(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) June 10, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—Much like the scenes unfolding in Los Angeles in recent days—and I have plenty to say on that but not below—a bird’s eye view can often be most revealing, helping to sift through the noise made by often quite loud individuals spreading misinformation and/worse, disinformation that is amplified deliberately by social media algorithms.  A zoomed-out view usually gives you a larger perspective and allows you to attach weight and context where a much more zoomed-in, granular view does not, where a particular point of view may be wildly unrepresentative compared to what is happening in a larger radius.

Well, Ladies and Gentleman, Comrades and Friends, Fan and Critics alike, I present to you the bird’s-eye-view of Russia’s territorial progress in Ukraine between January 2, 2025 (the fine Institute for the Study of War, which provides these excellent maps of this terrible war along with Critical Threats, was understandably closed on January 1) and June 2, 2025, roughly the first half of the year, and, well, what is revealed in clear and indisputable:

Your eyes do not deceive you: Russia has made virtually no visible progress advancing in Ukraine, despite constant attacks: try squinting, try squinting hard, and you will still have difficulty finding clear progress, let alone significant progress.

The one exception where there is easily visible progress? Inside Russia, in the Kursk Oblast that Ukraine boldly partially occupied to great effect beginning in June, 2024.

If Russia’s only easily visible territorial progress in an imperialist, colonialist attempted conquest of Ukraine that is trying to genocidally erase Ukrainian identity over the course of six months is to retake some of Russia’s own territory (after it was mortifyingly occupied for some ten months and was only liberated with the help of thousands of North Korean—North Korean—troops!), it’s impossible to credibly claim Russia is “winning,” let alone that Ukraine is “losing.”

Last time I checked, a defender successfully defending most of its territory from enemy advances means the defender is, actually, winning (for all you Risk board game players, think the tie-goes-to-the-defender rule)…

I plan to elaborate on some of the details of what’s been going on, but for now, take a look at that stark picture of failure on the part of Russia that is also a portrait of dogged Ukrainian determination and perseverance and it is clear which narratives are backed by reality and which are not.

Add to all this that over five of the six months were under a fascist Trump Administration that was and still is hostile to Ukraine, favors Russia narratively and diplomatically, and had criticized, redirected, “paused,” and/or ended major aspects of U.S. aid to Ukraine, and it is even more embarrassing that Russia has failed to advance when it should have been able to.  In fact, think of a major war where a major backer—one of the world’s most powerful nations—of the weaker defender pulls much of its support for that defender against a far stronger attacker—also one of the world’s most powerful nations—and it is harder to find examples in history where such an attacker was unable to capitalize on the rug being pulled out from under the defender (and this even was after Republicans in Congress had cut off aid for much of 2023-2024).

But here we are, Putin’s Russia even more laughably pathetic than ever (and this says a lot) and increasingly unable to defend its own territory, often mostly only able to pathetically and indiscriminately target civilian areas with war-criminal, Hamas-like area bombardments and far less able to actually hit Ukraine’s military.

And oh, we haven’t even gotten into the historic, amazing, and devastating June 1^st special operation by Ukraine that has disabled or destroyed as much as some one-third of the Russian aircraft capable of wielding nuclear weapons.

I think you can say Ukraine is winning, all things considered, but more on this another time…

© 2025 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Bluesky @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) June 8, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News is approaching two million all-time content views, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish; Russian/Русский перевод)

A PERSONAL NOTE

SILVER SPRING—My dear readers, I owe you an explanation as it has been some time since I have engaged in publishing articles as a journalist, and the reasons are simple.

Last fall, I took on a job in the U.S. Federal Government, and out of an abundance of caution beyond the Hatch Act’s requirements and especially with the de facto war insurrectionist Trump’s presidential administration has declared on federal workers, critics, and many of the world’s most desperate poor alike, I decided that continuing my journalistic work at the time would put my ability to continue my work—work helping those suffering from disasters here in the U.S.—in serious jeopardy.

Over the next few months, I was proud to serve this nation and its people in time of need.  I didn’t care that most people where I was deployed had voted for Trump when it came to my work: they were my countrymen and deserved our support, and that was why I was there.

But then my personal life got in the way, and I had to take some time off.  Soon after, it was constant dread as it looked more and more likely that drug-addict and all-around bad person Elon Musk’s farcical, gaslighting DOGE would cost me my job.

While all this was going on, my Dear ol’ Dad passed away late in March and monstrous, deceitful relatives of mine made that experience exponentially worse.

Right around that time, I was formally DOGEd along with so many others, my federal position not continuing.  Since then, I have had to focus on things other than the news.

Finally, though, I am trying to get back into the swing of things and am working on a number of new pieces I hope to be publishing quite soon.  I might very much still be a mess in some ways on the inside, but this is life and it is time to move forward.

However, I think that it is important and that I owe it to you, my readers, to address a few issues before going forward.

A Note on My Ukraine Coverage

As far as my previous Ukraine/Russia coverage, I maintain most of that still stands up quite well, it’s just been delayed: between Ukraine not achieving the massive land gains hoped for during the big 2023 offensive, Trump’s MAGA Republicans holding up Ukraine aide well into 2024, between the aid that did come being diminished because of all the increased costs resulting from the aid delay, with the distraction of the 2024  U.S. elections, and with the Trump Administration favoring Russia diplomatically now and treating Ukraine and Zelensky horribly, the dynamics I have espoused upon consistently were diminished yet still intact and are what they are even if diminished or somewhat dormant.

Well, I do believe a lot of those dynamics could amplify in a decisive way for Ukraine and will be explaining that in a future piece that (indeed, recent spectacular events might signal a promising shift…).  The last two years had slowed down and delayed a lot of the core dynamics but not rewritten them.  So, while I would have loved for 2023 up until now to be different, like Ukraine is, I am looking to the future to vindicate myself even if the situations have looked less promising (so far) than my analysis would suggest.  And I don’t think time favors Russia now just as I felt the same before.  Still, while what I predicted is not happening and may yet come to pass and I would argue it will, I will understand if readers intelligently and reasonably question my work, and such questions are welcome.

And I will certainly be covering that recent historic, daring special operations strike against Russian air bases that somehow turned trucks into aircraft carriers and humiliated Russia spectacularly, evolving warfare as we know it before our very eyes, as Ukraine has done before.

A Note on My 2024 U.S. Election Coverage

In some of my coverage and depending on the prevailing trends of polling in any particular race, I have at times challenged pollster’s methodology.  I saw a closer race than most in 2016, for example.  In the 2022 midterms, I was more than vindicated by my analysis that polls were underestimating Democratic turnout.  But in 2024, building on some of the logic from 2020, I ended up putting out my least accurate predictive analysis of my journalism career.  To be fair, I still gave Trump a realistic chance of winning—about one in five—but my reading of the tea leaves, uncharacteristically, was seriously flawed.

Why?  I may elaborate in the future on each of these reasons below, but for now:

First, I looked at polls showing Americans caring about the state of democracy and the high portions placing democracy as their top or a major voting priority and I assumed—admittedly for very good reasons—that the vast majority of most of those voters were supporting Harris against Trump.  I was wrong: it was far closer in various exit polls and surveys released the day of and after the election, with Trump voters absurdly also quite concerned about Harris’s and Democrats’ perceived threats to democracy.  I simply did not think that so many millions of Americans would have been hoodwinked and gaslighted enough to think that Trump was in any way a better candidate to protect democracy than Harris, let alone someone who practices or respects democracy. 

I also did not believe the polling showing minority and younger voters shifting—in some categories, significantly—towards Trump and MAGA and away from Harris and Democrats.  I looked at how some of these polls were constructed and conducted and thought I had understood correctly their flaws.  But instead, after the election, I realized that this country had changed, even over the past four years, in ways I didn’t see or expect or recognize fully, and explained away the evidence that did point to this.

I was wrong, and, to their credit, the pollsters overall were pretty accurate.

And, very much related, I underestimated the degree to which social media and random generally unqualified people often dubbed “influencers” (both of which I have long-noted are more and more so spreading dangerous misinformation, propaganda, and disinformation, often backed or carried out by powerful hostile foreign government intelligence agencies) have for years increasingly displaced traditional media (the term “legacy” media is such an arrogant misnomer) and are now seeming to eclipse it.  In turn, I overestimated the degree to which people were actually seeing the implosion in terms of coherence, message, and performance at the main events of Trump campaign in the closing weeks.  I thought things like the MSG rally from fascist past just before the election would have cost Trump a lot of votes.  But it seems a lot of people were not checking into reality.  Often, people are so misinformed or worse that they vote for a candidate who will actually do the opposite of what they expect (and no, the recent Elon-Donald catfight will not save the left, but more on that another time..).

Now, I am not sure how many people, or even if a majority of voters, were aware of the quality of campaigns overall or heard the candidates unedited in their own words at any length (relatively few people watched the conventions compared to past election years, for example).  Instead of watching what could pass for a white version of a ranting aging Col. Qaddafi with a disturbing cast of minions leaving a bad aftertaste, they seem to have made their minds up on selective or doctored clips or even loved the awfulness, if they even paid attention to it.

I thought the awfulness would cost him the election, but instead it seems to have helped him win it or not hurt him, at the very least.  The information sphere is now so jumbled by these new forces that large sections of the electorate are not making well-informed decisions, even more than before.

As others have said, the cruelty is the point.  And this time, he won on it.

Conclusion: Stay Tuned and All Hands on Deck

Every path is a learning experience, and even the best still learn on the job.  I will be incorporating these lessons and others in my future work, so look soon for more stories Ukraine and Russia, the situation in the U.S., a major piece on Gaza, and even possibly some thoughts on the singular current cultural phenomenon that is the Star Wars show Andor (a must watch for all antifascists, the most politically relevant fictional show on television now, in my opinion and that of others, and the show with the highest-rated-string of episodes of all time on IMDB!).

I will have content soon on Orwell vs. Trump, for my podcast, and on this glorious human achievement known as the Andor Star Wars television show (so damn relevant to our times it’s literally terrifying [spoilers in link]). I humbly ask for your patience and forgiveness and am confident my future content will rectify my recent past underperformance.

Oh, and, given this tough time we’re all in, I’m very much asking for your support.  If we don’t support each other, as the senior senator from Chandrila and fellow ginger redhead exclaimed in this season of Andor, “If we do not stand together, we will be crushed.”

First, donate to help Ukraine and civil liberties organizations, but then please consider donating to support my efforts here.  Many thanks!

© 2025 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод coming soon; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) August 11, 2024; see my related August 15 Twitter thread on the Kursk operation, what led to it, & its importance; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—I know it has been some time since I have written about Ukraine, with personal reasons having played a role in this, including losing a Democratic U.S. Senate primary campaign in Maryland (but hey,  I came in 5^th out of 10 candidates in my first race ever against some opponents with a lot more staff, much more money, and far deeper roots in the state, but now make sure you support winner Angela Alsobrooks in the fall!).  But aside from my own personal hectic situation, the fact is that compared to the previous massive Ukrainian counterattacks, previous smaller Ukrainian-supported Russian rebel incursions into Russia, spectacular victories of Ukraine against the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s ill-fated rebellion against the Kremlin, and Russia’s suicidal Pyrrhic “victories,” very little exciting large-scale developments have happened until this thus-far successful operation in Russia being conducted by Ukraine.  Of course, there have been the standard war-criminal barbarity of the Russians in targeting and massacring Ukrainian civilians throughout this period in addition to the standard smaller-scale Russian offenses by a Russian military incapable of sustaining large-scale offensives, offensives that made mild-to-no progress while Ukraine was running out of ammunition and Republicans under Trump’s sway were holding up Ukrainian aid—a telling fact that displays Russia’s impotence as it was unable to do more when Ukraine was at its weakest.

Setting Up This New Counteroffensive

But now that that massive aid package finally passed in late April some three-and-a-half months ago, many including myself were wondering how soon how much of that $61 billion in U.S. aid would be disbursed and how soon that could allow Ukraine to be in a position to launch a major successful counteroffensive.

