. So far Russia has been understandably unwilling to adopt Houthi tactics and simply start lighting up civilian vessels at beyond visual range, something which is probably very much within their military capabilities but a non-starter from a political and diplomatic perspective. But at the same time Russia isn't in a position to enforce a more traditional blockade where you actually stop and search ships. That would almost certainly mean putting Black Sea vessels in range.

Of Ukrainian naval drones and potentially anti-ship missiles. And the Moskva probably provided a pretty strong argument as to why that might not be the best idea. So instead it looks like the Russians so far have settled on a sort of middle ground. It's reported that Russia has deployed a number of naval mines along the corridor used by vessels transporting Ukrainian cargoes. And in December a Panamanian flagged bulk carrier reportedly hit a mine transiting to a River Danube port. Now in simple military terms laying mines there probably doesn't make much sense. Ukraine doesn't really have any warships to hit the mines,.

And the Russian claims that Ukraine itself is laying the mines make even less sense considering this is the corridor used by the ships that function as Ukraine's lifeline. But as a weapon against civilian traffic, they potentially apply the same risk logic as the Houthi attacks. The mines may not sink any or many vessels. But the simple fact they are there might drive up war-risk insurance costs and give shipping companies pause before they decide to dedicate ships to the route. So far the two counter measures we've seen from Kyiv include a new insurance scheme to bring down the cost of insurance for ships transiting that corridor.

And secondly a number of countries pledging to deliver Ukraine a number of minesweepers. The UK announced that Ukraine would get two ships of the Sandown class. The Dutch have pledged two ships which should arrive in 2025. And the Norwegians will also be supporting the so-called Maritime Capability Coalition. Now even if someone asks Pavel and his mates how many Neptune missile mounts they can weld to a 500 ton minesweeper, the new ships probably aren't going to do much for the overall combat capability of the Ukrainian Navy. But what they might be able to do is help keep that trade corridor clear, and as long as Ukraine can actively trade on the Black Sea, that's a massive win for Kyiv.

But “Hey,” you are probably saying, “Perun, enough with all this boring trade stuff, what about the kinetic element, what are they actually shooting at?” Russian missile and aviation attacks from the Black Sea and Crimea have gone after a wide array of Ukrainian targets, but a number of those claimed strikes have been against the sort of assets Ukraine uses to project its power in the Black Sea. Russia for example has claimed to attack things like assembly locations for naval drones or the air bases housing the Ukrainian Sukhoi 24 fleet. Which are the aircraft that carry Storm Shadow and SCALP, and in turn are used to strike Crimea.

For Ukraine the targets have included the full range of Russian Black Sea assets. A recent example of this was a claimed Ukrainian missile attack against a Russian amphibious warfare and transport ship in Crimea, the Novocherkassk, which according to the Ukrainians resulted in the valuable ship being destroyed, along with its cargo. While Russian sources were quick to inform us that the ship had been damaged. Here for context is an image of the ship reportedly being damaged, and here's a pair of satellite images showing the vessel before and after the damage took place. Look personally, I think the thing might need a little bit more than some panel beating and a fresh coat of paint before it is ready to go into service again.

But on the plus side, while the Russian Navy has lost a valuable amphibious vessel, the port has undeniably gained a fantastic new artificial reef. All that said, while Ukraine has clearly been able to deliver some very damaging strikes to the Black Sea Fleet and its supporting infrastructure, as well as to increase the amount of trade it can do on the Black Sea, the Black Sea struggle itself is still very much far from over. The Russian warships in the Black Sea that act as Kalibr missile carriers are still very much intact. But for now the Crimean Bridge is still very much intact, and Russia is actually working on a new railway to Crimea.

That runs along the coast through the occupied territories. That would reduce the potential impact of the Ukrainians making it to Tokmak, and mean potentially a much deeper penetration would be necessary in Zaporizhzhia if the Ukrainians wanted to cut the supply links to Kherson and Crimea. I'm sure the Ukrainian government would welcome foreign assistance in building up additional infrastructure in the country, but this new railway is probably not what they had in mind. In short, while Ukraine has had some good months on the Black Sea, the fight is far from over. Having talked land and sea then, let's talk air.

