Putin’s Cannon Fodder

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In Ukraine, as war with Russia grinds on, one question has become decisive: Which side will outlast the other, especially as both face another grueling winter? One thing that Russia has in ample supply is men—but how Russia treats its soldiers is having an impact on the battlefield, argues Dara Massicot.

Dara has studied the Russian military for years; first for the Defense Department and later at RAND and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. My colleague Kate Brannen sat down with her to discuss how the human dimension to this war provides clues about where it might be headed next. 

KATE BRANNEN

Dara, thank you so much for joining us today.

DARA MASSICOT 

Thanks for having me.

KATE BRANNEN

As we head into winter, the central question driving the war in Ukraine seems to be: How long can each side sustain this war, or does one side have the ability to outlast the other? To dig into this, I thought we should start with what’s going on today on the battlefield. What can you tell us about the Ukrainian counteroffensive? After about four months we know the front lines haven’t changed much. But what effect has the counteroffensive had on the Russian military?

DARA MASSICOT 

You’re right. October marks the fourth month of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. They have made some limited gains in the south, in Zaporizhzhya. It’s been slowed by complex and active Russian defenses that have been set up since the fall of last year, so they have not probably made as much progress as they hoped. But they are still taking active cuts at the Russian military in very precise ways. So there’s the frontline engagement. There’s also the deep battle or deep strikes on Russian sites behind the lines in Crimea, in occupied Ukraine, with a mixture of counter-battery fire and precision strikes. So even though there’s not much changing lately on the ground, there is still damage being done.

In terms of what’s going on with the Russians, for the last two or three weeks they have launched several localized offensives in Donetsk and Luhansk. They are making slow progress in their attempts to encircle the town of Avdiivka, near Donetsk. Now, in this process, they have lost several battalions of equipment and personnel while fighting for this town, which doesn’t hold a lot of strategic significance. I think it’s mostly to even out their frontline; it’s to try to provide some additional fire control over a few specific routes in the area. But again, they are paying a very high price for this. Ukrainian brigades defending Avdiivka are at risk of being encircled, and they’re paying a price, too.

KATE BRANNEN

If they take the city, how do you think the Russians will portray it? Will they claim it as a bigger victory than maybe it is?

DARA MASSICOT

There’s any number of ways that they could try to spin this. It’s not an accomplishment, given what they’ve paid for it. I mean, there’s losses in war, but it just seems like they’re throwing capital resources and human resources at this that they don’t actually have. They cannot sustain this for every 30 kilometers of Ukrainian territory that they want to reclaim.

KATE BRANNEN

It’s clear—and you’ve talked about this—that the casualty numbers are extremely high. How can listeners kind of wrap their heads around this level of casualties? Can you compare it to what the U.S. military has sustained in the recent wars it’s fought?

DARA MASSICOT

It’s hard to verify the exact number. The Ukrainians have said somewhere between 5,000 to 6,000 casualties and 400 pieces of equipment. As far as I know, the last update today—on commercial imagery—puts that number somewhere between 100 and 150 confirmed vehicle losses. Going from that as a floor, just those, that’s anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 casualties either killed or severely wounded. So to sustain that amount of casualties in two or three weeks—we don’t have recent experience with this. These are like World-War-II levels of fatalities. 

KATE BRANNEN

Let’s switch gears just a little bit as we think about how Russia is sustaining its side of the war. Tell us a little bit about its military-industrial capacity and what steps it’s taking to make sure it continues to have the equipment and weapons it needs as it burns through them so fast on the battlefield.

DARA MASSICOT

Russia has been ramping up its defense industrial base for the past year. Once they declared mobilization is when we really saw that change. They are now producing more on a few different metrics. If we’re talking about artillery shells, they are estimated to bring their production up anywhere from 1.5 million to upwards of 2 million artillery shells per year, potentially by 2024. They are repairing armored vehicles at a faster rate than expected. They are also producing missiles at around triple the rate that they were in 2022. And what that allows them to do is to produce a few dozen intermediate- or long-range PGMs—precision guided munitions—and they’ve been launching them at Ukraine, basically rolling out of the factory and loading them and launching them. 