Having received billions of dollars in aid from the U.S. and other allies, we have now seen the beginning of what can hardly be called a minor incursion into Russia, not of Ukrainian-allied-and-supported Russian rebel units—the Russian Volunteer Corps (R.D.K.) and the Free Russia Legion (also translated as the Freedom of Russia Legion or Liberty of Russia Legion) that raided Russia earlier—but of actual Ukrainian forces themselves.  For ground combat, this is the most Ukraine has taken the actual fight to the Russians’ actual home territory and it is unprecedented and an utter humiliation for Russia and Putin (Putin’s face in this clip speaks volumes).  Even earlier, the fact that this was being undertaken by Ukrainian, and not Russian rebel units, suggested that this is was likely going to be much more than a raid, could even be a major operation.  Now, it is obvious that this is a major operation involving many Ukrainian troops.  And the beauty of all this is that this could very much be the beginning of a dramatically different phase of the war that could very well transform it.

How so?  I wrote well over a year ago, after a series of dramatic raids by the aforementioned Russian rebels into Russia and Ukrainian drone strikes deep into Russia hitting Russian bases and even Moscow itself, that such operations had the potential to cause Russia to dramatically drain its combat power and strength from the front lines in Ukraine and that this, in turn, would leave Russia very vulnerable to massive Ukrainian counterattacks.

Well, we can think of what we saw before with the Russian rebel forces as mini-preview versions of what we are seeing now, providing a lot of intelligence on the borderlands on the Russian side.  And, as I have noted before, Ukraine—unlike Russia—values the lives of its troops and does not try to rush its operations but puts a lot of effort into planning, exercising prudence.  So it prepared on its own timetable, meticulously, and patiently, and we can be certain that Ukraine has put a tremendous amount of time and effort into planning what is now unfolding.

And that is why it is unfolding so well for Ukraine right now.

Kursk Crumbling!

For what is unfolding is the most spectacular, impressive development in a long time, with Ukraine taking more Russian territory in days than Russia has taken as far as Ukrainian territory in months.  Or, Russia has lost far more of its own territory in just a few days than Ukraine has lost in terms of its own territory in months, if you prefer.  To quantify this, we’re talking roughly between 500-850 km², and that is almost certainly outdated and smaller than where things are currently as Ukraine and those posting publicly about this siding with Ukraine are exceptionally careful about operations security, or OPSEC (in contrast to Russian OPSEC, which is abysmal in general and specifically so in Kursk at the moment).

What we are seeing now in Ukraine is not raid, then, but a major effort to take and intend to hold and be able to hold Russian territory.  If the raids from before showed Russia was not able to effectively defend its own territory from potential attack and, that like its positions in Ukraine, it had no layered defense in depth in its own territory, the current operation is the realization of that potential, with disastrous consequences for Russia.  Indeed, Ukraine has taken a significant amount of territory in Russia’s Kursk Oblast—well-known in the hearts of Russians as the site of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany during World War II from July-August 1943 in the largest tank battle in the history of the world and including today—and has also begun to advance into Russia’s Belgorod Oblast, long staging areas for Russian attacks on Ukaine.  But now the tables have turned, and turned dramatically and suddenly as Ukraine outmaneuvers Russia inside Russia again and again in recent days.

And let’s be clear, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his regime have been absolutely embarrassed, it being clear that Russia’s military was incapable both of anticipating the Ukrainian invasion and of putting together a competent defense for its early phase: even Russian military bloggers (“milbloggers”) are openly acknowledging this.  There is even a hilarious “Belgorod People’s Republic” Twitter account that is trolling Russia on a next level.  Things are unfolding as rapidly as the great Ukrainian counteroffensives earlier in the war, except this one is inside Russian territory.

Why should this operation be transformational for this war?  Because Ukraine is attacking in force inside Russia with high quality troops and high-quality, NATO-level equipment, and Russian security forces and military left behind in Russia are generally not of high-quality (often very poorly-trained green conscripts), nor well equipped: the most seasoned troops with the “better” Russian equipment (“best” is really too strong) are spread throughout the frontline in Ukraine and there are not even that many: most troops in Ukraine at this point in the war, after so many Russian casualties and so much Russian equipment destroyed, are poorly-trained and with outdated equipment (Russia is literally throwing T-62M tanks at the Ukrainians in Kursk Oblast, tanks that are 1983 upgrades of a 1961 tank that was itself an upgrade of a 1958 model, all while Ukraine takes far better care of its equipment than Russia).  This means that Putin is going to have to remove large numbers of better troops and better equipment from the front lines in Ukraine, and this means there will almost certainly be collapses of the Russian lines in Ukraine.  Already, the number of Russian attacks in Ukraine are declining dramatically because of Ukraine’s Kursk invasion as Russia withdraws troops from Ukraine to face the threat in Kursk.  It’s basic math, as I have noted before.

And the choice for Putin is clear: cannibalize key parts of the Russian lines in Ukraine, almost certainly leading to major Ukrainian breakthroughs there, or allow Ukraine to occupy, control, and demilitarize large swathes of Russia on Ukraine’s border.  Because as it stands now, Ukraine has smashed through the rear support lines of the Russian right flank of the entire war effort and will be able to threaten and roll up a large chunk of the Russian line in the north of Ukraine unless a dramatic redeployment of Russian troops from those Ukrainian lines occurs.  Again, simple math.  And Russia will have to keep a closer eye on other border areas, too, further diverting resources from the front lines in Ukraine.  So make no doubt about it, this is the weakest Putin has been since Prigozhin was approaching the gates of Moscow, but unlike with the late Prigozhin, Putin has no way to manipulate the Ukrainians into to giving up their march into Russia without major concessions Putin would be unwilling to entertain and the Ukrainians are in a prime position to do massive damage to both the whole Russian military position in Ukraine as well as the ability of Russia to even use these border regions to stage any further military operations against Ukrainian territory.

Ukraine Railroading Russia

If you think I am exaggerating, I am not.  And for this next section, I would like to thank Trent Telenko and Intelschizo from Twitter for much of what I will explain here (not that I always accept everything from any particular account, but really appreciated what I cite here).  Russia’s land forces—“more so than any other military”—are highly dependent on its rail network to supply their troops and move them and their equipment.  And one of the main Russia rail lines supporting the war for a large part of the front line—the Lgov-Belgorod Line—has now been severed during this operations and is partly under Ukrainian control along with the Lgov-Vorozbha line, to the point that they have taken over and will be able to use Russia’s own rail lines to rapidly move in its own heavy equipment into the area.  Ukraine is already in a strong position and will be dug in with excellent fields of fire, controlling the heights in the area and using those heights to dominate the roads that operate in between and around this high ground, creating ideal kills zones and already making it hard for Russia to reinforce or counterattack.  This means Ukraine is establishing a solid bridgehead into Kursk Oblast around the key crossroads town of Sudzha, which contains one of Russia’s major operational natural gas line Gazprom metering stations for Europe, with nearly half of Russia’s gas exports to Europe passing by pipeline through Sudzha in 2023.  Protecting this bridgehead, among other defenses, is a solid buffer zone where Ukraine’s drones can easily monitor and hit enemy targets.

As a result, we even have multiple examples of cheap Ukrainian drones taking out Russian military helicopters midflight and Ukraine has already inflicted heavy casualties on the disorganized Russian defenders, even taking many Russian personnel as prisoners.  Also, a major Ukrainian drone attack pretty much destroyed a nearby Russian military airbase in Lipetsk, making lack of air support a real issue for the Russians, and Ukraine is also already hitting neighboring Voronezh Oblast with drone strikes.

The other main rail line Russia might have used nearby, the Oryol Line, has already been well-targeted by Ukraine and is unusable, so, essentially, what has happened is that Ukraine has or is just on the cusp of making it impossible for Russia to send supplies, troops, or equipment by rail from Moscow and the rest of the north to the frontline without going far, far out of its way by using other circuitous rail lines that will severely delay any attempt to move anything from there to the front.  Resupplying and reinforcing using rail lines from the east, Russia is facing dramatically less effective, far longer logistical routes that will make the Russian army’s already miserable logistics situation far more miserable.  And a lot of these rail lines will be susceptible to further sabotage and attacks and will also likely suffer from overuse and maintenance issues as Russia panics in response to Ukrainian offensive operations going deeper into Russia. And those troops will be exhausted when they finally arrive and subject to Ukrainian attacks while en route.

What all this means is Russia is in a lot of trouble not just in Ukraine but also in Russia.  And I don’t just mean militarily: as I have noted in the past before Prigozhin’s rebellion, which I essentially predicted, and as I noted with Prigozhin’s rebellion how that would plant mental seeds of further rebellion, such failures in the past in Russian history have provoked rebellion and revolution inside Russian history, including defections of whole military units.  If things collapse rapidly for Russia inside Russia and Ukraine in the coming weeks and months, I would not be surprised if sizable Russian military formations defect in whole and rapidly march on Moscow to overthrow Putin.  Again, I am not saying this will definitely happen specifically because of this operation or soon, but I would not be surprised and have noted this possibility for some time (and do see Putin’s downfall coming at some point as a consequence of this disastrously and pathetically mismanaged war of colonialist imperialism).  Russians’ confidence in Putin has already been shattered time and time again as the reality of this war consistently keeps piercing Putin’s propaganda bubble, from Russia’s insanely high casualties to the sinking of the Black Sea flagship the Moskva, but significant amounts of actual Russian territory being taken and occupied by Ukraine and used to stage further attacks deeper inside Russia is a whole other level of undeniable failure, failure that falls squarely on Putin and the people he has personally chosen to run this failing war.

Russia, Still Screwed and Now More Screwed

Even if there aren’t internal revolts against the Kremlin in the coming weeks and months, Russia’s military situation is just terrible now to an even higher degree with these most recent developments.  For, as I noted before, if Russia could barely advance against Ukraine when it was running out of ammunition while Republicans pushed by Trump shamefully blocked Biden Administration aid to Ukraine, it was only going to get worse for Russia once that aid started flowing from the U.S. again, and now, three-and-a-half months later, it’s certainly getting worse for Russia and is only now going to get dramatically worse for Russia after the events of the past few days.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) February 23, 2024; *Update in evening: more downed Russian aircraft; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—Regardless of how well one side is performing or another, the loss of life and destruction in Ukraine during the past two years of Putin’s imperialist war against our ally Ukraine has been horrific for all: tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken as hostages by Russia into Russia and Ukrainian civilians and members of both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries are dying.  Yet far more Russians military personnel have been killed and wounded* by the Ukrainian military than the reverse (according to Ukraine’s numbers, which I have argued should be seen as quite reliable, over 408,000 Russian military and wounded* killed since February 24, 2022 as of February 23, 2024).

Yet even now, despite two years of massive embarrassment for Putin, Russia, and the Russian military, Putin shows no sign of being deterred from using that ever-so-dysfunctional military force to dismember and bend Ukraine to its will.  If anything, the U.S. failure to keep sending aid has given him and Russia a sense of hope that they can outlast the U.S. and the West, especially if insurrectionist Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican allies can keep blocking additional aid to Ukraine or even prevail in the 2024 elections.

The Asinine Politics of Aid

The U.S. aid already given is very tiny part of the overall U.S. budget: total U.S. aid since just before Russia’s late February 2022 scalation so far has been roughly $74.3 billion and the U.S. budget for FY 2023 was $6.13 trillion, so Ukraine aid only represents just over 1.2% of the budget but keep in mind that is aid over the course of two years, so divided in half to represent a one year’s aid that is only about 0.6% of the 2023 budget.  This all costs less than many, many other programs do each year, has paid for itself and then some by far, absolutely serves vital U.S. interests, and is greatly degrading the power and influence of the current largest threat to international stability, order, and Western democracy itself, Vladimir Putin’s Russia.  The current proposed additional aid invests by far most of the money back into the U.S., too.

In contrast, Russia overspent its target on defense for 2023—about an entire third of its budget—and is slated to spend about 40% of its budget on defense and security in 2024!

Abandoning Ukraine and allowing Russia to de facto control and annex parts of Ukraine’s territory, to keep Ukraine bogged down in war and terror, and to threaten the entire security of eastern Europe would undermine and jeopardize three-quarters of a century of U.S. policy in Europe, successfully built upon the ashes of World War II, nation by nation, new NATO member accession by new NATO member accession.  And NATO and other U.S.-led global alliances have, without question, presided over the most peaceful era in world history since the Pax Romana nearly two millennia ago.  Not just for reasons of national interest, though, but for deeper reasons I have articulated before, Ukraine absolutely deserves our aid.

