How They’re Getting Fooled

From the looks of things, Ukraine will be launching a counteroffensive in the coming weeks. That’s not because it’s a good idea. They won’t have any element of surprise and they’ll be attacking well-prepared units head on. However, for political reasons this is what has to happen, or it’s feared that support will wane because the Western public needs something tangible marketed to them as evidence of success. More military aid has been provided to Ukraine than the Soviet Union in World War 2.

The general public doesn’t understand what’s happening even though opposition to sustaining the conflict has been growing as we’ve squandered a couple hundred billion in just a year. That’s perfectly understandable since they have very little comprehension of military matters, but I must admit to feeling an intense disquiet when my former comrades, who are field grade officers, don’t get it either.

What’s been happening for the past 13 months is a decisive Russian success but marketed as the opposite by the exact same people behind the Global War on Terror (GWOT) with its fabricated premises and comprehensive failures. A lot of this is done by absurd lies such as claiming the Russians, with multiples of acknowledged advantage in firepower, are taking multiples of the Ukrainian casualties without ever supplying a credible explanation for the disparity. However, there are some genuine reasons why they’re able to keep up the deception, which I’ll run through:

Scale

Ukraine is a bit smaller than Texas. The line of contact between the two sides would stretch from the White House down to the middle of Florida. The fighting is occurring on a scale unseen since World War 2 and thus nothing for which anyone would develop a frame of reference during the GWOT. Units are often stationed far apart, there’s not really a solid line.

Everything NATO can feasibly provide is being sent to Ukraine. According to the Russian Ministry of Defence, and as of April 2nd, it has destroyed: 405 airplanes, 228 helicopters, 3,641 drones, 415 mobile AA systems, 8,510 tanks and armored fighting vehicles, 1,077 MRLS, 4,485 artillery pieces, and 9,270 special military motor vehicles. One can infer that the loss of life entailed has been absolutely horrific because Ukraine refuses to release anything that would approach an honest assessment.

Iraq as a Frame of Reference

This is nothing like what the U.S. military has ever taken on in its entire history. However, what happens is that people naturally compare it to the invasion of Iraq, which the U.S. appeared to go through like a hot knife through butter. They conclude that Russia hasn’t done the same thing to Ukraine because of some combination of cowardice, incompetence, shoddy equipment, and supply issues, which the West is constantly fed nonsense about by the media.

Iraq is a much smaller country, most of which is desert. Much of the population is along a corridor from Basra to Baghdad. Its military was dilapidated and poorly motivated, to the extent it was at all. Some of the commanders didn’t offer any opposition because they’d accepted bribes. This was nothing like the enormous, modern, well-trained and equipped military that the Russians went up against last year.

Fortifications

In a desperate World War 3 scenario, Ukraine was where the Soviets would make their last stand against NATO because it would all be open ground from there to Moscow and they really didn’t trust the Warsaw Pact countries to fight to the last man in their defense. Ukraine was the first place NATO would encounter that was populated by Russians willing to do that sort of thing.

The country is peppered with redundant and dispersed facilities, many of which are fortified and underground. The gigantic bunker complex where the Azov Battalion held out is one of many. In Donbass, the Soviets built their version of the Maginot Line which NATO then had eight years to turn into an even bigger fun house.

The Russians are constrained from flying overhead and dropping large bombs on them due to Ukraine’s anti-aircraft (AA) network, which will be covered next. Instead, they’re forced to cut them off and reduce them with artillery (a lot them are too deep in the rear for that) before going in and clearing them out. It’s a difficult and lengthy process. Assaulting them head on would be suicidal, and yet I’ve been told that’s what the Russians are doing with waves of conscripts like this is a scene from Enemy at the Gates.

Anti-Aircraft

The Ukrainians inherited an enormous AA network designed and stockpiled for World War 3, along with everything that could be squeezed out of the former Soviet satellites for this conflict. These systems are very effective, particularly the long-range S-300 which can operate far beyond the reach of Russian artillery.

Thanks to the amazing technical capabilities and scale of NATO’s C4ISR support, these units are fed real time information on what’s coming, from where, and even what it was loaded up with at the airfield. They only need to turn on the radar to fire the missiles. Then, they move to the next location.

When they get taken out, it’s usually because they were visually located by a Russian drone and then hit with a Lancet loitering munition or an Iskander missile. In Serbia, NATO only managed to take out about half of their Soviet network and lost a vaunted stealth fighter. That was a much smaller situation, and the Serbs didn’t have the support the Ukrainians receive.

Airstrikes

Thus far, air strikes on Ukraine have mostly been carried out by “lofting,” a technique in which fighters fly to the perceived edge of an AA zone, launch their ordnance, and do a U-turn as they deploy flares. In Syria, U.S. and Israeli F-35s do the same procedure thanks to these same Soviet systems. That’s not terribly effective compared to flying overhead and dropping a big bomb.

The problem for Ukraine is that they can’t produce more AA missiles and anything available from NATO has already been provided. They can’t produce more missiles for the systems, either. An objective of massive Russian cruise missile barrages is to drain the stockpiles. That’s one reason why they’re accompanied by old ones without warheads (used as decoys).

Glide bombs guided by GLONASS are now being deployed in some areas which can be dropped from distances of up to 70km. When the Russians are confident of being safe from AA, they’ve dropped really big stuff like the FAB-3000. So, that could be what’s in store for the denouement of this conflict if the AA network collapses.

Counteroffensives

Seizing ground can represent victory but not on open terrain devoid of strategic value. On the vast steppe, taking advantage of superior firepower and mobility to hit your enemy as he moves forward in a vain attempt to strike you is a much smarter tactic.