In terms of what else they’re doing, they have also recently received ammunition from the North Koreans. This was a byproduct of the big push from defense minister Sergey Shoigu and Vladimir Putin earlier this summer to either visit North Korea or host Kim Jong Un. Depending on who you ask, whether it’s NATO or whether it’s the United States, the estimate that they may be getting from the North Koreans is around 350,000 artillery shells, for now. And to put that number into context, at the rate of fire that the Russians are at, which is a very high rate of fire—about 10,000 rounds a day—that’s a month, a month and a half. But to put that number into context in terms of the United States, 350,000 shells is slightly higher than what we can produce in one year, assuming a rate of 24,000 shells a month. So it’s not good from an artillery production perspective.

KATE BRANNEN

I’ve seen some coverage of the role that North Korea is now playing—some people say it’s a sign of Russian weakness that they have to turn to the North Koreans, while others say, well, Ukraine is also having to turn to partners to get what it needs. How do you view that move on Russia’s part? Is it a source of strength or a sign of its weakness?

DARA MASSICOT

I think that’s exactly right; Ukraine is dependent, in most respects, on being supplied from its partners right now, particularly with reference to artillery shells. 

Is this a sign of Russian weakness? I would say it would be if they didn’t have a functioning defense industrial base that can produce for them at a rate that outpaces Ukraine’s and also outpaces the West.

KATE BRANNEN

When you step back, is it possible to say one side has an edge over the other in terms of its ability to replenish weapons and equipment?

DARA MASSICOT

Just from a numbers game, Russia is at an advantage here with sustainment and production capacity. Now, some of the sanctions are hurting their more advanced components. But they’re not giving up; they’re creating shell companies, they’re getting subcomponents from China and other places so they can continue to do this. They are able to domestically produce a significant number of artillery rounds and make repairs. So that sets them at the edge. 

How does Ukraine mitigate this? Well, in several different ways. Ukrainian counter-battery fire is enabled by really successful drone usage. Ukraine is being supported by the West with intelligence and other information provided to them. They are using their PGMs in a very methodical way that is very damaging to Russian logistics and Russian command posts. So Ukraine can undercut some of that numerical advantage. But it can’t compensate just for the sheer volume, from that quantitative perspective.

KATE BRANNEN

You wrote a wonderful piece for us last spring called “What Russia Got Wrong” that looks closely at the decision-making and the problems that went into the start of the war. But there is also a really great piece that I returned to a lot that you wrote early on in the war, in May 2022, called “The Russian Military’s People Problem,” which looks closely at how the government treats its military and the people who serve in it. So just to start here, what’s so toxic about the culture within the Russian military?

DARA MASSICOT

I’m always making sure, as much as I can, to not judge from my perspective as an American—because it’s like apples and oranges—but to understand Russians in the context of themselves. And what is really striking to me, and other people who have followed the Russian military for 20 years now, is that they did spend about 15 years—a lot of money, a lot of policies—to try to eradicate some of the brutality that is a holdover from the Soviet or even tsarist military; to reduce corruption, to reduce hazing, to reduce this brutal command style. 

And there was progress that was made. They knew it was not compatible for them to have a professional, enlisted military and treat people this way—people will not sign up. So there was that recognition. It was early in the process—10 or 15 years into it, max—where there was progress. And then they went to Ukraine and they defaulted to their old patterns. Just the same old stuff, not telling the force what they were going to do; that they were going to war until, in many cases, the day in advance. I really cannot overstate the mistake that this was for them, strategically. 

The other thing that I’m thinking about in real time here is how much of that was predicated on Russian intelligence assessments that they had hundreds of people who were willing to be this puppet government for them. Or, they had all this intelligence that the Ukrainians would not fight back, or were not prepared to fight back, and that the West wouldn’t get involved. I mean, Russian intelligence, even within the Russian power ministry community in Moscow, is not viewed as always communicating accurate results or accounts. So for them to assume that that all checked out and all that intelligence work was lock-tight was another huge mistake on their part.