Ukraine doesn’t have to be perfect—no country ever is and no war ever has been perfectly run, from Alexander’s war on Persia to the Allies’ war on Hitler’s Greater Nazi Reich—to merit further aid from the U.S.  Mistakes will be made—goodness knows Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive plans were far too ambitious and overextended Ukraine’s offensive potential against U.S. recommendations—but Ukraine’s track record in the two years since February 24, 2022, has been amazing by any historical standard and would be amazing against any larger, more powerful opponent, let alone Vladimir’s Putin’s Russia today.  And, as an ally, for one-year-and-a-half, America’s track record on aid to Ukraine through the Biden Administration has been amazing by any historical standard: in world history, only America’s own Lend-Lease from World War II stands as comparable.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Hark Hertling—the man with my top account to follow on Ukraine—called it perfectly: for roughly 18 months, we supported Ukraine and thwarted Russia’s objectives in invading Ukraine.  And then, for roughly the past half year, we let our aid run out and failed to authorize new aid, leaving Ukraine in a lurch as it ran out of ammunition and suffered more casualties and reverses as a result, the most significant visible result of this the Ukrainian withdrawal from the small city of Avdiivka in Donetsk Oblast.

But to put it more accurately and specifically, Republicans in Congress under the not so-subtle influence of insurrectionist Donald Trump—blocking wartime aid for Ukraine for political reasons again, the last time rightfully leading to his first impeachment—and his fascist MAGA movement that have overtly aligned with fascist Putin’s Russia (I do not use that term “fascist” lightly) have been blocking aid for months.  And yes, the Trumpist-Putinist bromance is real, has been for years, and is very much ongoing.

Thankfully if very belatedly, though, aid was finally passed in the Senate with 22 Republican Senators—including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—joining nearly every Democrat to pass earlier this month a massive foreign aid package, including some $60 billion for Ukraine, but the MAGA pressure on Republicans in the House is still very real and prevalent as Christian extremist Speaker Mike Johnson has decided to follow Trump’s lead by continuing to refuse to bring the bill up for an up-and-down vote.

Why U.S. Aid Will Put Ukraine Back in the Driver’s Seat

Much of the conventional wisdom is that Ukraine has been in a stalemate for some time, but I argued months ago against this on the basis that Ukraine was continuing to inflict significant casualties on Russia’s Air Force and Navy as well as on the Russian Army even if not a lot of territory was changing hands.  I still feel that is the case and that Ukraine is winning a war of attrition and I still doubt Russia’s ability to take and hold any large new swathes of Ukrainian territory, but Ukraine is currently at its worst position since the Russians were at the gates of Kyiv (to be clear, this is far, far less bad than then, part of the reason why I still think dynamics have been favoring Ukraine and still can over time).  But it does seem that Ukraine is now exhausted to without resupply by the U.S. to the point that is might have to fall back on multiple fronts if something does not change—in the words of Gen. Hertling, an “inflection point.”

So, just to be clear, America has been failing Ukraine for months because of Trump MAGA Republicans in Congress, especially now the House under Mike Johnson.  And the result has been higher Ukrainian casualties, a stalling of Ukraine’s progress on land and even setbacks, such as the fall of Avdiivka, concurrent with a minor resurgence in Russian offensive capabilities (and it is just minor).  But if U.S. aid is still withheld in the coming months, all these trends could increase to the point of reducing Ukraine’s ability to keep inflicting large numbers of casualties and thus create a genuine stalemate, or even to have Ukraine be slightly losing overall.

But even in the current context, Ukraine is not losing!  In most cases, Ukraine is still holding Russia at bay and is still inflicting horrific casualties on Russia.  In just the past week over a five day period, Ukraine has inflicted more combat aircraft losses—seven—on Russia than the U.S. has experienced in decades (*Evening UPDATE: as if to prove my point, just today Russia has apparently lost an incredibly expensive and rare A-50U advanced surveillance aircraft, an Su-34 fighter-bomber, and possibly even an IL-22M command plane, making that 9-10 aircraft losses in little over a week!) and inflicted more combat naval losses in the first half of this month on Russia than the U.S. has experienced in decades (hell, Ukraine barely even has a navy, yet has destroyed a third of the major vessels Russia’s Black Sea Fleet: embarrassingly, Russia cannot defend its navy, something I have called since the early months of this war).  And that does not even touch on the terrible losses on land suffered by the Russians.  That all sure isn’t losing for Ukraine, that’s still winning in what has become a war of attrition, but it doesn’t feel like that, not for the world, and not for Ukrainians, and momentum could swing in Russia’s direction and may be beginning to do so in the absence of further U.S. aid.

Conversely, Ukrainians could be winning so much more with steady U.S. support.  Imagine how well Ukraine can do with a lot more U.S. aid when it has been running on fumes for these recent months and still has mostly held off Russia’s attacks while also still inflicting massive casualties on Russia, which also treats its own troops barbarically.  After all, in the end, Russian troops are in a foreign land where they are simply not wanted and where most of the locals are willing to die and take even more of them per Ukrainian to make that point (according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, seven Russians were killed per Ukrainian killed at Avdiivka, but that was said before apparent executions of captured Ukrainian soldiers after Ukraine’s withdrawal from there; still, Avdiivka was clearly a Pyrrhic Russian victory).  Given Russia’s widely visible deficiencies that I and many others have discussed at length, Russia will not be able to take over all of Ukraine and impose its will through installing a new puppet government.  And yes, while U.S. aid was coming in strong last year, Ukraine opted for an overambitious offensive strategy that spread its offensive capability too thinly and focused on some of Russia’s most heavily fortified positions contrary to U.S. advice—a planning oversight that resulted in just modest, incremental gains on the ground and led in part to the overall stellar Gen. Valery Zaluzhny being removed from overall military command earlier this month by Zelensky, all that does not mean that another, even larger round of U.S. aid will not yield far better results.  In fact, with new leadership running the military led by Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky and Ukraine’s versatility and adaptability, I would expect a new counteroffensive that would start being concocted while new U.S. aid was flowing in robustly would succeed where the last one did not and would likely focus where Russian defenses are weakest, in the south near Kherson, as I have been hoping would happen for some time.  A major thrust on the Kherson front would be able to bypass and threaten from the rear or outflank many of Russia’s most heavily fortified lines in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk, dramatically altering the dynamics from the way the fighting has unfolded for most of 2023.  And Zelensky is already indicating this may very well be the case, or at least that the south is now going to be the main objective in the next offensive; such an offensive could even threaten Russia’s occupation of Crimea. 

And while the lack of territorial gains from Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive did get a lot of attention, the fact that the entire time Ukraine was striking deep behind enemy lines and hollowing and thinning out Russian forces and defenses from Crimea to the Donbas did not get as much attention (even if strikes inside Russia did).  This destruction wreaked on Russian forces, bases, air defenses, equipment, and supply lines still has yet to bear full fruit but will when there is finally another successful Ukrainian counteroffensive and the heaviest frontline defenses of Russia are breached.  Then, the middle and rear Russian positions far from the current fronts will collapse more quickly than many imagine they will because of the cumulative effects described above.

The House Can Pass that Aid and Ukraine Can Still Win

Having suffered from mistakes and now being left in the lurch by MAGA Republicans in Congress, Ukrainian planners will do much better once they start receiving U.S. aid again.  And I am confident that at the least Democrats in the House will get enough House Republicans (I think even more after Putin’s killing, directly or indirectly, of the prime Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny; major new sanctions on Russia in response were just announced today by Biden) to enact a rare discharge petition procedure and force a vote on the floor of the House on the Ukraine aid bill, which should result in the bill passing soon after the House returns from the ill-timed vacation Speaker Johnson sent it on.

Over the course of months of waiting for U.S. aid, Ukraine has still inflicted punishing losses on Russia—including expensive fighter jets and naval vessels—while only losing small amounts of territory and one small city.  Ukraine is more than capable of winning this war, and with a steady resumption of U.S. aid, it will.  Putin’s main audience targets with his farcical interview with Tucker Carlson were voters in America gullible enough to take anything he says at face value: more than missiles from Iran or artillery rounds from North Korea, Putin needs MAGA Republicans to be able to block U.S. aid in Congress to “win” this war, and the reelection of insurrectionist Trump as president would not only weaken American democracy perhaps fatally, it could mean a U.S. exit from NATO, not just an end to support for Ukraine, making Europe even more vulnerable to Russian aggression. 

A win for Biden and enough Democrats in Congress to thwart MAGA Republicans who have an affinity for Putin and Russia, conversely, mean Russia will lose the Ukraine war and lose badly, Putin likely falling from power at some point as a consequence.  But very key now will be getting new U.S. aid to Ukraine so Ukraine can try again and find more success on the offensive.  All this is very possible, even quite likely, should that U.S. aid start flowing and there is every reason to be confident that a Ukraine brimming with $60 billion in a new aid, ammunition, weapons, and equipment can surprise us all again and eventually push Russian forces back into Russia, liberating every square inch of its territory.

Indeed, in many ways, the fates of Biden, Zelensky, Democrats, and Ukraine on one side are tied to each other in the way the fates Putin, insurrectionist Trump, MAGA Republicans, and Russia on another side are tied to each other, but I still believe that democracy will triumph over fascism and that Ukraine, Zelensky, and Biden will triumph together over Russia, Putin, and Trump.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) September 30, 2023; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

AN IMPORTANT NOTE TO MY READERS: Dear readers, I know it’s been a while since a Ukraine update and I apologize, I have just had a lot of personal and professional issues that needed to take priority, plus I am trying to move ahead with my U.S. Senate campaign here in Maryland.  And I will be honest: it’s been really tough recently for me.  Not least of the reasons for this are that backup Bond villain Elon Musk continues to ruin Twitter based on absolutely false pretenses, to boost content he personally favors (which sure is not mine) and that is often disinformation or hate speech and to deboost content like mine along with content about Ukraine (I keep getting Russian government accounts, Tulsi Gabbard, and Republican Party accounts that I do not follow in my feed and it was recently suggested by Twitter that I follow Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, of all people; THIS is Elon Musk’s Twitter).  But there is still nothing else anywhere approaching Twitter’s reach or power, Threads isn’t even close to functioning like Twitter does if you are a journalist sharing your content.  So fewer and fewer people are being exposed to my work because of Elon’s deliberate biased changes to Twitter and its algorithms.  That means fewer shares and fewer donations, far, far fewer, I am sad to report.  That’s why it’s more important now than ever that you, my dear readers, new and old, continue to support my efforts here at Real Context News by continuing to read, share, and donate.  Your traffic, shares, and donations however small make a huge difference for me and my ability to keep up my unique work here.  It is because of you that I am able to do this, this site and this content does not exist without you so please keep up or begin your generous support as I struggle through these difficult times.  In particular, if you are a notable person in the relevant fields and/or have a large following here, plugging my work, not just retweeting but plugging it, can have a HUGE impact on the reach of any of my particular articles, and the more reach the more donations I receive.  This is not at all in doubt as I see the dramatic results in traffic and donations when you do.  But, again, even the smallest donations are helping me a lot and lots of shares with even a small reach from a lot of different people have a cumulative effect, so no matter who you are, please do consider sharing, donating, and encouraging others to do the same, it means the world to me and really does make a difference.  I dedicate this article to you and the Ukrainian people.

SILVER SPRING—The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines a stalemate primarily as “a disagreement or a situation in a competition in which neither side is able to win or make any progress.”  In case any of my readers are some of the people producing headline after headline, article after article proclaiming a “stalemate” in Ukraine to Kyiv’s forces’ detriment, let me emphasize that the definition is one of “neither side…being able to make any progress,” emphasis mine.  Let’s be more generous and consider the idea to be of a net-quality: if both sides make minimal but equal progress—say, just two square miles of progress in two weeks made by each side on different points in their line, both sets of two square miles being of roughly equal strategic value—we can say that that is a net gain of zero—each side won and lost two comparable square miles (not all territory is equal)—and that that, too, is in spirit a stalemate.  So by that definition, it’s not that neither side is not making any progress, but that neither side is having a net gain over its opponent.

