Russia is 'accepting risks' and dropping its guard against other threats to hold its ground in Ukraine, British military says

• Russia has committed forces from across its territory to fend off Ukraine's counteroffensive.
• Shifting the bulk of its military to Ukraine has made Russia vulnerable elsewhere, experts say.

Russia has thrown forces from across its territory into the fight in Ukraine, showing Moscow's willingness to accept risk elsewhere to thwart Ukraine's advances, according to the British Ministry of Defense and other experts.

The war has become a nearly all-consuming effort for Russia's military. Ben Wallace, the British minister of defense, said in February that 97% of the Russian army was estimated to be in Ukraine and was experiencing "First World War levels of attrition."

Among the forces committed to the fight are elite Russian units and troops from important outposts along Russia's long border.

Prior to the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russia transferred some two-thirds of the combat forces assigned to its Eastern Military District from their bases in the Far East, roughly 6,200 miles away, to central and western Russia and southern Belarus. Most of the marines of Russia's 61st Naval Infantry Brigade, which is stationed near the recently expanded border with NATO in northwestern Russia, are deployed to Ukraine, where they have taken heavy losses.

Units from across Russia are now "bearing the brunt" of the Ukrainian counteroffensive that kicked off in early June, the British Ministry of Defense said in an update published Thursday.

Russia's 58th Combined Arms Army, which is normally assigned to the "volatile" Caucasus region, is now "defending heavily entrenched lines" in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, north of Crimea, the ministry said.

Russian positions around Velyka Novosilka, a front-line town in the Donetsk Oblast, are manned by the 5th Combined Arms Army and naval infantry units that are normally based some 4,300 miles away "as a balance to Chinese power," the ministry said, adding that Russian defenses around Bakhmut are largely manned by airborne regiments usually stationed in western Russia, where they "act as an elite rapid reaction force in case of tensions with NATO."

"The way Russia is accepting risks across Eurasia highlights how the war has dislocated Russia's established national strategy," the ministry said.

Experts have said Russia's scramble to find troops and equipment for the war has emptied its domestic stockpiles and depleted its foreign outposts, leaving Moscow less able to wield influence and respond to crises. "Russia has really made itself vulnerable globally," Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at the Rand Corporation think tank, said in April.

Adm. Tony Radakin, chief of the British defense staff, told British lawmakers on Tuesday that Russia "is so weak that it does not have the strength for a significant counteroffensive" in Ukraine.

Russia's military "has probably lost nearly 50% of the combat effectiveness of its army for very, very little gain," Radakin added, noting that Russian forces have likely fired more than 10 million artillery shells and lost more than 2,000 tanks over the past year, while Russian industry is at best able to replace one-tenth of those amounts each year.

Despite its troop losses, Russia has called up hundreds of thousands of reservists and conscripts, and its ground forces are bigger than they were before the war, Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the head of US European Command, told US lawmakers in April.

Cavoli said that despite losing dozens of planes and helicopters, Russia still has hundreds of fighter aircraft and dozens of surface warships and submarines, the latter of which are "more active than we've seen them in years."

While Russian leaders have not committed most of their airpower to Ukraine, they are "all-in" on the invasion, and their deployment of forces from other important areas belie claims of concern about NATO aggression, according to Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

"Frankly, if they were actually worried about NATO — in terms of direct involvement outside of some sort of entanglement that was unintentional — they wouldn't have drawn down their forces in Kaliningrad the way they have. They'd have protested more about Finland joining," Bronk said during a podcast recorded in April.

Russian leaders likely fear an accidental war with NATO and a longer-term shift in the balance of power with the alliance, Bronk added, "but they're not worried about escalation on their flank with NATO at this point, because if they were they wouldn't have drawn down the forces the way they have."