Why Russia's military operations have fallen short of expectations

when moscow launched its invasion there were concerns that ukraine's military would be quickly outnumbered and overwhelmed but ukrainian forces amounted to fierce resistance and the war is still going on more than two months later here to talk more about this is michael wise he is the news director at new lines magazine that's a global affairs magazine that specializes in long-form reporting michael thank you so much for joining us um so how is the russian army holding up right now not very well um according to the uh british ministry of defense intelligence they have lost uh 25 of the invasion force that they committed to ukraine this is about 120 battalion tactical groups that have been rendered combat ineffective i mean these are staggering numbers for a campaign that's now end during its third month much less for a country that was said to have possessed the world's second most powerful military they have comported themselves atrociously on the battlefield i was in kiev a few weeks ago and i also reported from a town called bordeanca where the russians occupied but before occupying they basically targeted civilian-only infrastructure there were no military barracks or facilities in that town so this is a campaign of slaughter and extermination that has gone sideways for them militarily and i'm seeing today uh in fact this morning the ukrainians destroyed two uh raptor patrol boats uh manned by the russian navy using turkish drones that ukraine doesn't have a navy and for a country that has no navy they've already sunk russia's flagship uh a battle cruiser of the the black sea fleet and now two patrol boats in one day um so i i think it's no wonder it's not not to uh overstate matters at all to say that what russia thought it could do and what a lot of us in the west had anticipated russia being able to do they have not done at all so michael i understand reporting about a high-ranking russian official who was in a war zone in ukraine um what can you tell us about that well not just a high-ranking russian official this is the chief of the general staff um of russia's armed forces so literally the top officer in their military and he was it's been confirmed that he was in uh isiam which is uh in the north northeast of ukraine this is a town that they the russians took a few weeks ago they haven't really managed to break out of it though to take more terrain this is so to complete their new strategic objective of occupying essentially all of the donbas but general valeri garasamoff this is a guy who's been in his post since 2012 he authored a white paper several years ago which made a lot of hay in the analytic community basically uh envisaging russia's way of warfare largely as a reflection of how uh general gaurasimov saw america going to war in iraq and afghanistan but i don't need to to tell anyone watching the show that america doesn't go to war by sending the the chief of the joint chiefs into a combat zone and uh the ukrainian military intelligence suggested to me yesterday that they might have lightly injured him in an artillery strike which killed another general and took out as many as 200 uh senior staff officers there so again they're not just sending rank and file they're sending essentially their command into into the battle zone yeah i've actually been quite surprised by the number of high-ranking russian military personnel who have died like every so few weeks or so we hear about another person i'm always surprised that they're that vulnerable right you know um not in general has been counting so far i mean it's it's staggering losses for them so let me ask you a question about that what sort of impact then does a loss like that have on the ability of the russian military to you know strategize and plan and lead yeah i mean look the russians have been bedeviled by a host of problems uh not least of which is corruption which has rotted out i mean virtually all levels of russian state and society uh it's sort of it beggars belief that we couldn't have imagined in the west that this would have been a major pathology eating away at the heart of the russian military industrial complex so you know it's the kind of thing where they say they're going to build a hundred tanks and only 85 get built or 70 get built and the money that was allocated for that program is simply just siphoned off the top by warrant officers and majors and colonels but another huge problem has been logistics you know uh it's not enough to commit firepower and manpower into a war zone you have to you have to fuel the trucks you have to make sure the wheels and the treads on your tanks are are combat ready and that they've been maintained well you have to do things like not go into uh you know a war zone or battle space in the middle of spring when the the ground is thawing out and everything is just turned to mud ukrainians remember that column of armored vehicles that was snaking in uh north west of kiev uh everyone was terrified of this ukrainians thought this was the biggest joke because basically they they blew up a dam and flooded the zone and these trucks got stuck in the mud for several weeks and were simply the ukrainians were able to just pick them off so the question is are they going to have an easier time in the east where they're more entrenched that is the russians uh since 2014 they've been occupying whole swaths of this terrain but so far look we're we're about into week two or three of this massive offensive for don boss and the russians have made minimal progress and today i've seen credible evidence that they're being pushed now out of harking all the way back up to the border so the ukrainians are taking the fight to them so michael then uh given all that you've just told us uh given that there's this uk ministry of defense report that uh labels most of the russian troops and materiel combat ineffective and given that on the 9th of this month there is supposedly going to be a very large military parade in moscow to memorialize russia's victory in world war ii it had been postponed so some 11 000 russian troops parading through the streets given all that we've talked about uh help me understand that and if you're vladimir putin surrounded by you know 11 000 members of the military who are by all accounts demoralized facing uh facing um crushing losses