Russia Forced To Scale Back Missile Strikes Amid Shortage: U.K.

Russia’s war effort in Ukraine is being hampered by a shortage of munitions that is limiting the amount of strikes its forces can carry out, according to British defense officials.

In its daily update, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said on Saturday that Russia has dealt with troop shortages by augmenting its forces with “tens of thousands of reservists since October.”

This followed a partial mobilization that was announced the previous month by Russian President Vladimir Putin, although the draft was beset with complaints that it was botched.

Despite this increase in personnel “a shortage of munitions highly likely remains the key limiting factor on Russian offensive operations,” the defense officials said.

The assessment said that “the limited availability of cruise missiles” had meant that Russia had probably limited long-range missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure to around once a week. It added that Russia was also unlikely to have increased its stockpile of artillery munitions enough to allow for large-scale offensive operations.

The officials concluded that “a vulnerability” of how Russian military operations were conducted was that “even just sustaining defensive operations along its lengthy front line requires a significant daily expenditure of shells and rockets.”

Newsweek has contacted Russia’s defense ministry about the daily assessment, which emphasizes Ukrainian gains and Russian losses.

Russia has been drawing on supplies of Iranian-supplied Shahed-136 unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as kamikaze drones, to bolster its air attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. Tehran is also reportedly supplying missiles although it has denied giving any weapons to Moscow.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted on Saturday that Iran “humiliates the institution of international sanctions” with its reported supply of weapons, and called for the “liquidation” of factories that make them.

Following his visit to Washington, DC in which he received further pledges of American military support, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russia could launch more strikes over the holiday season as he called on citizens to heed air raid signals.

He then switched from Ukrainian to Russian at the end of his nightly address to say that “citizens of Russia must clearly understand that terror never goes unanswered.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department responded to the first time that Russian President Vladimir Putin referred to his invasion of Ukraine as a “war” instead of the official Kremlin term of “special military operation.”

“Finally, after 300 days, Putin called the war what it is,” the spokesperson said “As a next step…we urge him to end this war by withdrawing his forces from Ukraine.”