The dumb thing would be to hold your ground and negate this decisive advantage. Ownership of the ground is decided later by your enemy’s defeat. This was a signature tactic of the Mongols. It works even better with pre-sighted heavy artillery. The Russians have been practicing this ever since the invasion of Phase One concluded.

The media gives the public the impression that these offensives smash the Russian lines, forcing them to retreat in panic with enemy fire to their backs. This has never happened.

For instance, the Russians evacuated the city of Kherson to avoid being trapped in a static fight with their backs to a river in the flood zone of a dam. They’d take unnecessary heavy casualties going head-to-head with everything NATO could send at them.

Prior to this move, President Vucic of Serbia warned that NATO was trying to set up a new Battle of Stalingrad. Days before Zelensky’s publicity stunt downtown, Russian forces, along with anyone who wished to leave, were pulled east, back across the Dnieper River. They even took the statues with them.

Somewhere between five to seven Ukrainian brigades (!!!!!) were lost. When this is over, those men will still be dead, while the land will return to Russian control. The Western headlines for which their lives were sacrificed won’t mean anything. That’s the grim logic of what’s going on.

These counteroffensives have been pitched as major victories when, in fact, they trade Ukrainian lives for propaganda to bolster public opinion. Bringing the Ukrainians out into the open, en masse, is only helping to get them hit with barrages in a war that is dictated by positional artillery battles.

Manpower

The Russian army does have conscripts, but they’re not being thrown in to die in droves. I was told by a lieutenant colonel that they were being sent forward without even having rifles to expose Ukrainian positions by getting killed. The reality is that last winter’s 380,000-man mobilization came from volunteers and their version of the Individual Ready Reserve.

Wagner Group is more like a version of the French Foreign Legion than the companies contracted by the Department of Defense. The prisoners in Wagner Group are treated like soldiers and fight alongside contractors, mostly in small fire teams. They have a good chance of getting killed, but it’s not like Red Army penal units from World War 2. It’s a very Russian way of utilizing men who’d otherwise be useless.

If you were languishing in federal prison and offered the chance to have a life again in exchange for storming urban areas of Mexico, that could be a very attractive deal. But, like everything else, this is cited as evidence of Putin’s desperation.

Kiev

When the operation was launched last year, the Russians parked a column with about 40,000 soldiers outside of Kiev. That was a small fraction of what would be required subdue a city of that size. Their purpose was to tie down its much larger garrison and put political pressure on the Ukrainian government to negotiate. That would’ve been the rational decision for them, rather than being subjected to a slaughter with no chance of victory.

When it became clear that NATO wouldn’t allow any settlement and the operation moved into its next phase, the column dispersed. It wasn’t repelled by the Ukrainians. According to the media, this was a “siege” in which the Russians were defeated. It’s a key piece of a false narrative that’s kept up the deception for over a year.

I had some officers tell me we should have gone in and wiped them out, like it was the Highway of Death from the First Gulf War. The sense of impunity these guys felt at what would have been the start to an apocalyptic conflict is unnerving, but it’s par for the course after everything that’s transpired for over 20 years.

When foreign leaders and celebrities appear in Kiev for these publicity stunts, it’s because they’re allowed to by the Russians. Anything over the city can be intercepted from Belarusian airspace. They can hit any facility they want, no matter how deep, with a Kinzhal hypersonic missile that will plunge into the ground at Mach 15, creating some sort of plasma field in front of it. These things can be launched from deep inside Russia and can’t be intercepted.

When Biden visited, the media left out the fact that this was approved personally by Putin, just like all the other foreign leaders. If Russia was losing, these stunts would be humiliations, but this is not what’s actually happening. They’re allowed to visit because, in the end, they just serve as an embarrassment. Imagine if President Ford had made a trip to Saigon, claimed North Vietnam was going to be defeated, and promised unwavering support.

They’re Not Attacking Us

That’s the simple street math: we’re fighting them but they’re not fighting back, this means they’re too scared of us. To be fair, there are American military personnel in Ukraine, whom the Russians agreed not to target. We also had experts like General Petraeus assuring us that Russia was on the verge of catastrophic defeat and that if NATO decided to step in, we’d wipe the floor with them quickly. Once again, this isn’t true.

Last month, the Russians launched the largest missile attack thus far in retaliation for a cross-border incursion that injured a bunch of children. Reportedly included in the barrage were six Kinzhals. Those would only be used to hit things that were heavily fortified and important. One of those targets was apparently a bunker in the far west. It’s being claimed that around 40 American officers and intelligence personnel were killed.

If this is what happened, it would make sense. It preceded the simulated nuclear attack on St. Petersburg in which a U.S. bomber pulled away just before reaching Russian airspace and the incredibly expensive, advanced drone getting flown in an irregular course over the Black Sea, to which the Russians reacted by spraying it with fuel (a Soviet tactic) to take it down for reverse-engineering. Turkey won’t allow the U.S. Navy into the Black Sea, so only they can recover it. We can be assured that the media will avoid discussing this humiliation.

As far as I can tell, the U.S. has responded by sending more money to Ukraine. Doing anything more would get American personnel killed. If the Russians were scared of an American response, this wouldn’t have happened. A lot of these things we’ll probably only find out about later, so there’s not much point in speculating about a bunch of other stuff.

When this is all over and the consequences start really setting in, most of the people fooled into supporting this evil insanity won’t learn anything from what happened due to their ignorance and credulous nature. I’m pretty sure they’ll get distracted by something else and then fooled again. When you watch the same shit happen multiple times, it’s not unreasonable to conclude it’ll just keep happening.