My first article on a potential settlement in Ukraine discussed Trump’s inability to recognize his lack of economic leverage over Russia in forcing it to accept terms that would be acceptable to the Western Establishment. It had intentionally provoked Putin’s intervention in 2022 under the ignorant calculation that this action could be cited as a just cause to institute sanctions which would rapidly implode the Russian economy.
This proved to be a spectacular failure. Russia’s economy is now more independent of the West than ever, and its performance is arguably better than it was before the sanctions were imposed. My point was that the West has had no good idea about what to do next in its economic war on Russia and clearly neither does Trump.
This also applies to the military situation, which I’ll discuss at length now. First, it’s important to note that there was never any plan to defeat Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine. The point was the sanctions. NATO’s preparations in Ukraine were meant to turn it into a quagmire for the Russian military while its economy collapsed in the rear.
Once those sanctions failed, the whole plan to take down Russia and then dismember the Federation failed. The most generous assessment is that they’ve been forcing Ukraine to hold out this entire time in the hope that Russia’s economy will eventually succumb. Probably the most realistic would be that they can’t admit they were wrong, so they’ve been sticking with a new narrative which was improvised in response.
To be fair, the notion that Russia could be defeated in a massive land war on its border is laughably idiotic. This narrative was only meant for Western consumers of the MSM in the wake of the intervention. NATO doesn’t know what to do because this isn’t a feasible directive. It was set up to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe while aging Soviet leaders were busy fortifying Ukraine (the Donbass in particular) so NATO couldn’t invade the Soviet Union like Hitler. To what extent Trump can appreciate such historical nuances is unclear.
Here’s what’s obvious: Trump is referencing the same information that readers of prestigious publications have been fed by the Kagans’ Institute for the Study of War since the Putin ordered the intervention in 2022. This has been the primary source of all the bogus information about Russia losing the entire time.
There was never any point during the ensuing years where Russia has been losing, or the strategic situation was even developing poorly for it. Russia has a broad set of overwhelming advantages against Ukraine which are yielding predictable results.
The ISW acts as a coordinating mechanism for the bogus MSM narratives about the conflict to paint the opposite picture. When a Westerner reaches the conclusion that a narrative about the conflict is true because everyone important is saying it, this is how that happens. This nonsense is never the organic product of reason or consensus. It’s both false and counterintuitive and thus requires formulation and distribution to keep all outlets working on the same narrative.
One of its most important functions is to provide evidence for articles and news segments to cite in promoting these fabricated narratives. The ISW establishes evidence usually by citing itself or the Ukrainian government.
The Ukrainians have demonstrated themselves to be so untrustworthy that they literally distribute cut scenes from video games like Arma 3. The clip below of KA-52s getting shot down was enough to fool military analysts from Fox News:
Trump’s take on the military situation is absolutely delusional but completely in tune with the MSM narratives:
Trump said Putin couldn’t be happy with the slow progress of his war against Ukraine — nearly three years after he ordered an all-out assault, and 11 years after disguised Russian troops first entered Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula……
“He’s grinding it out. Most people thought it would last about one week and now you’re into three years. It is not making him look good,” Trump said.
“We have numbers that almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed. About 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed. Russia’s bigger, they have more soldiers to lose but that’s no way to run a country,” he added.
Again, these figures are farcical and most likely come from conflating Ukrainian and ISW lies. The premise of these lies is the absurdity that Putin launched an all-out assault against Ukraine. That’s why it is described in some variation of this term in every single article you’ll read in the MSM. It’s a gigantic clue that the average reader simply doesn’t have the critical thinking skills to notice. To be fair, clearly neither does Trump or any military officer I’ve ever spoken with about the subject.
In reality, the Russian Army went in with an expeditionary force consisting of somewhere under 120,000 men pulled mostly from the Eastern Military District of Russia all the way out on the Chinese border. A consumer of Western media is led to believe that Russian conscripts have been perishing in human wave attacks ever since, along with his kitchen sink and anything else Putin could throw at Ukraine.
While the Russian military doesn’t release such figures, one can conclude that the side with overwhelming firepower which controls the skies will be taking far less casualties than the side on the receiving end which has been forced to sacrifice entire armies in bogus suicidal offensives in order to generate narrative-boosting headlines. The Ukrainians had to do this three times in order to fool the Western public into thinking they could win. Three armies equipped by NATO were lost.
Putin has been very careful to minimize Russian casualties. This directive has full priority over speed. Conscripts don’t participate in the SMO zone and aren’t allowed to do so under Russian law, nor does the Russian military generally carry out mass urban assaults like it did in World War 2. Instead, casualties in Verdun-style kill boxes such as Bahkmut are borne primarily by PMCs, Donbass militias, Chechen volunteers, and penal units. These troops operate in small fire teams. Human wave attacks have no value in a modern battle.
Figures haven’t been released on these irregular casualties, but reasonable estimates based on publicly available information in Russia place the total for the Russian Army somewhere in the range of 80,000-120,000. If the official figures are ever disclosed, it will be long after the conflict is over.
