Austrian military expert Tom Cooper, who regularly analyzes the situation at the front and is known for his ironic remarks about the Russians, published another report for February 6.

The expert commented on the possibility of a new large-scale offensive by the Russian Federation and assessed the strength and size of the Russian army.

Next, TSN.ua provides a

This will be an unusual report, because a large part of it is devoted to endless questions about some super-large Russian offensive, including 500,000 troops, etc.

The Russian army lacks personnel

Since the end of the 1990s, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have been experiencing a shortage of troops.

Sounds strange for a country with a population of 140 million?

Yes, but this is so because of numerous socio-economic reasons, which boil down to one thing: Russia lacks soldiers.

For years now.

Of course, the Kremlin has a corps of 600,000 officers left over from Soviet times.

But officers are not sergeants who serve in the infantry.

However, there was not enough money, and in the 1990s and 2000s, the Kremlin constantly reduced the total number of personnel in the service: from 1.7 to 1.3, then 1.2 million military personnel.

Then they decreased to 1 million in the mid-2010s, etc.

Note, however, that these were all troops—not just ground forces, but also air force, navy, strategic forces, and so on.

Moreover, this 1 million is all that Putin and, therefore, the Ministry of Defense in Moscow allowed the Russian Armed Forces to have.

And this is a nominal, but not a real figure.

As you can read here, as of 2020-2021, the real figure was closer to 780,000.

Of course, the Russian army annually recruited about 280,000 conscripts.

Photo: Associated Press

However, it never happened that all these conscripts remained to serve as "contract workers" - professional soldiers.

Their number changed from year to year, but it was not even 50%.

Moreover, not all conscripts remained in the ground forces, and especially in the infantry.

That is why, at the beginning of Putin's invasion of Ukraine last February, Russian ground forces entered the war with approximately 260,000 troops.

How the Kremlin tried to solve the problem

Putin and his allies in Moscow were well aware of this fact.

They repeatedly tried to find a cheap and effective solution.

They initiated a project of military training for members of the "Russian Cossack Society".

Photo: Getty Images

Then the Russian Guard was created;

then they started to create PVC.

And when the General Staff was unhappy and refused to officially legalize the existence of PMK (probably due to the fact that Putin put PMK under the control of the Russian Guard, which, in turn, meant that the top of the Russian Armed Forces did not receive any share of the business created), the Russian Armed Forces created a system BARS.

In essence, it did the same thing that the PMCs did: they hired people who had just been released from military service.

Photo: Associated Press

Even this did not solve the problem: the Russian Armed Forces had so few troops left that when they invaded Ukraine in February 2022, more than 170 of the famous battalion tactical groups (BTGs) consisted of crews driving vehicles, but no infantry.

In the reserve there were also auxiliary troops: clerks, service personnel, supply personnel or troops who served in railway brigades.

But there were no "those who pull the trigger."

It was not much better with special forces and airborne troops.

The units sent to storm Kyiv on February 24, for example, were "reinforced" by the addition of "mini-BTG" of the "Redut/Redut-Antiterror" PMC.

Redoubt is one of the little-known Russian PMCs that closely cooperates with the Air Force.

Regardless of the reason, as of May 2022, Russian ground forces have been reduced to 60% of the number of troops that entered the war.

The troops were so few that the Kremlin found no other solution than to officially legalize the PMK.

That is why the "Wagnerians" appeared near Popasna that month (with the support of about 70% of the Russian artillery deployed in Ukraine).

What helped the Armed Forces to de-occupy Kharkiv Oblast

At about the same time, the Russian General Staff began deploying the BARS and Rosgvardiya in "quiet" areas of the front line.

Until August 2022, significant parts of the front line in "quiet" areas, such as eastern Kharkiv region, were held by BARS units.

The Ukrainians used this to their advantage and managed to launch a successful, rapid counteroffensive that took them all the way to Svatovoy and Kreminnaya.

Apart from the already defeated 1st Guards Tank Army of the Russian Federation, which was almost surrounded by the Ukrainian onslaught on Kupyansk, there were no larger, regular units of the Russian Armed Forces, only the BARS and the Russian Guard.

Photo: Kostiantyn Liberov and Vlada Liberova.

Stas Yurchenko, Yevhenii Zavhorodniy

After such a slap in the face, the Kremlin brought its famous Third Army Corps to Ukraine, and new BARS units distinguished themselves in the battles near Kreminna.

However, by then it was too late: the collapse of the front line east of Kharkiv forced the Russian Armed Forces to redeploy any reinforcements in the area.

In turn, the Russians could not continue to support the troops in Kherson: they had to withdraw.

Putin was left with no choice and once again broke his word by announcing mobilization at the end of September.

The large number of the Russian army is only on paper

Now, at the beginning of this mobilization, we saw how the Kremlin was going to announce the mobilization of 300,000, 500,000, 1 million reservists.

However, as usual: these are nominal — and largely theoretical — numbers.

No real numbers.

The fact is that the Russian Armed Forces may have many generals, but there are no junior officers, corporals, sergeants, etc., let alone technicians with the skills necessary to maintain the necessary equipment, as well as to command and control such a huge number of troops .

They are barely enough to control, provide and train about 280,000 conscripts every year.

The process alone of issuing uniforms and equipment to, say, a company of 60-100 soldiers can easily take an entire day.

Then increase that to say 10,000, 20,000 troops… to 280,000 troops… It could take "a century".

When this process is complete: they will be a long way from being formed into coherent units and then trained to handle personal firearms or equipment.

Cooper urges Ukrainians not to panic

Everyone who is panicking in anticipation that "Putin will now deploy 500,000 mobs" in Ukraine, rest easy.

Five months after the September mobilization, the Kremlin police were able to call up about 150,000 reservists.

Thousands of them have already died: they were so unlucky that already at the end of September and during October they were thrown to the front without any preparation.

The next two waves were a little more fortunate, as they received at least some more training before being sent into battle.

The forces of the Russian Federation will be sufficient only for limited offensive operations

The bottom line: The mobilization in September 2022 was enough to bring the number of Russian ground forces in Ukraine back to about 250,000 — to regain the ability to conduct limited offensive operations.

The main difference with the situation in April-June 2022 is that most of these troops are older and therefore less fit than the youth they replaced.

In addition, they will have to make do with outdated equipment on which they have had an absolute minimum of training.

The ground forces of the Russian Federation lost or exhausted more than 60% of the best equipment: BMP and armored personnel carriers and - especially - artillery systems that entered Ukraine at the beginning of the invasion.

Photo: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine / Facebook

In addition, "mobs" receive significantly worse training than "contract workers".

This is a far cry from what would be necessary to make them capable of large-scale offensive operations.

And no amount of 15 Gerasimovs and 30 Surovikinas can change anything.

Therefore, I do not believe in the appearance of "500,000 Russian soldiers", as well as "big Russian offensives" in the coming days.

The Russian military has neither the strength nor the means to do such things, and this trend will not change even if their support services (which were themselves critically undermanned even before the invasion) find a way to "put into service" 3,000 or 4,000 or even 5,000 tanks extracted from naphthalene.

Earlier, Tom Cooper said that NATO has no idea how to end the war in Ukraine.

He also wrote that war is a 100-story skyscraper, and Ukraine is somewhere on the 20th and moving to the 21st.

Read also:

• Ukraine news

• War in Ukraine

• News of Ukraine: video

Subscribe to our

 and

channels .