Thread by @PhillipsPOBrien

Pentagon briefing today, a few interesting points on Russian logistics and AirPower, and the Battle of the Donbas. defense.gov/News/Transcrip…

First, rather remarkable but 63 days into the war and fighting much closer to its supply dumps, the Russian army is still being severely limited by logistic problems. Progress forward is ‘incremental’

Basically logistics problems alone (not including Ukrainian resistance) means Russian forces can only ‘sustain’ more than a few kilometres of progress a day. This is still extraordinarily little.

And this is after trying to do some serious improvement. The Pentagon claims the area of the greatest attempted improvement by the Russian army is in its logistic operations.

The Russians have continued their build up in Ukraine, sending in now a total of 92 BTGs, but these are in varied states of readiness and suffering command and control problems.

So overall the Russians have built up forces, are limited by logistics and command and control, and for a while at least will also be limited by mud keeping them to paved roads.

Air power struggle is also ongoing. Air space over Ukraine is still congested. Russians still launching regular air strikes, but almost all from bases in Russia. So they haven’t been able to first deploy much. Also might indicate a Russian logistics inability to supply airfields

All in all sounds like the combat in Donbas is in a pretty intense attritional phase. Russians have built up more force and are blasting away. However they still don’t have air dominance and are staying close to their logistics bases.

Sounds like they are being very cautious and probably just blasting at things using artillery while making slow advances.