Why Doesn’t Ukraine March on Moscow?

Here’s a question I frequently see asked on social media. “If Ukraine now sends 100,000 troops in to attack Russia’s Kursk and Bryansk, Russia will have to pull its troops out of Ukraine, but why doesn’t Ukraine do this?” There are NUMEROUS reasons why.

Political Reasons:

As bizarre as it might sound, this isn’t a war. Russia hasn’t declared war, and equally important, Ukraine hasn’t either. This is because Ukraine is still receiving Russian transit fees for their gas pipeline. If Ukrainian militants became too serious a threat to Russian citizens and territory, that privilege would go away. Furthermore, the EU’s gas supply would take yet another serious hit. I do think it’s likely, perhaps inevitable, that the Ukrainians are going to cut off most or all of the gas supply themselves for their own needs this winter. Tough for Europe, but all’s fair in love and, ahem, war.

Not enough training

Military operations are immensely complicated, and every soldier from the lowest private to the highest general needs practical experience with large-scale maneuvers. In 2014–15, almost the entire Ukrainian army deserted, going home or in case of local units in Crimea and Donbass, actually defecting. With huge amounts of money and patience, NATO has built a new Ukrainian military almost totally from scratch. Quite impressive, but those big training maneuvers Russia carried out over the last several years never happened on the Ukrainian side. However imperfect the first phase of the Russians special operation was, it would be ten-fold worse if the Ukrainians attempted something similar.

So far, there has been no evidence of the Ukrainians being able to coordinate anything larger than a battalion. Brigade and higher-echelon movements and attacks require finely skilled and practiced commanders and staff officers, which Ukraine just doesn’t have. If you don’t believe me or think this is Russian “disinformation,” look at the Ukrainians’ own propaganda. If it’s a few dots on the map, that’s nothing that would have required more than a few hundred men to do.

The wrong Command and Control (C2) system

As mentioned above, NATO extensively trained Ukrainian militants, but apparently for the wrong type of war. NATO emphasised Ukrainian proficiency at the small unit level. Nothing more than this is needed for static defense, limited counteroffensive, and partisan ops. Even fire support can be done this way, as long as it’s kept at a low level (battery or split-battery), with Ukrainian gunners using target location data fed to them from NATO networks – the gunners themselves don’t need to know what they’re shooting at, and from an operation security standpoint, it’s better that they don’t. But that’s not how the war played out. Instead, the Russians are advancing ponderously behind massive artillery barrages. Countering this requires brigades and divisions in coordinated combined arms operations. Ukrainians just don’t have that capability.

Again, if you don’t believe me or think this is disinformation, look at how thin the Russian lines are. There are at most 200,000 Russian soldiers (and remember there’s generally a 10 or 12 to 1 ratio between support personnel and actual combat troops) stretched out across Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The Ukrainians do clearly still have a significant numerical advantage, so they actually shouldn’t have much difficulty punching through in a classic blitzkrieg fashion, I think it’s highly likely that they just can’t.

Too many casualties

Ukraine might have been able to pull off a large-scale offensive in Febuary, and that’s likely what they were trying to do with their huge troop concentration in Donbass before the Russian bear beat them to the punch. Most of Kiev’s best soldiers were in the Donbass pocket, presumably for their own offensive, now they’re dead or scattered. However prepared for combined arms warfare these guys might have been, their replacements are raw recruits. Also bear in mind the huge number of Russian strikes, especially in the first hours and days of the war. Their command structure has certainly taken a huge hit.

Not enough mechanization

Even if Ukraine could assemble 100,000 soldiers, “one doesn’t simply walk into Mordor.” They would need thousands of tanks, armored vehicles, and self-propelled artillery. We have to assume that most of what they had at the beginning of the war has been destroyed. And even if you think this is disinformation and the superhuman blonde blue-eyed ubermenschen haven’t suffered serious vehicle losses, the war has been ongoing for almost six months. That’s an eternity for a military vehicle. How are the Ukrainians rotating vehicles for maintenance and spare parts while in around-the-clock combat, not to mention frequent Russian missile strikes disrupting their supply chain? Color me skeptical.

