Ukraine Is the New Afghanistan… For Us

While it is possible that Ukrainians are choosing to not retreat, its equally possible that they can’t retreat. Our perception of the war in Ukraine is, as usual, backwards. I also need to debunk a very popular myth surrounding the so-called “military industrial complex.”

On April 17, I noticed a shift in rhetoric from the mainstream media:

CNN finally noticed Donbass…

“Prior to the outbreak of war on February 24, Ukraine had already positioned the majority of its army in the eastern Donbas region — focusing on the line of contact between Kyiv’s troops and Russian-backed separatists defending the Luhansk and Donetsk areas.

Reports estimate there were as many as 40,000 Ukrainian troops fighting at the Donbas front when war broke out. And there has already been fierce fighting there over the past six weeks. But it now appears both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky realize the significance of winning the “Battle of Donbas” in the greater trajectory of the war.If Zelensky can hold the line in the Donbas, it will be virtually impossible for Putin to carry the war any further, and will buy Ukraine time to build an offensive force that could later drive Russia out of the country. If Putin’s forces succeed, they will capture or destroy a major percentage of all trained Ukrainian forces — and there will be little to stop Russian armor from capturing Kharkiv, Odessa or even return to Kyiv.”

Here’s the thing, as correctly observed by CNN, the Ukrainian strategy of holing up in densely populated cities and using human shields is very effective. There is also enough passive and sometimes even active loyalty from the civilian population for this strategy to work without significant backlash. So why are Ukrainians suddenly doing the opposite? Why not get out of the kill zone in the Donets basin and retreat to more defensible positions? Furthermore, why is the West enabling this strategy by funneling billions of dollars of equipment into a meat grinder where most of it is just destroyed immediately? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to retreat, even if this means abandoning their equipment?

Refusing to capitulate to Russia is morally indefensible, but from a pragmatic point of view, it would make sense, if there was a chance of the situation improving. If the Ukrainian army were to escape from Donbass, that would presumably give the Zelensky government more bargaining power at the negotiation table. But instead they’re sitting in their fortifications and being destroyed wholesale.

As odd as it might seem, this strategy seems predetermined.  Look at this commercial for the Ukrainian ground forces from several years ago.

This was the plan. Attack, dig in, and die. Now we’re seeing that plan unfold. Check out these (unofficial) casualty figures for May 2 and May 6.

Here’s a good synopsis from the Moon of Alabama.

Without artillery support in good quantity the Ukrainian military has no chance to hold the line and to stop Russian moves. Any unit which attempts is hold the line will simply be mauled by Russian artillery until it is no longer able to fight. That is happening now. As the Ukrainians have orders not to leave or move their defense lines they either have to give up or die defending them.

By giving ‘hold the line’ orders the Ukrainian leadership is contributing to the Russian demilitarization of the Ukraine.

It is the ‘west’ that is preventing Zelensky from suing for peace.

The ‘west’ has fallen for its own propaganda. It believes that the Russian troops near Kiev were defeated by Ukrainian forces. In reality they retreated in good order after the diversion they constituted was no longer needed. The ‘western’ fairytale that they were ‘defeated’ gave hope that Russia could be ‘weakened’, as the U.S. Secretary of State said.

The war will hardly ‘weaken’ Russia. But the war will destroy the Ukrainian military and many, many of its men.

So no matter which way you look at this situation, it seems unsustainable, both for Ukraine and for NATO. While the writers at Moon of Alabama are probably correct that there is downward pressure on Kiev to keep their forces committed in Donbass, there is another possible explanation. Here’s my theory on what is happening.

Russia is using their contract soldiers, and spent years rotating them all through large-scale training exercises, including the exercise they just finished in February. Thanks to this, they rolled into this war with a warm start, as opposed to a cold one. They can perform adequately on a strategic and operational level. Tactical inadequacies in the face of a real-life enemy could be quickly corrected.

As for the Ukrainian side, it looks like they are a NATO-quality force rebuilt from the ground up after their serious failures in 2014-15. As individuals and small units, they can hold their own against their Russian and often win, especially with the added advantage of being on the defensive. The problem is that so far they have never demonstrated the ability to push back Russian forces and retake ground. And no, recapturing terrain that the enemy voluntarily abandoned doesn’t count. Ukrainians recapturing suburbs around Kiev was a victory in the same sense as water filling a bowl. Wars are won by shaping the battlefield to your advantage and forcing the enemy to conform to it. Flowing into channels the enemy created for you is the opposite of winning.

Eight years was enough time to build a huge army almost from scratch, but it was not enough time to properly train them to function at anything higher than a battalion level, and I think we are seeing that deficiency play out in Donbass. In previous months they couldn’t maneuver to exploit Russian mistakes and tactical defeats, and now they can’t maneuver to escape destruction. Aside from losing a huge number of their vehicles, they don’t have the doctrine and cohesion to move 40-100 thousand men to safety.

The logistical complexity of uprooting and moving that many people is enormous and there is also the morale factor. Standing your ground is one thing, but if these soldiers moved westward in a clear retreat, there would be an overwhelming urge to desert and go home, and that’s what many of them would probably do.

Ukrainians can’t capitulate, they can’t retreat, so all they can do is stay where they are and die. Rather than conserve their resources, Kiev is doing the opposite and sending a continuous stream of additional men and equipment to be destroyed in the Donbass pocket.

