“Morale,” says Jack Watling, a land warfare expert at the Royal United Services Institute military thinktank, “is the most important factor for ground forces”.
“It is not just about how soldiers feel about their prospects relative to the enemy, it’s also about the experiences they have recently had and how they are anticipating into the future.”
On one side is an army – Ukraine’s – that considers itself to be fighting for the cause of national liberation. Having beaten off the Russians from Kyiv and pushed them back in Kharkiv,
Ukraine increasingly believes it will one day win the war, helped by western intelligence, financing and above all artillery and other fresh munitions.
Morale cannot be detached from the wider military and political context, but it is also an important component to both. Reports from visiting wounded Ukrainian soldiers frequently emphasise that many want, if at all possible,
to return to the frontline, and say that
the fight against Russia is necessary, despite what has happened to them.
Set against them are the Russian invaders, a mixture of elite soldiers, recent recruits, and lightly armed and sometimes conscripted separatists who are often reluctant to fight outside their home provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, many of whom are exhausted having fought constantly, without rotation, for six-plus months.
While Ukraine has quietly trained large numbers of troops from its initial mobilisation, and replenished them with western-supplied weapons, Russia has done so far less and, the US says, is now
buying weapons from North Korea. Winter is coming and how well each side is prepared will be critical.
“The Russians have poor morale, poor camaraderie, a lack of confidence in their command from the beginning. Most soldiers were not told a war was starting and many things they were told about Ukrainians were wrong,” Watling said. Since then there have been repeated examples of a
reluctance by some Russian soldiers to fight, and difficulties Moscow
is facing recruiting.
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