Nato Officials Call Ukraine War Increasingly Pitted Quantity Against Quality

JAKARTA - The war in Ukraine will increasingly become a battle between large numbers of poorly trained Russian troops with outdated equipment against smaller but better armed and trained Ukrainian troops from the West, says a top North Atlantic Treaty Organization military official (NATO) on Wednesday.

Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of NATO's Military Committee, said Russia was now deploying a large number of T-54 tanks, an older model designed in the early years after the Second World War.

"But the problem is, they still have a lot of T-54s. So... in terms of numbers, quantity, that's a problem," Bauer told reporters after a meeting of the alliance's national military heads at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. May.

"What we're going to see now is, Russia is going to focus - it has to focus - on quantity, a larger number of conscripts, and mobilizing people, not materially trained and older ones. But in large numbers," he explained.

"Meanwhile, Ukraine will focus on quality, with Western weapons systems and Western training. That's the big difference in the coming months, I think," said the man who once commanded the HNLMS De Ruyter warship.

He added that NATO military chiefs reaffirmed their "unrelenting support" to Ukraine's representatives at the meeting.

"There is no doubt that NATO will support Ukraine as long as necessary," said Bauer, who is a Dutch military officer.

Separately, US Army General Christopher Cavoli, NATO's top commander for Europe, added that the degradation of Russian troops was "highly uneven".

"Most of it happens to ground troops," he said briefly.