And while air power alone hasn't been an overpoweringly decisive weapon in this war, it's still been a very valuable tool for both sides to use, and one they seek to deny their opponent. Air-delivered fires have been able to do jobs for both sides that ground-based weapons often can't. For Ukraine, air-l aunched cruise missiles like Storm Shadow and SCALP have enabled them to reach further and hit harder than any other weapon in their arsenal. While for Russia, a family of glide bombs, which has included increasingly large units, have been a very important tool against Ukrainian equipment and positions. And lacking a fighter force that can operate safely against Russia's air defence system, countering the threat posed by Russian aviation has usually been a job for Ukrainian air defence.

And to an extent watching the way all this has played out has actually been really interesting if you followed the debate before Patriot was sent in the first place. Which at this point runs the full spectrum from drone-hunting teams riding around in pickup trucks with machine guns and MANPADS, up to a couple of advanced Patriot batteries firing missiles that might be in order of magnitude more expensive than said truck. We all saw lot of arguments that Patriot wasn't a system the Ukrainians needed. And I saw a number of articles that basically said the main problem Ukraine is facing is the Shahed drone, Patriot is not a cost-effective counter to the Shahed drone, therefore sending Patriot is a mistake.

Other objections included the fact that Ukraine couldn't possibly be given enough batteries to cover the entire country and so the whole effort would come down to putting a very expensive Band-Aid on a bullet wound. A lot of these critiques however seem to make an assumption, that having been trained on Patriot by the Germans and the Americans they would then use the Patriot like the Germans or Americans would: emplaced for the largely static defence of strategic locations. And indeed that appears to be how Ukraine has used some of its Patriot assets, particularly for defending Kyiv against high-end threats,.

But they also appear to have got a little creative. One might suspect that a reason countries like Germany might have been happy handing Ukraine systems like Patriot was because of the assumption that these were largely passive defensive weapons. Perhaps to their surprise however, Ukraine has given us all something of a master class in just how aggressively you can use a defensive weapon. With Ukrainian Patriot assets sometimes being employed in an almost guerrilla-like fashion, being snuck up to a zone often quite close to the front line, rapidly unmasked and used to ambush airborne targets,.

Before packing up, displacing, and doing it all again. It's an approach, the aggressive mobile employment of a valuable rare asset, that kind of makes the great Patriot road trip of late 2023 early 2024 at least somewhat reminiscent of the rampage of the original 4 HIMARS back in 2022. And it seems to have allowed Ukraine to, at least on occasion, flip the script on the usual shot exchange problem. Because while shooting down a drone or a missile with a PAC-2 is expensive, shooting down a Russian aircraft with the same is an absolute bargain. In mid-2023 a reported Patriot ambush took down multiple Russian aircraft over Bryansk.

The aircraft destroyed in that incident reportedly included both fixed wing and rotary assets, including electronic warfare helicopters. Then in December what looks like another ambush happened in a very different part of the country. And to borrow an old saying: when it comes to missile defence, if you can you want to shoot the archers, not the arrows. When a number of Russian Sukhoi 34s were brought down in the Kherson region. The Ukrainian claim is three of these aircraft destroyed. And while the Russian government didn't confirm the details of the shoot down, discussion on Russian social media channels of the pilot and crew casualties, the result of the incident,.

Do also seem to suggest that it was three aircraft downed. But it will probably take a long time for us to be sure, if indeed we ever are. If you need a higher degree of confidence, two might be the safe number for now. Sukhoi 34s flying in Kherson by the way, have been vital to making life extremely painful for the Ukrainians defending Krynky, or fighting to support the bridgehead from positions on the other side of the river. The shoot downs seem to have at least somewhat inhibited those efforts. Generally, destroyed aircraft do under-perform in the ground strike role compared to intact ones. While the shoot down may also have inhibited Russian.

Tactics somewhat, something we'll come back to in a moment. Because having done their work in Kherson, it seems like the Patriots might have been once again on the move. The shoot downs only added to the extent to which the Sukhoi 34s have borne a disproportionate share of Russian aviation losses. And with an annual production rate measured in the single digits, Russian industry so far doesn't appear to have even kept up with combat losses, let alone demands caused by wear and tear, or the fact that 34s are meant to be being introduced to replace older platforms.

For now it probably isn't so much a critical problem for the Russian Air Force as a long-term pressure. And recently we've seen attention shift away from the 34 shoot downs towards something a little bigger. Because earlier this month there were two very interesting claimed hits over the Sea of Azov. With one of Russia's effectively irreplaceable modernised A-50 AWACS aircraft, NATO designation Mainstay, being reportedly shot down over the ocean. While an accompanying Ilyushin 22 airborne command centre was hit with several of the officers on board being reportedly killed or wounded and the aircraft heavily damaged, but ultimately managing to land.

