Ukrainian servicemen fire a 2S7 Pion self-propelled gun toward Russian positions, on a frontline near Bakhmut in Donetsk region, Ukraine, January 24. REUTERS/Oleksandr Ratushniak
* NATO leaders have been worried by the heavy casualties and massive ammunition usage in Ukraine.
* “The scale of this war is out of proportion with all of our recent thinking,” NATO’s top general said in January.
The heavy casualties and massive ammunition consumption seen during the war in Ukraine has top NATO commanders worried.
NATO was created in 1949 to stop a massive Soviet invasion of Western Europe, and it has added new members since the end of the Cold War, but many of its militaries shrank in the decades after the Soviet threat disappeared. Now the scale and intensity of the fighting in Ukraine has raised questions about the alliance’s ability to fight a big-unit war against Russia.
“Scale, scale, scale,” US Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, told a Swedish defense conference in January. “The magnitude of this war is incredible. The Ukrainians have 37 frontline brigades, plus dozens more territorial brigades. The Russians have lost almost 2,000 tanks. If we average out since the beginning of the war, the slow days and fast days, the Russians have expended on average well over 20,000 artillery rounds per day.”
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WNU Editor: And we have seen nothing yet. With 400,000 additional Russian soldiers now being deployed to launch a new offensive, we may soon see some of the biggest battles in Europe since the Second World War.