Ukraine’s military leadership plans to extend basic military training to two months to enhance the preparedness and safety of soldiers, Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi announced on Dec. 27.
He noted that recent graduates had completed a revised 1.5-month training course, an improvement from the previous 30-day standard.
This is great news! If it’s an indicator that training capacity is improving that’s fantastic, and it may also indicate that the manpower shortages at the front aren’t as acute as many have been claiming.
A typical negative spiral that it’s hard to get out of is a situation where you’re forced to send untrained or poorly trained people to the front to fill gaps, but that the poorly trained can’t hold as well, reinforcing the problem. If they’re able to break out of that kind of circle, while the russians are burning through their men at an unprecedented rate, it may indicate that things are slowing improving.
The man power shortages are real, but not in the sense of they can’t handle it. It’s more that you want to be able to rotate people out vs leaving them there for extended periods of time without relief. The russian human wave tactic doesn’t really work for this war, and the drones are allowing Ukraine to decimate complete waves before they even make it to their goals.
I definitely believe the man power shortages are real, but if Ukraine is increasing training time, that seems to indicate they’re at least not stuck in a downward spiral of sending ever-less-prepared troops to rush to fill gaps.
Hopefully, these better trained troops will be able to hold longer, creating a positive spiral such that troops can be rotated more often.
Absolutely, this is a positive thing. To me it also means that Ukraine isn’t losing units as much as it was at the start of the war.
It sort of is working though, since Russia does not give a shit about their people or how it affects the country in the long term. Ukraine also has massive desertion issues currently, so hopefully more training can help with that since morale is not great after the last few years. Russia is basically slowly grinding down Ukraine and I don’t see how that’s going to change without more actual support (and yes, I know a lot of the training is done by allies already).
It’s working in the sense that they’re gaining ground and heavily pressuring the Ukrainian defenders. However, it will only work in the long term if they’re able to pressure the defenders to the point where the defending troops deteriorate over time.
If Ukraine is able to withstand the human waves while increasing training time and producing/receiving more materiel than they lose, it will eventually turn around, at the point when the human waves start being exhausted, while Ukraine has managed to scale up the quality and quantity of it’s troops and materiel.
