Ukrainian casualties in combat far outweigh those of the Russians, who lost over 300,000 troops. Photo: REUTERS/Sofia Gatilova
The Russians are losing the war in Ukraine. They just don't know it yet.
Many armchair generals ignore this fact. They say Putin is stronger than ever. We are told that even if his invasion fails to conquer Ukraine, the crushing burden of the war cannot be sustained indefinitely by its defenders. And even if they survive, the Western democracies are already tired of their role in ensuring the military and financial life of Kyiv, while imposing sanctions against Russia.
Or so the «realists» say, although such arguments are often indistinguishable. from appeasement or defeatism.
The Western media is filled with stories that quote unnamed US and other Western officials about how the Ukrainian counteroffensive has stalled and criticize their strategy and tactics.
At last week's EU summit in Spain, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba advised these critics to «shut up, come to Ukraine and try to liberate one square centimeter on your own.» They «spit in the face of a Ukrainian soldier who sacrifices his life every day,» he said.
Dmitry Kuleba These remarks showed the growing frustration of Kiev with criticism of the counter-offensive. Photo: Stephanie Lecoq/Reuters
The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, almost certainly at the behest of Putin, heavily influenced the formulation of arguments about the course of the war. This incident gave new life to the «realistic» argument for compromise.
It is true that the liquidation of the Wagnerian commander removed a dangerous rival from the Russian arena. But that Putin was left with no choice but to behead a mercenary unit that has proven to be more effective than his regular military units is a sign of weakness, not strength.
Prigozhin's coup failed, but not because the Kremlin's huge repressive apparatus was able to prevent his march on Moscow. Apparently, he was bribed with the promise of a safe-conduct from Alexander Lukashenko, but not before panic broke out in Moscow and Putin was humiliated.
Now there is a video from Mali in which Prigozhin refutes the rumors. about his impending demise: «For those who like to discuss my destruction, it's all right.» And so it was — while he remained in Africa.
In fact, not only Prigozhin's putsch, but also his alleged assassination, only reinforce the impression of final decline and even chaos at the very heart of the Russian political body. Putin's colleagues, the siloviki, or «strong people», must have noticed that he is much more effective in destroying them than the Ukrainian enemy. The purge of generals that followed the uprising also failed to restore confidence in the war machine, which had failed from the start.
Hawks vs. Realists
Why, then, is the realist argument gaining momentum again? As Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion and leader of the opposition, points out, “The worse Russia behaves on the battlefield, the more calls you will hear from Kremlin allies, sycophants and propagandists about false ceasefires, concessions and negotiations to give Russia time to rearm.” and consolidate to prepare for a new offensive.
A typical representative of this phenomenon is Nicolas Sarkozy. The former French president is demanding that Ukraine recognize Russia's sovereignty over Crimea and Donbass, renounce NATO or EU membership, and become «neutral.» As for NATO, it should stop arming “one of the belligerents” and “restore good neighborly or at least calmer relations” with Russia.
Sarkozy denies ulterior motives for his position, although he seems eager to return in the spotlight at any cost. He also has a book that he is selling. In it, he boasts of defending France, but the reader is confronted by a Russian apologist who is also suspicious of American influence and skeptical of Atlanticism.
Across the Atlantic, the first Republican televised debate saw a rising star. Vivek Ramaswami is repeating a similar line regarding Ukraine, only this time Europe is supposedly dragging America into an endless war. Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the UN, retorted: «You choose a killer, not a pro-American country.» He had no experience in foreign policy, «and it shows.»
Both in America and in Europe, public opinion regarding Ukraine balances between hawks and realists.
Should Ukraine be allowed to join NATO and the EU after the war?
Within the Biden administration, the president is leaning towards the realists, led by his old friend John Kerry and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who are doing behind-the-scenes diplomacy with the Kremlin, rather than the more belligerent Secretary of State Anthony. Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
Western Europe tends to be dominated by realists, led by the usual suspects Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz. But in Holland, Mark Rutte is a hawk: the Dutch have not forgotten the nearly 200 of their compatriots who died in 2014 on a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine by a Russian missile. Georgia Meloni, who had a pro-Russian past, has become militant in office.