KATE BRANNEN

So they’re lying to themselves about themselves, but also lying to themselves about Ukraine and how it would react.

DARA MASSICOT

Yes. And if we’re taking this back to February 2022, they could probably look at the government in Kyiv at the time, who really didn’t start preparing for an invasion until right before then. [The Russians] could look at their sources, they could look at what some of the [Ukrainian] military units were doing, and conclude that [the Ukrainians] weren’t prepared, they weren’t ready. This was a story that they could plausibly tell themselves. And they were already anchoring on their belief that the Ukrainians wouldn’t fight back. So you can see how these things started rapidly compounding to where [the Russians] felt like they had properly assessed the situation, because they saw what they wanted to see.

KATE BRANNEN

When we think about the both sides being able to sustain what they need to for this war, part of that is morale. On the Ukrainian side, we know morale has been, from the start, quite high, and continues to be. But it’s cloudier on the Russian side for me. How important is morale to a military’s performance, and how do you judge Russian morale right now?

DARA MASSICOT

Morale is really important and we know that. I mean, the Ukrainians have no other choice. Look at the alternatives to how Ukrainians are treated under Russian occupation—you know, whether it’s torture centers or being sent through filtration camps back into Russia or stealing children, all of these things. I mean, they’re on death grounds, they are fighting, they’re committed to this; you compare that with what’s going on in Russian units right now. 

And here I want to talk about the complicated issue of Russian morale. Yes, Russian morale is poor. Their commanders are abusive, or absent, or extorting them for money for leave that they are entitled to have. But that being said, their baseline for what is acceptable treatment is far lower than what Western militaries would tolerate. And by that I mean they have not experienced a whole lot of positive treatment, and they don’t expect a lot of positive treatment. Even with their morale the way that it is, they’re still able to attack the Ukrainian forces, they’re still able to launch artillery shells on them, they’re still able to conduct operations. What this means, though, is that they’re not doing it at a very effective level, or what they could be capable of if their command was different. 

I think it’s important to know that, yes, Russian desertions are up; yes, there are instances where people are not following orders, and they’re just kind of ignoring them. But there’s not this massive groundswell where everybody’s going to pick up and just start walking back to the east for Moscow—that’s not happening. It’s not happening because there are blocking battalions; for those of you who know your Soviet history, these are units with the express purpose of shooting deserters and preventing them from leaving. And I think it’s important not to wishcast—to wish that they would just crack and break and this whole thing would be over, when they’re resilient in their own way to this kind of poor treatment.

KATE BRANNEN

I’m curious to know how the culture of the Russian military has evolved over the course of the war, and what indicators you look at to determine where it stands, the health of it.

DARA MASSICOT

I think that’s a really important question. I’ve talked with my colleagues about this, where I’ve tried to find what part of the Russian army, or Russian airborne, or Russian SOF [Special Operations Forces] that still exists in the way that I understood it before the war in terms of personnel, because the losses have been so significant. And they have replenished them with mobilized Russian civilians; they have raided jails, so you have a lot of felons, you have violent criminals, you have people with substance abuse issues now in the military, too. And it is changing the character of the Russian army. I think this is a really significant issue that’s going to come back and bite them—it’s already starting. But once the active phase of this war is over, whenever and however that is, this will be a social crisis. 

How it’s changing—there are a few different ways to think about answering that question. There is a caste system, there has always been a caste system in the Russian army. But now it’s becoming more multi-layered. You have your prewar group, where they consider themselves professionals—like, “we signed up”—and they think that they’re at the top. Then you have volunteers who are signing up for money. And then you have this group from prisons—inmates. This was a Wagner tactic, and the Ministry of Defense adopted it as well. And those second two groups, they’re bringing in with them some of the problems that they had in the Russian prison system or in their life before being mobilized. 

