Russia’s Defense Ministry has a new excuse for why it is faltering in the war in Ukraine: Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed—without providing evidence—that Russian forces are being careful to avoid civilian casualties, which he says is slowing down their progress.
“Every effort is being done to prevent civilian casualties. It certainly slows down the advance,” Shoigu told a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Wednesday, according to TASS. “But we are doing it on purpose.”
Russian forces, however, have been hitting Ukrainian civilians from the beginning of the war, which Wednesday reached its six-month mark. In the early days of the war, Russia hit a maternity hospital, killing at least one mother and baby. Since, Russia has hit playgrounds, theaters clearly marked as safeguarding children, office and apartment buildings, a shopping mall.
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Moscow has repeatedly denied it was behind the attacks, and has instead claimed it was “fake news,” or that the people dying from the attacks were crisis actors. Russia has even tried to place blame on Ukrainians and accused them of attacking their own people.
Shoigu’s bogus attempt at explaining Russia’s failings in the war in Ukraine come after a series of embarrassing news cycles for Russia, with a whole slew of explosions and attacks damaging a Russian air base in Crimea and a key supply bridge. According to a senior U.S. defense official, they come as the war has entered a new phase where Russia is really not making much progress at all.
“Right now, I would say that you are seeing a complete and total lack of progress by the Russians on the battlefield,” the senior U.S. defense official told reporters in a briefing last week. “We are at a different phase than... where we were even a couple of months ago.”
Shoigu's comments to brush off Russia’s battlefield problems also come in advance of an expected counteroffensive against Kherson, which Russia seized early in the war.
There’s a whole host of other answers as to why Russia’s military may be having issues fighting the war besides the bald-faced lie that it is trying to avoid killing civilians. Russia’s military has encountered trouble from the get-go and has still not achieved its major objectives. Russian forces encountered logistics, planning, and fuel problems as they attempted to seize the capital, Kyiv, in the early days of the war. Russian troops waited in a column approximately 40 miles long outside of Kyiv, stalling for a week, before pulling back and resigning to regroup and deploy to other regions in Ukraine.
“Russia launched a full invasion of Ukraine six months ago, with the aim of toppling the government and occupying most of the country. By April, Russia’s leaders realized this had failed, and reverted to more modest objectives in eastern and southern Ukraine,” read a British intelligence assessment released Wednesday.
And even in regrouping to the east, efforts to take territory have only achieved “minimal” progress, according to the assessment.
To make matters, worse, morale is dragging among Russian forces, and munitions, vehicles, and personnel shortages abound, according to the intelligence assessment.
Some of Russia’s stumbling blocks can be attributed to their issues distributing resources and predicting warfighter needs in advance, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
“Russian forces had likely exhausted their momentum from territorial gains around Avdiivka and Bakhmut in Donetsk–a very small section of the whole Ukrainian theater–partially due to their inability to allocate sufficient resources to offensive ops,” the institute said Tuesday.
In other cases, Russian leaders are resorting to intimidation and threats to try to get soldiers fighting, according to British intelligence. Forces in Luhansk have been expressing an increased lack of willingness to fight in offensive operations in recent days despite those threats, which could be an indication of how desperate Russia is to pick up the pace.
