Moscow Boasts West Has No Weapons That Can Turn Ukraine War Around, While Kyiv Claims to Have Inflicted Half-Million Casualties on Russia

Fighters of the 53rd Battalion of the 141st Separate Infantry Brigade are serving in the Z
Getty Images
Oliver JJ Lane

Ukraine’s Western backers are sending new tranches of weapons and supplies to keep the nation in the fight, but Russia attempts to taunt the effort, insisting no weapon can overcome their invasion.

Boast and bluster from Russia on the Ukraine war as it attempts to persuade Western nations their continuing support for Ukraine is pointless and only leads to people being killed. The remarks come from Russian diplomat Maxim Buyakevich, per Moscow government media, in an apparent bid to persuade that resisting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is pointless.

Buyakevich is said to have stated: “Kiev’s sponsors have no weapons capable of drastically changing the situation on the ground. Decisions to send more batch of already combat-tested weapons will only protract the military confrontation, causing more deaths and destruction”.

The inadequacy of comparative weapons systems is tricky ground for Russia, which has lost its apex fighting units in colossal numbers since its invasion began and even now refuses to deploy its limited number of next-generation tanks, apparently for fear of losing them in combat. Where Russia has seen success is in absolute weight of numbers-type fighting, where its huge legacy stocks of artillery ammunition and ability to retrofit large air-drop bombs with rudimentary guidance-glide kits has allowed the Federation to pound Ukraine with high explosives.

Western allies of Ukraine, on the other hand, appear to have a comfortable lead in the technological sophistication of weapons systems but have struggled to deliver these weapons in sufficient quantities. Even the absolute simplest weapons like artillery shells which haven’t meaningfully changed in decades suffer from seriously constrained supply chains and an industrial base not optimised for wartime.

It isn’t as if Russia has been invulnerable to Western weapons so far either. Beyond losing thousands of tanks, per Ukrainian estimates it has also sustained approaching half a million military casualties. While the exact proportion of that figure being killed or injured is unknown, according to Kyiv’s official figures, the half-million figure for Russia’s armed forces will be reached in the coming days.

The estimate is considerably higher than some of those produced by Western analysis. A recent project put the number of confirmed Russian war dead at 50,000.

Russia’s goading on weapons comes as the United States said it would keep weapon deliveries to Ukraine flowing, and as Germany revealed it has sent more tanks to Ukraine. Included in that shipment were thousands of infantry weapons and over one and a half million rounds of ammunition, Germany said.

While Russia may boast the West has no weapons that could help decide the Ukraine war, one particular system that crawls glacially towards deployment is the F-16 jet fighter.

Ukraine has pleaded for the fighter since the first days of the war, and it was long dismissed by allies as impossible, but attitudes softened as the conflict ground on and last year a coalition of European states said they would donate over 60 airframes to Ukraine for self-defence.

The greatest stumbling block to that deployment has been the training of Ukrainian pilots to fly the warbirds, a process that in normal times takes years. But as reported this week, the first class of Ukrainian pilots have now graduated from training in Arizona. Those pilots would now travel to Europe to continue their training, Kyiv said.

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