The logistics that must have been involved in this shoot down have been discussed extensively elsewhere, so I won't go into them here. The key point for me is that while exactly what happened is obviously contested, the fact that one of these very valuable aircraft was brought down really isn't. And that fleet, particularly of modernised A-50s, represents a niche valuable capability. Allowing Russia to fill gaps in sensor coverage, and so enable and augment both Russian air and air defence operations. The Russian aerospace forces still have hundreds of combat aircraft, plenty of teeth. But the Mainstays help give the force its eyes.

And so while the loss of one is unlikely to be catastrophic, one suspects there'll be intense pressure on the Russian side to avoid a repeat. And a lot of drive on the Ukrainian side to cause one. So where does that leave the dynamics of the air war as we go into 2024? And the first is to say that after more than 600 days of fighting Russia still does not have air superiority over Ukraine. What they do have however is a massive advantage in air-delivered fires. Russian glide bomb attacks for example have become a constant issue for Ukrainian forces. And so a lot of Ukrainian efforts appear to have been focused.

On trying to mitigate that Russian advantage. The aggressive use of valuable long-range SAM systems in these sort of ambush operations is one example. Perhaps not just because of the direct losses they inflict, but also how they must shape Russian decision-making. If you are very, very confident that your opponent doesn't have a super-capable long-range SAM system right on the front line (because who would?) then as an air force you can afford to take risks in order to generate efficiencies. You can fly at high altitude and close to the front line.

In order to give your glide bombs much more range than they would have if you were flying low to avoid the radar or further away from the front line to avoid the missiles. But if the great travelling Patriot caravan could be anywhere, your risk calculus has to change. Glide bombs are cheap, but 34s and their crews are not. And you probably need to drop a heck of a lot of glide bombs to balance the ledger on losing even one. So instead you might choose to fly less or fly safer. Reducing the risk from a Patriot that may or may not be there in exchange for leaving the ground forces with a little bit less support.

Similarly if you are tasking Mainstays, you might want to keep them further away from the front line, again just in case. But that ultimately means they can't see as far or do their job as well. None of this means Ukraine is anywhere close to taking the advantage in the air war. But what it does suggest is that they have once again taken a capability that they only have available in small numbers, and by using it both aggressively and creatively have helped disrupt a traditional area of major Russian advantage. Ukraine has not been given enough Patriot batteries to defend the entire country, but they have been given enough to hold a lot of airspace hypothetically at risk.

That's not to say the Ukrainian Air Force won't be receiving additional tools in the short term. The French government for example recently announced that it will be sending Ukraine 50 rocket-assisted guided bombs per month, the so-called “Hammers”. These are sometimes broadly compared to the extended-range JDAMs that Ukraine has already been receiving from the United States. But the rocket propulsion system might give Ukrainian pilots comparatively more options when it comes to releasing the bomb at very low altitude. It's also worth remembering that all of this might play a role in shaping what the air war looks like later in 2024.

With some observers suggesting there might be some battlefield shaping going on here. We know Ukraine is almost certainly going to receive its F-16s this year. We also know F-16 is not a platform designed to fly face first into an integrated Russian air defence system. So when we see Ukrainian forces apparently prioritising the destruction of Russian radars in forward areas, launching attacks on Russian targets well behind the lines, forcing the diversion of air defence systems, or trying to push critical enablers like the A-50 further back from the front line, it may not be just because that seems to be a good idea in general.

But also because it might help make life easier for the F-16s once they begin to arrive. Obviously it's impossible to know at this point, but it's an interesting enough theory that I thought I should share. The other component of the air war that I think bears some talking about is the ongoing drone and missile strike campaigns we see both sides launching albeit on very different scales. In the lead-up to winter, different sources noted that it seemed like Russia was stockpiling long-range precision munitions for a potential campaign. With the obvious addendum there that while I've seen plenty of theories,.

And indeed some pretty wild claims on some Russian social media channels, I haven't yet seen any evidence that F-16 is already in Ukraine and flying combat missions. The suspicion by some was that come winter we would basically see a repeat of the previous missile strike campaign, albeit on a different scale and with new tactics. That previous campaign remember had targeted a lot of Ukraine's energy infrastructure. Which while they obviously didn't end up breaking the will of the Ukrainian people to resist, did plunge significant parts of Ukraine into darkness and inflicted significant pain and discomfort on the civilian population. The Ukrainians claimed that the Russian attack on the 29th of December for example.

