The Ukraine war – the military realities.

Posted by Pointman on April 15, 2022 · 16 Comments 

If you’ve any lingering belief in the worth of the mainstream media’s authority, you’ve no doubt watched them interviewing various old fogey generals who’re offering various opinions on how the Red Army is really screwing up the Ukrainian campaign. It only takes a moment’s reflection to realise they all generalled lightning quick wins against essentially third world armies which were followed by decades long agonising guerrilla wars of resistance which ended up in humiliating retreats like the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in ’75 or more recently Kabul airport in ’21.

The West picks its enemies carefully and always uses the same quick win strategy every time. A rolling three day air offensive by high tech airplanes piloted by men wired up on three day sleep-free jags of some variety of meth-amphetamine until they keel over to be replaced by the next tranche of wired bots. Once the command and control and infrastructure has been pulverised, the opposing army having sheltered from air raids for days, out of food and water and with no coherent command structure left surrender in hordes.

There’s elements of that method to making war in Russia’s approach but there is a significant difference too. The accent on how they make war is not on totally destroying the enemy’s support infrastructure but just the critical juncture points they know the enemy needs. What they concentrate on is destroying the enemies army, not their bricks and mortar. The way the current conflict in the Ukraine is being fought is a classic example of that approach.

Formations in modern armies are usually roughly classified into As, Bs or Cs. A class A formation are usually young, volunteers, highly-motivated, well trained and equipped. A B unit is usually conscripts, lowish motivation and just trying to serve out their period of conscription without doing anything heroic like getting their heads shot off.

The C units are what’s left. Older, sometimes on special diets, armed with obsolescent equipment, a dumping ground for incompetent officers and basically only fit for sedentary duties like garrisoning cities captured by the A class units. At a certain point, even the village idiot in every hamlet in the Donbass knew the Russians were coming in and it’d be via the eastern part of the Ukraine. And indeed, the initial invasion was from the East and the Ukrainians reacted exactly as the Russians expected by rushing all their A units eastwards to blunt the soviet advance.

Once the Ukrainian A units were totally committed to the engagement, the trap was sprung. Russia invaded from the north and indirectly from the south with the full intention of enveloping 60,000 Ukrainian troopers which they’ve succeeded in doing. That was what they called phase one. It’s U.S.Grant’s philosophy about how to fight a war against any enemy – you totally destroy their army. Find ’em, fix ’em and then destroy them. The apparent pause in the war at the moment is just the Red Army assembling massive overwhelming force before eliminating the massive Donbass pocket. It’ll kick off anyday soon.

In a smaller way, the port city of Mariupol has just fallen to the same massive encirclement tactic with over a thousand Ukrainian marines, that’s to say A troops, surrendering and what’s left of the Azov brigade and some foreign mercenaries holding out in a sprawling steelworks because they’ve got a pretty good idea the Russians are in no mood to be accepting any surrendering from the likes of them. Russians have long memories especially about the torture and murder of Russian POWS. Things will be done, revenge will be taken.

There are some other military fictions you’ve been fed by western propaganda who only seem to regurgitate handouts from the Ukrainian war ministry. There was never an attempt by the Russians to assault and capture the city of Kiev. They merely surrounded it to prevent it sending any help to the 60 thousand troops trapped in the Donbass enclave. Any “retreat” from around Kiev was merely Russia rotating in fresh troops to replace those who’d sliced through Ukrainian forces supposed to defend the capital.

In case you haven’t realised it, the performance by the Ukrainian army has been piss poor. They’ve been badly generalled and promised help that never appeared by their leaders who were lying through their teeth. Courtesy of a lying western press, the Ukrainians appear to be winning on all fronts but the truth is exactly the bloody opposite, with bloody being the operative word. The fantasy of a small plucky army heroically throwing back a massive flood of Red Army forces is even starting to crumble. What the western press were touting as an invasion force of 150,000 Russians now looks to be about 60,000 men, a fraction of what the Russians can call on but enough to do the job.

What you have to get through your head is that despite an avalanche of anti-Russian propaganda in the western media, the Russian people are very happy at how their boss man is conducting this war, hence the 83% approval rating he currently enjoys. That’s a number the western leaders trying to kick off a real shooting war against Russia can only dream of.

When the Donbass pocket is eliminated, the Russians may start winding down their war machine but my feeling is that ending the war might make for some determined efforts by the West rather than Russia. The Minsk 1 & 2 agreements were supposed to settle things after the 2014 war but since the Ukrainians abetted by the West totally ignored the concords and kept creeping NATO eastwards, my feeling is Russia will not be interested in a Minsk 3 accord that’ll just turn out to be yet another pause before the necessary next invasion of the Ukraine in ten years time.

The Russian strategic goals were always well defined and stated, legitimising the annexation of the Crimea, setting up the two Donbass republics, de-nazification and securing the Mariupal port city, but with the way the Ukrainian clown leadership is pissing around with peace talks in Turkey, it might just be easier to take over the Ukraine completely, throwing some western bits to the Poles and some southern bits to the Hungarians. Historically, those bits are theirs anyway. The other alternative is to adopt the western style of war – simply build a north/south border chopping off eastern Ukraine and then use remote missile technology to bomb the whole of the Ukraine infrastructure back into the stone age.

One of the nastier surprises produced by this conflict is the Russian usage of some pinpoint accurate weapons we thought were basically hypothetical but have turned out to be very real. Things such as hyper-sonic missiles the West has absolutely no defense against. We don’t even have that weapon, never mind any means of stopping it getting through.

The neo-cons and neo-liberals got their cold war against the East block but I don’t think they’ve yet to realise the havoc it’ll wreak on western economies, but my feeling is they’ll begin to realise it in the coming year along with something else, we’re going to need Russian help to climb out of the economic hole we’ve dug our self into. If Putin turns off the tap of natural gas and oil to western Europe, the dominoes start to fall and there’s no stopping them.

Turning off this war to Russia’s satisfaction may prove to be a difficult proposition.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

All articles about the Ukraine situation

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Azov, Donbass, Mariupol, Ukraine