Will Russia lose its army in Ukraine?

Since the 2008 military intervention in Georgia, Russian conventional military power had been a powerful tool at the service of the Kremlin, both to intimidate its neighbors and to bring Russia back to the forefront of the international geopolitical scene. The successes recorded in Crimea and then in Syria created an aura of power that allowed Moscow to impose itself on several occasions in Europe but also in Africa. This same conventional power, backed by the immense deterrent force of the Russian nuclear arsenal, largely explains the sometimes timorous attitude of Westerners in support of Ukraine during the first weeks of the conflict, when very few believed that Kyiv could withstand the onslaught of Russian armor and aircraft, as well as their combined firepower.

Two months later, the situation is almost completely reversed. Not only did the Ukrainian armies manage to protect the capital Kyiv from a massive assault by 4 Russian armies, but the losses recorded by the Russian forces, whether documented in terms of equipment or estimated in terms of personnel, have profoundly changed the balance of power on the ground, even if the Ukrainian armies have also paid a heavy price for this heroic resistance. The fact is, while the West is now more actively supporting the Ukrainian forces with the shipment of an increasing number of increasingly sophisticated military equipment, they are also coming to believe that Ukraine can not only resist the Russian armies but , but to take victory and deprive Moscow of a significant part of its armed forces.

During the meeting held today at the American base at Ramstein in Germany, bringing together around the American Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, the representatives of some forty European and allied countries, the latter thus acted to profound changes concerning Western support for the Ukrainian armies. For Lloyd Austin, the objective of this aid is now to prevent Russia from threatening its neighbors with military power in the future, which implies the destruction of a sufficiently significant part of the Russian army deployed in Ukraine. To achieve this, the allies engage in a gradual westernization of the Ukrainian armies, by providing increasingly advanced equipment from Western industries and no longer equipment inherited from the Soviet era from former members of the Warsaw Pact. , so as to be able to increase this support without coming up against the inherently limited stock levels of Soviet equipment in the West.

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