Abraham
Lincoln and Union officers at Antietam
The Object of War
From the moment in early April
when Russian forces on the perimeter of Kiev began to withdraw to new positions
in eastern Ukraine, western war propagandists have been trumpeting what they
characterized as Russia’s “humiliating defeat”. As one who recognized as early
as February 28th that the Russian army was executing a strategic
feint in and around the Ukrainian capital, I could only shake my head and laugh
at the cluelessness of most of the so-called “experts” who have attempted to
sell this interpretation of events to hopelessly ignorant western audiences.
I am reminded of how, during the
US Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was ceaselessly frustrated with his early cadre
of generals.
Much as the vast majority of
current western military “experts” have been fixated on conquering “territory”
as a measure of progress, or the lack thereof, Lincoln’s early generals were
illogically focused on the objective of “taking Richmond” – the capital of the
Confederacy. This obsession dominated the strategic focus of the Union high
command for most of the war.
Lincoln, on the other hand –
notwithstanding there is no evidence he ever read von Clausewitz – intuitively
and correctly understood that it was not a city, nor any piece of territory, per
se, that was the objective upon which his West Point-trained generals
should focus.
General Carl von Clausewitz
Rather, he repeatedly (and
vainly) urged his generals to come to understand it was the destruction of the Confederate
Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee,
that constituted the only valid objective of their actions.
Lincoln’s frustration with this
lack of understanding on the part of his generals reached its zenith after the
July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg when, despite having Lee’s defeated and demoralized
army trapped on the north side of the Potomac River, Union General George Meade
permitted it to escape.
Confederate
General Robert E. Lee
Union
General George G. Meade
Lincoln was beside himself when
he learned Lee had effected a crossing of the river with all his troops, and
was able to regroup once again.
Fortunately, in March 1864
Lincoln finally found the general he had been looking for: Ulysses S. Grant.
Union
General Ulysses S. Grant
Destroying the Enemy Army
Grant was given supreme command
of the Union armies, and from that point until the end of the war he made his
sole objective the engagement and destruction of Lee’s army.
The subsequent series of battles became
known as the Overland
Campaign, with both armies maneuvering southward from one bloody engagement
to the next. Grant made several tactical errors and suffered inordinate
casualties on multiple occasions. He could have even finally “taken Richmond”, and
thereby secured a strategically meaningless “victory”, but he ignored the opportunity
to do so.
Grant’s focus never varied
from its singular objective: to destroy the enemy army. He sought every
chance to engage it. If he lost a particular battle, he simply disengaged
momentarily, and then moved to flank the Confederates yet again, forcing
another engagement of forces.
This relentless series of battles
and maneuvers finally culminated in Lee’s army seeking refuge in a massive complex
of field fortifications and earthworks outside Petersburg, Virginia. From that
point, highly accurate Union rifled artillery systematically ripped them to
pieces for months, ultimately forcing Lee’s surrender, and the end of the war.
The “Demilitarization” of Ukraine
This has been precisely
the Russian mentality in Ukraine. Their foremost objective, from the very
beginning, as explicitly articulated by President Vladimir Putin in his historic speech of
February 24, 2022, was to “demilitarize” Ukraine – to destroy its
army.
When the war began, the most
capable, experienced, well-armed, and well-positioned Ukrainian forces were NOT
in Kiev, but in the Donbass and Mariupol. They had been positioning there for
months, with the ultimate objective of retaking the Donbass and Crimea – a goal
never far from the minds of Ukraine’s ideological and political leaders.
Indeed, they spoke of it openly
and without qualification. They strongly believed the strength of their armed
forces, after eight years of preparation, had reached a point where it was
capable of actually achieving that objective.
Their benefactors in NATO
encouraged them to believe this – for it was also NATO’s fondest dream to raise
its banners over the naval base at Sevastopol, and thereby wield
dominance over the entire Black Sea and the Bosporus.
The Black
Sea and immediate environs.
