Dr Jack Watling

A recent report published by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank and Open Source Centre estimated that Russian artillery attacks are responsible for some 70 per cent of Ukrainian casualties. Their research revealed that Russia's rate of artillery fire has averaged roughly 10,000 rounds per day since the early months of the war which saw peaks as high as 36,000 rounds per day. By contrast, Ukrainian fire rarely exceeded 6,000 and dropped below 1,800 rounds per day by early 2024.

“The current British Army actually fields half of one heavy brigade’s worth of equipment, split between two, and one regiment of artillery,” Jack Watling, senior research fellow for land warfare at RUSI, wrote in a July analysis. The decline in size and capability of the force in its current state falls far short of a 2015 effort to deliver a “warfighting division of two heavy and between one and two medium combat brigades, an artillery brigade, an engineering brigade, an air defence group, a logistic brigade and an ISR brigade,” he noted.

In a recent essay, Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank in London, identifies several reasons for Ukraine’s declining fortunes. One is a shortfall in its air-defence interceptors, allowing Russian reconnaissance drones to establish what he calls “continuous and dense surveillance”. These in turn cue up ballistic-missile and drone strikes against Ukrainian artillery in the rear and glide bombs against troops at the front, allowing Russia to make slow but steady advances in small units, often using motorcycles because tanks are too easy to spot. Ukraine’s limited stock of shells—Russia currently has a two-to-one advantage in shellfire, according to Ivan Havrilyuk, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister—as well as tanks and armoured vehicles compounds that problem. The less firepower and armour are available, the greater the reliance on infantry and the greater the casualties.