Russia sends poorly trained recruits into battle despite losses, analysts say

Ukrainian military and Western analysts say Russian forces carry out unsuccessful attacks in eastern Ukraine and suffer heavy casualties after a hastily organized appeal added more than 300,000 men.

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia is funneling newly recruited conscripts with little training to the line of front in eastern Ukraine, while staging intensified but ineffective attacks and suffering heavy casualties, according to the Ukrainian military and Western analysts.

Des Grisly videos showing Russian infantry in ill-prepared, artillery-hit positions have partly supported these claims, as have Russian media reports of mobilized soldiers telling relatives of high casualty rates. The videos, filmed by Ukrainian drones, have not been independently verified and their exact location could not be determined.

Russian President Vladimir V Putin announced on Friday that the draft he ordered on Sept. 21, a chaotic effort that swept away men who should have been exempted, had added 318,000 troops to the Russian military, including 49,000 already in combat. But he did not acknowledge widespread complaints of inadequate training and equipment, with some soldiers being killed within days of deployment.

Attention has recently shifted shifted to the southern front, where Ukrainian forces are slowly closing in on the Russian city of Kherson, but the Kremlin is also pouring more troops into the eastern Donbass region, trying to halt recent Ukrainian advances while rebuilding ground forces which have been decimated by more than eight months of war.

Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the commander of the Ukrainian army, said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app on Thursday that Russian forces had tripled the intensity of their attacks along parts of the front and were staging up to 80 assaults per day. He did not specify a time frame or where the attacks came from or their scale; some may be small probing attacks, looking for weak points in Ukrainian lines.

ImageMembers of the Ukrainian armed forces removed the body of a Russian soldier in Kupiansk-Vuzlovyi on Tuesday. said that in a phone call he told General Christopher G. Cavoli of the United States, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, that "thanks to the courage and skill of our warriors", the Ukrainians were repelling the assaults.

An assessment released Thursday by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based analysis group, agreed that Russia had not won of land in the Donbass. Instead, he said, Moscow's forces were "wasting the new stock of mobilized personnel on marginal gains" by attacking before they had mustered enough troops to ensure success.

"Russian forces would probably have been more successful in such offensive operations had they waited until enough mobilized personnel had arrived to muster a force large enough to defeat the Ukrainian defences," said the institute said.

The Russian attacks were directed against several towns and villages, including Bakhmut and Avdiivka.Ukrainian National Police said all civilians had been evacuated from a frontline town, Marinka, a suburb of the city of Donetsk.At the same time, Ukraini...