According to the March 5 U.K. Defense Ministry's intelligence update, Russian soldiers are forced into hand-and-hand combat due to lack of ammunition. The reservists were thus ordered by the Russian Command to assault a Ukrainian concrete strong point with only “firearms and shovels.”
“The lethality of the standard-issue MPL-50 entrenching tool is particularly mythologized in Russia. Little changed since it was designed in 1869, its continued use as a weapon highlights the brutal and low-tech fighting which has come to characterize much of the war,” the report states.
The U.K. Defense Ministry also commented that one of the reservists described being “neither physically, nor mentally” capable of the action.
Meanwhile, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on March 5 that Russia had lost 153,120 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion, including 930 casualties over the past day.
