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ZebraZ's avatar

John M. is underestimating Russia and it’s between the lines he writes that one can detect this tendency.

First of all, Russia never committed all its military capabilities including troops to this battlefield. And even since expanding or mobilization, most of its troops have been sitting in reserve, including tens of thousands in Belarus, southern and western Russia.

Over the last year, Russia has prepared for a war with NATO rather than just with Ukraine.

More importantly, Russia has embarked on a systematic, grinding, slow, and methodical destruction Ukraine’s military and, at the same time, minimizing their own losses and degrading NATO’s hardware and ammunition arsenals. And time, resources, advantages in logistical controls and supply routes, all favor Russia. That’s why the West is the one desperately looking for a quick victory, even if only for the optics or propaganda value of it.

And, most importantly, whether it’s six months or two years from now, at this rate, there will be not much of Ukraine left to negotiate anything, drag anything along by presenting as a bona fide threat to Russia, or dictating demands for “security guarantees” that would compel Russia to compromise its own security. This kind of conclusion at this point is only comical and a pipe dream of a bunch of politicians or academics in Exceptionalism-Stan of USA and the rest of its poodle west!

The way it looks likely at this point for an end scenario is that Russia will dictate the terms, unless NATO paper tigers (who couldn’t even defeat the Taliban) are ready and willing to commit troops to Ukraine and start a hot non-proxy war against Russia. And, with what troops (name one country trust would dare send troops to fight Russians at their border), equipment, or given the logistical nightmares were they to engage in a type of warfare that they’d sure would lose and be humiliated worse than Ukraine? And even if they muster such capability in reality than just blustery propaganda, then Russia will be even prepared and willing to go ALL THE WAY TO THE BITTER END. So, forget about Ukraine continuing to exist into the not-too-far future with any relevancy as a threat or similar to how it’s been used and bled by the neocons since at least 2014 to serve as a proxy cannon fodder against Russia!

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Chris Mott's avatar

Excellent breakdown of this offensive, Professor. The combination of pressure to attack coupled with the various excuses really does make me more likely to pin the blame of failure more on NATO than Ukraine, especially taking into account how the western coalition seems unable to consider how out of date its own tactical doctrines might be. My thought turns to the amazing gains of the Imperial Japanese Army in the early stages of the Pacific War--and how that was much more a product of air and naval supremacy than it was the quality of the land forces. Having become so used to operating under such conditions, the Japanese found themselves poorly situated in campaigns were they lost these assets.

U.S. and allied troops have not operated without air supremacy since late 1942/early 1943 and it is perfectly logical that they are now totally unable to effectively instruct armies which do not have that advantage. There has been few examples of them taking heavily fortified positions in recent times too, even Tora Bora was partly offshored to local militias (and ultimately failed in its main objective). It makes me wonder how their own forces would perform in a theater where they themselves lost air supremacy, if even for a time.

It also can't be denied Ukraine performed better before these western trainers showed up. Now, I'm sure most of that is because of growing Russian capability and experience, but even so it is hard to wonder how much fighting per local circumstances dictate tactics better than following a standardized field guide from a distant and very different set of nations whose operations concepts are generations old.

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