At the start of the war in Ukraine Vladimir Putin threw his elite troops straight into “the meat grinder” and now the Russian Army are left “with the remains.”

Ukraine’s counteroffensive over the last week has seen Ukrainian forces recapture large amounts of territory which took Russian many months to capture.

Putin is in denial as he continues to insist things are on track, and said at a Kremlin Parliament meeting, “Everybody should know that largely speaking, we haven’t even yet started anything in earnest.”

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Simon Miles, an assistant professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, told business Insider, “A lot of these units are not exhibiting what we would call military professionalism, including cutting and running.

“We saw the best Russian military performance in the first few weeks of the war when the Russian military took its best units and sent huge numbers on basically suicide missions.

“They took the cream of the crop and threw them into the meat grinder, and now they are left with the remains.”

He said that the Kremlin are desperate and are looking to implement a “stopgap solution” as they are attempting to offer apparent professional soldiers a whole years wage if they fight on the front line for just three months.

Professor Miles added, “Lots of people signed on for one round. But as summer gives way to fall and fall gives way to winter, I would doubt that given how disastrously things have gone in the last few days especially, that many people will sign up for spending winter in a Ukrainian trench.

“Combat is the most physically and mentally taxing thing a human can subject themselves to. Units that have been in it for six months, it is just exhausting.”

The only way Putin would be able to get a whole new army would be if he declared a state of war then he could instigate mandatory conscription.

He said, “Continuing to refuse to mobilise is denying the Russian military the resource it needs most, which is personnel.

“To declare mass mobilisation, to declare formal war would be an explicit declaration that this isn’t working.”