• Ukraine faces critical personnel challenges on the battlefield.
• An analyst who recently returned from Ukraine said Russia is trying to exploit this challenge by deploying small waves of attacks.
• “It is death by a thousand cuts. It’s very stressful for units that are understaffed,” she said.

Ukraine is facing increasing personnel challenges on all front lines, and Russia is relying on brutal, if costly, tactics to strain Kiev’s defenses.

Dara Massicot, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Russia and Eurasia Program, recently returned from a research trip to Ukraine, where she met with various units, all of which are facing manpower shortages and other issues.

“What the units are experiencing at the hands of the Russians is significant exposure to Russian tactics,” Massicot recounted her trip in a podcast with the Center for Strategic and International Studies this month.

She said the Russians “attack the Ukrainians in very small groups constantly, day and night. This is death by a thousand cuts. This is very stressful for units that are understaffed.”

Russia’s small wave attacks, sometimes called “human wave attacks” or “flesh attacks,” have been a problem for Ukraine throughout the conflict, but have been particularly challenging for Kiev as the country faces critical labor shortages.

To address this issue, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lowered the mobilization age from 27 to 25, but the Biden administration has pushed Kyiv to lower it even further to increase the number of civilians who can fight. So far, Kyiv has not been willing to do this.

Ukraine is not alone in addressing workforce challenges. Russia faces its own mobilization problems. They are much less urgent than those in Kiev, but Moscow is taking heavy losses on the battlefield, raising questions about the maintenance and replacement of troops in the future.

These human wave tactics come with enormous costs. Conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank, said earlier this month that Russia’s commitment to maintaining its theater-wide initiative in Ukraine is straining its domestic workforce.

“The limited manpower pool is unlikely to be able to sustain this elevated casualty rate in the medium term,” they wrote in a wartime update.

In November, Russia recorded the highest number of casualties in a month of war. An average of more than 1,500 soldiers were killed and wounded every day, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence update earlier this month, citing Ukrainian military figures.

This made November the costliest month of the conflict for the Russian military, with almost 46,000 deaths, the British Ministry of Defense said. It was also the fifth consecutive month that Moscow saw its monthly losses increase. ISW said the West needs to increase its support to increase Russia’s losses, which are not sustainable.

“The high number of casualties likely reflects the higher tempo of Russian operations and offensives,” Britain’s Defense Ministry said of the losses, adding that Moscow continued to kill and wound more than 1,000 soldiers a day as its troops continued to advance the front lines.

Russia employs Soviet-style tactics in which any ground gained justifies losses, no matter how severe. It sends wave after wave of soldiers, offering little rest or recovery to undermanned and undersupplied Ukrainian units. Such tactics were observed in Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Pokrovsk, among others.

The Russian leadership has signaled that it is willing to accept these losses in a grueling, grueling campaign that simply does not benefit Ukraine, which is the smaller fighter with fewer resources in this fight.

Massicot said that while Russia is currently suffering the highest casualty rate in the Ukraine war, Moscow is still putting overwhelming pressure on Ukrainian forces trying to hold the line against ongoing Russian attacks, and those attacks are increasing.

“The losses do not cause these tactics or these waves of attacks to stop,” she said.

Russia is trying to advance against Ukrainian defensive positions in various directions of the front. A key focus is on the city of Pokrovsk, a key logistics and rail hub that Moscow is approaching.

Russia is also trying to drive Ukrainian troops out of its own Kursk region, which Kiev invaded in a surprise move in early August. Thousands of North Korean soldiers have been deployed to the area in recent weeks to support Moscow’s efforts, further increasing pressure on Ukrainian troops fighting for control of their territory.

U.S. and Ukrainian officials have confirmed that North Korean soldiers fought alongside Russian forces in Kursk. They have also suffered losses in combat, partly because they have no experience with this type of war.