A strategic crisis is taking place at the front.
The Defense Forces are losing ground, retreating, and there is no prospect of changing [the situation]. Now battalion-sized defense areas are “failing”, then entire brigades will begin to “fail”, until collapse occurs. This crisis, in the worst-case scenario, will lead to the loss of statehood, in the current scenario — to the front passing along the Dnipro River.
The main thing that the front lacks is people. There are not enough of them to hold a front more than a thousand kilometers long. It no longer looks like it did during the ATO and JFO.
Russian troops are seeping through the “gray” zone, accumulating in the rear, and then going on the offensive, sometimes from two sides. The strategic initiative on the battlefield is with the Russians. They set the pace, and we are forced to react.
On paper, Ukraine mobilizes about 30 000 people per month, but not all of them reach combat units.
A person becomes a military serviceman when he enters a training center, and before that he goes through the TRC, MMC and the distribution center. Some bring real documents confirming that they cannot be mobilized, others leave the unit without permission or are simply not suitable for service.
Such people either get stuck in the demobilization process, which is poorly regulated, or remain living in training centers. The state can lose tens of billions of hryvnias a year on such people.
As a result, out of 30 000 mobilized, only about 20 000 reach military units.
Every month we lose approximately the same number of people: losses do not increase, and sometimes they may even decrease slightly.
At the same time, the number of AWOL cases is increasing, and the number of mobilized people is falling. Because of this, the number of people on the battlefield is gradually decreasing to a level where units can no longer perform combat missions.
Now there can be only 11 people in a company, about 20 in a battalion in positions, and about 200 people in a brigade at the front.
According to the standards, with such a staffing, units should not fight at all. They should be taken away for replenishment and training. But there is no one to replace them, so they remain in positions. Because of this, fighters have to be distributed manually, adding 20-100 people to where it is necessary.
If you change the commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi nothing will change.
The problem of the collapse of the front is complex, it cannot be solved in the “office of simple solutions”. The problem is in the system. There is a lack of qualified people capable of implementing changes.
But even qualified people do not take on reforms that require years of work — because they know that they will not be given much time to work, and will be removed quite quickly.
Therefore, even qualified people take on problems that can be solved in three to four months.
There are short-, medium- and long-term issues. The long-term is education and training: the state must systematically reform military education at all levels, from schools and universities to higher military educational institutions, training centers and training grounds. The medium-term is the strategy of waging war, which is the responsibility of the state, not the Defense Forces.
The strategy for waging war should be determined by the state — the president, his team, the General Headquorters, because the Defense Forces are only one of the instruments of this war.
Whether this strategy exists at all is a big question. We still do not have an answer to two basic questions — what is our goal? How do we plan to achieve it?
When we say "we will reach the borders of 1991", the cause-and-effect relationship must be clear — what exactly should happen? What resources are needed? How will we achieve this?
If our strategy is conditionally "to kill every Russian who enters the borders", then this is about different mathematics, different forces and means. And if the goal is simply not to lose statehood, then we have already fulfilled it: we did not lose it. And the logic is different then — to freeze, to negotiate.
The front management system after the corps reform.
«Babel'»
The corps reform is stalling.
It is extremely difficult to implement it in wartime: as soon as you withdraw a brigade or battalion to put it in “your” corps and replace it with another, the front immediately collapses in this area.
Russia is conducting offensive operations in seven directions, and the units that are on the defensive today must be there tomorrow as well — they just need to be given more people, equipment, and weapons. Simply withdrawing them from the front would mean “sinking the ship”.
Therefore, the Armed Forces of Ukraine continue to fight with assigned units, a “crazy quilt”. One brigade can be scattered throughout the country. Two battalions are in the Sumy region, two — in the Kharkiv region, an artillery division near Pokrovsk, one battalion being restored near Kyiv, and the brigade itself holds Zaporizhzhia.
There is also a more systemic problem with the corps reform. Each corps needs a “corps” set of troops: separate medical and support battalions, engineering brigades, artillery divisions, and so on.
Therefore, new military units are still being created in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which require people and weapons. And the already limited resources of the troops continue to be dispersed.