There are now reports coming from different sources, but it paints a very similar picture: these other groups have substance abuse problems, in particular with synthetic amphetamines. And it gives them energy, it’s almost like ecstasy, so it improves their morale temporarily—but then there’s a crash that comes afterward and they get violent. This is happening on the front lines. The kontraktniki [contract soldiers] complain about these Storm-Z units; they complain about these inmates being junkies. There is self-medicating that involves drinking alcohol and that seems to be culturally acceptable, but there is a drug abuse issue happening. I don’t want to overstate it because I don’t know the percentage of it, but even doctors in Russia are saying that these veterans are coming home and they’re addicted to uppers, they’re addicted to speed, and it makes them agitated and violent.

KATE BRANNEN

As Russia launched its invasion, I know you and others couldn’t believe what you were seeing. You weren’t surprised so much that Putin decided to invade, but because the way the military went about doing it went against Russian military doctrine—and really, common sense—in a lot of ways. What did they do or not do that was so surprising to you?

DARA MASSICOT 

In their doctrine, you lead with airstrikes, you lead with air power. And once your enemy is degraded to a certain percentage or certain capability, then you commit your army. But that’s not what they did. On day one, they committed everything at one time. So that was an indicator that things went wrong. 

But an interesting indicator, since we are chatting about that time period—and this was one of the first moments where I knew something was wrong—was about a month before the war started. They were loading up all the soldiers onto trains to reunite them with their equipment that was parked near Ukraine at that point. The soldiers were in many cases back in Siberia or wherever, and I was watching them say goodbye to their families—and it was just normal, like, “I’m just going to go for a training thing, I’ll see you later,” really casual. I remember seeing that and thinking, “Oh my God, they didn’t tell them.” I’m not surprised that they didn’t tell them because that’s been their pattern before. But to make this kind of bet with all of the army, all of the airborne, and to not have informed them—I mean, it’s just so wildly irresponsible, even for them. 

But how have they learned and recovered from that? They are capable of learning, and I’d say that the most experimentation is happening at the tactical level, or maybe the operational level. Strategically, back in Russia, I still see lags. By that I mean with the command in Rostov, with Shoigu and [Valery] Gerasimov and his immediate deputies—I think that Gerasimov in particular is committed to the idea of going on offensives. And as soon as he feels like he has artillery shells, as soon as he feels like he has a few thousand mobilized people, he immediately commits them into some kind of offensive that goes poorly. We saw this earlier this year; we’re seeing it again now.

KATE BRANNEN

This is what’s going on in Avdiivka.

DARA MASSICOT

Yes, this is what is going on in Avdiivka right now. There has always been a bit of a distortion about Ukrainian performance and Russian performance in the media—you know, the Russians are these hapless clowns and everything they do stupid, and Ukrainians get it right all the time. The reality is a bit different on both sides. So it’s hard to cut through the curated information that we’re being shown by both parties to try to determine where reality here is. 

The Russians are adapting many tactics they’ve seen the Ukrainians use against them; they’ve integrated that. They’re making advancements in their drone use, and that’s having an impact as well. Are they capable at this point of turning a huge corner, and being capable of really sophisticated combined-arms operations? No. But they are capable of throwing a lot of weapons at Ukraine. And the Ukrainians are the first ones to say, “This is really concerning. They’re going to throw missiles at us this winter, and they’re going to try to grind down our air defenses. They keep stockpiling people in occupied Ukraine, and this is going to be hard for us to deal with.” So the Ukrainians who are experiencing them up close are saying this organization is very dangerous. And I think we should all listen to their voices.

KATE BRANNEN

What would you say right now is the current Russian military objective?

DARA MASSICOT

This is a working theory of mine, but I think Gerasimov is still fixated on acquiring all of Luhansk and Donetsk. I’m trying to make sense of why he keeps pushing forward in these areas, despite the fact that his forces have lost that kind of offensive capacity. I think that’s what he feels like he owes Putin, or maybe what he promised him. This is just a working theory, based on what I can see. 

Their other goal this winter—and this is a concern of mine—is that they haven’t been firing a lot of missiles at the same rate at Ukraine for the last couple of months, even though they’re producing them. So I’m worried that now they have triple-digit missiles sitting somewhere that they’re going to start launching in a pretty large way. And the Ukrainians have voiced their concerns about this, too. They think it could happen starting in November, with Russia launching at cities, launching again at the power to make life horrible. That is stressful; that is a strain on Ukrainian air defenses.