When the Russians first withdrew from Kiev at the end of March, I wondered at the possibility that this was an attempt to lure additional Ukrainian forces out of safety and into the danger zone. I dismissed it because I just didn’t think that anyone would be stupid enough to fall for that. And yet, that seems to be exactly what’s happening.

As I observed in my post about Soviet Deep Operations, the Russians have succeeded in taking and holding the initiative, staying at least one step and kept the enemy in a state of constantly reacting. From my post Our Own Propaganda Is Killing Us:

Even with the so-called “fog of war” and disinformation campaign, I can say with reasonable certainty that these analysts weren’t lying. This was the widely held perception of Russia’s military capabilities, and the Ukrainian “Afghanistan” was tailored to these specifications (see my post here). Judging from numbers given by the Russian MoD, roughly half of their casualties (so far) were incurred in the first week of fighting. Indeed, that matches up with what NATO has publicly declared about an expected Russian attack, and their own plans to counter it. This also matches up with that overwhelming tsunami of propaganda.

The key element missing was the NATO airpower. Did western neoliberal oligarchs “abandon” their nazi allies in Ukraine in some act of cowardice or lack of unity? Or is there a bigger reason? Maybe we should consider the most obvious explanation. There was no air attack because an air attack would be impossible. They would be shot down and destroyed.

If direct NATO intervention was going to happen, it would have happened already. Now it’s too late. A Ukrainian counteroffensive would have needed to happen early on in the fight, while they still had command and control (C2), aircraft, tanks, and perhaps most importantly, fuel. A lot of fuel.

Now all of those assets have been vastly reduced or destroyed altogether, the window for direct NATO intervention came and went. A NATO air war would only succeed if there was a Ukrainian ground attack for it to support, and their ability to do that must be near nonexistent by now. The only remaining course of action with even a theoretical chance of changing the outcome of this war would be for NATO to fight and win a ground war, which is probably equally unlikely as winning an air war. (See my post No-Fly Zone is a Euphemism for War)

To be clear, I do not think the Russian MoD was playing 12-dimensional chess by withdrawing from Kiev. The goal in the first phase of the war was to force the Ukrainian government to quickly capitulate, and this failed. However, the first phase of the war did absolutely succeed in destroying most of the Ukrainians’ heavy equipment and their ability to do much of anything except sit in static fortifications and wait to be attacked. The Ukrainians’ inability to inflict serious damage is evident even from our own propaganda. Western outlets endlessly recycle old “victories,” like the sinking of the Moskva, each retelling of the story more embellished than the previous ones. The ghost of Kyiv even briefly came out of retirement. See this great video from Paul Joseph Watson:

I have to ask an obvious question. Was NATO’s triumphant chatter lately just disinformation, or did our military and political leaders sincerely believe that the bad Ruskis are on the run and the Ukrainians have a chance of winning? I had always assumed it was disinformation, however, I’m beginning to wonder if the Biden war room got fooled by their own bullshit.

Here’s why I think that. From my post No Ukrainian Girlfriend for You:

We call it an “information war,” but there’s very little the West is doing right now that amounts to much more than literal censorship. Even the disinformation at this point seems to serve no other purpose than to keep western audiences suitably brainwashed. I think that also explains this continuing obsession with the Moskva and I think I finally have an answer for why that particular incident is so important to our regimes.

The West needs a distraction, literally any distraction, against the real story of Mariupol, and the impending battle with what’s left of the Ukrainian army. A big Russian ship sinking serves that purpose nicely.

There’s also the much bigger problem that the window for NATO direct confrontation with Russia has already closed. It’s not clear that this window even existed at all. If it did, the Biden regime needed to escalate within the first week, when American interest in the war was the highest.

Now about the military industrial complex. A couple of weeks ago, Slovakia sent their S-300 system to Ukraine, where it was destroyed almost immediately. Now they’re receiving a Patriot system to replace it. News reports I’ve read used the word “system,” implying a singular unit as opposed to a battery. I’m not sure but in principle this doesn’t change the story. European allies dump their weapons in Ukraine, and in turn, receive new weapons from the USA. It’s pure grift. It’s the biggest money-laundering scheme since the end of the Cold War.

For some reason, many people find this comforting. See, we didn’t actually lose in Afghanistan because defense contractors made a lot of money. I think the idea of a capitalist conspiracy is more comforting than the alternative, that our system is broken to the point we deliberately suffer serious military defeats so some white collar executives can make money. We threw thousands of lives and billions of dollars of space-age tech at some mountains for 20+ years and still lost. There is no way to paint that as anything but a serious defeat.

I think that’s what’s going to end up happening in Ukraine. We smugly set it up as a trap to drag Russia into a bloody proxy war that drains their military capacity and treasury, but the opposite might just well happen. We’re not even three months into this and Washington is already spending tens of billions of dollars just to keep the game going for a little while.

The point of a proxy war is that it is asymmetric. The target of the proxy war, Russia, should be spending more energy to fight than we are. Instead, the opposite is happening. From what we’ve seen so far, Russia can keep this up indefinitely, while the collective West is forced to consume tens or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars just to keep up. And that’s not even touching on the economic side of the conflict.

In other words, we set a trap for Russia and then sprung it on ourselves.  

Ian Kummer

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