I have to say i'm not sure if i buy this "depeted rusisian stockpiles' thing all that much. For bigger items like tanks and such it makes some sense but things like missiles? I mean, the us and the allies are depleating their stocks too, so they just go to their industries and say "ramp it up, make us more". The russians have the industrial might and they know how to make 'em - early on when putin thought he could win in a week i totally get that they'd have been slow to ramp up but what on earth would be stopping them right now from having their facgtories pumping out missiles and rockets and ammo etc. And it's not hard to make a warhead for a missile.
ANd i am TOTALLY not buying them sending their troops out with mosin's. Rifle practice during training MAYBE but c'mon. I'd need to see some hard core verifiable sources for that. They've been pumping out AK's by the billion since 1950. Coming up with 300 thousand for the new troops seems pretty doable.
I think that while the russians are short on a lot of things and critically short of some things, they're better off than some suggest. They appear to be doing a fair bit of offensive operations in the northern regions and they're not attacking with T-60's and mosins. And they are using a lot of artillery by all reports
THe Ukrainians will win the war in the end but the idea that the russians are only fighting with ww2 eqipment when they have any equipment at al sounds implausible to me.
Link Ukraine Reveals How Many Missiles Putin Has Left: 'Defeat Is Inevitable' (newsweek.com)
Link How many tanks are left in Russia and which countries can transfer equipment to the occupiers: an expert's explanation - Daily News (txtreport.com)
Military expert Oleksandr Kovalenko believes that Russia had up to 3,300 combat-ready tanks at the beginning of the full-scale war against Ukraine.
In Ukraine, the occupiers have already lost 2,899 tanks.
He wrote about this on his Telegram channel.
Kovalenko emphasized that the Russian Federation lost a large part of its tanks during the war.
According to open sources, Russia has up to 15,000 tanks in storage, but probably only 20% of them can be restored to be sent to war.
And that is why the Russian Federation is taking tanks from Belarus.
"About 20% of all available tanks are suitable for restoration of combat capability from Russian storage centers.