Pursuant to this and many other
geostrategic objectives – arresting Russian resurgence foremost among them –
NATO had been providing arms to Ukraine for years, and those arms shipments
were expanded and accelerated dramatically in late 2021.
Tens of thousands Ukrainian
troops had been trained in the use of these NATO armaments. And, as was known
to anybody paying even casual attention, thousands of western
intelligence operatives, special forces, and mercenary contractors (predominantly
American, British, and French – and lots of them) were embedded with
front-line Ukrainian forces, where several have since been killed or captured,
and a substantial contingent still remains.
Many of these western troops are
there primarily to coordinate the reception, interpretation, and “actionable”
use of highly prized and even more highly classified US/NATO “ISR” (Intelligence,
Surveillance & Reconnaissance) data.
The Mother of All Proxy Armies
The army the US/NATO built in
Ukraine, by the beginning of 2022, had swelled to become the largest and
best-armed land force in Europe. By almost every metric, it was more potent than
the combined armies of Germany, France, and Italy.
European Land
Forces – 2022
The Ukrainian military was
purpose-built to serve the interests of the American Empire in its
long-established goal to cripple Russia and prevent it from ever again being
able to wield global influence; to effect its ultimate dismemberment and reduce
it to a faint fragment of its former status and glory – to realize the geopolitical
objective expressed in the popular cold-war-era board game RISK, which erased
Russia from the world map.
No Russia
on the RISK board.
The Russian decision to invade
Ukraine in late February 2022 was motivated by and predicated upon all of these
factors in aggregate, and was hastened by the widespread Ukrainian artillery
strikes on the Donbass region that had commenced weeks previously.
To destroy this powerful “Mother
of All Proxy Armies” which the United States and its NATO partners had
methodically constructed on its borders was, logically and manifestly, Russia’s
foremost objective.
There was no other.
The elimination of this substantial threat on
their literal doorstep was understandably viewed by the Russians as an existential
imperative.
Destroying the Mother of All
Proxy Armies
And, in order to best achieve
that objective, they effected
a classic Russian stratagem to impede the possibility of the forces in northern
Ukraine from reinforcing those in eastern and southern Ukraine once the fighting
began.
THIS is why they conducted the
elaborate “feint and fix” operation in and around Kiev.
And, all things considered, it
worked perfectly.
That said, it is essential to
understand that the greatest and most effective feints must be convincing.
And, to be convincing, they very often risk being costly. The best
feints are based on a cost/benefit analysis whose “benefit” often represents
the foremost objective of a war.
In the case of the feint and fix
operation in Kiev, there was a substantial cost – although it was not
nearly as costly as western war propagandists have sought to portray it. This
is because much of the feint consisted of demonstrations of intent,
rather than concrete actions.
For example, after achieving air
dominance in the first few days of the war, the Russians assembled a huge
armored column, and casually drove it down the main highway from the north
towards Kiev. Then they essentially just parked it there for many days, occasionally
pretending to be heading in one direction or another, before eventually pulling
back to their own borders, and sweeping around to join the forces preparing to
launch the main offensive in the Donbass.
Everything it did north of Kiev
was all for show. They didn’t break down; their troops didn’t run away; they
didn’t run out of gas. It was just a big “feint-in-force”.
Even Belarus assisted in the
theatrics by assembling troops and vehicles, moving them around aggressively
just across the border from Ukraine, and making veiled threats to join the
Russian assault on Kiev – which, of course, they never did, because no such assault was ever envisioned. And these aggressive Belarusian demonstrations ceased once
the Russians concluded the feint operation and moved their forces to the
southeast.
The result of this feint
operation was that, over the course of several weeks, the Russians effectively
“fixed” over 100,000 Ukrainian troops and their equipment in the vicinity of
Kiev, took control of key transportation nodes and corridors between Kiev and
the Donbass, and simultaneously conducted a major offensive to encircle and
annihilate the 20,000-strong Ukrainian army group in Mariupol, a highly
strategic port city on the coast of the Sea of Azov.
