According to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, by the end of the year, the Russian invasion force will have grown nearly 7x from the initial 100,000 in February 2022:
Syrskyi is Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief. His unenviable task is to defeat a bigger Russian army. Two and half years into Vladimir Putin’s full-scale onslaught, he acknowledges the Russians are much better resourced. They have more of everything: tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, soldiers. Their original 100,000-strong invasion force has grown to 520,000, he said, with a goal by the end of 2024 of 690,000 men. The figures for Ukraine have not been made public.
“When it comes to equipment, there is a ratio of 1:2 or 1:3 in their favour,” he said. Since 2022 the number of Russian tanks has “doubled” – from 1,700 to 3,500. Artillery systems have tripled, and armoured personnel carriers gone up from 4,500 to 8,900. “The enemy has a significant advantage in force and resources,” Syrskyi said. “Therefore, for us, the issue of supply, the issue of quality, is really at the forefront.”
It is this man and machine superiority that explains recent events on the battlefield. Since last autumn Ukraine’s armed forces have been going steadily backwards. One of his first acts when he got the job in February 2024 – replacing Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK – was to order the withdrawal of his troops from the eastern city of Avdiivka. The retreat coincided with a six-month gap in the US supply of weapons.
As Simplicius points out, this means that Russia invaded with only 40 percent of the troops that the Western media reported. And far from running out of ammunition and tanks in two weeks, the Russians have doubled the number of tanks and tripled the number of artillery systems. Also, since about two-thirds of the initial invasion force was provided by the rebel Donbass militias, that means that as few as 30,000 Russian troops were utilized against an initial Ukranian army of 250,000 that has now been completely destroyed.
Just to make matters worse, the British, French, and US militaries have already lost dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers in a war they supposedly are not fighting.
Colonel of the Spanish Army Reserve Pedro Baños:
So, the Russians carried out an attack on Odessa, which killed 18 members of the British Special Air Service and injured 25 more. And they tell me that French soldiers died. These are not mercenaries who are French, no, these are soldiers of the French army. They were killed in large numbers, I was told that the number was greater than in Algeria. These are scary numbers because we are talking about NATO countries.
The sooner this foolish, unwinnable war ends, the better. Vladimir Putin clearly doesn’t want to take all of Ukraine, but he will do that and more if NATO – or to be more precise, Clown World – doesn’t permit its Ukrainian puppet state to stop the bleeding and surrender.