While much has been made of the Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv and Cherniv sectors  of Ukraine in order to facilitate a fresh offensive in the Donbas, there’s every reason to expect that this will generate another strategic failure.

After the 2008 war against the Republic of Georgia, the General Staff in Moscow announced a radical change to the Russian army’s tactical structure. The primary combat maneuver element became the Battalion Tactical Group — 10 tanks and three dozen mechanized infantry vehicles, along with self-propelled artillery, combat engineer, and air defense elements.

The initial Russian attack on Ukraine involved around 70 BTGs in all invasion sectors, totaling around 700 tanks and 2,100 mechanized infantry vehicles, the Institute for the Study of War estimated.

Private-sector intelligence analysts have been tallying Russian equipment losses by cataloging images of destroyed, damaged, or abandoned combat vehicles posted on social media. They count more than 500 tanks, almost 900 mechanized infantry vehicles, and more than 200 artillery pieces lost to the Russian order of battle. These are the most modern types in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal.

Then there are the casualties. The Foreign Policy Research Institute estimates that Russia has incurred more than 10,000 killed and 23,000 wounded from among the army’s most combat-ready troops.

The toll within Russia’s elite airborne units has been particularly brutal, with the Guardian reporting on a memorial erected at the home base of the 247th Guards Air Assault Regiment to commemorate its 55 dead.

These estimates are confirmed by a Pentagon source who described the degradation of Russia’s combat power in the stark terms:

“Some of the units that attacked Kyiv were severely mauled, many battalion tactical groups experiencing a combined personnel and equipment reduction of 30 percent, and others hurt even more. ‘We’ve seen indications of some units that are literally … eradicated. There’s just nothing left at the BTG except a handful of troops and maybe a small number of vehicles.’”  

Vladimir Putin has sought to turbocharge his flagging war effort by deploying to the battlefront Syrian soldiers on loan from Bashar al-Assad and Wagner Group private military contractors. These reinforcements-for-hire haven’t been enough to turn the tide of war in Russia’s favor

Mr. Putin has subsequently selected the desperate expedient of mobilizing 60,000 veterans discharged from military service over the past few years. It’s improbable that calling up rusty reservists will be the answer to Russia’s military woes.

Warfighting is a perishable skill. As the US Army learned during America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it takes around six months of intensive training to turn a weekend warrior into a combat-ready infantryman or tanker.

There are thus only two possible options for the use of these newly mobilized reservists. One is that they’ll spend so long in training that the war will be over by the time they’re prepared for combat. More likely, they’ll be thrown into the front lines as ill-prepared cannon fodder armed with second-line weapons. In either case, it’s doubtful they’ll make a substantial contribution to the Russian war effort.

The lines in Ukraine’s southeast have stabilized into a salient around the city of Kramatorsk, where a Russian missile attack on the train station killed more than 50 civilians trying to escape the coming battle. According to open-source intelligence, the Russians have concentrated about a dozen BTGs around the Kramatorsk salient in preparation for a new offensive to pinch it off and destroy its defenders.

When they attack, these second-rate Russian units will be met by battle-hardened Ukrainian defenders armed with the latest in anti-tank missile technology and more. On April 13, the Biden administration authorized an additional $800 million in military assistance to Ukraine that, for the first time, includes heavy weapons such as howitzers and armored personnel carriers.

A new offensive around the Kramatorsk salient means more coffins will be arriving in towns and cities throughout Russia. The will be filled not only with the bodies of 19-year-old conscripts, but with fathers and husbands whose deaths will widen the circle of grief seeping through a nation devastated by brutal economic sanctions.

There’s little question that this double-whammy will spur greater dissent against Mr. Putin and his gratuitous war of aggression.