KATE BRANNEN

Let’s talk a little bit about the possibilities of another Russian mobilization—which is the other thing that Russia really has the ability to throw at this, which is just men. Are you expecting another one? Is it a matter of “when” and not “if,” and what do you think the time frame is?

DARA MASSICOT

I think if it was up to Putin—and it is—he would not want to conduct another mobilization before his own election in March. And it’s not like he’s not going to “win,” but I don’t think he wants to introduce any more question marks before that process.

KATE BRANNEN

There is some political cost to him in doing this. While it doesn’t mean risking the election there, it does introduce risk.

DARA MASSICOT

It does. And so their preference is to just keep what remains of those 300,000 from last year and just keep them indefinitely. They notionally get two weeks off every six months, but that is not really being consistently applied. Sometimes they actually have to bribe their commander to allow them to go home for their two weeks. 

In terms of do they need to [mobilize], there are a few different signals that are coming out designed to confuse people like me who try to make sense of all this madness. Defense Minister Shoigu has said that 300,000 or close to 400,000 are going to sign contracts with the Russian military this year. I have a lot of questions about how he’s counting that number. I think it’s entirely possible that those mobilized folks are on the ledger as that, and any of those mercenaries that he forced to sign up with the MOD [Ministry of Defence] could also be on that ledger. 

Long story short, I think they’re going to take stock of where they are after this offensive near Avdiivka and other places comes to a close and see what their new requirements are. And if that number is low, I think they’ll keep trying to do it through volunteer means, trying to entice people. If the numbers are extremely high, and they feel exposed next year, I think that they could potentially be needing to do another round. For right now, I don’t see the same type of critical situation on their lines that would force them to do another 300,000 right now. The way that it was last year, it was pretty critical for them. 

KATE BRANNEN

Were there any lessons from the last mobilization about how you integrate brand new people into the force this quickly—things they did wrong, things they did right—that will change how they do it this time?

DARA MASSICOT

Yes, they did learn from that experience. One of the first things they did was tighten up the intake process. They’ve made a lot of that process digital now so they can more easily grab people that they need. In terms of how they train and integrate them; yes, there are multiple training grounds that are devoted to training these individuals. The problem is that some of these individuals, again, are coming from prisons, where they come with violence. We’re talking rapists and murderers and drug dealers—like, this is who they’re getting in, and whoever else off the street who signs up. 

So the discipline at these training facilities is bad. Those in charge of training them are either recently discharged from the front in Ukraine and they have untreated mental combat trauma—or they’re trainers, and they don’t know how to maintain discipline over these guys. They’re not 18-year-olds that can be easily scared; these are middle-aged hardened criminals, and it’s hard for them to get discipline over them. 

And there are a few cases from defector accounts—verified by commercial imagery with work done by the Conflict Intelligence Team—that they’ve dug pits into the ground on these training facilities inside Russia. I can see them. And they just put people in the pits because they don’t know what to do to maintain discipline. So, this is not going well. They’re also doing that inside occupied Ukraine, where they’re just digging pits and they’re putting people in pits until they get them back to Russia and put them through some kind of court-martial process. So there’s discipline, but it’s old-style, brutal discipline.

KATE BRANNEN

If they do another mobilization, does that give them access to the younger recruits that you can shape and mold in a more traditional fashion? Is it this reliance on the voluntary and the prison recruitment that is leading to these problems?

DARA MASSICOT

It is. But I think about how they’re using these recruits—from the prisons, and a lot of the mobilized, they’re using them as part of these Storm-Z units. Those are infantry units that they use to draw fire. I mean, this is the definition of cannon fodder. 

This is very cynical, but this is how I presume they view this: “If I’m going to launch these kinds of Storm-Z battalions, it is less of a liability to me, the Kremlin, if I do this with prison labor than 19-year-old men, 20-year-old men, who could still go on and have careers and have children.” It is the height of cynicism, but I have to assume that these kinds of calculations are taking place based on the pattern of what we’re seeing play out.

