Who is pushing Putin to escalate the war against Ukraine — analysts' data

Anatoliy Gerashchenko

Source: ISW

As the ISW team notes, it is the influential Russian security forces and military who insist on escalating military actions against Ukraine, ignoring the offer of negotiations and an end to the war.

Points of attention

The Russian military command admits that it has not been able to achieve significant territorial gains.
Russian security services are urging Putin to step up military efforts, even at the cost of massive casualties.

Security forces have influence over Putin

The Russian invaders do not deny the fact that they are unable to achieve significant territorial gains that would be proportional to the losses in manpower and equipment.

However, even against this backdrop, the Russian military command continues to suffer colossal losses of manpower in exchange for tactical, but not operational, achievements.

What is important to understand is that last month the average daily advance of Russian troops slowed to about nine square kilometers.

This happened after virtually 3 months of minor territorial gains and large-scale losses of personnel in September, October, and November.

At the same time, the Russian military command may be less inclined than Vladimir Putin to tolerate such high losses if the pace of advance continues to slow, suggests the American Institute for the Study of War.

It is worth noting that Russian security services and military officials are not ready to end the war, even if they lose hundreds of thousands of their soldiers on the front.

Instead, they are calling on Putin to step up military efforts, proposing partial calls to the reserve, presumably to fill the battlefield with manpower and equipment.