Hamish de Bretton Gordon writes that the Russian armed forces are in deep decline, as evidenced by reports that wounded prisoners, many of whom have no arms or legs, are being forcibly sent back to the front.
While Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has theatrically announced a pause in attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine and received inappropriate praise for this from US President Donald Trump, Ukraine should not be fooled.
As Colonel and former British Army soldier Hamish de Bretton Gordon writes in a column for The Telegraph, Putin is proposing to end his war crimes in just 7 days. “This is not the gesture of a confident commander; it is the maneuver of a leader whose army is on the verge of collapse“, he notes.
Hamish de Bretton Gordon writes that the Russian armed forces are in deep decline, as evidenced by data that wounded prisoners, many of them without arms or legs, are being forcibly sent back to the front. Some have not even been given prosthetics - they are expected to return to battle on crutches.
“This is not resilience, this is desperation“, the British military officer noted, adding that after more than 1.5 million people were killed in Ukraine, Putin is draining the last of his troops.
“He bought and destroyed 15,000 North Korean soldiers. Russian recruiters are scouring Africa in search of mercenaries. The prisons have emptied. And now even the legless are coming back into the fight. For anyone of fighting age under Putin, or indeed anyone who can barely stand and hold a rifle, this should be a startling lesson,” he believes.
Hamish de Bretton Gordon notes that this speaks to two important things. First, the Russian army is losing combat capability: over the past two years, the Russian Federation has captured just over 1% of the territory of Ukraine at the cost of over 500,000 casualties and continues to lose about 1,000 people a day.
„Since the beginning of 2024, Russian troops have been moving 15-70 meters a day, which is a serious indictment of their tactics and command. "This would be considered a failure even by the standards of Passchendaele and Verdun in World War I," the British officer noted.
He stressed that this was a war of attrition at its most brutal.
"These wounded soldiers are being used as expendable material, as 'bullet absorbers', in the hope that Ukraine will eventually run out of ammunition. That will only happen if we in the West allow it to," he stressed.
Second, it demonstrates the Kremlin's complete disregard for its own population. While ordinary Russians are impoverished, the Kremlin is investing its remaining resources in missiles and drones to terrorize Ukrainians instead of taking care of its own people.
"For the Kremlin, the Russian army is just cannon fodder...