Also note that the majority of replacement vehicles that they received wouldn’t be terribly helpful in a blitzkrieg. The M113 is an aluminum tin can that was practically obsolete when it was first produced in the Vietnam War, and unsuited for anything except protecting passengers from small-caliber fire and shrapnel. Same story with the BMP-1. Vehicles like MRAPs and Humvees are meant for counter-insurgency, not tackling enemy armored formations face-first. HIMARS are wunderwaffen, but 12 of them aren’t even close to enough, even if they were concentrated along one axis, which they aren’t.

Logistics

Amateurs talk tactics, experts talk logistics. Thousands of soldiers and armored vehicles require and equally vast number of trucks, ammunition, fuel, food, and other supplies, and it’s not enough for these to just be stockpiled. They have to be ferried along with the advance, always arriving to each subordinate unit, on time and in the correct quantities. However much you believe the Russians are struggling with this, it would be ten times worse for the Ukrainians who have less training, experience, and resources.

It’s also a very bad sign when NATO propaganda almost never even touches the issue of logistics, except to sneer how bad the Russians are at it. Alright, if the Russians are struggling to get fuel and ammunition to the right place at the right time, then how are the Ukrainians doing it? Why don’t any of the major pro-West media outlets even attempt to provide an explanation? Oh right, because it’s the blonde blue-eyed ubermenschen. They’re good at everything.

Corruption

Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Look at any American investor who wrote about that country prior to the war. The reviews are not favorable. Entropy is brutal, and the longer a supply line is, the more opportunities there are for materials to be… “lost.” Large objects like tanks can presumably make it to the front alright (assuming they aren’t destroyed by Russian air or firepower), but small high-value items like small arms and spare parts have a high probability of getting pilfered.

So no offensive, what then?

At this point, I’ve given up even attempting to make concrete predictions about what’s going to happen, and I also think that key decision makers on both sides aren’t clear themselves how this is going to play out, so are doing “tit for tat” incremental escalations. Drip feeding long range weapons into Ukraine isn’t even close enough to fulfill the dream of reversing Russian territorial gains, and certainly not enough to get pre-2014 borders like the natobots all dream about. But it is enough to force the Russians to keep leaning forward into new advances, however incremental.

If at any point there’s a lull in the fighting, people are going to ask “why?” If the war ends and it becomes obvious that Russian demands weren’t that bad, there will be a realization that tens of thousands of lives were sacrificed for absolute no reason at all. Worse for NATO, they will have thrown their full weight against Russia and failed, there’s no amount of propaganda to cover that one up..

On a somewhat related note, here’s a blurb I found on a pro-Ukrainian Quora page:

Is it possible for a Ukrainian to determine Russians from Ukrainians?

I suppose you are asking how a Ukrainian can distinguish Ukrainians from Russians. In this case, there is a way, and here it is!

This bread, seen here on a Ukrainian postage stamp, is called palianytsia (паляниця), and it is a traditional Ukrainian bread. Now, the bread itself may not be useful at distinguishing Russians from Ukrainians, but the word for it is.

The proper Ukrainian pronunciation of this word can be rendered into the International Phonetic Alphabet as [palja’nytsja]. However, Russians who are not well-versed in Ukrainian may mispronounce this word in numerous ways, with the y being pronounced like an i and the ya being pronounced like a.

Therefore, whether this word is pronounced correctly can be used to distinguish Ukrainians from Russians. In fact, as early as 2013 (or before the Russo-Ukrainian War began!), one article discussed how palianytsia can be used as a shibboleth, a term which can be used to distinguish one group from another.

During the war, this bread came to the fore as a way to distinguish actual Ukrainians from enemy spies for the Russian Armed Forces. One article I read even described it as a “national password” of Ukraine!

So, I would say that it is not only possible to distinguish Ukrainians and Russians, but it is very simple to do so: just ask a suspect to name this bread!

If you doubted the stories about Ukrainians torturing or killing people for incorrectly saying the word “palianytsia,” well, the Ukies themselves boast about it.

Ian Kummer

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