Farther east, Poles, Balts and Scandinavians compete to be tough on Russia, though Viktor Orban in Hungary is almost more Putinist than Putin.< /p>
Putin's trump card has always been his nuclear arsenal, which, as he repeatedly reminds NATO, is still the largest in the world. And from the very beginning, he used nuclear weapons to intimidate the West.
In June, he used the installation of such weapons in Belarus, which in itself is another element of psychological warfare, aimed primarily at Ukraine's neighbors, Poland and Ukraine. the Baltic countries to tell NATO where it can push its arms reduction proposals.
Putin watches Russian strategic nuclear forces exercise. Photo: News Scan
Putin leaves a melodramatic boast to his puppet Dmitry Medvedev, who last week posted a literal apocalyptic warning on Telegram, quoting the Book of Revelation, Lenin and Khrushchev («We will bury you»).
But the truth is that the fears raised by nuclear blackmail in the West — including, it would seem, in the Biden administration — turned out to be groundless.
< p>Every time Ukraine destroys targets inside Crimea or Russia, it crosses the red Putin lines. However, only conventional, and not any, sign of nuclear retaliation was delivered by the Kremlin.
According to Secretary of State Blinken, Western intelligence has so far found no indication that Russia is preparing to use tactical nuclear weapons. weapons against the battlefield, not to mention the launch of missiles at NATO countries.
The Kremlin has warned that a U.S. supply of F16s to Ukraine would carry a «tremendous risk» of nuclear escalation. However, Biden allowed NATO allies to do just that, without any sign of serious retaliation.
However, there are still signs of caution in the White House. The president still insists that Ukrainian pilots trained in the US won't be ready to fly these planes for another year. Veterans who have flown F-16s dispute that claim, but the nuclear threat still holds the White House back. With the 2024 election approaching, Biden will not take any chances.
American isolationists argue that Zelensky is getting too much money and equipment, and disaster-hit Hawaii is being left behind. This is bullshit. As far as blood and treasure is concerned, not a single soldier has died, and only 4 percent of the US defense budget is spent on Kyiv. Compared to Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, Ukraine is a bargain.
0309 Military assistance to Ukraine The triumph of Ukraine's counteroffensive
What happens in the war itself? At least 500,000 combatants have been killed or wounded on both sides, on and off the battlefield, after a summer of bloodshed, according to authoritative US estimates last month. Ukrainian forces lost about 70,000 killed and 120,000 wounded, while in May the civilian death toll was already estimated at 42,000.
Nearly all experts agree that Ukrainian losses in combat far exceed those of Russians, who lost more than 300,000 troops, including 120,000 killed.
Putting these numbers in context, all Russian invading forces in February 2022, they numbered no more than 190,000 people.
In fact, at least a third of the military forces with which Putin began his war have now been sacrificed in his nightmarish ambitions to restore Soviet or imperial borders.
p> 
Such a rate of attrition is much more demoralizing for Russian occupiers than for Ukrainians defending their homeland.
There are many reports of desertions, the most impressive of which is the case of a Russian pilot recently surrendering his helicopter, his cargo, and himself. Meanwhile, the conditions in which the Russians will have to fight have worsened: there is not enough equipment, food and even water.
This is the backstory of the Ukrainian breakthrough this week in the crucial Zaporozhye region, breaking through the so-called Surovikinsky line of mines: «dragon's teeth», anti-tank barriers and trenches. Key villages have fallen, the last of which is Verbove, the nodal point of the Surovikin Line.
0309 Ukraine's Coming Counteroffensive
The Russians have thrown in some of their best troops to close the gaps in their defenses, but little has been done. The Ukrainian offensive was led by the British-trained 82nd Air Assault Brigade, armed with British-made Challenger 2 tanks.