The forces in Mariupol included
the notorious neo-Nazi “Azov Battalion”, whose arming and training had long
been a US/NATO priority, and they were considered to be one of the most
formidable components of the Ukrainian army.
The forces in Mariupol also included many
dozens of NATO “advisors” (CIA, special forces, and so-called “contractors”).
Also present were ~2500 foreign mercenaries, most of them NATO veterans of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While potential reinforcements
remained idle and immobile in and around Kiev, the powerful force in Mariupol
was methodically surrounded and systematically annihilated in an
operation I am confident will be studied in war colleges for generations as one
of the most impressive prosecutions of urban warfare ever executed.
The Russians completely reversed
the generally accepted casualty ratio between attacker and defender, and did so
against an enemy shielded within massive and complex fortifications it had
prepared for years inside the sprawling Azovstal steel plant.
Azovstal
Steel Plant – Mariupol, Ukraine, after the battle.
While all of this was taking
place, Russian forces and their allies from the Donetsk and Lugansk republics
engaged in “shaping the battlefield” in the Donbass region in anticipation of
the next and most important stage of the war.
Bear in mind, the Ukrainian
forces in the Donbass had spent eight long years building an elaborate series
of hardened fortifications in the region with the objective of resisting a
Russian attack and inflicting severe damage upon them when they did.
Of course, the Russians knew all
this, and they clearly planned out a course of action designed to overcome the
advantages that accrued to the Ukrainians as a result of their fortifications
and their reprehensible tactics of using civilians and their dwellings as shields.
As matters stand here in early
July, it is now incontrovertible that the Russian operation in the Donbass has
been an overwhelming victory. It is, in my estimation, the most impressive
management of a quasi-urban battlefield in modern history. The original force,
consisting of over 60,000 of the best-trained and best-equipped soldiers in the
Ukrainian army, has been effectively destroyed. It has suffered catastrophic
losses of its experienced, NATO-trained professional cadres. Its massive losses
of personnel have been partially replenished by poorly trained territorial
militia troops, but its even more massive losses of heavy weaponry cannot be
replenished.
I described the Russian strategy
and tactics in a previous
post:
Here is a brief summation of the Russian tactical
approach to the Battle of the Donbass:
Step #1: Advance reconnaissance
units (often in force, with dozens or hundreds of drones overhead) to assess
the situation; draw fire; relay to commanders raw video and geo-coordinates.
Step #2: With
target-correcting drone swarms overhead, relaying real-time strike video,
proceed to savage the fortifications with towed and mobile artillery, Multiple
Launch Rocket Systems (in gradations of strength and precision), and even
horrific thermobaric munitions for particularly suitable targets.
Let smoke clear.
Repeat Step #1.
Still something moving there?
Repeat Step #2.
Repeat Step #1.
Dead bodies everywhere?
Step #3: Send in tanks and
infantry to mop up.
Move to next series of fortifications.
And so on and so forth …
This is why Ukraine now suffers hundreds of battle
deaths every single day. And why, for months, the Russians have
suffered very few casualties – at least a 1 to 10 ratio – and quite likely much
lower.
The artillery (with occasional air and precision missile
strikes) is doing all the fighting.
The Russian objective was NEVER
to “take Kiev”. I’ve heard all the arguments and rationalizations to the
contrary. They are demonstrably fallacious. The foremost Russian objective was ALWAYS
to destroy the Ukrainian army, the most potent groupings of which were
positioned in the Donbass and in Mariupol. And they have done so COMPREHENSIVELY.
I am likewise persuaded that
“demilitarization” will continue to be the Russian objective in Ukraine until
the Ukrainians beg to surrender, accepting whatever terms the Russians propose.
Only then will the disposition of
territory be decided once and for all, and if the map includes at all a toponym
for a sovereign Ukraine, it will likely look somewhat like this:
Likely
post-war map of Ukraine
We can only hope desperate #EmpireAtAllCosts fanatics in
London and Washington don’t commit a fatal blunder in their futile attempts to
retain hegemony in the face of a resurgent multipolar world.
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