Yet even under this less restrictive definition, anyone at all who employs the term “stalemate” to apply to the overall war in Ukraine between the Ukrainian and Russian sides is being recklessly ridiculous and simply furthering a false Kremlin narrative.

In the past few months, the counteroffensive is gaining steam and momentum is clearly on Ukraine’s side.

Ukraine Advancing in Bakhmut and Zaporizhzhia

This progress has mainly come in two geographic areas.

First to discuss are months of Ukrainian counterattacks taking territory north and south of Bakhmut, which Russian forces spent close to a year taking and saw tens of thousands killed in the process in the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory, mostly from the efforts of the now-murdered, onetime-rebel-against-the-Kremlin Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s Wagner Group forces, whose remnants are being so mistreated now by the Kremlin that the risk of rebellion from them is hardly over.  And as I noted before Russia had even fully taken Bakhmut, Russia’s near-pointless offensive there even if it took the city would only setup what we are seeing now: a successful Ukrainian counterattack that would take territory far faster than Russia had.  Ukraine’s advances there are setting up a possible encirclement of Russian forces in Bakhmut should they continue to advance both north and south of the city.  And all during Ukraine’s retaking territory north and south of the city, Russia has continued in conducting attacks that have failed to take and hold territory but have certainly resulted in high Russian casualties.  Bakhmut, itself a small city that lacks even moderate strategic significance, was by far the largest “victory” Russia could claim since the first few months of the war that is now over a year-and-a-half old; should Russia lose control of it after suffering such Pyrrhic losses in taking it, the embarrassment for Russia’s fascist President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin leadership would be extreme, hollowing out further any claims they can make to their people that they are “winning” in Ukraine of that things are “going according to plan” and making only more obvious Putin’s clear weakness.  In fact, Ukrainian advances here and elsewhere have meant Russia has had to divert forces from its own nearby paltry and ineffective offensive in the Kreminna-Kupyansk front to the point where it may be petering out after accomplishing very little, taking some territory but mostly in unpopulated woods in an area even less strategically significant on the eastern front than Bakhmut.  Admittedly, even Bakhmut’s “importance” is in part because has Russia forced so much attention on Bakhmut, making it a prize more valuable because of its propaganda value and the embarrassment it would cause Russia should Russia lose it, but at least it is a crossroads city and not just empty forest.  Thus, Russia’s gains in Kreminna Forest are not equivalent to any similar gains near the symbolically important city of Bakhmut or in the far more strategically important Zaporizhzhia theater.

But there is also arguably an even larger thrust and more strategically significant gains for Ukraine in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, particularly in driving towards the critical Russian logistics hub at Tokmak and penetrating Russian lines of defense towards this end.  Even if a there are not signs of an imminent breakthrough—such a major penetration that a significant section of the main defense line collapses—Ukraine’s progress has been steady and enough such progress should eventually lead to a breakthrough.  A breakthrough in these lines could bring Ukraine to the outskirts of Tokmak, the last main hub before the major city of Melitopol, the fall of which would cut Russia’s land bridge to Kherson and Crimea and severely degrade Russian logistics for much of its holdings in Ukraine.  Ukraine is currently less than thirty kilometers from Tokmak—where Russia’s air defenses comically managed to just shoot down one of its own Su-35 fighter jets—though the territory in between is heavily defended.  That should come as no surprise as Russia has had a long time to prepare fortifications there and, worse yet, minefields: Russia’s mine-laying efforts have made this terrain some of the most heavily mined in the world, with as many as five mines per square meter, thus, the progress has to at first be painstakingly slow in order to clear the mines and minimize Ukrainian casualties, explaining much of why this counteroffensive is moving far slower than some of Ukraine’s previous, more spectacular ones (this intense level of fortification is the case further behind the front lines in the east, too).

Still, this does not mean Ukraine is “losing” or not making progress, and this means a limited number of Russian positions are all that stand in the way, even if heavily defended, and, as Ukraine has demonstrated the ability to maintain steady if slow progress in penetrating these positions, there is reason to believe that Tokmak is very possible as an objective, then Melitopol after that.  And it seems Russia has little defense in depth and few reserves in the area: the same Russian units that are manning  the forward lines are also manning the lines behind those and positions down to Tokmak, thus, these forces are spread thinly and are taking serious losses and retreating even as I write this.  The only Russian troops available to reinforce would very likely have to come from other sections of the line, weakening those sections, or would be green raw recruits.  What is not happening is Russia counterattacking successfully and pushing Ukraine back here (or near Bakhmut): to expect anything else would be to expect a reversal of the overall dynamics in place since the second week of April in 2022.  Those dynamics—including Russian losses that are far, far higher than Ukraine’s—may be lessened or wax and wane, but they are still present, are hardly close to reversing, and overwhelmingly favor Ukraine, as I have noted for quite some time.  So, while progress has been slow so far, Ukraine is gaining momentum on this key Tokmak-Melitopol axis.  Indeed, unlike Russia—which has demonstrated a sickening callousness towards its own troops—Ukraine has in the past been content to go slow and careful when it sees fit to minimize casualties (Ukrainian prudence meeting Russian limitations, as I noted here, and in that case it led to the major breakthroughs of last summer and early fall).  This current counteroffensive has thus far been another of those instances or Ukrainian prudence over Russian recklessness.

In both Zaporizhzhia and near Bakhmut, Ukraine keeps gaining, Russia keeps losing, with some Russian insiders knowing this and are publicly admitting their side is losing.

Other Dynamics Also Clearly Favor Ukraine

That would be enough to tell you that Ukraine is winning.  But there are other reasons that this is the case.

There are important reasons to believe that Ukraine is winning the war of attrition here, which will make a breakthrough more and more likely.  After all, not only is Russia running low on experienced military officers to lead its formations at the tactical level from both casualties and the demoralized leaving the military, Russia is apparently running low on its better better-quality troops, particularly its (relatively) elite VDV Airborne troops, roughly half of the some 30,000 of whom were deployed in 2022 apparently becoming casualties by early August of this year.  Ukraine has been weakening defenses in key parts of the Russian line in western Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and in response, Russia is moving some of those key VDV Airborne troops from the Kherson front in the south and the Kreminna and Bakhmut fronts in the east, leaving those locations even more vulnerable.  If things were going well in Zaporizhzhia, Russia would not be pulling these elite troops (available in limited quantities and nearly impossible to replace given the collapse the collapse of Russia’s training regime as Russian cannibalizes its limited trainers to by deploying them to Ukraine) to face the most intense attacks of the Ukrainian military.  If the Russian Airborne VDV troops take enough casualties and we should expect they will, that could demoralize the other troops along the line.  And as with other Russian troops, these VDV, too, are still being poorly led and supported, taking careless casualties.  In fact, overall, Russian forces are being run into the ground, even being denied leave after a year of service (lies from the Russian government promised them two months’ leave every six months).  As any good commander will tell you, failing to rest, refit, and rotate troops is a recipe for an eventual collapse in combat effectiveness and chronic underperformance.

And on top of this, Ukraine has just received the promised Abrahms tanks from the Biden Administration as it continues its historic support of Ukraine’s war effort of a scale not seen by any nation since U.S. support for the U.K., Soviet Union, and others through Lend-Lease in World War II (the only other comparable effort in history).  Ukraine will also be receiving the long-range ATACMS missile it has so intensely requested for months.  The Abrahms tanks could add some significant punch to Ukraine’s attacks wherever it decides to deploy them, and the ATACMS will threaten key Russian command and control, air defenses, logistics and supplies, and infrastructure in the rear, harming Russia’s ability to support their troops on the front line and also exposing troops it is redeploying to fire at an even longer distance from the front line.  Ukraine is even using cheap modern drones to knock out Soviet-made guns that are almost eighty-year-old models (the D-44 which was first deployed in 1946) while Russia may also be running low on artillery gun replacement barrels that are wearing out from overuse and being of inferior quality (thanks to Trent Telenko for bringing that to my attention); considering the primacy of artillery in Russian military doctrine, the potential for this to be a major factor going forward if Russia is not able to remedy it could be severe for the Russian military, especially since there are signs Ukraine is already winning the artillery war.

Ukraine has also demonstrated that it can strike anywhere in Crimea—meaning nowhere on the peninsula is safe for the Russian occupiers—and that the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s main vessels are no longer safe in its headquarters port of Sevastopol in Crimea—not even a Kilo-class cruise missile-carrying submarine in a drydock, meaning Ukraine has destroyed one of just five Black Sea Fleet submarines—nor are the Black Sea Fleet’s top brass in its now blown-up main headquarters building, blown up in a Ukrainian cruise missile strike that killed dozens of senior officers, perhaps including the actual commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Admiral Viktor Sokolov (or perhaps not him but still many other senior officers…).  Even Russian insiders are admitting such attacks expose Russia’s weakness, and, as I noted would happen long ago, the Russian Navy is becoming largely irrelevant.  Crimea itself could in the not-too-distant future even become a liability for Russia to occupy.

Ukraine has also been using drones to consistently strike targets inside Russia, including destroying bomber aircraft at bases deep inside Russia and hitting oil facilities along with Moscow itself.  And oh, the Freedom of Russia Legion (or Freedom/Liberty of Russia Legion), a group of Russian rebels who want to overthrow Putin and are supported by Ukraine, is again raiding in southwestern Russia, forcing Russia to throw troops and air defenses into defending its own actually Russian territory, forces that are therefore not being deployed where they are needed in Ukraine.  As I have noted repeatedly, Ukraine’s capabilities keep increasing while Russia’s keep decreasing.

Also, be sure to keep an eye on Kherson, another area where Ukraine has opted for caution but where it has had a presence on the bank of the Dnipro River south and east of Kherson City for months, where Russian forces’ morale is low from mistreatment by commanders, where Russian positions seem to be experiencing supply issues and are relatively weak, especially after, as noted, Russia has redeployed more experienced troops like the elite Airborne VDV troops from there to Zaporizhzhia.  Additionally, after (almost certainly) Russia destroyed the Nova Kakhokova Dam, Russia has removed the reservoir there as a barrier separating Ukraine from the other side of the Dnipro Rover there.  Yes, in one of the stupidest and most backfiring war crimes in history, the drained reservoir is now another land route that can be invaded and crossed by Ukrainian forces, perhaps even by heavy vehicles.  In short, there is a very real possibility of a major thrust by Ukrainian into the Russian-occupied parts of Kherson, which would both threaten to flank Russian positions in western Zaporizhzhia, already under intense pressure and where Russians are losing and retreating, and puts Ukrainian forces in a position to seal off and threaten Crimea, beginning what I anticipate would be the Siege of Crimea (I discussed in detail how that could unfold here).  And, as is the case for Russia before, it can move troops to meet such a potential threat and weaken its defenses in other key sectors or leave itself even more unprepared in Kherson, making such at attack even more likely: Russia has no good options, as I have argued before.  Considering all this, southern Kherson now calls as an even more attractive target, with any major successful thrust by Ukraine further into that region putting incredible pressure on both Crimea and the Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia.  Such a successful campaign would essentially be the beginning of the end of Russia’s war in Ukrainian territory and its unwanted presence in Ukraine that began in 2014.  If there is going to be a surprise and/or more rapid breakthrough for Ukraine the likes of which we have seen before, the Kherson front is as good a possibility for this as any.

Finally, Russia has gained no serious diplomatic support since the beginning of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, but Ukraine has, as its allies beyond the U.S. continue to send major aid packages Kyiv’s way.  Conversely, the traditional clients of Russia’s in Central Asia—the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan—recently announced they are going to cooperate more with the West in several areas, including on implementing sanctions, with even Kazakhstan—where Russia sent its military at the government’s request as recently as January 2022 to help that country put down major protests—explicitly saying it will cooperate on sanctions against Russia.  As this is going on, Russia’s traditional client of the former Soviet republic of Armenia has seen Russia lose credibility as a patron as it has been powerless to and/or unwilling to stop Azerbaijan’s dramatic recent takeover of Armenian enclave Nagorno-Karabakh—even attacking Russian “peacekeepers” in the process—and resulting in a humanitarian disaster with over half its population thus far becoming refugees.  Understandably, Armenia is turning away from Russia and perhaps towards the West, further weakening Russia’s stature internationally at a time when it is already incredibly isolated.  Also quite pathetically, Putin is begging North Korea’s Kim Jong Un for artillery shells (North Korea was founded largely on Soviet aid and was a client state of the Soviet Union for decades, speaking to how low Russia has sunk today).  How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin, indeed.

