'We can only hope desperate #EmpireAtAllCosts fanatics in London and
Washington don’t commit a fatal blunder in their futile attempts to
retain hegemony in the face of a resurgent multipolar world.'
The “Demilitarization” of Ukraine has been precisely the Russian
mentality in Ukraine. Their foremost objective, from the very beginning,
as explicitly articulated by President Vladimir Putin in his historic
speech of February 24, 2022, was to “demilitarize” Ukraine – to destroy
its army.
When the war began, the most capable, experienced, well-armed, and
well-positioned Ukrainian forces were NOT in Kiev, but in the Donbass
and Mariupol. They had been positioning there for months, with the
ultimate objective of retaking the Donbass and Crimea – a goal never far
from the minds of Ukraine’s ideological and political leaders.
Indeed, they spoke of it openly and without qualification. They strongly believed the strength of their armed forces, after eight years of preparation, had reached a point where it was capable of actually achieving that objective.
Their benefactors in NATO encouraged them to believe this – for it was also NATO’s fondest dream to raise its banners over the naval base at Sevastopol, and thereby wield dominance over the entire Black Sea and the Bosporus.
Pursuant to this and many other geostrategic objectives – arresting Russian resurgence foremost among them – NATO had been providing arms to Ukraine for years, and those arms shipments were expanded and accelerated dramatically in late 2021.
Tens of thousands Ukrainian troops had been trained in the use of these NATO armaments. And, as was known to anybody paying even casual attention, thousands of western intelligence operatives, special forces, and mercenary contractors (predominantly American, British, and French – and lots of them) were embedded with front-line Ukrainian forces, where several have since been killed or captured, and a substantial contingent still remains.
Many of these western troops are there primarily to coordinate the reception, interpretation, and “actionable” use of highly prized and even more highly classified US/NATO “ISR” (Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance) data.
The Mother of All Proxy Armies
The army the US/NATO built in Ukraine, by the beginning of 2022, had swelled to become the largest and best-armed land force in Europe. By almost every metric, it was more potent than the combined armies of Germany, France, and Italy.
European Land Forces – 2022
The Ukrainian military was purpose-built to serve the interests of the
American Empire in its long-established goal to cripple Russia and
prevent it from ever again being able to wield global influence; to
effect its ultimate dismemberment and reduce it to a faint fragment of
its former status and glory – to realize the geopolitical objective
expressed in the popular cold-war-era board game RISK, which erased
Russia from the world map.
The Russian decision to invade Ukraine in late February 2022 was
motivated by and predicated upon all of these factors in aggregate, and
was hastened by the widespread Ukrainian artillery strikes on the
Donbass region that had commenced weeks previously.
To destroy this powerful “Mother of All Proxy Armies” which the United
States and its NATO partners had methodically constructed on its borders
was, logically and manifestly, Russia’s foremost objective.
There was no other.
The elimination of this substantial threat on their literal doorstep was
understandably viewed by the Russians as an existential imperative.
Destroying the Mother of All Proxy Armies
And, in order to best achieve that objective, they effected a classic
Russian stratagem to impede the possibility of the forces in northern
Ukraine from reinforcing those in eastern and southern Ukraine once the
fighting began.
THIS is why they conducted the elaborate “feint and fix” operation in and around Kiev.
And, all things considered, it worked perfectly.
That said, it is essential to understand that the greatest and most
effective feints must be convincing. And, to be convincing, they very
often risk being costly. The best feints are based on a cost/benefit
analysis whose “benefit” often represents the foremost objective of a
war.
In the case of the feint and fix operation in Kiev, there was a
substantial cost – although it was not nearly as costly as western war
propagandists have sought to portray it. This is because much of the
feint consisted of demonstrations of intent, rather than concrete
actions.
For example, after achieving air dominance in the first few days of the
war, the Russians assembled a huge armored column, and casually drove it
down the main highway from the north towards Kiev. Then they
essentially just parked it there for many days, occasionally pretending
to be heading in one direction or another, before eventually pulling
back to their own borders, and sweeping around to join the forces
preparing to launch the main offensive in the Donbass.
Everything it did north of Kiev was all for show. They didn’t break
down; their troops didn’t run away; they didn’t run out of gas. It was
just a big “feint-in-force”.
Even Belarus assisted in the theatrics by assembling troops and
vehicles, moving them around aggressively just across the border from
Ukraine, and making veiled threats to join the Russian assault on Kiev –
which, of course, they never did, because no such assault was ever
envisioned. And these aggressive Belarusian demonstrations ceased once
the Russians concluded the feint operation and moved their forces to the
southeast.