Involved more than 110 missiles plus drones, one of the largest attacks of the war to date. At the time we discussed that the Russian campaign probably would have had more of an impact if it had diverted resources away from energy infrastructure and towards more targets with industrial, military or logistical significance. And so far this campaign it seems like we might have seen more of those in the target mix. And those targeting decisions have been applied across some very, very large strikes. The attacks have also involved new tactics and flightpath planning. The way drones and missiles are integrated continues to change. And in the 29 December attack the Polish authorities actually reported.

That one Russian missile may have actually hooked around Ukrainian air defences by flying in Polish airspace for about 3 minutes before turning back into Ukraine. And in terms of targeting while things like jamming, equipment failure, or just plain inaccuracy can twist our perceptions, so far we've seen a lot of missiles hit major cities impacting buildings with highly variable levels of apparent military utility. Things like a warehouse or a transport depot in Kharkiv, through to infrastructure targets, residential buildings, a shopping centre, and reported damage to schools and a kindergarten.

Some of those targets may represent misses or targeting with no identifiable military purpose. But many of the claims I've seen on the Russian side relate to claimed hits against industrial targets, reflecting a potential stated desire both to suppress Ukrainian war production and where possible, to destroy equipment while it's in storage. And when you are talking about claimed attacks on things like Ukrainian drone production infrastructure, it may be that the goal is less to turn out the lights in Ukraine, as it is to keep them on in Russia. In terms of weapon mix, what Russia is claimed to be using has probably become more diverse over time. Just as the usage rate has likely become more and more closely connected to the production rate.

Ukraine's estimates for Russian production of long-range precision missiles, things like Kalibr, were 115 per month in October 2023. Newly produced and high capability systems, things like the Iskander ballistic missile, continue to be used alongside (because the Soviet Union never threw anything away) a variety of ancient but often very dangerous garbage. What you're seeing on screen there for example, is reportedly the wreckage of a P-35B anti-ship missile. This is a 4+ ton subsonic anti-ship missile, the first versions of which were brought into service in the 1960s.

The warhead is obviously massive, but against a ground target this thing is going to be about as accurate as your average internet horoscope. But to some extent a missile is a missile. And so I would continue to expect to see both a mixture of new production systems combined with whatever museum pieces they can pull together, being used in strikes on Ukraine. And given Ukraine's noted use of the ancient S-200 anti-aircraft missile in a ground attack role, it's not like the Russians are exactly alone in this regard. How Ukraine's missile defence system is faring is obviously hard to interpret. On one hand we've continued to receive reports of incoming missiles and drones.

Being shot down by hard kill systems, again meaning everything from Patriots to pub goers in a pickup. And on the other hand increased Ukrainian claimed reliance on soft-kill mechanisms like jamming. Back in November, Zaluzhnyi commented on the Ukrainian deployment of a nationwide electronic warfare system. And while I'd always advise against taking press releases as a given, those systems would likely operate against the relevant targets not by shooting them down in a traditional sense, but rather by massively increasing their inaccuracy. How the balance shifts between the attacker and defender in that electronic warfare space is something that's going to be very interesting to watch this year.

And in some ways you can see parallels to the EW arms race that proceeds closer to the front line, only there the targets are things like FPV and strike drones, not cruise missiles. While the Russian campaign has been playing out, Ukraine of course has also been firing back. The evidence would seem to suggest that Ukraine has a lot more long range strike drones available to it now than it did a year ago. And so while we have really only seen long-range precision Western-supplied weapons like Storm Shadow being used against targets in places like Crimea, Ukraine has been launching rather frequent attacks against targets in Russia using its ever growing family of domestically manufactured one-way attack drones.

And at least based on the reporting I've seen, there's a couple of observations we can make about Ukraine's targeting decisions. Firstly, target typing has been either diverse or rapidly changing. Secondly, geographically they have been very spread out. And thirdly, that they often reach far behind the lines. To give a series of examples, in October and November there were claimed drone attacks against the Smolensk Aviation Factory, more than 200 miles behind the lines. Then in mid-December the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed to have downed something like 35 Ukrainian drones over three regions in south west Russia,.