Conclusion: Ukraine Still Winning, Russia Still Losing, Nowhere Near a Stalemate

Thus, to all those complaining that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is “taking too long” and screeching that Ukraine should, as a result, negotiate away a huge portion of its sovereign territory in a way guaranteed to not bring any stability or peace to Ukraine over the long run, I say that the longer this counteroffensive continues, the better off Ukrainian forces will be and the worse off Russian forces will be, the more of its own territory Ukraine will liberate and the less Ukrainian territory Russia will illegally occupy, the weaker Putin will be at home and the greater the chance for Russia to have a future without his fascist warmongering tyranny.

And, contrary to a new round of preemptive bad takes that the coming winter is somehow going to mean the Ukrainian counteroffensive will be unable to continue during it, the winter, again and as I noted last winter, will be much worse for Russian forces than it will be for Ukrainian forces.

In the end, it is not difficult to tell who is winning and who is losing.  Those proclaiming stalemate are not only abusing the English language (or whatever language they are writing in), they are maligning and negating the very real gains made by Ukrainian forces—net gains—against some of the most heavily mined and most heavily fortified territory currently on the planet, coming at far from no cost but in willing sacrifices in life and limb as Ukrainians prove time and time again they are willing to fight for their land, for their homes, for each other, for their freedom, for democracy to triumph over fascist kleptocratic autocracy in Ukraine and Europe overall.  So enough with the “expert” analysis characterizing the current state of the war as a “stalemate,” as Ukraine is clearly still winning and Russia is clearly still losing, even if less clearly than in other more spectacular phases of the conflict.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

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(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 10, 2023; see related February 17, 2017 two-part article: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—I am giving myself the privilege of reading Orwell in Spain, the Penguin Classics edition of Homage to Catalonia by Eric Blair of the immortal pseudonym George Orwell and one of the original antifascists, bookended by a number of relevant letters written by Orwell and those in his circles and with context from editor Peter Davison throughout.  The volume also includes occasional files from archives of the Soviets, who were targeting Orwell, his wife, and his other comrades for a future show-trial just as Orwell and his wife slipped out of Spain; some of his comrades were not so fortunate as he by far.

Orwell went to Spain in late 1936 in the spirit of pitching in for the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on behalf of the Spanish Republic, supported by numerous liberal and leftist volunteers from around the world and ostensibly supported by dictator Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union against General Francisco Franco’s fascists, in turn supported by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  For his efforts, Orwell took a bullet through the neck but survived that and many other hardships, acquitting himself well in having genuinely sacrificed for a cause worthy of such sacrifice, but one that was undermined in part by Spain’s supposed ally, the Soviet Union, whose agents in Spain often focused on settling scores within the international leftist/socialist/communist movement and who turned on many of their supposed allies to engage in purges and trials based on lies and gaslighting.  This would be a main reason that the Republic would fall completely to Franco’s fascist Nationalists in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.

Hitchens on Orwell, Ringing with Urgent Relevance for the Present

As usual, the late legend and one of the few humans who could rightly be described to be at least a partial heir to Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, provides an introduction to Orwell in Spain that is as mind-blowing as it is well-written and pithy (the introduction was also published around the same time as Orwell in Spain as an essay in The Los Angeles Times).  Hitchens’ essay on his hero Orwell’s experiences in Spain includes some points that hit all too close to home in the here-and-now:

The history of the May events in Barcelona in 1937 was certainly buried for years under a slag heap of slander and falsification.  Orwell, indeed, derived his terrifying notion of the memory-hole and the rewritten past, in Nineteen Eighty-four, from exactly this single instance of the abolished memory.  ‘This kind of thing is frightening to me,’ he wrote about Catalonia, ‘because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’:

But in our very immediate past, documents have surfaced to show that his vulgar, empirical, personal, commonsensical deposition was verifiable after all.  The recent opening of communist records in Moscow and of closely held Franco-era documentation in Madrid and Salamanca has provided a posthumous vindication.

The narrative core of Homage to Catalonia, it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937.  Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) upon arriving in Spain.  Allowing as he did for the bias that this lent to his firsthand observations, he nonetheless became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch, complete with rigged evidence, false allegations and an ulterior hand directed by Moscow.  The outright and evidently concerted fabrications that immediately followed in the press, which convinced or neutralized so many ‘progressive intellectuals,’ only persuaded him the more that he had watched a lie being gestated and then born.

Hitchens continues later in his introduction:

…‘History to the Defeated’ is the underlying subject and text of this collection of pages and fragments.  Like several others in the ‘midnight of the century,’ the glacial period that reached its nadir in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Orwell wrote gloomily but defiantly for the bottom drawer.  He belongs in the lonely 1930s tradition of Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine and David Rousset — speaking truth to power but without a real audience or a living jury.  It is almost tragic that, picking through the rubble of that epoch, one cannot admire him and Auden simultaneously.  ‘All I have is a voice,’ wrote Auden in ‘September 1, 1939,’ ‘To undo the folded lie,/The romantic lie in the brain … And the lie of Authority.’  All Orwell had was a voice, and to him, too, the blatant lies of authority were one thing and the ‘folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves were another.  The tacit or overt collusion between the two was the ultimate foe.

Let’s let that sink in: it is not the generally bad-faith “blatant lies of authority” that is “the ultimate foe,” but the “tacit or overt collusion between” those “blatant lies of authority” and that authority on one side with the “’folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves” and those clever people on the other.  As a consistent antifascist, Hitchens himself often energetically dedicated himself to taking on such “clever people:” intellectuals and leaders who should know and act better but in their actions still give aid and comfort to the “blatant lies of authority,” often unintentionally making good faith yet terrible arguments as “useful idiots” (to borrow the phrase attributed to Lenin, perhaps falsely) but other times lying deliberately (hello Ted Cruz).  Thus, Hitchens happily took on fellow leftist intelligentsia members and activists like George Galloway, Julian Assange, and Noam Chomsky (almost?) as fiercely as he critiqued Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Kim Jong-il.

Fighting the Rewriting of History from 1937 to 2023

For the Stalinists and their apologists Orwell stood up against (and, indeed, for the fascists of that era as well), the fastidious, near-robotic repetition of baseless lies and disinformation over and over and over again served to give reality to such “alternative facts,” to borrow former Trumpist mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway’s Trumpian phrase.  And, of course, it is altogether fitting to quote that disgraced woman—her own daughter and now former husband even very publicly more honorably refused to support Trump’s lies and hers—because what is terrifying my soul even as I write part of this is that the Trumpist movement—now one of the two largest political factions in the United States of American in 2023—is very much successfully engaging in that tactic Orwell dedicated much of his writing to combatting, a tactic used by the people Orwell spent much of life fighting.

A stark example is the recent Ohio Republican Jim Jordan-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the so-called “Durham Report”  and the related investigation of Trump’s Justice Department-appointed Special Counsel John Durham’s pathetic, embarrassing, and failed attempt to find proof that the U.S. government’s investigation into Trump’s Russia ties and 2016 election interference was a baseless, politically-motivated witch hunt; this in and of itself is gaslighting and “hypocrisy” in the extreme, as the opposite is true, a truth I spent years of research and writing on in detail.  Short of ending in appalling violence, is there anything more politically Stalinist than an investigation ordered in bad-faith and/or extreme delusion to smear and undermine a good-faith investigation into topics most deserving of investigation, that then twists the results of the failed counter investigation to continue to make claims wholly unsubstantiated by reality??  In this vein, Republicans even spitefully, shamelessly, and wholly inappropriately censured—censured!—Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) the same day as the Durham hearing for his work against Trump on impeachment and his efforts to get answers on Trump-Russia, a ridiculous act of distraction from their embarrassing failure of a Durham hearing and in spirit also a pure act of abusive political retaliation: only five members of the House were censured in all the twentieth century and Schiff is only the third member of the House of Representatives this century and only the twenty-fifth member of the House in all of U.S. history to be censured, an act that is for generally serious offenses, including violence or incitement to violence, sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, and—at the time of the Civil War (1861-1865)—supporting the rebel “Confederacy.”

To go back to Durham and his probe, former Special Counsel Durham seems to be at least a partly honorable fool.  On the one hand, Durham seems to incorrectly accept as articles of faith that the Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller probes were baseless political hit jobs (the first in his deluded mind concocted by the Clintons) and that there is nothing to Trump-Russia to the degree that he is unaware of many of the facts and much of the evidence and context surrounding team Trump’s deeply troubling ties to Russia, his perspective warped enough to believe in the nonsense and/or gaslighting his higher-ups—including then Attorney General Bill Barr—and others fed him and that he fed himself: during the Judiciary Committee hearing, I heard him tell Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) that he did not think Barr’s infamous memo had “blatantly mischaracterized” the Mueller report, which it clearly and obviously very much did, even according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself.  On the other hand, Durham more or less carried out an investigation that at least mostly adhered to rules and the law within the confines of his warped worldview even as that worldview was biased, selective, and inaccurate when it came to the issues between Trump and Russia, and that is why his results were so limited along with the reality that the evidence he sought didn’t exist because the investigation’s premises were false.

Both those who put Durham in place as Special Counsel and the rest of the Trump faithful were hoping as much as possible over the course of the four years of the Durham probe of to undermine investigations into Trump, playing politics with legitimate, serious investigations. Durham’s disappointing results—0 for 2 on prosecutions that went to trial, defeated twice by unanimous juries that returned “not guilty” verdicts and one plea deal with no trial for an FBI employee doctoring an e-mail who was determined by the presiding judge not to have acted with any political bias (confirming the previous findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s far more credible report) and who only received a year of probation—speak volumes about Durham’s probe’s credibility despite the spin of his “report” and show just how baseless was his effort to show that the Biden Administration Department of Justice was weaponized as a tool of political persecution.  In the end, it was Durham’s and Barr’s own conduct that actually revealed it was the Trump Administration Department of Justice that fell into being weaponized, yet Jordan, Trump, and many other Republicans and “useful idiots” insist on persisting in gaslighting or making unsubstantiated arguments with their original unsubstantiated claims even after Durham’s probe failed to prove them (ironically, it seems the probe did find enough evidence of possible financial criminal wrongdoing involving Trump that the Durham probe was forced to launch a criminal investigation into that, which, unsurprisingly, we have heard very little about…).

And herein is one of the more horrific aspects of this Jordan’s show-hearing that should be giving us all trouble sleeping at night: some of the Republicans on Jordan’s committee, most notably the vile Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), are furious at Durham not for the degree to which he was inaccurate, ignorant, or possibly dishonest but for the degree to which he did not go into full Stalinist show-trial mode because he did not run wild with lies and falsehoods but, rather, still operated within some level of orbit of reality.

To be clear, this hearing is not a Stalinist show-trial, and does not carry the consequences of them.  But they do share, on the part of today’s Republicans and their accomplices on one hand and the those of the Stalinists and their accomplices of yesteryear on the other, absolute contempt for truth and justice and an absolute commitment to pursuing the party line relentlessly.  And both Orwell’s and Hitchens’s words rang loudly in my mind throughout my viewing of the hearing as I digested it in terror, far more profoundly for having recently read certain pages of Orwell in Spain.