Several factors gave the Ukrainians a decisive advantage in combat: superior leadership, both military and civilian; better morale, due in part to more thorough training for modern combat; and growing superiority in modern Western technology, including offensive systems such as heavily armored tanks and precision artillery.
The HIMARS rocket artillery systems delivered to Ukraine last year have been a decisive factor in every victory. With. Now the Americans are being urged to supply cluster warheads for these weapons, as well as to provide Kiev with M1A1 Abrams, F16 tanks and ATACMS long-range artillery. building artillery there. This is not a decision the UK's largest defense contractor will take lightly.
Commentators tend to focus on technology, in part because it is supplied by the West. But the courage, leadership and pressure of the Ukrainian troops are no less important.
An example is the amphibious raid on the Crimea, which took place shortly after the death of Prigozhin. This bold operation by the Ukrainian special forces showed that a Russian bear can be poked with impunity even in its Crimean lair.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians, hampered by the West's reluctance to allow them to defend themselves against night bombing, have become increasingly aggressive in using drones not only on the battlefield, but also behind enemy lines and even deep inside Russia.
Moscow is now regularly exposed to drone strikes that disrupt air traffic and bring the war home to the hitherto well-isolated Russian middle and upper classes.
0309 Russia's latest strikes
The Ukrainians have had better success than the Russians, who use Iranian-made Shahed suicide drones worth $20,000 each, using disposable cardboard or foam drones worth just £2,750 each.
These Australian SYPAQ drones are also easy to assemble, like the Ikea flat pack, but they are so small and covered in radar-absorbing materials that they cannot be detected by Russian air defenses. Swarms of SYPAQ drones are currently destroying Russian aircraft worth many millions at a paltry cost.
Drone attacks on military bases now cause serious damage to the Russian Air Force and other targets. Shelling hit six Russian regions simultaneously this week, including an attack on Pskov airport near Estonia, which Putin himself regularly uses.
» />Putin's mistaken extermination war
Losses are growing. Last week, Ukraine scored another victory by destroying a S-400 missile battery in Crimea, depriving the Russian-occupied peninsula of a key link in its air defense system.
The Ukrainians are believed to have hit the battery with a modification of their own Neptune missile. Originally intended for naval warfare, the Neptune was used to sink the Black Sea Fleet's flagship Moskva last year. With Crimea now within reach of Odessa, the pride of Putin's empire is becoming a liability where his forces have nowhere to hide.
The defeatists will answer: so what? Nazi Germany was destroyed from the air by thousands of bombings for three years, but she did not give up until she was occupied by the Allies. Imperial Japan held out until the atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Drones or missiles alone will not defeat Putin's Russia.
No, but Putin's regime lacks either the deadly discipline of Hitler's Germany or the ritual fanaticism of Hirohito's Japan. And the Russian leader has no Goebbels to drive the Russians into a frenzy of enthusiasm for total war.
Instead, the war exposed the shortcomings of Putin's system: the corruption and profligacy of the military industry and supply chains, the drunkenness and depravity of the soldiers, and the cruelty and cowardice of the elites. The Russians notice that these elites protect their own, leaving the sons of workers and muzhiks (peasants) to be treated as cannon fodder. While Zelensky cracked down on the draft evaders, Putin clearly failed to do so.
May 9 parades
Prigozhin's popularity, whatever it was, was based on the carefully cultivated impression that he was a tribune of the people. perhaps even Spartacus, who will one day stand up for the enslaved. At the funeral, he was compared to Nelson Mandela, a friend of Africans.
In reality, Prigozhin was, of course, a bandit who enriched himself by the same murderous methods as the rest of Putin's entourage. It may have been news to most Russians that he had two private jets, but the only real surprise was that he was actually on board the plane that crashed.
Putin himself has sometimes portrayed himself as a modern-day tsar. , the traditional paternalistic «father», who remains aloof from responsibility for the abuses of his officials. But the war has shown him to be the ruthless dictator he has always been, more ruthless than any of his subordinates.
