Russia has successfully used infantry for offensive operations on the front in Ukraine, but there is a critical lack of tanks for effective attacks in battle, Forbes magazine wrote in its analysis.
The reason is simple: Ukrainian drones. There are so many Ukrainian drones constantly on the front line that Russian armored vehicles cannot leave their cover without becoming targets for their attacks. And where the Russians have advanced, they have largely done so on foot and have suffered huge losses in manpower.
At the same time, some Russian commanders are still giving orders for mechanized attacks, but, as one Russian blogger put it, “they are not gaining anything” of this.
But just because the Russians can no longer safely use tanks does not mean they cannot continue to advance towards Pokrovsk and Chasov Yar. It means they will most likely continue to advance on foot, paying in blood for every meter of ground.
For now, Russia has enough troops and a willingness to trade their lives for small but steady gains in eastern Ukraine. What the Kremlin does not have is a large number of tanks or any means to use them effectively on the battlefield.
In the Donbas, the Russian army is advancing slowly but steadily. According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, since the start of the full-scale war, more than 9,800 Russian tanks have been completely destroyed or damaged at the front. This figure has not been confirmed by independent Western sources. Putin’s army is also suffering a huge number of casualties – According to Kyiv, the number of eliminated soldiers is over 815,000.