With targets including a military air base. Then about a week ago at time of recording, there was a damaging drone strike against a Russian gas export terminal on the Gulf of Finland, about 170 kilometres west of St Petersburg. Leading into a series of drone attacks against oil infrastructure, including hits which caused a fire at a 240,000 barrel per day facility near Russia's Black Sea coast. Which leads to a couple of personal observations. The first is that while none of these strikes are believed to inflicted catastrophic damage, they all have the potential to do so.

Strike drones often don't have the largest warheads on the planet, but if you think about it, things like aircraft in the open or facilities that might be processing very large volumes of very incendiary materiel are all the kinds of targets that could hypothetically be significantly damaged by sustained drone attacks. That export terminal on the Gulf of Finland for example, was shut down for a number of days. Then I'd observe that these are all high value targets that you can't risk leaving undefended, so you need to allocate air defence resources to do so. And we've seen some reported evidence of more air defence being deployed to St Petersburg.

And that matters because of the third observation, the geographical dispersion of the targets. Russia has a lot of air defence systems, but it also has a lot of Russia. And if you have to defend everything, everywhere, all the time, then that's a lot of resources which may not be available for other uses. Like inhibiting Ukrainian air operations in Ukraine. So my personal suspicion would be that Ukraine probably does want to do some damage with these drone attacks. But the far more certain and still very cost-effective pay-off would instead be the impact it has on stretching.

Russia's air defence and electronic warfare capabilities. And so moving forward I expect we'll see more of the same, not less. Russia has its supply of long range weapons and it's going to want to use them, both to try and pressure and exhaust the Ukrainian air defence system and also to hit a wide array of targets. The Ukrainians meanwhile are trying to seriously ramp up drone production. Their agreements prohibit the use of things like Storm Shadow against targets in Russia, but cheap drones do offer them the opportunity to stretch Russia's air defences, shape the battlefield in Ukraine, potentially inflict some economic and military pain,.

While also trying to demonstrate that Russian targets are not entirely out of reach. For the moment however, it seems like neither side is close to having the resources they would need to deliver a decisive amount of damage in the short to medium term. And so in the months to come expect the drone wars to continue. Moving on then however, if we are trying to get a comprehensive picture of what the fighting over winter has looked like, I think it's important we don't entirely skip over the human cost of it all. Often in my videos I tend to focus on things like ammunition consumption and equipment losses. And I do that both because they are very important, and also because.

Compared to something like human casualties they are much easier to verify. And so the information space is inevitably choked with thousands of different estimates using as many different methodologies. Ranging from doing things like counting obituaries or probate cases through to the age-old favourite: making it the hell up. But the real world realities behind the lines we see drawn on maps are often ultimately marked out by people in trenches. And so I think it's worth giving a couple of data points and estimates around Russian and Ukrainian manpower, losses, and mobilisation efforts.

And the best we can probably try and do here is to generate some soft estimates, ceilings and floors. In terms of foreign estimates of Russian casualties, there's a couple we have covered before. We covered the Mediazona KIA figures for Russian forces excluding the DNR and LNR before. But those figures were then used as the basis for a BBC News Russia estimate of 321,000 Russian casualties to 11 January. A reported US estimate was 315,000 to 11 December. And a UK estimate 290-350,000 through to 30 November. But you know what, obviously those are just Western estimates. They also don't really directly tell us the state of the Russian military now.

Casualty numbers obviously matter, but so too do the manning levels of the current force. Because depending on your recruitment and retention levels, 300,000+ casualties could either leave you with a hollowed out ground combat force, or, dark as it is to say, be relatively sustainable. And so to establish some upper estimates for the current strength of the Russian military I want to turn to an unimpeachable source that would never lead us wrong, Russia's Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu. And trust me, I'm really hoping the transcript adequately captures my sarcasm on that one. Because over the course of the war Shoigu has given us.

A number of data points, all of which should be closely related. So, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for some maths with Sergei Shoigu. Sergei is the Defence Minister of the Russian Federation, and the Russian Federation armed forces have a maximum authorised strength. Total authorised strength is a phenomenon in many armies, not just Russia. It turns out that most governments are not happy to metaphorically right click the infantry icon, set them onto auto-build and let the military recruit as many people as it wants to, but will instead authorise a certain number of positions, which hopefully the budget can support. In February 2022 the Russian armed forces had a reported.

