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Russia is firing 1.5x more shells than Ukraine, Western officials said, up from 10x earlier this year.
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As the artillery advantage diminishes, glide bombs compensate, officials told Sky News.
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Russian progress on the front lines has come at a terrible cost, they said.
Russia’s artillery advantage over Ukraine is rapidly diminishing.
The Russian lead has now been reduced to 1.5 rounds for every shell Ukraine fires back, Sky News reported, citing Western officials. According to previous Ukrainian estimates, the artillery advantage was 10 to 1 earlier this year, and as high as 15 to 1 in the first months of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
The unnamed Western officials said a “wide variety of factors” were behind the decline, including restrictions on Russian production lines, challenges in transferring munitions to the front line by rail, drone strikes on major Russian and Northern Korean ammunition depots and Western ammunition deliveries to Ukraine. .
But they told the newspaper that Russia appears to be compensating by dropping massive amounts of glide bombs on the front lines.
One official said Russia’s “massive” increase in the use of glide bombs was having a “devastating effect.”
Since the start of the war, Russia has regularly attacked Ukraine with glide bombs – cheap but very valuable destructive weapons which are notoriously difficult to intercept.
War and air force analysts have said Ukraine’s ability to counter these threats is limited because moving its best air defense systems closer to the front lines makes them vulnerable to attack.
Until last month, Ukraine was not allowed to use Western-supplied long-range missiles to attack bases in Russia, where many of the attacks originate.
Ukraine has responded by making its own glide bombs, using bombs supplied by the West and mounting them on its F-16 fighter jets. It dropped several in Kursk during its surprise cross-border assault on the region in August.
Ukrainian forces have also targeted Russian aircraft capable of dropping glide bombs and used drones to attack military bases where the weapons are stored.
But the glide bombs have wreaked havoc on Ukraine’s infrastructure.
Russia dropped more than 900 glide bombs on Ukraine in just one week in late October and early November. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at the time.
Russia also continues its gradual advance in Ukraine.
Late last month, analysts at the Institute for the Study of War said Russian forces in eastern Ukraine were advancing at their fastest pace since the early months of the conflict.
But this has come at a terrible cost, Western officials told Sky News, comparing Russian frontline losses to those of the Battle of the Somme, one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the First World War.
In November, Russia set a new record for the average number of deaths and injuries per day in the war, according to the British Ministry of Defense, which said in an intelligence update this week that the losses were “likely to reflect the increased pace of Russian fighting .” operations” against Ukraine.
It was the third month in a row that Russia suffered record-breaking daily losses, the report said.
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