It was he, and only he, who turned this war into a criminal, in fact, genocidal enterprise. The “special military operation” has grown into an existential conflict not only for Ukraine (the legitimacy of which Putin openly denies), but also for Russia.
Executions, rape and torture are taking on a colossal and systematic character. scale, as well as the kidnapping of children and the destruction of the ecology and infrastructure in occupied Ukraine.
War crimes in Ukraine
The Russian “scorched earth” strategy, invented by the general of Tsar Alexander I, Barclay de Tolly, to repel the invasion of Napoleon in 1812, was revived by Putin against what he calls the «Nazi» state of Ukraine.
It's possible. there will be no return from this war of extermination. Either Putin succeeds in subjugating the largest country in Europe besides Russia itself, or he and his regime will be swept up in a whirlpool of collective guilt and indelible shame.
A «black day for the German army»
However, if Putin falls into the abyss, he intends take Russia with you. Blaming an entire nation in the eyes of the world, he seeks to bind his subjects to his own destiny.
Just as Hitler began by rewarding loyalty with booty confiscated from his Jewish victims, so Putin has been generous. with property stolen from Ukrainians. But in the end, Germany lost not only all the lands annexed by Hitler, but also East Prussia, Silesia and other provinces, as well as about 14 million exiles to be absorbed. The rest of Germany remained divided for more than four decades.
The destruction caused by the current war is so great that reparations and regime change will not be enough to end it. The price of defeat could now be nothing less than the dismantling and disarmament of the Russian Federation.
How can you expect Ukrainians, not to mention the other neighbors of defeated Russia, to feel safe near a rogue state that has nuclear weapons, embraced by a diabolical mixture of revanchism and nihilism?
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once Russia's richest oligarch, worth an estimated $15bn (£11.8bn), but his outspoken criticism of Putin cost him a loss of fortune and 10 years in prison. Now living in exile in London, Khodorkovsky will release How to Kill a Dragon (Politics, £20) this month.
Oligarch-turned-dissident now advocates a new and peaceful Russian revolution to create a parliamentary democracy instead of Putin's dictatorship and the nation-state instead of Putin's empire.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, believing that his $15 billion provided a degree of impunity, dared to criticize the corruption at the heart of the Kremlin. Credit : Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images Europe
Khodorkovsky has brilliant ideas of what a post-war Russia could look like — a decentralized federal system instead of the old autocratic Muscovy. But he admits that «the threat of Russia's collapse is the main result of Putin's war, which the interim government will have to deal with.»
To Russian ears, this will sound like a reenactment of the Russian Civil War of 1918-21, in which ten million Russians, far more than in the world war that preceded it. The Kremlin is mobilizing popular memories of Russia's many civil wars to consolidate its power.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was relatively bloodless at first, but the subsequent wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and now Ukraine demonstrate the Pavlovian response to a declining empire striking back on its periphery.
Now Stalin's statues are reappearing, consecrated Russian Orthodox priests who seem oblivious to Uncle Joe's penchant for killing his predecessors and destroying their churches.
Russia seems to be in the grip of a mass psychosis — a regression to a mythical past that is increasingly confronted with the reality of industrial-scale violent death. Few people return from the killing fields of Ukraine to tell this story, but defeat on the battlefield is an irrefutable argument.
If the Russians cannot hold the line in Zaporozhye, they may well be defeated — as happened last time . year near Kharkov. However, this time Ukrainians are much better prepared to use a local collapse to drive a wedge between the Russian occupiers in Donetsk in the east and the Black Sea coast, including Crimea, in the south.
The war seems to be approaching the point it has reached World War I August 8, 1918. The 100-day campaign that ended the war.
Ukraine has tanks, it has people, and it has Zelensky. This battle-hardened, but by no means war-weary people, whose national identity is hardened in adversity, is fighting to liberate all of their land, including Crimea.
With or without Western support and sanctions, Ukraine will fight until Putin's evil empire is defeated.
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