Authorised strength of approximately 1,013,000 personnel. And since the invasion that authorised figure has been raised twice. By 137,000 in August 2022, and by 170,000 in December 2023. So Russia starts the war with an authorised strength of 1,013,000 and right at the end of 2023 Sergei says that that has successfully been increased to 1.15 million. Now at this point we'll make a couple of assumptions just to make the maths for Sergei a little bit easier from here on out. Let's assume the Russian military on net didn't sign up any volunteers or contractors in 2022. And that because of the rules implemented alongside the partial mobilisation,.

No contractors were allowed to exit the force in 2023. Those sort of restrictions probably aren't great from a morale perspective, just ask any American serviceman how great Stop Loss was. But you have to admit not allowing your soldiers to quit does make the retention maths just a bit easier. So if Sergei said he had 1,013,000 personnel and now he has 1.15 million personnel, how many personnel did Sergei need to recruit? Some primary school mathematics says 137,000. The same maths, plus an assumption the Russian military might have been 100,000 personnel understrength at the time of the invasion, gives us a number of 237,000.

And so of course Sergei tells us he successfully inducted 790,000. Which is a combination of the statement that 300,000 people were mobilised as part of the partial mobilisation, and that 490,000 people signed contracts with the Russian military in 2023. Notably I'm excluding any other recruitment activity besides mobilisation that might have taken place in 2022. So basically if you take the Russian figures at face value, Sergei managed to recruit almost 800,000 people to fill just over 100,000 positions. And if you believe there's no double counting, that no one's able to quit,.

That there's no attrition of any kind on the force, then if you assume some of the reporting we've seen that Russia intends to recruit another 400,000 troops in 2024 is accurate, then you end up very roughly calculating that the Russian military should have been 300,000 over-strength at the end of 2022, 700,000 over-strength in 2023, and almost 900,000 over-strength at the end of 2024. Suffice to say somewhere, somehow, this math isn't mathing. Russia says it is recruiting huge amounts of people to increase the military by a relatively small amount while taking very few casualties,.

And those three assertions don't play well together. It's hard to parse what exactly might be going on here. There might be a significant double-counting problem wherein those who are mobilised then called to sign contracts and so count in both categories. Or troops who involuntarily have their contracts extended being counted as new contracts. Or maybe you've had troops sign up with so-called “volunteer” units which counts as a contract, only for that unit to then be absorbed, which counts as another contract. Other possibilities include the recruitment numbers just being bullshit, or hundreds of thousands of personnel are leaking out of the system every year.

Whether as a result of them somehow being able to retire, or Ukrainian forces actively retiring them. As with many Russian statistics, my suspicion is there's plenty of fudging and definitional games being played basically everywhere here. But if I had to nominate three key takeaways from Shoigu's various data dumps, it is that one: despite absorbing Wagner, various PMCs, the DNR and the LNR forces etc. the Russian military doesn't claim to have got that much larger between 2022 and 2023. Secondly, because when it comes to recruitment numbers big obviously equals good, Shoigu is claiming they mobilised or contracted the better part a million people.

In order to increase the size of the military by not much. And that thirdly, Sergei may not be the best at maths. There's also two small addenda that I can add onto the end here. The first is that Shoigu has separately given numbers for the increase in the total number of contractors in the Russian force. From a pre-war number of 405,000 to 521,000 in 2023. That gap of 116,000 is interesting, both because it is significantly less than the 490,000 contractors we just heard were recruited in 2023, and because it would account for almost the entire increase in the authorised strength of the force.

Leaving basically no room on the roster for people like those 300,000 mobilised. Meaning statistically either the overwhelming majority of them became contractors, or that the vast majority of them are no longer on the books. The second addenda is the interesting comparison to Ukraine. Because as we are about to cover, they also claim to have recruited or mobilised a very large number of people, but in that case the call-ups, volunteers and mobilisation comes alongside a claim that the active strength of the Ukrainian armed forces has increased accordingly. Before we expand on that, some quick casualty estimates.

Again we'll start with some foreign and non-governmental estimates. For example the organisation Memory Book use data points like Ukrainian obituaries and posthumous awards, as well as an upward adjustment for assumed missed cases. Bring that all together to come to an estimate of 145,000 casualties, including 30,000 killed, 15,000 missing and 100,000 wounded. Meanwhile in the Western media everyone's favourite source, “the anonymous American official”, gives us a somewhat dated estimate of 170-190,000 casualties. Those numbers, if accurate, would obviously be horrifically painful.

