Ukraine’s Military Chief Says Russia Will Struggle to Keep Up the Fight

In an interview Thursday, with Ukraine’s withdrawal already under way, Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military-intelligence chief, acknowledged the tough situation for Ukraine’s outnumbered and outgunned forces. But Russia also has problems, he said.

Russia’s professional army was largely destroyed in the first year of the invasion, he said, meaning it now throws untrained conscripts into suicidal assaults. It uses more artillery shells than it can produce, and although it fielded hundreds of tanks last year most of them were old models taken from storage and refurbished, while only 178 were new. Missile attacks on Ukrainian cities have subsided in recent weeks as Russian supplies have run down.

As a result, Budanov said, Russia will struggle to achieve its main strategic goal of seizing all the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions this year. “They don’t have the strength,” Budanov said.

A recent study by London-based think tank the Royal United Services Institute suggested Russian forces are likely to peak toward the end of the year, then struggle increasingly with a lack of ammunition and armored vehicles in 2025.

Western officials say that Putin hasn’t given up on his maximalist goals of subjugating Ukraine but has no master plan and is instead betting that Russian manpower and equipment will win the day. Officials note that Russian domestic ammunition production is insufficient to meet the needs of the grinding conflict. Western sanctions are causing delays and increasing costs for Russian industry, affecting both the quality of new systems and the ability to repair damaged ones, they say. This has left Russia increasingly reliant on allies to provide it with equipment to sustain its war effort.