"Russia has one million soldiers. How can they be running out of troops in Ukraine."


Well, first, that figure includes their navy and air force both of which have around 150,000 troops and their Special Rocket Forces, the branch that runs their nuclear deterrent, that has around 50,000.

Next of the 650,000 in their army, 200,000 or so are conscripts who, according to Russian law can't be deployed outside Russia's borders. Even if they choose to ignore that law, you can't send troops who haven't even completed basic training into high intensity front line combat because if you do they'll die. So let's assume 50,000 of those conscripts are available for service in Ukraine.

That leaves 500,000 troops. Now in a typical military there's what's known as the spear tip/spear shaft split. The spear tip are the units that directly conduct offensive operations - the tanks units, the artillery and the infantry - the spear shaft are all the other units that make that possible - the trainers; the medical corps; the logistics units that get everything from ammunition to food to fuel to those front line units. In a western military, the ratio of support personnel to to combat personnel can be as high as 10 to 1. Let's assume Russia's is a lot lower and that some of those rear echelon jobs can be done by conscripts. Let's also assume that the Russian maximum figure of 200,000 deployed in Ukraine includes a lot of those support personnel like truck drivers and field hospitals. But even so, even if the ratio is only 1:1 that leaves 250,000 deployable troops.

Now assume you need to keep at least some troops elsewhere to, for example, stop the Poles simply walking into Kaliningrad or Japan seeking to retake the Southern Kuriles. Plus, for example, Russia has troops deployed to Syria and Nagorno-Karabah as well as to UN peacekeeping missions. Let's say 50,000 troops to guard all the other borders of the world's largest country.

So that leaves around 200,000 troops. Now recognize that troops are human and can't simply continue fighting in high level combat indefinitely. In World War I, a typical deployment to the trenches of the western front was two weeks, followed by a week of leave, followed by a month of reserve duty followed by two weeks support duty. Front line combat only made up around 15% of their time - and that was in what other sides regarded as a war for survival in which manpower was critically short.

So after six weeks, any Russian units that have been in more or less continuous combat need to be rotated to the rear urgently or their combat performance is going to degrade rapidly.

All this is why Russia is trying to hire mercenaries from Syria and Arica, trying to convince 60 year old reservists to reenlist and transferring staff like teachers at military colleges to combat roles.

None of these are likely to work long term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces

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