A top level Biden administration official has issued surprising remarks assessing Russian resiliency in the face of two years of Washington sanctions, and after a grinding war which has likely resulted in at least tens of thousands of troop losses.
Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell spoke at a Wednesday event hosted by the notoriously hawkish Center for New American Security where he emphasized that Russia's military has almost fully reconstituted its military losses in Ukraine, even as sanctions have tried to dent its military supplies, funding, and capabilities.
"We have assessed over the course of the last couple of months that Russia has almost completely reconstituted militarily," Campbell told the audience.
Defense News underscored this is notable and surprising given that "Campbell’s assessment seems to contradict those of the Pentagon and America’s allies in Europe."
For example Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently claimed that Russian losses total well over 300,000 casualties since the invasion began, a staggering figure.
Further, this is from an interview with the chair of Lithuania’s national security committee, Laurynas Kasčiūnas:
Q: How long will it take for Russia to reconstitute its forces to prewar levels?
"If we consider in planning a real conventional, division-level war: five to seven years. If you imagine some semi-conventional, hybrid [war], they need maybe two to three years."
Meanwhile it has been confirmed that Russia has certainly been able to keep its military supplies and artillery flowing to the front lines.
In March Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said Russia’s artillery shell production increased by nearly 2.5 times over the past year. International reports at the time also acknowledged that Moscow continues to significantly out-producing the West.
The Ukrainian side too appears to have admitted this is the case, with an officer who served under former Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny describing that the front lines are at risk of collapse as "There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us."
"We don’t have those technologies, and the West doesn’t have them as well in sufficient numbers," the officer added.
In light of all of this, it's important to recall SecDef Austin's words in 2022 wherein he said a goal of US policy is to see Russia weakened militarily and unable to recover quickly.
