According to Western officials and experts, the generals are pressuring the Russian president to make a decision
Putin has only a few days to decide: either he attacks or he withdraws. According to analysts who monitor Russian troops on the border with Ukraine, soldiers cannot stay away from their bases for long: they are camped in the cold, drink too much, are forced to buy food and sell diesel to locals. The capabilities of the army could degrade very quickly and the stalemate is increasingly playing against the Kremlin leader’s muscle display.
According to Western officials and experts cited by the “Guardian”, the generals are pressuring Putin to make a decision: either he moves the troops across the border and invades Ukraine, or he sends them back to the rest areas further south or in the west of Russia, tens or hundreds of kilometers away. A withdrawal of even a few kilometers would be interpreted by the West as a proof of the will to dialogue, but would instead have only practical reasons, due to logistical difficulties that perhaps the strategists of the Russian president had underestimated.
Once, when you wanted to know the status of enemy troops, you had to infiltrate spies who risked their lives to send some messages to their headquarters. Today everything is easier, and to know what is happening in the opponent’s camps, just follow the social networks. All the soldiers tell their friends and girlfriends how things are going, take selfies, complain like any soldier at the front, and give a precise and detailed description of their difficulties.
Analysts have deduced from this that the advanced and poorly protected positions from the cold can still be held only for a short period, five or six days at the most. Russian military scholar Rob Lee, of the War Studies Department at King’s College London, examined messages revealing the presence of at least 100 soldiers best camped in the halls of a train station 20 kilometers from the border, now without rations and forced to buy food in local shops.
Another intercepted message, from a resident of the Belarusian city of Khoyniki, 50 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, speaks of the troops encamped in the nearby forest and describes the soldiers as “people who drink a lot and sell large quantities of their diesel fuel “. The lack of discipline would be widespread, and tolerated by the officers in command.
Nick Reynolds, a field warfare expert at the Royal United Service Institute, noted that “if the troops are to be used, they will probably be very soon, as long as they are still fresh.” Reynolds thinks the generals will want to attack within a few days so as not to risk finding themselves in command of soldiers no longer so ready to fight. Western intelligence, according to the Guardian, believes that only a third of Russian forces are tactically deployed on the front line and ready for attack.
The next few days will therefore be decisive. If Putin does not attack immediately, he will still have to move the troops and bring them back to the rest areas they occupied in January. He will be able to sell this tactical necessity to the West as proof of readiness for dialogue, but be ready again to send soldiers to the Ukrainian border at short notice after they have been resupplied and disciplined again. The threat remains, but there will be a few more days to evaluate the effectiveness of the sanctions and for the diplomatic initiatives of those who do not want war.
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