The Unit Cost Is Too High
One of the stranger spectacles of the Russian invasion into Ukraine has been the armoured column stuck on the road to Kyiv. All those vehicles trying to advance and somehow they've managed to get themselves stuck on the road. A lot of it is probably the abysmal logistics from back home in Russia via Belarus, but also the horror of being attacked by modern anti-tank missiles. Even the forces trying to break into Kharkov and the other force pushing towards Odessa seem to have advanced rather slowly, and more to the point have failed to take their objectives. When it gets right down to it, it's been anything but a Blitzkrieg.
When you see images of Russian tanks all smashed up on a road blocking the progress of tanks to follow, you start to get the picture that this whole World War II sort of image of an advancing armoured division thing is not working at all. The reason it is not working is of course the modern anti-tank missiles provided by NATO. The UK NLAW for instance is all of $40,000 per unit, but it takes down a tank per missile at a 94% rate. That's roughly 19 out of 20. You take a batting average like that any day.
A quick scour around Google says each of these T-90A tanks that are being blown up are worth USD 2-3 million to maybe 4.5million. It's hard to tell with any accuracy, but basically you have a multi-million dollar vehicle - kind of priced like a top-shelf Ferrari or Lamborghini - trundling down the road with 3 fully trained guys operating it. 2 Ukrainian soldiers pop up from the top of the building and fire an NLAW - and 19 times out of 20, the tank blows up with the 3 Russian dudes inside.
The Russians have been putting their forces through this process for 17 days. Even without sanctions and frozen accounts and the rouble collapsing, I don't think Russia can afford to be fighting this war on the ground in this manner. This is possibly why they have resorted to indiscriminate bombings of civilian areas, but apart from being a war crime those bombings and missile strikes to civilian areas do not help get them closer to their objective of taking Ukraine and holding it.
Too Many Lives Either Which Way
Just how many Russian troops have been killed since the invasion commenced on 22 February is up for debate:
Russia claims that the number of its soldiers killed and injured in the first six days of its invasion of Ukraine is a fraction of what Ukraine has said to be more than 5,000 dead and many more wounded. While neither side’s claims can be verified, even if we rely on official Russian figures, they are proportionally much higher than what the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan over a decade in the 1980s. This raises serious questions about the ability and efficacy of the Russian military under Vladimir Putin in comparison to the forces his Soviet predecessors commanded during the Afghan war.
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Moscow has officially put the number of its soldiers killed and injured during the first week of fighting at about 500 and 1,600, respectively. These figures exceed the Soviet loss of about 28 troops on average during a comparable period in Afghanistan. If Russia continues to suffer troop casualties at this rate, and if the war drags on for weeks and months, Russia’s Ukraine performance will fall substantially short of the Soviet operations in Afghanistan.
The Ukrainians think they killed more like 11,000 so far, and that's from 4 days ago. That number is closing in on the 15,000 killed in Afghanistan during the Russian campaign there during the 1980s.
If indeed the casualties are already at 10,000 out of a force of 190,000, they've lost over 5% in just 2 weeks. This is not some computer game where you can order your forces to keep going even with 50% casualties. At 10,000, somebody is reckoning with the loss of a division's worth of troops.
Oh, and they lost a Major General in the field.
Even if the Russian claims were accurate they're doing badly. If the Ukrainian claims are accurate, they're doing disastrously. There doesn't seem to be an interpretation of the casualty numbers that gives a sense that the Russians are doing well in any aspect of this war they started.
How Long Will The Money Last?
All of this, apart from the simple costs of tanks being blown up by missiles and troops dying n droves, is costing money. It was calculated by some economist in Japan that Russia really only had 2 weeks' worth of money to be running a campaign of this size. One way we looked at it was that the war was costing Russia $20 billion a day. Russia had $630 billion in sovereign wealth funds, saved from all that oil money and set aside for this very day. A back of the envelop calculation says that in isolation, the campaign can run 30.5 days with that money. This of course totally denies that Russia has other obligations such as running its various other state apparatus as well as the rest of its military.
16th of March will bring up roughly the 3 week mark of the invasion, and it is also the day that Russia will default on its debts. Now that Russia is cut off from SWIFT, and all the international businesses have headed for the door, and in fact people are clamouring to get out of the country as their businesses are now in a shambles, maybe about now is when the army runs out of food and pay.
So what will the army do when it finds out there's no pay and there's no food and their heads are getting blown off with these anti-tank missiles? Maybe they'll rewatch some 'Battleship Potemkin' and go topple their government? Am I being optimistic? Yeah maybe. But you tell me what you would do if you were the Russian general in the field getting your ass kicked in Ukraine, under-fed, under-supplied and then your pay stops? Would you politely take an IOU from Vladimir Putin and keep on going about your losing business of getting kicked in the pants?
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