The gaslighting is also strong with the claim that Trump is being persecuted unfairly and Hunter Biden might get off with a “sweetheart deal” should a submitted plea deal between Hunter and the government be approved, which was reported the day before the Durham hearing and Schiff censure.  Again, the opposite is true: people in a position similar to Hunter Biden when it comes to gun possession while being an addict are rarely criminally charged or see jail time, as are first-time offenders in terms of the tax violations he had committed and has since paid off his debts in relation to, including back taxes and penalties.  If anything, his treatment has been harsher because he is Joe Biden’s son and the government is going out of its way to avoid any credible suggestion that the son of the sitting president is being treated lightly while the former president, Trump, is not; and, if anything, Trump has been treated with an extraordinarily light touch, given the nature and severity of his crimes and the more than two-years’ worth of blatant obstruction of justice committed by Trump to further his crimes.  The gaslighting only becomes even more ludicrous when Trump’s defenders claims there is a “two-tiered” system of justice, with the Trumps of the world being the victims, a deeply “insulting” claim coming from many white Republicans who have been loath to acknowledge the very real systemic racial disparities in the American criminal justice system—let alone do anything about them—but now whine for “justice” (i.e., impunity and immunity) for Trump.

The gaslighting is also front-and-center when Trump’s insanely ridiculous classified documents case for which he has been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith is claimed to be equivalent or close to the Biden classified documents case or Hillary Clinton’s (conspicuously omitting Pence’s case, which is pretty similar to Biden’s), all the other cases including Clinton’s case were dramatically different especially regarding intent and when the Biden/Pence examples only turned up a comparatively small number of documents which were promptly returned and both of them agreed rapidly to have their respective locations searched, bearing no resemblance to Trump’s obstructionist and gaslighting conduct and the severity of the material at issue.

And those are merely a few current examples…

Orwell and His “Power of Facing”: A Ghostbuster to the Gaslighting Ghosts of Nazism and Stalinism Rearing their Ghastly Heads Today

We fought a world war some eight decades ago against a totalitarian fascism that I have previously noted gaslit reality to the point of being at war with reality itself, and we triumphed some four-and-a-half decades later against a Soviet totalitarian communism that similarly gaslit reality and also, like the Nazis it defended its homeland against in the earlier world war, used disinformation as a preferred weapon of choice in its losing ideological struggle against the capitalist democratic West.

After the West’s victories in World War II and the Cold War, how depressing is it, then, that, in 2023 the West finds itself embroiled both internally and externally with major forces practicing and embodying much of the same spirit of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany when it comes to waging new wars on reality, with its biggest centers of gravity in Putin’s fascist Russia—resurrecting the Soviet war on reality as the successor state to the Soviet Union—and in the Trumpist fascist movement and its media and political allies within the West (if you doubt the appropriateness of the label fascist for Trump or Putin, read my two-parter [part I and part II] and realize that was written well before the violence of January 6, 2021 or the massively increased levels of violence and war crimes Russia has been perpetrating in Ukraine since February 24, 2022).  While the Chinese Communist Party helms a Chinese state that is increasingly totalitarian under the leadership of Xi Jinping and also embraces a war on reality, it is not nearly as aggressive with this tactic on the international stage as Russia, thus, China’s current relative restraint means its threat to the West is, for now at least, far less potent than that of both Russia and Trump as it is Russia that routinely engages in electoral and political interference in the West and Trump’s brand of fascism and its like-minded allies are a clear and present danger within the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, with fascists having real chances of gaining political power—even the U.S. presidency once again, though I do not believe they will succeed in this coming American election in 2024.  Other countries, such as France and Italy, are far more vulnerable, and some, like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Israel, are veering hard in that direction.  Indeed, while I have been warning of this possibility since just after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and even earlier in 2016, it brings little comfort to see the modern versions of fascism and their accompanying wars on reality staring us down directly in the face while also staring deeply into the past at horrors that we had vanquished twice in living memory, drawing power from their zombie-Frankenstein cousins from the Cold War and World War II.

Orwell would truly be rolling over in his grave were he aware of what was happening today, after so much blood and toil and sacrifice in the twentieth century to defeat fascist and communist regimes, to transcend their lies and assault against reality, and yet, he could take comfort in his words standing the test of time, not only validating his prescient view of past evils, but that his words could still be so useful and relevant today.  Yes, this is bittersweet, for we should have transcended those phantoms from past eras, but at least we have in Orwell the perfect guide to fighting these nefarious forces, that honesty, reality, truth, persistence, and simple eloquence can confront the enemy and defeat their lies, sometimes even without the forces of arms.  Orwell did risk life and limb (and was even shot) in Spain against Franco’s fascists (and Soviet agents), but it was in his writing that he made his largest contributions in the fight for freedom against fascism and communism.  Like Orwell and like his admirer and perhaps his heir Hitchens, we can and must be unflinching in the face of the gaslighting of Trump and Putin and their allies who constantly assert “that two and two are five” and that things that happened “never happened” (from the January 6 U.S. Capitol Insurrection—team Trump claiming “it was Antifa”—to the Russian military torturing and executing civilians in Ukraine—Putin saying, ludicrously, that: “The Russian army does not strike at civilian facilities. There is no need for that.”).  Though Orwell had “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he never gave up and never ceased articulating the truth through his brave and, it seems, timeless writing.

As Hitchens wrote in his magisterial and pithy Why Orwell Matters:

‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’  Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’.  It’s oddly well put.  A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact.  So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’.  The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’.  Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious.  The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.

In the spirit of Orwell and (even if to a somewhat lesser degree) Hitchens, we must wield a similar “power of facing” in the face of the fascisms of Trump, Putin, and their lesser emulators.  In particular, the “clever people” and “progressive intellectuals” that Hitchens and Orwell single out who “tell themselves” Auden’s “’folded’ lies” that, when in “tacit or overt collusion” with “the blatant lies of authority,” become “the ultimate foe.”

Prominent “useful idiot” fools on such matters include Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Briahna Joy Grey, Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Michael Tracey, Caitlin Johnstone, Katie Halper, RFK Jr., Russell Brand, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Joe Rogan, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Jill Stein, Tulsi Gabbard, Cornell West, Jordan Peterson, George Galloway, Scott Ritter, even Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s own rather less impressive brother) and others who fancy themselves public figures displaying freethinking but who ultimately do little more on these matters than to give aid and comfort to fascism and even colonialism and imperialism in the name of supposed “pacificism” or “free speech.”  Those people and their ilk make their arguments in ways that usually show they have little understanding of peace or the U.S. Constitution.  In particular, they often keep parroting debunked Kremlin talking points about Western “escalation” and NATO expansion, which I have debunked myself repeatedly.  Or they will conflate moderation of disinformation on private platforms with unconstitutional “censorship.”  Orwell has the best of possible responses to the first group, the so-called “pacifists,” here in his perfect essay from 1942 “Pacifism and the War” in which he noted that “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.” Orwell therein further elucidated his views:

What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don’t care to say so and take refuge behind the formula ‘I am just as anti-fascist as anyone, but—’.  The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda.  Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.

He added: “My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking” and that “It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.”  Better descriptions of that crowd’s heirs in the present cannot be written, and, as before in Orwell’s day, many of those in this crowd today are often caught “back-scratching” and “arse-licking” each other in echo chambers.  To listen to them, rather than blatant Russian imperialism and colonialism, the greater evils are supposedly the Western exercise of power in daring to aid a Ukraine that, they will stress, has been dominated by and even been part of Russia for centuries (as if that should matter when Ukrainians themselves have earned their freedom and independence, recognized by formal treaty repeatedly by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union) and, even more so, in asserting either that there is, in fact, a moral dimension to supporting Ukraine or a false equivalence in equating Russia’s exercise and practice of its power in comparison with the America’s and the West’s: whether knowingly or unknowingly, these supposed and self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists” engage in behavior that dismisses, excuses, deflects from, or even advances Russian imperialism and its supporting false narratives. 

There can be but one course of action against today’s “intellectual” descendants of Orwell’s critics and enemies among the intelligentsia, and it must be that we especially utilize our “power of facing” to face them because they are usually the ones weakening the front against today’s fascists without claiming to actually be “for” those fascists, they are the ones who might persuade those with less moral discernment who would never think of consciously siding with fascists and who would be susceptible to low-hanging fruit of arguments relying on “free speech” and “peace” that objectively advance bad-faith disinformation and war against those fighting for their actual freedom.  And perhaps, with relentless opposition to their nonsense, some may even realize their folly and find their own “power of facing” directed back at themselves even though this may “put …[their] own position or preference to the test.”

Hitchens opens his introduction to Orwell in Spain with following two magnificent paragraphs:

The grandeur of George Orwell, in our store of moral and intellectual memory, is to be found partly in his very lack of grandeur.  He is remembered, with different and varying degrees of distinctness, as the man who confronted three of the great crises of the twentieth century and got all three of them, so to speak, ‘right’.  He was right, earlier than most, about imperialism, viewing it as an unjust and unjustifiable form of rule, and also as a cause of war.  He was right, early and often, about the menace presented by Fascism and National Socialism, not just to the peace of the world but to the very idea of civilization.  And he was right about Stalinism, about the great and the small temptations that it offered to certain kinds of intellectual, and about the monstrous consequences that would ensue from that nightmarish sleep of reason.

He brought off this triple achievement, furthermore, in his lowly capacity as an impoverished freelance journalist and amateur novelist.  He had no resources beyond his own, he enjoyed the backing of no party or organization or big newspaper, let alone any department of state.  Much of his energy was dissipated in the simple struggle to get published, or in the banal effort to meet a quotidian schedule of bills and deadlines.  He had no university education, no credential nor area of expertise. He had no capital. Yet his unexciting pen-name, drawn from a rather placid English river, is known to millions as a synonym for prescience and integrity, and the adjective ‘Orwellian’ is understood widely and – this has its significance – ambivalently.  To describe a situation as ‘Orwellian’ is to announce dystopia: the triumph of force and sadism and demagogy over humanism.  To call a person ‘Orwellian’ is to summon the latent ability of an individual to resist such triumphs, or at least to see through them and call them by their right names.

We don’t have to take a bullet in the neck like Orwell did in Spain in 1937, but the least we can do is call out the lies, disinformation, and misinformation religiously in the cause of reality, as Orwell seems to have pretty much always done and Hitchens mostly did (even when Hitch Hitch erred—most notably on Iraq—he usually did so for principled and admirable reasons).  We can, sadly, fall into either of the definitions Hitchens enumerates for “Orwellian,” but we must strive to be his latter definition and we can do so by calling out the imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism of today as Orwell did for the versions in his lifetime.  We can also be sure that Orwell’s stances on Trump, Putin, and their movements and allies would not be doubt were he alive today.

Herein, then, has not been any kind of comprehensive catalogue of Trumpist and Putinist attempts to rewrite history—those of you following these stories are all too familiar with too many of those examples—but a clarion call to honor the spirit of those two writers departed from us, whose careers were mostly dedicated to opposition to lies but fidelity to the truth should inspires us even if we, too, feel frightened like Orwell because we have “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  Orwell consistently and unflinchingly spoke truth to power with “a power of facing unpleasant facts” and so must we.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) June 28, 2023; see related May 31, 2023, article Recent Raids and Drone Strikes in Russia Show How Screwed Russia and Putin Really Are; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—Just days ago, Russians and the world watched as Russian rebels supported by Ukraine repeatedly attacked and held territory for days in parts of Russia near the Ukraine border as Ukraine’s counteroffensive was just warming up.  Then, Russians and the world watched as Ukraine sent a series of drones to strike Moscow and its suburbs.  After that, Russians and the world watched as the de facto extension of the Russian Army—the Wagner Group, led by warlord, Mueller-indictee, and Putin protégé Yevgeny Prigozhin—took two major Russian cities on the road to Moscow, going from Ukraine to less than 125 miles south of Moscow’s outskirts in one twenty-four hour period.  And while that last bit kept unfolding, Ukraine retook Krasnohorivka, its first liberation of a village that Russia has occupied since all the way back in 2014.

All this within the rough span of a month.  Dare we guess at what new lows Russia will reach in the coming months?

I noted at the time of the rebel raids and wave of drone strikes against Moscow from about a month ago that this was just first of serious infighting of Russians between Russians spilling out into open conflict inside Russia, that given the obvious dynamics, more and more Russians were going to turn on Putin and his regime for his disastrous management of this war rather than die pointlessly in losing battles that keep getting worse and worse for Russia.