uh how concerning would it be for him well he seems to be kind of trapped inside his own head um whether or not this is just a function of getting bad intelligence uh where he's being told everything's going swimmingly and and we're achieving all our objectives or putin simply doesn't care uh if if ukraine turns into a meat grinder he will send tens of thousands possibly hundreds of thousands of soldiers to their death or to become casualties taken off the battlefield rendered combat infective you know the funny thing about this victory day parade that's due to take place on may 9th is all of their most sophisticated and modernized weaponry will not be on display because they've lost it all in ukraine i'm seeing you know railway cards cars filled with i mean world war ii era relics that the russians are now committing to theater because they've run out of all their best stuff uh precision guided munitions you know one of the things that ukraine's deputy defense minister told me a few weeks ago is everything that the ukrainians have shot out of the sky whether it's aircraft helicopters drones or cruise missiles when they open it up the guts of these these devices the electronics are all come from the united states and europe so sanctions are going to take a big bite out of russia's ability to basically select targeting packs and hit the things that they want to hit this is one of the reasons they're just kind of blasting everything in sight they don't have that kind of uh you know capability anymore so yeah look the real question here is what happens on may 9th does putin announce some kind of pyrrhic victory and go home probably not will he announce mass mobilization and a declaration of all-out war it's important to remember he has couched this campaign for the last two months and change as a quote special military operation the minute he declares open war on ukraine they can start calling up conscripts and you know 18 year olds from siberia are going to get called in and you know go to the front and and fight the ukrainians however are not afraid of this um i mean it's sort of an extraordinary thing when you go to this country uh you know all of the the doom and and the misery and the atrocities that we've seen and that have been exhaustively reported by myself included that has to be counterposed with a an incredible degree of morale optimism resiliency humor i mean ukrainians have been just dripping with contempt and derision for for their adversary they think the russians are a busted flush uh and and there is absolute hatred at all levels now for for this country these countries used to be culturally intertwined in a way where you know if you lived in ukraine you had relatives in russia and you know you you called them up and everybody kind of got along i think what putin has done is going to resound for generations to come he has effectively destroyed any leverage that russia has had in this country historically politically economically and that's not something he's going to regain sort of the mass irony of this whole thing is so many of the things that he has railed against he's actually sort of fortifying nato is now sort of more uh you know on the same page than ever before ukraine has no interest in being part of russia at all i mean it's all the opposite and and michael three days after victory day uh finland is going to start its candidacy for nato so three days after victory day putin is going to wake up and see the initial stage of russia gaining an 830 mile border with another nato member state exactly the opposite contingency you know that he was seeking by going to war and seeing so much yes michael yesterday um given uh this victory day parade that uh president putin is going to display on the main on may 9th which is to celebrate russia's victory in world war ii given that russia lost 20 million people during world war ii given his love as nostalgia for the old soviet state yes or no do you think that vladimir putin could conceivably not care if millions of his countrymen and women die in this conflict with ukraine well it's important to know the soviet union lost that number of people in world war ii and by the way quite a lot of them were ukrainians and quite a lot of them were in countries that are now part of nato including the baltic states um but look this is a man who does not seem to care at all about his own people much less people in countries that his army or whatever you want to call this contingent of murderers rapists and thieves is occupying so no i don't think he has any compunction about sending as i said earlier 18 year olds from siberia to their death in in a not not even a far away land next door um and from from all the reporting i've seen from people who are very tapped in and who have a kind of good beat on what's happening inside not really the kremlin anymore because i think that the circle has narrowed to just a handful of people security hawks that he surrounds himself with this is a man of absolute certitude he does not care he thinks that that things are going to go his way in the mid to long term and i think it's it's um you know the west has now in a way that i frankly did not expect and could not have envisaged three months ago come together and said we're going to rob him of this opportunity i mean all the weapons systems the ukrainians have been begging for for years 155 millimeter artillery howitzers from the united states the czech republic uh the uk things like that multiple launch rocket systems they're now getting i mean this is the other side of the story right we're not just helping them defend themselves we are now creating ukraine we essentially without even they're having to join nato we are helping them modernize to such an extent that they are going to become a nato peer military through by the end of this war and that's that's basically what they wanted at the outset man michael wise this has been a great conversation it really has and we could keep talking obviously our producers are screaming at us we got to go but uh thank you and come back and talk to us again because this has really been an illuminating discussion we appreciate it

Channel: CBS News

Views: 1,966,206

Keywords: CBS News, video, live streaming, live video, russia, military, ukraine, war, troops

Id: w1eENwQOp_c

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Mon May 02 2022