KATE BRANNEN

Right. And I realize I have my own American military bias—which is, the amount that we invest in our new recruits, where you’re trying to develop your human capacity. And that’s not what this is really about.

DARA MASSICOT

At this point, no. Pre-war, there was money and policy and training programs available to try to develop the human capital and make it professional. From a policy perspective, they did legitimately want that. Where it fell apart, of course, was the execution, and some intractable elements of Russian military culture that they could not overcome. At this point in the war, this is like survival mode. This is existential. And we’re going to grab bodies off the street, we’re going to give them a few weeks of training, maybe a few months in some cases, and then we’re going to throw them in. 

Where I noticed it playing out is that Russia is able to do unit rotations, and I don’t think we should downplay that. They were in the south near Zaporizhzhya, and were able to do a few thousand personnel rotations along the frontline where the [Ukrainian Air Force] is attacking them. So there’s capacity there—there is capacity in Donetsk and Luhansk, for them to allocate, by my count, single-digit brigade or regiment elements against these offensives. So there’s padding on the manpower issue. From just raw numbers, if they wanted to do more mobilization, they have millions that they can pull from. So this is an ambient and serious concern. 

KATE BRANNEN

To close, I wanted to step back and think a little bit about how we know what we know about an adversary’s military, seeing that a lot of people misunderstood or were misled about what the Russian military was going to be able to accomplish when it invaded Ukraine. Are there things you can’t know about an armed force until you actually see it in combat? And thinking about that and the lessons from Ukraine, how should that realization play into how the United States is thinking about the Chinese military?

DARA MASSICOT

You know, we had seen the Russians in multiple conflicts in the previous decade, and they were very different in their character, in their size, who they were fighting. But nevertheless, there were some core capabilities that they demonstrated the ability to do—which in Ukraine, based on how they decided to launch this war, and based on how secrecy was more important than actual preparations, a lot of that went out the window. I’d say that in terms of how we judge military power, whether it’s from China, or whether it’s Hamas, or the Taliban, or North Korea, especially if we’re looking at authoritarian regimes—what is that military’s relationship with the truth? How are they able to communicate unexpectedly bad news up the chain? Do they have the freedom to speak the truth to power so that they can make the best operational choices? 

In Russia, we knew before the war that they did not have that capacity. And I would suspect that it’s very similar in a system like North Korea or China that that has a direct negative impact when they come into contact with the real world on the battlefield. I would say that in terms of other aspects of military power, you have to look at the surrounding architecture around the force. Look at the logistics; look at the sea for ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance]; look at what they can sustain with their targeting, with their satellite imagery processing; look at their intelligence. 

For me, as a military analyst—and I think this is just based on how things work with information available publicly, some information that’s available privately—there’s a tendency to over-focus on what’s happening in the capitals. But the real worry is what’s happening in the military units, what’s happening within the squadron, what’s happening within the division, what’s happening within the fleet headquarters. That’s where the details are; that’s where you can get a sense of training capacity, cohesion, morale, corruption, graft—that’s where all of those secrets hide and live. So I would say that’s really important. 

And then finally, just from a broader perspective, is avoiding the perils of wishcasting. That’s been really important in this war, is that there’s a certain amount of wishcasting or wishing things would happen. Like, “the Russians are so corrupt or inept that this will all fall apart. This is a house of cards, they can’t sustain this. The military is going to crack, and they’re going to go home.” I mean, that’s wishing for something, but that’s not actually the case. That is not what’s happening on the ground. So whether it’s overestimating your enemy or underestimating their sophistication, the goal always has to be checking yourself, making sure that you’re not using your opinion or what you hope to be true, but just really clear-eyed, hard-nosed, take a neutral stance and evaluate it for what it is.

KATE BRANNEN

Dara, thank you so much for joining us, for doing this, and for your invaluable analysis. I can’t wait to see what you write next for us.

DARA MASSICOT

Thank you so much.