For those impacted, their families, and the entire nation. But by historical standards, even accounting for Ukraine's war-adjusted demography, those figures after nearly 2 years of war would likely be sustainable as long as the political will to do so is there. What we probably need though in order to say that with some more confidence, is some sort of ceiling, some sort of upper estimate. And while I know there are some truly wild figures out there on the internet, for that soft upper limit I'd once again want to go back to that unimpeachable source of information, the Russian Ministry of Defence.

Whose claims I'm happy to regard as a soft ceiling here, both because historically armed forces dramatically over-claim opposing casualties, and because the rate at which they claim Ukrainian equipment losses is so high as to be literally impossible in some cases. And so from the folks who brought you such classic claims as 568 Ukrainian aircraft, 265 helicopters, 14,738 tanks and armoured fighting vehicles, 1,200 MLRS systems and 7,822 pieces of artillery, we have Sergei Shoigu's 20 December claim of 383,000 Ukrainian troops killed and wounded since the start of the war to serve as our soft upper bound.

The source is TASS, and it's on screen. I think the record on other topics has established that Sergei might have a bit of a record when it comes to exaggerating. But as sobering as it is to say, even if that number was accurate, history would suggest numbers like that are well within the capacity of a country like Ukraine to endure as long as the will is there in the population to endure it. On these numbers, both Ukraine and Russia would both run out of weapons long before they ran out of people capable of using them. Which brings us to the topic of mobilisation and recruitment in Ukraine,.

Where the rumour has been (not confirmed by the military) that the target mobilisation number for 2024 might be between 450,000 and 500,000 people. And there are a couple of notes there about why that number might be considerably higher than the loss estimates. With probably the key one being that the Ukrainians have been trying to do a lot more with their mobilisation processes than just replace casualties. While Shoigu provides very high recruitment estimates at the same time as relatively modest claims around the increase in size of the Russian military, the Ukrainian armed forces have enlarged massively from their pre-war state.

In September the Ukrainian Defence Minister said there were more than 800,000 people in the Ukrainian armed forces. So there have been well over half a million positions for new inductees to fill. And there's no indication that the Ukrainians have entirely backed off the idea of continuing to build out new units or expand existing ones. Then you have the need to replace casualties and enable rotation. Rotation obviously has a lot of benefits, both for the units and the people that make them up. But the more you want to do it, unless you are willing to draw down strength at the front, the greater the force you require.

And it's reported that at a recent press conference Zaluzhnyi, when discussing potential rotation requirements, did indicate that some potential rotation schemes would require a massive increase in the size of the force in order to be practical. Which again leaves us in a situation where we are trying to square our maths. If the Ukrainians are saying they want the manpower to enable more frequent rotations and to continue to generate new units, then even allowing for some continued flow of volunteers into the force, a 500,000 mobilisation target may not exactly be consistent.

With some of the higher casualty estimates out there. For now this is all mostly speculative, and I'll revisit the issue in a lot more detail once a final decision is made and announced in Ukraine. But I think it's pretty clear if Ukraine wants to achieve all of its stated or imputed goals in terms of rebuilding existing units, establishing new ones, and enabling rotation, not to mention making sure the force has enough young fit people in order to fill physically demanding roles, additional call-ups are going to be necessary. But while getting more people into uniform is going to be a major pressure for both the Ukrainian and Russian forces during and coming out of winter,.

I do need to close out by previewing a future discussion on the importance of equipment and ammunition availability. This is ultimately a war where even Russia with its immense stocks of Soviet surplus, is often struggling to keep up with the insatiable demand for just about everything. And so we have continued to see all sorts of Mad Max bullshit, like Russians mounting RBUs on their MT-LBs That is a 1960s-era anti-submarine rocket launcher that was usually mounted on warships, but here it is being used on land as a very short-ranged artillery weapon. In a role where it does conceivably have some use,.

But where a system like the TOS-1A would be much, much, much superior if the Ukrainians weren't making their best efforts to turn those into an endangered species. Russian production capacity and storages are significant but not infinite. And so they, just like the Ukrainians, are going to face availability pressures. One of the most vital elements of supply in this war, and one of the factors that has probably allowed Russia to go on its winter offensive, has been artillery ammunition availability. And while Ukraine may have been able to achieve small localised advantages in order to enable it to attempt its offensive last year,.

There are a few reasons that availability has inverted yet again. Some of the key kingmakers here have probably been North Korea and Iran. Iran was critical in getting Russia's production of Shahed analogues localised and online. While analysts generally assess that North Korea has come through in a big way when it comes to artillery ammunition. To fire even just 10,000 main calibre shells per day Russia would need 3.65 million rounds per annum. In January, Ukraine estimated that Russia produced 2 million such rounds in 2023. Taking into account things like the recovery of old ammunition,.

