- Ukraine is facing critical manpower challenges on the battlefield.
- An analyst recently back from Ukraine said Russia is trying to exploit this challenge by using small assault waves.
- “It’s death by a thousand cuts. It’s very stressful to units who are undermanned,” she said.
Ukraine is facing increasingly serious manpower challenges all along the front lines, and Russia is relying on a brutal, albeit costly, tactic to stress Kyiv’s defenses.
Dara Massicot, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Russia and Eurasia Program, recently returned from a research trip to Ukraine, where she met with different units that are all facing manpower shortages and other struggles.
“What the units are experiencing from the Russians is a significant amount of strain from Russian tactics,” Massicot recounted from her trip on a podcast this month with the Center for Strategic and International Studies earlier.
She said that the Russians “are attacking [the Ukrainians] in very small groups all the time, day and night. It’s death by a thousand cuts. It’s very stressful to units who are undermanned.”
Russia’s small assault wave attacks, sometimes called human wave attacks or meat assaults, have been a problem for Ukraine throughout the conflict, but they have especially been a challenge for Kyiv as it faces critical manpower shortages.
To address this problem, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has lowered the mobilization age from 27 to 25, but the Biden administration has pushed Kyiv to lower it even more to expand the number of civilians who can fight. So far, Kyiv has been unwilling to do that.
Ukraine is not isolated in grappling with manpower challenges. Russia faces its own mobilization issues. They are much less urgent than Kyiv’s, but Moscow is taking serious casualties on the battlefield, raising questions about troop sustainment and replacement down the road.
These human wave tactics come at a tremendously high cost. Conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, said earlier this month that Russia’s commitment to maintaining its theater-wide initiative in Ukraine is putting strains on its domestic labor pool.
The “constrained labor pool is likely unable to sustain this increased casualty rate in the medium-term,” they wrote in a war update.
Russia experienced its highest number of casualties in any month of the war in November, averaging more than 1,500 soldiers killed and wounded every day, Britain’s defense ministry said in an intelligence update earlier this month, citing Ukrainian military figures.
This made November the most costly month of the conflict for the Russian military, with nearly 46,000 total casualties, Britain’s defense ministry said. It also marked the fifth straight month that Moscow saw an increase in its monthly losses. ISW said that the West needs to be boosting support to increase Russian losses, which are not sustainable.
“The high rate of casualties is likely reflective of the higher tempo of Russian operations and offensives,” the British defense ministry said of the losses, adding that Moscow will likely continue to see over 1,000 soldiers killed and wounded every day as its forces push along the front lines.
Russia employs Soviet-style tactics in which any gained ground justifies the losses, no matter how heavy. It sends wave after wave of soldiers, offering undermanned and undersupplied Ukrainian units little rest or respite. Such tactics have been seen in Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Pokrovsk, among other places.
The Russian leadership has signaled it is willing to suffer these losses in a grinding, attritional campaign that is just not to Ukraine’s advantage, given that it is the smaller combatant with fewer resources to throw into this fight.
Massicot said that even though Russia is suffering its highest casualty rates of the Ukraine war right now, Moscow is still applying overwhelming pressure on the Ukrainian forces trying to hold the line against continuous Russian attacks, and these attacks are taking ground.
“The casualties are not causing a cessation of this tactic or these waves of attacks,” she said.
Russia is trying to advance against Ukrainian defensive positions in several different directions of the front. One important area of focus is the city of Pokrovsk, a key logistics and rail hub that Moscow is closing in on.
Russia is also trying to push Ukrainian forces out of its own Kursk region, which Kyiv invaded in a stunning move in early August. Thousands of North Korean soldiers have been deployed to this area in recent weeks to help Moscow with its efforts, putting more stress on Ukrainian troops struggling to hold territory.
US and Ukrainian officials have confirmed that North Korean soldiers have engaged in combat alongside Russian forces in Kursk. They have also suffered losses in battle, in part because they don’t have any recent experience with this kind of war.
