The Russian invasion of Ukraine, a balance of forces favorable to Moscow

The Ukrainian armed forces find themselves vastly outnumbered and outgunned by their Russian opponents, despite increasing military aid to Kiev’s troops from Western countries.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country has concentrated 150,000 troops on the border with Ukraine in recent months, ordered a military invasion against the neighboring country on Thursday.

According to Western estimates, there are another 30,000 Russian soldiers in Belarus, who could attack Ukraine from the north. And Russia concentrated naval forces in the Black Sea and closed shipping in the Sea of ​​Azov.

For the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), based in London, the Russian armed forces have 900,000 soldiers, some two million reservists and more than half a million other forces.

For its part, Ukraine’s forces barely exceed the number of troops that Russia amassed on its borders: 196,000 troops in the armed forces, 900,000 reservists and 100,000 from other forces, according to the IISS.

Analysts further point out that the difference in firepower is even greater in terms of military hardware, as Russia’s nearly 16,000 armored personnel far outnumber the Ukrainian’s 3,300.

Artillery numbers show a similar difference, while the Ukrainian air force is a tenth the size of its Russian counterpart.

“The balance of military power is totally overwhelming” in favor of Moscow, according to François Heisbourg, special adviser to the Strategic Research Foundation (FRS) in Paris.

Western support for Ukraine

Kiev has benefited from significant Western military aid since the start of the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, including $2.5 billion from the United States ($400 million in 2021).

Until the outbreak of the current crisis, some US troops trained Ukrainian forces to use US equipment: light weapons, patrol boats and anti-tank missiles.

The UK has also been involved in troop training for several years and in January said it was sending offensive anti-tank weaponry, the first time it had supplied lethal weapons to Ukraine.

But Russia’s military has also undergone major reforms in recent years, after its soldiers were perceived to have performed less than brilliantly in the 2008 conflict with Georgia.

Reform “has made Russia a far more capable military power today than at any time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union”, point out the IISS analysts.

Commanders have also been able to gain valuable theater-of-war experience, especially during the deployment of Russian troops to Syria to support the Bashar al-Assad regime.

Analysts at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) claimed in a report in early February that Ukraine’s air defenses were “deficient” both in terms of quality and quantity.

In addition, the country faces the problem of sharing a nearly 2,000-kilometer land border with Russia, most of which is exposed to attack, and a 1,000-kilometer border with Belarus.

The “conventional military scale” is “firmly” on the Russian side, according to analysts at the Royal United Services Institute.

Ukraine has also been the target of repeated cyberattacks that the West has blamed on Russia and that experts say have the potential to cripple the country.

But RUSI analysts also noted that the “unconventional resistance threat” should worry Moscow, which would want to avoid a protracted and bloody conflict, especially in urban centers.

The Ukrainian government has invested heavily in promoting national unity and Kiev would like to “prolong the fighting” to the point where Moscow is plunged into a “embarrassing, messy, attrition fight”, they added.