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May 23, 2023Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Quibble, while I agree that Russia has more forces that they could theoretically use in Ukraine, one of the big problems they face is the amount of their forces that are totally unsuited to operating in Ukraine. For example, they could shutdown air defenses across most of Russia to send the operators to Ukraine, but they probably don't want to do that. Similarly, they could transfer all the personnel of the Strategic Rocket Forces to Ukraine, but I doubt they would want to do that either.

While there is an obvious mismatch in defense spending and manpower, Russia's problem is that a lot of its spending is committed to things that are important to its great/superpower pretensions but are useless against Ukraine. The Russian navy is largely useless. Aside from the dwindling Black Sea fleet and the missile corvettes in the Caspian, the surface warships and submarines of the Baltic, Pacific, and Northern fleets contribute virtually nothing to the fight against Ukraine. The SSBNs do nothing. The Strategic Rocket forces do nothing. The extensive air defense system inherited from the USSR does little, although it does help in that there are lots of S300 missiles both for SAM use and as second-rate surface to surface missiles.

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