And I expect even more dramatic escalation of this nature after this most serious round of Russians fighting Russians that we saw this weekend, and that Prigozhin’s Wagner fighters were the next big escalation along this vector did not surprise me at all.  And it won’t surprise me at all when it happens again, whether it’s again Prigozhin’s Wagner or its remnants, the Russian Volunteer Corps (R.D.K.) and the Free Russia Legion (also translated as the Freedom of Russia Legion or Liberty of Russia Legion), members of the regular Russian military, or some other Russian faction or partisan group yet to really make its mark.  Already there are Russians (including a sizable contingent of Chechens eager to take the fight from inside Ukraine into Russia) and Belarusians fighting for Ukraine, among other foreign volunteers inspired by Ukraine’s cause.

You sure don’t need The New York Times to know that Prigozhin’s rebellion had and still has serious support in Russia and the Russian military and at serious levels: crowds in Rostov greeted Prigozhin and his Wagnerites as liberators, and even worse was the fact that vast majority of Russian security forces and leaders—military or otherwise—in the areas of the Southern and Western Military Districts where he carried out his revolt, from Rostov and Voronezh and further on the road to Moscow, didn’t lift a finger to stop him all the way up until he was just some 125 miles from Moscow, and then, humiliatingly, it was the buffoonish leader of another, far weaker country—President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus—who apparently brokered a peaceful (for now) resolution.

There is no way Prigozhin did what he did and met as little resistance as he did without key support from key Russians along his path.  Whether or not it is true that Gen. Sergei Surovikin—head of the Russian Air Force and the Russian Space Force in a command combined as the Russian Aerospace Forces and the top general for Ukraine for a few months before he was relieved of that duty (and previously the “Butcher of Syria” and destroyer of Aleppo)—is now under arrest for suspicion of supporting Prigozhin’s revolt after unnamed U.S. officials told The New York Times they thought he supported Prigozhin’s insurrection (it would be hilarious if the U.S. was lying just to cast doubt so as lead to something just like his arrest), the landscape of top Russian security force leaders is now a paranoid trustless nightmare that will cripple the Russian military’s efforts in Ukraine, which were already crippled before this happened by dynamics long in place that have been leading to this coup clown show since early in the war, which I noted at great length at the time.  Every tank and troop going to protect Putin and his regime inside Russia is one less able to contribute to Russia’s pathetic war effort in Ukraine, a point I made about a month ago.  Except now the pendulum will swing even more to distracting from the actual war inside Ukraine to favor Putin’s war against his internal enemies.  Both seem destined to be losing fights, desperate ploys by a man who has gambled and now must throw in his watch and clothes and car keys into the pot, having lost all his chips already.

What was the response for Russia in Ukraine to Prigozhin’s mutiny?  Feckless, impotent missile strikes and drone strikes only good for killing civilians and not even many of those, with few missiles or drones getting through Ukrainian air defenses as usual; Russia literally often spends millions per casualty inflicted, even as Russia’s own Wagner shot down at least seven Russian aircraft inside Russia…

Any other general hating Putin’s conduct of the war and thinking of rebelling can now see what a modest-sized force of troops can get close to doing and that, at least in the short-term, he and his men can walk away with their lives even if they fail. That short time before an assassination or imprisonment that may come later has, throughout history, been more than enough time to try again and succeed. Get a few generals together with like minds and many more men than Prigozhin, and, in spite of high risks, the sky is the limit as far as potential rewards, which is why people throughout history have often taken huge risks to undertake coups.

We are seeing a devolution of Russia and while it’s wildly premature to talk about the entirety of the Russian Federation breaking up into its constituent parts of ethnic minorities versus ethnic Russians, there’s a lot that can still go wrong short of that.  After all, there are great forces in motion—the laws of war and human nature along with history itself—and Russia is truly reaping what it sows.

There is no “improvement” for Russia in this conflict after this.  There is no way morale increases in the Russian military or that military start to perform better overall for any sustained period of time.  There is every reason to expect the same steady degradation we have seen for most of the war at this point, even if the bleeding stops here and there.

Personally?  I can’t wait for the next Russian rebellion to yet again put the look of fear into Putin’s eyes in a nationally televised address, for all his countrymen to see.  Russians are, after all, famously thick, so in this case, repetition is key, and unlike all the reboots in Hollywood coming out these days, these reboots can be counted on to get better and better.

See Brian’s related May 31, 2023, article Recent Raids and Drone Strikes in Russia Show How Screwed Russia and Putin Really Are

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others. See all of Brian’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine here.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) June 13, 2023; *UPDATE June 22: Ukraine has hit the Chongar Strait bridges near Chonhar village and also the rail bridge nearby, as I predicted!; see related April 24, 2022, article How Ukraine Can Take Back Crimea from Putin’s Reeling Russian Military; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

“Ah, advisers, advisers!” he said.  “If we’d listened to everybody there in Turkey, we wouldn’t have made peace and brought the war to an end.  Everything quickly, but quick turns out to be slow. If Kamensky hadn’t died, he’d have been lost.  He stormed fortresses with thirty thousand men.  It’s not hard to take a fortress, it’s hard to win a campaign.  And for that there’s no need to storm and attack, there’s need for patience and time.  Kamensky sent soldiers to Rushchuk, but I, with just those two (patience and time), took more fortresses than Kamensky and made the Turks eat horseflesh.”  He shook his head.  “And the French will, too! Take my word for it,” Kutuzov said, becoming animated and beating his chest, “they’ll eat horseflesh for me!”

—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Volume III, Part Two, XVI, 1869

SILVER SPRING and WASHINGTON—Some rules of war are virtually ironclad.  Among these are the ideas that flanking is preferable to a full-frontal assault, morale and training increase value per soldier, defending high ground bestows a significant advantage while attacking it does the opposite, numbers alone cannot guarantee victory, you can win a battle but still lose the war, and von Clausewitz’s famous maxim that “War is merely the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means,” among others.

I.) Why

The idea I am most interested in here, though, is that in most situations, the preferable option for a commander is to preserve as many of his own troops’ lives as possible while still advancing towards achieving overall goals.  In certain situations, that means sacrificing an enormous number of troops still, such as defending a capital city or a major supply hub without which an army cannot feed or equip itself.  But especially on offense, a commander has more and usually better options than this; on offense, a commander can far more often engage in times and places of his choosing for priorities of his choosing.

When it comes to Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, there are many who rightly so regard Crimea as of the utmost importance to Russia.  It is the part of Ukraine Russian President Vladimir Putin prioritized conquering before any other, which he succeeded in doing so in early 2014, and it is the only distinct part of Ukraine that he has held onto in its entirety from that point though the current far-escalated phase of the war, which was inaugurated by Russia on February 24 of 2022.  One could even call it the spiritual heart of Putin’s westward imperial ambitions for Europe, but the importance also has deeply practical aspects, too: the peninsula hosts the main base for the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, the one warm-water port in Russia’s possession that is actually contiguous to Russia (as opposed to Syria’s Tartus, where Russia has established a naval base while supporting that nation’s mass-murdering dictator, Bashar al-Assad).  Russia has also invested much economically into Crimea, not least of which was Putin’s rushed-but-still-historic Crimean Bridge–also known as the Kerch Strait Bridge—connecting Russia to Crimea and more-or-less completed in 2018 (2019 for the rail part) with much fanfare, opened by Putin himself and currently the longest bridge in Europe.  Russia has also moved hundreds of thousands of its citizens into Crimea since its illegal invasion and annexation and it was one of the most popular vacation destinations for Russians (until Ukrainian missiles, drones, and special operations forces conducted successful strikes deep into Crimea; yet decades and centuries earlier, many a tsar or top Soviet official maintained dachas there to enjoy the warm weather and the beaches).  And it has been a major logistical hub and transit route for military forces supporting Russia’s military occupation and war effort.

Because of this, there is a set of commentary calling for Ukraine to liberate Crimea as soon as possible.

Yet this thinking falls for a more unnecessary symbolic approach when there is a far more practical approach available.

This different approach would have Ukraine take Crimea off the table for Russia as far as any practical military use for wider support of Russia’s military operations elsewhere in Ukraine and the Black Sea while allowing Ukraine to prioritize troops for where they are most needed.

In this approach Crimea is quickly and easily neutralized while the bulk of Ukraine’s forces in the south would roll through the Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia Oblast (i.e., province) to link up with its own hard-pressed forces in Donetsk Oblast and the rest of the Donbas-area front.

Keeping in mind the goal of keeping as many Ukrainian troop alive as practicable, it must be noted the heaviest fighting incurring the most casualties for Ukrainians has been on the Donbas line stretching through Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts, thus, it would not make sense to prioritize an assault on Crimea over combining other forces with the forces in the east.  Getting more Ukrainian troops to the east as fast as practicable would change the balance of power in the east and thus vastly reduce Ukrainian casualties on its Donbas front.  If there were a way to quickly neutralize Crimea and to move the bulk of Ukrainian forces engaged in the south over to the east, that would help to save as many Ukrainian lives overall as possible.  After all, there really is not much, if any, downside to neutralizing Crimea as a threat, setting it up for a later conquest, and pushing on to the east without taking Crimea first, as Crimea only offers resupply and reinforcement to the lands Ukraine would be cutting off Crimea from anyway were it to seal Crimea off from the north. 

II.) The Geography of How

So, would Ukraine be able to neutralize Crimea as a base for Russia?  Yes, for the simple and easy to understand reasons that hinge on understanding Crimea’s geography: there are only extremely limited ways to access the peninsula by land or road:

• In the west of northern Crimea, there are two major roads (those roads quickly merge into one on their way south) and a railway into the very narrow Isthmus of Perekop, Ukraine’s only natural land connection to its Crimean Peninsula and just a few miles wide at its narrowest point (the Isthmus is part of Crimea administratively).  Near the northeast part of the Isthmus and administratively still in Kherson Oblast there is what appears to be a dirt path from a piece of land jutting east into the water; the path goes out into the water on what appears to be a very narrow (150 feet wide) earthen dam that cuts across the water for four miles before connecting to Crimea as part of the system of water and salinization management for the salt industry there that extracts the famous pink salt from The Sivash (the system of marshes and lagoons separating the Crimean Peninsula by water from the rest of Crimea save for the Isthmus of Perekop; more on this below).  Any troop movement over this dam would be highly exposed with no cover on a very narrow path.
• Roughly a dozen or so miles to the east is what appears to be another earthen dam.  The two dams keep the very pink saltwater water boxed in from west-to-east as part of the salt extraction industry.  With this dam, there is a dirt path crossing 1.5 miles of water between the areas near the villages of Druzhelyubivka to the north in Kherson and Nadezhdynein to the south in Crimea; like its counterpart, this earthen dam path is also very exposed, very narrow (120 feet across), quite vulnerable, and should not be thought of a practical transit route for larger numbers of Russian troops, vehicles, and equipment.

• On the eastern side of Crimea, there is a pair of bridges side-by-side (one no longer even used) over the very narrow Chongar Strait into Crimea, by Chonhar village.  The crossing is easily bottlenecked.  There is also a nearby rail bridge to the west over the water that is not going to be of much use by the time Ukraine is on Chonhar’s doorstep (*UPDATE June 22: Ukraine has hit the Chongar Strait bridges near Chonhar village and also the rail bridge nearby, as I predicted!).

• East and north of the Chongar Strait, there is a bridge at Henichesk to the very long, narrow, and exposed Arabat Spit (essentially a giant sandbar that is not even fully pave-roaded), which would be impractical for moving large numbers of troops and equipment in a combat situation and could very easily be jammed up (a single brave Ukrainian defender named Vitaly Skakun blew himself up to blow the bridge early in the war, taking it out of commission for most of 2022 before the Russians repaired it: that’s the impact just one defender had).  Ukraine has already recently repeatedly demonstrated the ability to hit that area with ease, including Russian military facilities in both Henichesk and on the Arabat Split just in the past few days.   This Henichesk bridge is technically well inside Kherson Oblast as much of the northern part of the spit is administratively in that oblast, but it is still one of the only available ways into Crimea from the north.  This is almost certainly why Russia has invested in repairing the bridge at Henichesk and expanding a paved road down the spit.
• Far further to the east and south, there is the much publicized Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge, going from Russia into Crimea, the vulnerability of which I have discussed before and which the Ukrainians have already famously demonstrated this past October.  They will likely be looking to hit the bridge again, and it has recently apparently started showing literal cracks even after repairs in response to the Ukrainian attack (it was actually a rush job by the Russians, another point suggesting its ripeness as a target).
• Apart from the Isthmus of Perekop, the rest of the space on Crimea’s northern border is the somewhat toxic set of aforementioned lakes known as The Sivash (or Syvash), which can be forded in some places, especially in the winter if the water freezes over, but such crossings would occur through water or on ice and would leave Russian units terribly exposed and vulnerable to heavy casualties from Ukrainian attacks, with Russian troops and vehicles either stuck moving slowly in marshes and lagoons or on ice that could easily be destroyed by Ukrainian forces, sucking Russian troops into ice-cold water.  Let us just admit that the idea of any kind of competent Russian amphibious assault at this point in the war with what we have seen thus far is laughable.

