Both military and civilian studies have proven that an armed person will behave more aggressively than an unarmed person, for the obvious reason that having a weapon in his hands will make him feel stronger and more able to win a fight. In a geopolitical context, arming a proxy government can cause them to be overly aggressive. There was the additional problem that all of this NATO support and media attention pressured the Ukrainian government to try and get results that look good in TikTok videos. Ukrainians should have fought a war of flexible defense, trading space for time, not letting the Russians put them in fire cauldrons, and preserving their manpower and vehicle fleet as much as possible. Instead they did the opposite. Every Ukrainian offensive, whether or not it was successful, cost them lives and equipment they couldn’t replace.
A New York Times article published yesterday confirmed a suspicion many of us have had for a long time. Ukrainians have done almost nothing to build new defensive positions behind what was lost in Avdeevka. The NYT article cites lack of available engineers, equipment, and funds to build fortifications like what the Russians built in the South. That’s ironic, considering how western media spent months mocking the Russians for building these.
Basically every Ukrainian problem I cited in the early days of the SMO turned out to be true:
-Ukraine threw away their best opportunities to negotiate from a position of strength, and lacked the resources to benefit from a protracted conflict. Excessive reliance on atrocity porn made negotiation politically impossible, even when it was the wisest move.
-Ukrainians aren’t an army, they aren’t even a group of divisions. They’re individual battalions and companies fighting on their own with little to no coordination. Even western media are now starting to admit this, though it was obvious from every large scale operation. This is the first western article I’ve seen that admitted to Ukraine being unable to function at anything higher than the battalion level:
-NATO prepared for the wrong war, envisioning Ukrainians fighting as super soldiers using irregular infantry-centric tactics, like Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers or Pournelle’s Falkenberg’s Legion. They did not realize until it was too late that these fantasy tactics don’t work in real life. Because of this obsession with grassroots “strategic corporal” doctrine, NATO never bothered to train UAF command staffs, despite having full cooperation since 2014 and partnerships with dating back to 1993. Captured war trophies show the focus of early NATO weapon shipments was very infantry-centric, dismissing the role of tanks, massed artillery, and mechanized infantry. Here’s a trip I took on my visit to Patriot Park outside Moscow:
-Based off the previous Starship Troopers point, there was always this NATO fascination with “on demand” fire support. NATO is not used to operating in a target rich environment (with targets that shoot back), and a huge amount of competition for resources. Giving every “strategic corporal” the power to call in an artillery strike is great, but the system breaks down if there are hundreds of corporals making the same request in a single 24 hour period. The UAF appears to have eventually switched back to centrally directed fire plans, which is honestly what they should have done from the beginning.
All that said, I don’t see any evidence for the idea that Ukrainians are unable or unwilling to fight. The point is that without NATO pumping them full of weapons, they would have been forced to the negotiations table long ago, and almost certainly wouldn’t have instigated a confrontation in Donbass to begin with.
Ian Kummer
Support my work by making a contribution through Boosty
All text in Reading Junkie posts are free to share or republish without permission, and I highly encourage my fellow bloggers to do so. Please be courteous and link back to the original.
I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.
Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).
Indeed.
Right from the get go there has been this obsessive emphasis on superior tactics, NATO command & control, better equipment, and much higher morale, against the stodgy Soviet era Russians with poor equipment due to corruption and inflexible doctrinaire fighting with unmotivated “conscripts”. There are even videos of NATO trainers trying to inject the right killer psychology into the UA trainees with pre-verbal utterances and dancing, as if war dances decide the modern battlefield. It’s all Hollywood hype about the intrepid true warrior spirit overcoming impossible odds.
Who would counsel a friend to fight out a conflict with a stubborn elephant?
The whole premise of UA nationalism built on nostalgia for Nazi forebears and above all glorification of the West, the white man, and against the slavish mongoloid half-Asiatic tyranny controlled hordes of moscols, was doomed from the beginning. Russia affords more room to cultivate Ukrainian culture & language than does the Wester imperium. Being anti-Russian is a formula for self-destruction, a death cult, consonant with the Nazi priors.
Strategic corporals in battalions led by Major Retards. What could possibly go wrong