Russian T-72 B3 tanks in the vicinity of Mariupol, March 20, 2022 (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

As the last Ukrainian soldier withdrew from Lysychansk, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last Sunday that evacuating the troops from the city was a right decision, claiming that "we will return thanks to our tactics, thanks to the increase in the supply of modern weapons."

In his article for 19FortyFive, Daniel L. Davis, a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army, considered that "The most likely result for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF), if they continue fighting the Russians, is that more of Zelensky’s troops will be killed, more Ukrainian cities will be turned to rubble, and more territory Kyiv will lose to the invaders."

"Russia will almost certainly win a tactical victory"

The writer said that an assessment of the powers of the two armed forces suggests that "Russia will almost certainly win a tactical victory."

Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Oleksiy Arestovych claimed that the Ukrainian troops' withdrawal from Severodonetsk and Lysychansk weren’t defeats, but allowed Kiev to “buy time for the supply of Western weapons and the improvement of the second line of defense, to create conditions for our offensive actions in other areas of the front.”

However, Zelensky's advisor Mykhailo Podolyak indicated that in order for Ukraine to reach parity with the Russian forces, it "would require modern kit in the range of 1,000 howitzers, 500 tanks, and 300 rocket launchers."

According to The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, "the sum total of all heavy weapons delivered or promised by the West through last week’s G7 and NATO summits amounts to a paltry 175 howitzers, 250 Soviet-era tanks, and an anemic dozen or so rocket launchers."

Davis stressed that "despite numerous and boisterous claims of Western support, it is militarily unsound for Ukraine to base its defense plans on the hope that major quantities of high quality Western heavy weapons will show up to help Ukraine stop the Russians."

"Russia has hundreds of thousands more active troops"

The writer explained that "military victory or defeat in the Russian-Ukraine War is likely to be determined by the side that has the highest quality of manpower and less on the platforms of war," adding that since the start of the war, Russia had a total active force of 900,000, while Ukraine had approximately 250,000.

Although both forces have suffered from awful casualties since February, "Russia has hundreds of thousands more active troops from which to pull to replace its losses, whereas Ukraine has none," Davis noted.

According to the New York Times, a Ukrainian colonel revealed that most of the replacement troops being sent to his unit have “never served in the army."

Despite imposed sanctions, Russia still has the capacity to manufacture missiles, rockets, and artillery shells, "while most of Ukraine’s manufacturing capacity has been methodically destroyed," Davis mentioned in his article.

"The harsh truth is that the longer Zelensky and his Western supporters continue pursuing unrealistic objectives, the more likely Ukraine eventually suffers an outright military defeat," the writer concluded.