The result of this feint operation was that, over the course of several
weeks, the Russians effectively “fixed” over 100,000 Ukrainian troops
and their equipment in the vicinity of Kiev, took control of key
transportation nodes and corridors between Kiev and the Donbass, and
simultaneously conducted a major offensive to encircle and annihilate
the 20,000-strong Ukrainian army group in Mariupol, a highly strategic
port city on the coast of the Sea of Azov.
The forces in Mariupol included the notorious neo-Nazi “Azov Battalion”,
whose arming and training had long been a US/NATO priority, and they
were considered to be one of the most formidable components of the
Ukrainian army.
The forces in Mariupol also included many dozens of NATO “advisors”
(CIA, special forces, and so-called “contractors”). Also present were
~2500 foreign mercenaries, most of them NATO veterans of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
While potential reinforcements remained idle and immobile in and around
Kiev, the powerful force in Mariupol was methodically surrounded and
systematically annihilated in an operation I am confident will be
studied in war colleges for generations as one of the most impressive
prosecutions of urban warfare ever executed.
The Russians completely reversed the generally accepted casualty ratio
between attacker and defender, and did so against an enemy shielded
within massive and complex fortifications it had prepared for years
inside the sprawling Azovstal steel plant.
While all of this was taking place, Russian forces and their allies from
the Donetsk and Lugansk republics engaged in “shaping the battlefield”
in the Donbass region in anticipation of the next and most important
stage of the war.
Bear in mind, the Ukrainian forces in the Donbass had spent eight long
years building an elaborate series of hardened fortifications in the
region with the objective of resisting a Russian attack and inflicting
severe damage upon them when they did.
Of course, the Russians knew all this, and they clearly planned out a
course of action designed to overcome the advantages that accrued to the
Ukrainians as a result of their fortifications and their reprehensible
tactics of using civilians and their dwellings as shields.
As matters stand here in early July, it is now incontrovertible that the
Russian operation in the Donbass has been an overwhelming victory. It
is, in my estimation, the most impressive management of a quasi-urban
battlefield in modern history. The original force, consisting of over
60,000 of the best-trained and best-equipped soldiers in the Ukrainian
army, has been effectively destroyed. It has suffered catastrophic
losses of its experienced, NATO-trained professional cadres. Its massive
losses of personnel have been partially replenished by poorly trained
territorial militia troops, but its even more massive losses of heavy
weaponry cannot be replenished.
I described the Russian strategy and tactics in a previous post:
Here is a brief summation of the Russian tactical approach to the Battle of the Donbass:
Step #1: Advance reconnaissance units (often in force, with dozens or
hundreds of drones overhead) to assess the situation; draw fire; relay
to commanders raw video and geo-coordinates.
Step #2: With target-correcting drone swarms overhead, relaying
real-time strike video, proceed to savage the fortifications with towed
and mobile artillery, Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (in gradations of
strength and precision), and even horrific thermobaric munitions for
particularly suitable targets.
Let smoke clear.
Repeat Step #1.
Still something moving there?
Repeat Step #2.
Repeat Step #1.
Dead bodies everywhere?
Step #3: Send in tanks and infantry to mop up.
Move to next series of fortifications.
And so on and so forth …
This is why Ukraine now suffers hundreds of battle deaths every single
day. And why, for months, the Russians have suffered very few casualties
– at least a 1 to 10 ratio – and quite likely much lower.
The artillery (with occasional air and precision missile strikes) is doing all the fighting.
The Russian objective was NEVER to “take Kiev”. I’ve heard all the
arguments and rationalizations to the contrary. They are demonstrably
fallacious. The foremost Russian objective was ALWAYS to destroy the
Ukrainian army, the most potent groupings of which were positioned in
the Donbass and in Mariupol. And they have done so COMPREHENSIVELY.
I am likewise persuaded that “demilitarization” will continue to be the
Russian objective in Ukraine until the Ukrainians beg to surrender,
accepting whatever terms the Russians propose.
Only then will the disposition of territory be decided once and for all,
and if the map includes at all a toponym for a sovereign Ukraine, it
will likely look somewhat like this:
Likely post-war map of Ukraine
We can only hope desperate #EmpireAtAllCosts fanatics in London and
Washington don’t commit a fatal blunder in their futile attempts to
retain hegemony in the face of a resurgent multipolar world.
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