That number might have pushed north of 3 million, which would still be nowhere near enough for a military which sees hitting the artillery button as a reflexive response to basically any tactical or operational problem. According to South Korean estimates however, North Korea was able to top up Russia's ammunition supply by a casual approximately 2 million rounds. And at 10,000 rounds per day, 2 million imports would basically be the difference between having to dig deeper and deeper into reserves and actually topping them up slightly. Now there is the small factor that reportedly a lot of North Korean ammunition is a bit shit. Russian social media is full of all sorts of complaints about the reliability of the ammunition,.

And also importantly things like inconsistency in the propellant. That means you may see very different performance from one round to the next, which diminishes accuracy. But while it might be tempting for some in the Western defence industry to point at North Korean ammunition and basically laugh saying, “Ha-ha, their quality control is obviously trash.” The reality is the North Koreans may have been able to come up with 2 million rounds, while the European Union is still pushing for the first million. Add in North Korean ballistic missiles which are now believed to be in use, and while Russia may not be able to count on a supply of the best weapon systems on the market, for the moment the quantity is there.

And while all that has been happening, further US aid to Ukraine, which was a source of a lot of the country's artillery ammunition and critical ordnance, has now been basically paralysed for months. While the debate in the US continues, the task of holding Ukraine over has fallen to various European countries. With Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh reportedly saying, “Even though we aren't able to provide our security assistance right now, our partners are continuing to do that.” And to a significant extent that's been true. The UK has come through with a short-term resupply of 200 anti-aircraft missiles.

Sweden and friends are working together on additional ammunition and armoured vehicle supply. While French industry has more than tripled the rate at which it's producing the CAESAR self-propelled gun, and is pledging Ukraine small additional supplies of artillery ammunition, bombs and cruise missiles. Germany's pledges and military aid have continued to be substantial. About 1.4 billion dollars equivalent in November, with a targeted military assistance figure for 2024 of 8.5 billion. All against the backdrop of NATO announcing a joint production contract for 222,000 artillery shells. But the reason I want to save most the resupply discussion for a future episode.

Is because ultimately most of these announcements are ultimately stop gaps or sides shows from the two main events. Because at time of recording there's still uncertainty over a 50 billion euro package from the European Union and a $60 billion package from the United States. The Ukrainian military has done significant damage to Russian forces over the course of winter. Avdiivka has become such a graveyard for armoured vehicles that Vuhledar might lose its prominent place in the history books before they are even written. In throwing away that much materiel for such limited gains, the Russians may well have done their part to make sure the Ukrainians.

Have the best possible chance through the rest of 2024. But the offensives aren't over, more Russian attacks are almost inevitable, and predicting how things will turn out in the coming months probably means watching not just the battle of Avdiivka or the fighting in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions. Instead I'd recommend watching the battles of Brussels vs Budapest, and Washington DC versus, well, Washington DC. In conclusion: the war in Ukraine remains a slogging match. Ukraine's 2023 offensive fell short of its objectives. But the Russian winter offensives at places like Avdiivka that have followed,.

Have resulted in very little so far other than incremental territorial gains in exchange for the expenditure of an enormous amount of men and munitions. In the Black Sea and the air war, Ukraine has continued to rely on the creative employment of new technologies in order to help offset Russia's advantages in terms of mass. And in the ground war, things very much remain in the balance. OK, brief channel update to close out for reasons of time. I had been holding off on doing an update video for Ukraine while we waited to see what would happen with the proposed US and EU aid packages.

Given the ongoing uncertainty there and how much time has passed, I thought it was important to go back and look at the progress of the Russian winter offensive, on the understanding that once we have a final thumbs up or thumbs down on both packages we can probably fold that into a discussion of resupply and defence production as it relates to Ukraine. So if I only skimmed over those issues today, don't worry, we'll revisit them more in future. In other news, I want to say that I was thrilled with the response to the video on China last week. And so for those of you who did watch the video, thank you very much. Next week the current plan is to continue the 6th generation fighter series, with a look at the weapon systems that will be mounted on these.

Next generation fighters and their accompanying drones. But given the way of the world at the moment, anything can happen before then. Thank you very much all of you for watching, and I'll see you again next week.

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