Russia-Ukraine live updates: Western leaders pledge more military support as Russian troops reposition in east
A senior American defense official on Wednesday said the Biden administration has seen evidence of “significant morale issues” throughout Russia’s military, as it has confronted fierce resistance and weathered high casualties during its seven-week war in Ukraine.
“We don’t have perfect visibility on the morale of all Russian forces, but anecdotally, we know that throughout the force, in various units and in various places, they continue to have significant morale issues,” the official said Wednesday, during a briefing with reporters. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity in accordance with Pentagon guidelines.
Almost half of the Russian military’s enlisted troops are conscripts “who don’t receive a lot of training” and who have “been disillusioned by this war, weren’t properly informed, weren’t properly trained, weren’t ready — not just physically, but weren’t ready mentally — for what they were about to do,” the official said.
The Pentagon has also seen indications of frustration among higher-ranking officers. “[Officers are] frustrated with their troops’ performance, frustrated with their colleagues’ performance,” the defense official said. “There still are morale and unit-cohesion problems that are bedeviling the Russians, even as they now try to refit, resupply and focus on a more concentrated geographic area.”
U.S. and Ukrainian officials said last week that Russia had fully withdrawn its forces from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and the city of Chernihiv, to the north, after heavy bombardment of the cities and attempts to gain a foothold in Kyiv failed.
Pentagon officials say Russian forces that had been concentrated in the capital and some other cities have since moved to regroup in neighboring Belarus and Russia to focus the offensive more narrowly on the besieged southern city of Mariupol — where the city’s mayor recently estimated that Russia’s sustained assault had killed 10,000 of the city’s residents — as well as on the eastern Donbas region that has been under the control of Russian-backed separatists since 2014.
The defense official told reporters Wednesday that all Russian ground forces in Ukraine are in “an arc of southeastern Ukraine” that includes the contested Donbas region in the east, and then extending from there westward along the southern coast to Mykolaiv. “That’s where all their ground troops are,” the official said.