Russia’s military still has dangerous combat forces ‘barely touched’ by the Ukraine war, top US general in Europe warns

“The Russian military we see operating in Ukraine, and the punches it’s been taking, has to be viewed in the context of their entire military structure,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the commander of US European Command, said in an interview with the Atlantic Council.

Cavoli, also the NATO alliance’s supreme allied commander for Europe, said Russia still had forces that “have been barely touched” by the Ukraine war, including its long-range aviation, strategic rocket forces, defensive units, and undersea assets. He said most of Moscow’s tactical air force had not yet been committed to the conflict.

“So while there have been significant, significant losses in the ground domain, in the rest of the military structure of Russia, there remains a huge amount of capability — both conventional and nuclear — and so it’s necessary to keep that in mind,” Cavoli said during the video interview with the think tank, which was released Tuesday.

Throughout the war, Russia has made efforts to flaunt its military capabilities beyond Ukraine, such as carrying out submarine exercises in the Baltic Sea and increased undersea activity in the Atlantic, flying military aircraft with China near Alaska, conducting nuclear readiness drills, and attempting to test new long-range ballistic missiles.

But Moscow’s military demonstrations abroad have come against the backdrop of its setbacks in Ukraine; what Russian President Vladimir Putin expected to be a swift and decisive victory has become a bloody conflict inching closer to the three-year mark.

Western intelligence estimates that well over 600,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded since the start of the war in Ukraine and that Russia is averaging more than 1,200 losses each day — a trend that’s likely to continue. Moscow is meanwhile thought to have lost a massive amount of military equipment, including thousands of tanks and armored vehicles.

Cavoli said during the Atlantic Council interview that while Russia’s ground forces had suffered severe losses fighting in Ukraine, Moscow had taken notable strides to build them back up.

“The military force — the ground force — inside Ukraine today is significantly larger than the ground force that was there in the beginning of the war,” Cavoli said, “so the Russian army has actually grown during this period.”

“Now, there’s some quality problems, and some of the equipment may not be the newest, but that again is localized to the ground forces,” he said. “Russia has a plan to reconstitute that ground force and to deploy it, again, on the borders of NATO.”

“It’s a plan they’ve made public that they’ve talked about, and it’s something we have to take very seriously,” he added.

Cavoli’s remarks this week signal his latest warnings of the continued Russian threat. The American general — like other top US officials — has said on multiple occasions over the past few months that Moscow is still dangerous and is making up for its wartime losses.