Russia has 'lost nearly half' of its combat effectiveness since invading Ukraine, UK defense official says

• Russia has "lost nearly half" its combat power since invading Ukraine, a UK defense official says.
• Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said Russia was now "so weak" that it couldn't wage a counteroffensive.

A top British defense official says Russia's combat abilities have been slashed in half since last year's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the formal head of the UK's armed forces who is the chief military advisor to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, told a parliamentary hearing that Russia was now "so weak" that it could no longer wage a military counteroffensive of its own.

"Russia has lost nearly half the combat effectiveness of its army," Radakin said, according to the Financial Times. "Last year, it fired 10 million artillery shells, but at best, can produce 1 million shells a year. It has lost 2,500 tanks and, at best, can produce 200 tanks a year."

He then defended Ukraine's counteroffensive, which has been criticized for not making enough progress.

Radakin said Kyiv's strategy to "starve, stretch, and strike" was gradually eroding Russia's defenses. However, he did acknowledge that Russian mines, Ukraine's insufficient air defenses, and the lack of equipment Ukraine requested had weighed on operations.

"The question is, how do you take a front line that is more than a thousand kilometers long and turn it into more of a problem for Russia than for Ukraine?" he said. "That is why you are seeing multiple axes being probed and feints by Ukraine."

Radakin's statement about Russia's combat losses in Ukraine was roughly in line with previous reporting.

In February, the open-source intelligence group Oryx said at least 1,000 Russian tanks had been destroyed in Ukraine — and another 500 captured. A classified US military assessment, leaked earlier this year, suggested that as many as 43,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and another 180,000 wounded since February last year.

When Russia invaded last year, PBS reported that it had more than 400,000 contract soldiers.

Experts said the losses had taken a huge toll, particularly on Russia's elite infantry and armored fighting brigades.

"They've been decimated," Jeffrey Edmonds, a Russia expert at the Center for Naval Analyses who is a former CIA military analyst, told Insider's Jake Epstein earlier this year, describing it as a "blow to Russian's ground force's combat power."