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beyond success isolated such as the seizure of Vuhledar by the Russians in Ukraine or the Ukrainian attacks against airfields and refineries in Russia, which in themselves do not alter the correlation of forces along the vast war front, the fighting in Donbas, an acronym for the Donets River basin that covers the regions of Donietsk and Lugansk, highlighted the weaknesses of both armies.

The Ukrainian lacks the weapons promised, but not yet delivered by its allies, for the 19 brigades it formed in recent months and uses a considerable part of its reserves in order to maintain, for more political than military reasons, a minimum area of ​​​​the Russian Kursk region.

The Russian army, with a superiority in troops and military equipment of at least three to one, is not in a position to expel the Ukrainian soldiers from its territory or to begin a large simultaneous offensive in several sectors of the Donbas, which is why its progress is sustained, but very slow.

For some time now, the Russian army has focused its attacks on a single sector of the front in the Donbas, be it Pokrovsk, Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, Kurajovo or Selidovo, abandoning the frontal assaults and trying to surround them, and when Ukrainian reinforcements arrive, with the In order to stop them, they stop and begin the offensive in another place until, as happened in Vuhledar, before closing the encirclement the Ukrainians withdraw to a better position.

In this context, the General Staff of the Russian army has been insisting for months before its commander in chief, Vladimir Putin, that he announce a new wave of mass mobilization to achieve decisive superiority, but his advisors recommend against doing so due to the political cost it would have on the society, convinced that it will remain indifferent to what happens on the other side of the border as long as only those die who, in exchange for earning a fortune, agreed to play a kind of Russian roulette.

Faced with the dilemma of declaring a total war to justify to the Russians the massive call-up or leaving things as they are for now, but without unleashing a protest from the population with an uncertain end to his stay in the Kremlin, Putin ordered that the spending military by 2025 will once again be the largest in Russia’s post-Soviet history, it will still be able to recruit more contract soldiers.