Russia sends ill-trained draftees into combat amid losses, analysts say

Russia is funnelling newly drafted conscripts with little training to the front line in Ukraine’s east, while mounting intensified but ineffective attacks and suffering heavy casualties, according to the Ukrainian military and Western analysts.

Grisly videos of Russian infantry in poorly prepared positions being struck by artillery have partly supported those assertions, as has reporting in Russian news media of mobilised soldiers telling relatives about high casualty rates. The videos, filmed by Ukrainian drones, have not been independently verified, and their exact locations could not be determined.

The rubble of buildings destroyed by Russian bombs in Kupiansk-Vuzlovyi, in eastern Ukraine, on Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2022. (Finbarr O’Reilly/The New York Times)

President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced Friday that the draft he ordered on Sept 21, a chaotic effort that swept up some men who should have been exempt, had added 318,000 troops to Russia’s military, with 49,000 of them already in combat. But he did not acknowledge the widespread complaints of inadequate training and equipment, with some soldiers being killed within days of deployment.

Attention has shifted recently to the southern front, where Ukrainian forces are slowly closing in on the Russian-held city of Kherson, but the Kremlin is also pouring more troops into the eastern Donbas region, trying to halt recent Ukrainian advances while rebuilding ground forces that have been decimated by more than eight months of war.

A Ukrainian tank commander in the turret of his vehicle near Borova, Ukraine, Nov. 4, 2022. (Finbarr O’Reilly/The New York Times)

Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander of the Ukrainian military, said in a statement posted on the Telegram messaging app Thursday that Russian forces had tripled the intensity of their attacks along some parts of the front and were staging up to 80 assaults per day.

The scale of Russian losses on the ground is uncertain — as is the number of Ukrainian casualties. The Ukrainian military’s estimates of Russian casualties, which are seen as inflated, have increased sharply; on Friday, the military said more than 800 Russian soldiers had been wounded or killed over the previous 24 hours.

In Kherson, the Russian occupation administration that has controlled the city since February has largely withdrawn from it after pillaging municipal resources, and some military units have also pulled back, regrouping on the opposite, eastern bank of the Dnieper River. But Ukrainian military intelligence says that Russia has deployed about 40,000 soldiers to the western bank to stop the Ukrainian military from reclaiming the city.