They’re now accusing the North Koreans, whose participation has never been proven with any credible evidence beyond the word of the Ukrainians, as doing the same thing they accused the Russians of in the first years of the conflict. Does this sound familiar? From what I read in the New York Times this morning:
The North Korean soldiers fighting for Moscow in Russia’s Kursk region are assigned their own patches of land to assault. Unlike their Russian counterparts, they advance with almost no armored vehicles in support.
When they attack, they do not pause to regroup or retreat, as the Russians often do when they start taking heavy losses, Ukrainian soldiers and American officials say. Instead, they move under heavy fire across fields strewed with mines and will send in a wave of 40 or more troops.
If they seize a position, they do not try to secure it. They leave that to Russian reinforcements, while they drop back and prepare for another assault.
They have also developed singular tactics and habits. When combating a drone, the North Koreans send out one soldier as a lure so others can shoot it down. If they are gravely wounded, they have been instructed to detonate a grenade to avoid being captured alive, holding it under the neck with one hand on the pin as Ukrainian soldiers approach.
Over drinks in DC two years ago, I had an American officer tell me this was exactly what Russian conscripts were doing. No proof, no logic, just an anecdotal story that would make sense if you’ve been led to believe an ridiculous narrative because you have no critical thinking ability. It’s all so tiresome.
Relying on volunteer recruitment over the course of the conflict, Russia is reported to have assembled a reserve army consisting of six combat-ready divisions in prudent preparation for escalation into World War 3, which, if you were listening to them, they’ve been saying the United States started with the coup in 2014. The Russian military doesn’t need to fill trench positions by the inch like it’s the 20th century in order to pin down the Ukrainian military while it’s demolished from a distance.
In terms of gridlock, the Russians have had to contend with the Soviet version of the Maginot Line for Moscow designed to survive a preemptive nuclear attack. It was expanded and modernized by NATO for eight years and remains ensconced behind the world’s largest minefields. Anything advancing over open ground is also vulnerable to dirt cheap FPV drones, even the latest tanks. It’s been slow going, but it will ultimately prove to be a methodical demolition conducted to minimize Russian losses.
The Russian Airforce has been flying thousands of glide bomb sorties a month for well over a year. Although the scale is enormous, important nodes have fallen. In ground combat, the line suffers from a thousand Russian cuts, some of which are developed into cauldrons in which thousands of Ukrainian defenders are massacred trying to withdraw through narrow routes under Russian fire control. Daily casualties are estimated to be between 1,000 to 2,000 men.
Major hubs are now becoming vulnerable which threaten the integrity of the entire formation. Once it falls, there’s nothing to the west which can be set up again. That’s why the geography of Donbass made it the ideal place for the Soviets to build these fortifications and facilities in the first place. What’s happening is slow and at a massive scale, but when it’s done the defense of western Ukraine will become untenable.
To the rear, much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and military industrial capacity is ruins. The AA network has been so depleted and destroyed that these specialized soldiers are now being sent to the front as infantry. The manpower situation is dire.
Many of Ukraine’s remaining professional units were sacrificed in the suicidal stunt of invading the sparsely populated Russian region of Kursk. Once mines were put down, it became difficult for the Russians to quickly dislodge them. So, yes, the area is still being contested, but no, it’s not indicative of a conflict in which the two sides are vying with each other for victory. The whole point of the incursion was to enable the Western media to make this implication.
New cannon fodder past America’s enlistment age has to be dragged off the streets from jobs that keep what’s left of Ukraine’s economy functioning and its families with fathers. Westerner leaders and commentators are salivating at the prospect of making Ukrainian men in their teens and early twenties eligible for conscription. It’s all so ghoulish that it’s hard to do justice for the human toll in a couple of paragraphs. In cold terms, this is simply not sustainable. Ukraine has been in a desperate situation for over 2 years now.
The 20th century demonstrates that a modern army can hold up until the moment it doesn’t. At that juncture, it all falls apart in a day as domestic turmoil ensues. If one conducts an honest assessment of the situation and then considers what comes next, there are several obvious possibilities:
- Ukraine collapses. Russia advances west and south to secure its objectives in the chaos.
- Ukraine ignores its Western handlers and unilaterally secures the best terms it can from Russia.
- Trump manages to strike a deal that suits the West to the detriment of Russia.
- Trump is able to blame the first or second possible outcomes on Europe and the Ukrainians. He then moves on with his other agendas.
The third outcome seems like the least likely while my suspicion is that the fourth will be palatable to Trump since he never wanted to be saddled with Ukraine. For better or worse, he never accepts blame or admits defeat. This character trait points to the fourth outcome as well.
Next time, I’ll discuss the various objectives of the parties to a potential deal.
I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.
I may be mistaken here, but I recall watching a video not long ago which claimed that the conscriptions are almost exclusively lower and working classes. White collar types and the city of Kiev as a whole are largely untouched by the war.