The need to cannibalize a destroyed Russian vehicle to help protect Ukraine’s dwindling supply of equipment underscores Kyiv’s current challenges on the battlefield as it prepares for another year of pitched combat.

It is that tactic that provides Russia the advantage as it pushes to secure Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, Moscow’s primary war aim after its defeat in 2022 around Kharkiv, Kherson and the capital, Kyiv.

“The Russian advantage at this stage is not decisive, but the war is not a stalemate,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who recently visited Ukraine.

At the end of 2023, members of a Ukrainian artillery crew from the 10th Brigade sat inside a bunker nestled into a bare tree line in the country’s east, their Soviet-era 122-millimeter howitzer draped in camouflage netting and leafless branches.

Even the tranche of United States-supplied cluster munitions, controversial because they harm civilians long after a war’s end, has lost some of its potency on the battlefield.

It is a tactic replicated across the front by Moscow’s infantry, with little sign of stopping despite a high attrition rate common for a force attacking dug-in positions.

The original article contains 1,508 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!