It’s a long story, but I recently found myself dragged along to a Ukraine fundraiser. The food and drinks were decent, and they had a bunch of kitsch brought back by mercenaries on display. Oh yeah, and apparently to everybody there, Ukraine is still winning. I haven’t done an article on this for a while since the same process I’ve covered extensively is still playing out, but let me give a quick recap.
By February of 2022, the Ukrainian military had been armed to the teeth by NATO into one of the largest and most modern armies in the world. The Soviets never trusted the Warsaw Pact, which was hardly a voluntary alliance. Thus, Ukraine was where they’d make their last stand in a nightmare WW3 scenario before evacuating Moscow. In terms of geography, Donbass was the natural choice for Moscow’s defensive line. Ukraine was peppered with fortified complexes packed with Soviet stockpiles. For instance, it included the S-300 AA missile which so greatly constrained Russian airpower for the first year of the conflict.
The Ukrainian military was ready to go in and wipe out the Russian militias in the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, which had broken off following the U.S. coup in 2014. Ukrainians were assured by their NATO backers that Putin wouldn’t intervene directly and that sanctions would collapse the Russian economy overnight. Putin warned them against this course of action and then pulled the trigger when they refused to heed his warnings.
Russia’s economy never collapsed although Russia did take heavy casualties, which were unavoidable in offensive operations deep into Ukrainian held territory against a fully equipped modern army. The U.S. has never done anything like it. The Russians refer to this as Phase One. It had a few key goals:
First, wipe out Ukrainian airpower. Second, tie down the Ukrainian military while a much smaller Russian force secured a land bridge between Crimea and the breakaway Donbass republics. Third, to put political pressure on the Ukrainians to negotiate an end to the conflict.
This was the purpose behind the roughly 40,000 strong column parked outside Kiev falsely marketed as a failed siege. It was there to tie down the garrison of around 300,000 and put panic into the population to pressure Zelensky. This tactic was successful on both counts. The Ukrainians signed an agreement which would’ve eventually resolved the situation to Russia’s satisfaction. Putin has been showing off his copy, but NATO ordered the Ukrainians to fight.
The war then moved into the next phase, in which the Russians demolished the Ukrainian military, stockpiles, and infrastructure from afar using positional artillery battles, drones, and cruise missiles. The Russian strategy was also to cede ground in order to preserve their soldiers and lure the Ukrainians en masse into the open against these abandoned positions. There were Ukrainian “counter offensives” in which this process happened at scale, with the ground taken being falsely marketed as evidence of success.
For the storming of urban areas, PMCs, local militias, and Chechen volunteers were utilized. The Russian Army has lost well over 20,000 soldiers but given the scale of the conflict, this could probably be interpreted as evidence of their sincere effort to preserve life. The average Russian is much more comfortable with convicts and Chechens dying than their own sons.
The conflict has depleted Ukrainian and NATO stockpiles. Ukraine’s military industrial assets are being steadily blown up despite extensive efforts to disperse and disguise, while NATO’s MIC lacks the capacity to significantly ramp up production. By contrast, Stalin built massive, centralized military industrial complexes deep inside Russia.
They feature highly unprofitable mothballed lines which are now up and running 24/7. Russia has as many engineers as the United States despite the population differential. It can also supplement domestic output (munitions alone estimated four times what it was in 2022) with allies such as Iran and North Korea.
As NATO is running out of stuff to send, and Ukraine is falling apart, Russia’s economy has remained healthy and it’s now humming along on a partial war footing. Without billions per month from the U.S. just for government salaries, Ukraine will collapse. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers are dead and more maimed. Much of the population has fled to the east or west. From an attritional perspective, everything favors Russia.
It’s so much worse than that, however. As Ukraine’s AA network has been depleted, the Russians have been conducting dozens of precision glide bomb sorties per day. They pack a much bigger punch than shells and missiles. Worse yet, NATO has forced the Ukrainians into headlong suicide missions with Frankenstein assortments of equipment to get the proper headlines ahead of some sort of settlement the Biden Administration thinks it can impose on the Russians to halt their progress and market a victory to the Western public.
How do you successfully fight your way through a mine field when enemy artillery has fire control, drones prowl the skies, and helicopters hover beyond detection kilometers away with 20 anti-tank missiles apiece? Obviously, you don’t bother if even some of these factors are working against you.
This is why the Russians appear to have made such little westward progress, which is marketed as evidence of failure. They’d rather have Ukrainian forces come to their kill boxes in Donbass for these suicide operations. Crippling Ukraine’s transportation network would strand them all over the country, that’s why the Russians don’t do it.
It’s not difficult to learn from what’s going on in this unprecedented clash of technology. For instance, when C4ISR can detect any grouping of vehicles, lone wolves can operate effectively against larger groups in ambushes. For instance, a single Russian tank hiding in the distance took out a column of seven advancing vehicles with the aid of drones and artillery support to the rear. That’s how one-sided slaughters are conducted, not by sending columns forward.
The Russians have a wide variety of means to blow up everything Ukraine sends at them. Eventually, this horrific process will reach a denouement when everything and everyone available to be sent is depleted. The Russians don’t need to attempt a similar procedure. Ukraine is the most mined and fortified area in human history, it’ll be much easier to deal with these obstacles in peacetime. The grim logic is actually rather simple.
Russia has mobilized around 400,000 volunteers and reservists. Some probably rotate through the front, while others are prepared for an occupation force after either the Ukrainian state collapses, or they’re allowed sign some sort of withdrawal agreement as a face-saving measure. What’s definitely not happening is the Russians agreeing with the Biden Administration to halt their operations and not move westward.
To the extent progress is made on this final counteroffensive, it seems to follow this general pattern: trained Ukrainian assault force manages to approach Russian forward trench, Russians withdraw. Ukrainian conscripts abducted off the street replace the professionals; Russians pound the trench. This is why their life expectancy at the front is often about 4 hours. Trench is destroyed, Russia losses ground. The Pentagon can and does cite the ground taken, but it’s not sustainable.
What happens when Russia starts taking major territory to the east? Odessa and the Black Sea Coast are pretty much guaranteed, probably everything east of the Dnieper as well. What narrative will the sophisticated people at this fundraiser believe then? I’m confident it’ll be some new lie adjusted off the previous lies. Assuming we avoid WW3, I suppose it’ll be that we inflicted so many casualties on the Russians that they’ll never try this aggression again. A blue victory will be mailed-in to our fortified democracy, Trump will be in prison, and the neocons responsible for all of this will still be in absolute power cooking up their next nefarious scheme. Or, there’s the whole WW3 thing.
I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.
First-rate analysis.
Watch this: Colonel Douglas MacGregor
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/make-peace-you-fools-with-special-guest-col-douglas-macgregor/
The last thing we need is a war between two white nations who both have below replacement birthrates! If I listen to mainstream reports Ukraine is winning hands down, Putin is terminal ill, and Russia will split into 12 regions. But If I listen to Tik Tock Russia is winning hands down. (Scott Ritter and Douglas McGregor) I can’t watch Russia Today because they took it off my TV! Regardless Ukraine and Russian will be devastated for decades and henceforth Russia will always be an enemy of the United States and who can blame them? The United States is indeed an “Empire of Lies” just like Putin claimed. They lied to us about Vietnam (The Gulf of Tonkin incident) they lied to us about Iraq (weapons of mass destruction) and now they lie about the cause of the Russian/Ukrainian conflict. I too suspect Trump will be in prison as all the juries he will face will be majority non-white! But we did not learn the lesson we ought to have learned during the Trump administration and that is that the United States cannot be reformed from within!