How Ukrainian forces stress Russia’s “Death by a thousand cuts” tactic

• Ukraine faces critical workforce challenges on the battlefield.
• An analyst who recently returned from Ukraine said that Russia is trying to exploit this challenge using small assault waves.
• “It’s death by a thousand cuts. It’s very stressful for units that don’t have any crew,” she said.

Ukraine faces increasingly serious manpower challenges along the front line, and Russia is relying on brutal, if costly, tactics to stress Kiev’s defenses.

Dara Massicot, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Russia and Eurasia program, recently returned from a research trip to Ukraine, where he met with various units facing manpower shortages and other struggles.

“What units are experiencing from the Russians is a significant amount of tension from Russian tactics,” Massicot recounted from her trip to a podcasts this month with the Center for Strategic and International Studies earlier.

She said the Russians “attack (Ukrainians) in very small groups all the time, day and night. It’s death by a thousand cuts. It’s very stressful for units that don’t have any crew.”

Russia’s small assault wave attacks, sometimes called human wave attacks or meat attacks, were a problem for Ukraine throughout the conflict, but they have been particularly challenging for Kiev as it faces a critical manpower shortage.

To solve this problem, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did the age of mobilization has decreased from 27 to 25, but the Biden administration has pushed Kiev to lower it further to expand the number of civilians who can fight. So far, Kiev has been unwilling to do so.

Ukraine is not alone in facing workforce challenges. Russia faces its own mobilization problems. They are far less urgent than Kiev’s, but Moscow is taking serious losses on the battlefield, raising questions about sustaining and replacing troops en route.

These human wave tactics come at an extraordinarily 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-level initiative in Ukraine is putting pressure on the domestic labor pool.

“The limited workforce is likely to be unable to support this increased casualty rate in the medium term,” they wrote in a war update.

Russia suffered the highest number of casualties of any month of the war in November, with an average of more than 1,500 soldiers killed and wounded every day, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said information update earlier this month, citing Ukrainian military figures.

This made November the costliest month of the conflict for the Russian military, with almost 46,000 casualties in total, the British Ministry of Defense said. It also marked the fifth month in a row that Moscow saw its monthly losses increase. ISW said the West must boost support to increase Russian losses, which are not sustainable.

“The high casualty rate likely reflects the higher tempo of Russian operations and offensives,” Britain’s Ministry of Defense said of the casualties, adding that Moscow is likely to continue to see more than 1,000 soldiers killed and wounded each day as its forces continue . the front lines.

Russia uses Soviet-style tactics where any ground gained justifies losses, no matter how heavy. It is sent wave after wave of soldiersgiving the undermanned and undersupplied Ukrainian units little rest or respite. Such tactics have been seen in BakhmutAvdiivka and Pokrovsk, among other places.

The Russian leadership has signaled that it is willing to suffer these losses in a grinding, attrition campaign this is not to Ukraine’s advantage, given that it is the smaller combatant with fewer resources to throw at this fight.

Massicot said that while Russia is currently suffering the highest number of casualties from the war in Ukraine, Moscow is still applying overwhelming pressure on Ukrainian forces trying to hold the line against continued Russian attacks, and those attacks are gaining ground.

“Victims are not causing an end to these tactics or these waves of attacks,” she said.

Russia is trying to advance against Ukrainian defensive positions in several different directions of the front. An important area of ​​focus is the city of Pokrovska key logistics and rail hub where Moscow approaches.

Russia is also trying to push Ukrainian forces out of its own Kursk region, which Kiev invaded in a stunning move in early August. Thousands of North Korean soldiers were deployed in this area in recent weeks to aid Moscow in its efforts, putting more emphasis on Ukrainian troops fighting to hold the territory.

US and Ukrainian officials have confirmed that North Korean soldiers have engaged in combat alongside Russian forces at Kursk. They have also suffered losses in battle, in part because they don’t have anything recently experience with this type of warfare.