Russian General Claims Ukraine Facing Troop Shortages

By Staff, Agencies

Kiev’s ability to supply fresh soldiers to the front line has significantly diminished, placing the Ukrainian army under mounting strain, a senior Russian military planner has claimed.

Sergey Rudskoy, head of operations at the Russian General Staff, said in an interview published Friday that the Ukrainian army’s strength is being eroded by mass desertion and public resistance to mandatory conscription.

He told Krasnaya Zvezda, the Russian armed forces’ official newspaper, that Moscow estimates Ukrainian military casualties at more than 520,000 in 2025 and 1.5 million since the conflict escalated in 2022.

“Presently, the Kiev regime has largely lost the ability to replenish its units through obligatory mobilization.

The number of recruitments per month has dropped by about two times,” Rudskoy said. “A trend is forming for the decrease of the Ukrainian army’s strength.”

During his nomination hearings last month, Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov told lawmakers that two million potential recruits were on a wanted list for draft evasion and 200,000 troops had deserted.

This month, human rights ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets reported a sharp rise in complaints against mobilization enforcers, describing it as a “systemic crisis.”

New videos of violent confrontations between conscription patrols and civilians are published by Ukrainian media almost daily, even as authorities claim most such footage is fabricated.

In the interview, Rudskoy also discussed Russian battlefield developments and the impact of technological change on military planning.

He said modern warfare requires faster, AI-assisted decision-making and the broad deployment of robotic systems.

The large-scale use of drones in the Ukraine conflict, he added, has made them comparable to artillery in terms of damage inflicted.