Other than from the routes overland through Perekop and the dam near it, that just leaves the four fairly small areas of roads, bridges, and an earthen dam from the north that can be easily sealed off by Ukrainian forces, and these four nodes into Crimea can likely be rendered inoperable by Ukraine without much effort.  And while in the past, these routes, Perekop, and The Sivash have been used as military corridors for many centuries—including back-and-forth among Tatars fighting Cossacks or Russians and, more recently in the twentieth century, fought over between Bolshevik Reds, Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists during the Russian Civil War and between the Soviet and Nazi regimes during World War II—modern weapons and drone reconnaissance would make recreating the routes besides Perekop possibly suicidal when Ukraine is knocking on the area’s door with precision distance weapons like HIMARS, M777s, Caesars, and Storm Shadows.

The only other route into or out of Crimea is the Crimean/Kerch Strait Bridge southeast into Russia that can be rendered unusable one way or another, especially as Ukraine approaches Crimea from the north and more and more weapons systems in Ukraine’s possession come into range of hitting such a tempting target.

Russia, fearing an attack rather than being sealed off, might make the Ukrainians’ jobs easier for them as they approach from the north by destroying one or more of the four bridges aforementioned in the two locations—Chongar and Henichesk—that form the northeast routes into Crimea.

That leaves just the Isthmus of Perekop that would need to be the most heavily guarded spot, the only land entrance into Kherson Oblast that does not involve traversing something far more tenuous, hazardous, or easily destroyed.

Overall, it would not be hard at all to guard against any attacks from or resupply efforts into Crimea, as the entirety of the distance from the western end of the Isthmus of Perekop to the bridge at Henichesk to the Arabat Spit is not even 58 miles in a straight line as the crow flies.  Ukraine’s anti-ship missiles and air defenses have also already more or less sidelined the Russian Navy and Russian Air Force, respectively (and I discussed the naval aspect and predicted the eventual sinking of the Black Sea Fleet Flagship the Moskva just days before that historic embarrassment for Russia).  With those weapons systems and others right on Crimea’s northern border, Russian air and naval forces will even easier targets, meaning there will be little Russia can do to effectively resupply Crimea from either land or sea.

III.) Sealing Off Crimea’s North and the Bigger Picture: Options

With Crimea sealed off from the north, it will be easy for Ukraine to put overwhelming pressure on Russian positions in Zaporizhzhia Oblast and Donetsk Oblast to its east.  Looking ahead, Henichesk is not even 250 miles from the outskirts of Donetsk City, with mostly low-lying, hard to defend coastal plains in between, territory which has been increasingly subject to damaging Ukrainian shaping operations getting ready for Ukraine’s big counteroffensive, operations that have been going on for many, many months now and are still ongoing.  Crimea itself has increasingly been subject to such shaping operations in recent months and weeks, too, including even just a few days ago.  These shaping operations have been kicked into a higher gear now that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is officially underway.

Google Maps with edits from the author

It is hard to imagine Putin will just withdraw Russian troops from Crimea when they are under threat, and he will likely move to reinforce their positions from Russia via the bridge into Kerch, though such reinforcements will be of the generally inferior quality with generally inferior weapons, equipment, and leadership that has been evident with most of Russia’s reinforcements over the past year.  That is because most of these troops are green and most of the best Russian equipment has been destroyed: the force that was the Russian Army on February 24, 2024, has been largely destroyed and shattered over many, many months of losing and losing badly.  By the time any large numbers of reinforcements could make it to Crimea, Ukraine will be dug in on its northern border and will be able to turn the easily defended chokepoints out of Crimea into mini-Bakhmuts, graveyards for the Russian military, and even if Ukraine would have to pull back somewhat, it will still be easy to hem in Russian troops, who will be unable to hold any serious amounts of territory they might temporarily reoccupy in southern Zaporizhzhia, but it is more likely that Russia will fail to even do that and remain hemmed in inside Crimea.

As I have written repeatedly before, Crimea will begin to be a repeat of the situation from last summer and the beginning of last fall, when Ukraine, by destroying a number of key bridges, was able to box in a large number of Russian troops on the north/west bank of the Dnipro River near Kherson City; Ukraine even allowed Russia to reinforce their positions there before damaging the final bridges, allowed even more Russian troops to be trapped in a situation where they were cut off from supplies and ran out of ammunition and even food.  After sustaining many casualties, the Russian survivors were humiliatingly pulled and driven out in terrible shape over pontoon bridges.

Once the northern border of Crimea has been sealed off and Ukraine dug in, setting up Crimea for a later conquest, the bulk of Ukrainian forces can continue through Zaporizhzhia, join the fight there if it is still going on so as to threaten Russian positions from the south and west even as the Russians face attacks from the north (Ukraine seems to be making impressive gains along that axis and also striking behind those lines even as I write this); things may go badly enough for the Russians in Zaporizhzhia that most of it falls before Ukrainian forces retake southern Kherson Oblast and reach Crimea—a real possibility given the issues posed by the recent man-made flooding in the area (more on that in a bit)—but regardless of whether there will still be a lot of fighting left in Zaporizhzhia Oblast at that time or not, the eventual goal for many of the troops in the area will be to move through Zaporizhzhia Oblast to join up with Ukrainian forces on the Donbas axis, perhaps even helping to outflank the main Russian line from Donetsk Oblast in the south.  To focus on taking Crimea instead will mean depriving the Donbas front—the war’s bloodiest and most intense—of key Ukrainian reinforcements that could save a lot of Ukrainian lives by greatly strengthening Ukraine’s position there and decisively altering the balance of power quickly on the war’s main front, precipitating a possible collapse or at least a retreat of much of Russian’s main battle line there.  

Keeping in mind our earlier principle of saving as many lives as possible while achieving your goals, the best situation will be for Ukraine with Crimea to take its time with shaping operations while the main fighting rages to the east, using its advanced weapons to soften up and destroy many targets and supplies in Crimea, which, apart from the Crimean Mountains on its southern coast, is nearly entirely exposed flat steppe plains offering little cover.

One of the main questions for Ukraine regarding Crimea, however, will be when or if to hit the Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge to the point of rendering it inoperable (light strikes can cause more easily repairable damage while humiliating morale, causing panic among Russian colonists and sympathizers in Crimea so that they may flee to Russia).  Putin funneling more troops into Crimea that will still likely be unable to break out of Crimea, let alone venture far into southern Kherson, means those troops will be unable to contribute to the fighting in the east, but he will likely do that, given Crimea’s symbolic importance and that Russia has held the region since 2014.  Therefore, it might be in Ukraine’s interest to not take out the Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge until Putin has wasted a lot of men and resources reinforcing troops in Crimea for a Ukrainian counterattack that will not come soon or for Russian counter-counterattacks very likely to fail (as mentioned, this type of approach allowed Ukraine to trap even more Russian troops on the north/west bank of the Dnipro last summer and fall).

Even if there is a decision to not take the bridge out for some time so as to allow Putin to wastefully send troops into Crimea, at some point, it will likely make sense to render the Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge inoperable to cut off the only land supply route that would then be left for the peninsula and to do so well before any Ukrainian assaults into Crimea.  Doing so in combination with precision strikes all throughout this period from Ukraine’s advanced weaponry will also greatly reduce Russia’s logistics and supplies so as to make sure Russian troops are weak, grossly undersupplied, and at their mental breaking point before any possible eventual Ukrainian assault into the peninsula.

Whatever forces Russians has in Crimea will have a hard time breaking out and being relevant in much of any way, with just a small number of key chokepoints of primary concerns for Ukrainian defenders wishing to keep those Russian forces stuck in the peninsula and irrelevant.  The Russians will likely be focused on defending Crimea, anyway, although such is the stupidity of Russian command that they may very well engage in suicidal counterattacks, weakening whatever presence will be left if and when there is a Ukrainian assault into Crimea, as has been happening throughout the front lines even as Russia knew Ukraine was preparing to launch a major counteroffensive.

There will have to be some sort of balance struck between keeping the bridge open and letting Russia waste reinforcements it would send there on one hand and rendering the bridge inoperable so as to cut off supplies to all the troops in Crimea on the other.  Ideally, the idea would be to keep the bridge open until Ukraine has more or less won in the east and established strong border defenses there, entrenching and creating a lethal buffer zone on the Russian side of the border and allowing it to free up some of its troops there to return to Crimea to take part in any final assault on it, with the war on Ukrainian soil likely ending there unless there is some sort of dramatic collapse of the entire Russian position in Crimea beforehand.  Waiting to knock out the bridge as I have described would allow Putin to waste reinforcements there, thereby diverting troops from the east, keeping Russian force levels in the east lower than if the bridge were taken out and Russia was unable to reinforce there.  This, in turns, accelerates Russia’s defeat in the east.

At the same time, destroying the bridge earlier could have a significant effect on Russian morale, both on the battlefield and among the Russian civilian population and bureaucratic officials in Russia, and could help spur more unrest, even a coup or revolution, faster.

The main point here is, after Ukraine seals off Crimea from the north, it will have multiple options to consider.

Sealed off and cut off from resupply and under constant bombardment, artillery, and missile strikes from Ukraine, if Russian forces in Crimea are watching their country get routed in the east and lose control of territory even in Russia proper—or even watching a revolution happen at home—they may even surrender or revolt en masse.  Whatever they do, winning on the battlefield is their least likely outcome.

Before, I had thought it likely that Ukraine would reach the northern border of Crimea before it would have had a chance to clear out Zaporizhzhia Oblast.  But now, with the historical war crime and humanitarian and ecological disaster (ecocide?) that is the recent destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and the resulting flooding of the lower Dnipro River region—and it is hard to reasonably imagine Russia is not the culprit here, with it since then destroying other dams in the area in an effort to blunt Ukraine’s counteroffensive—whenever this Siege of Crimea process could begin has inevitably been pushed back as a weaponized Mother Nature will take its course and many of Ukraine’s forces in the region will be assisting in rescue and recovery.

Still, even a flood of biblical proportions will not change the eventual outcome: Russia is already moving (has moved?) its best units in Kherson Oblast (perhaps its least-manned sector) over to neighboring Zaporizhzhia Oblast or further east, so when the floods subside and Ukraine eventually does push further south into Kherson Oblast, the Russians will be in an even worse defensive situation than they were before the flood, actually increasing the threat to Crimea.

IV: Conclusion: A Siege of Crimea Allows Ukraine to Prioritize the Donbas

Whatever direction the Ukrainian forces come from, the same Crimean geography, the same Russian deficiencies, and the same Ukrainian advantages will still exist.  And all this means that it is, despite the flooding, well within Ukraine’s capabilities to seal Crimea off with a minimal number of troops and press on with the bulk of its force to the Donbas theater in the east.  Such a patient approach with Crimea would bring about a much faster resolution to the far more intense and bloody combat in Ukraine’s east even while that time focusing on the east will make it easier to weaken Crimea’s sealed-off Russian defenders.  Such a strategy is the most likely one to bring about the swiftest end to the war on Ukrainian soil and save the most Ukrainian lives.

That is, if Putin is not overthrown in the process and more reasonable Russians negotiate a true peace and a withdrawal of all Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory.  Failing that, this might be the best strategy for winning the war available to Ukraine.

I have been wanting to go into detail on this subject and write this piece for some time, building on my earlier work, and I hope now that the reader will have come to understand why a Siege of Crimea freeing up many more troops to go fight in Ukraine’s east may be both the most likely and most reasonable course of action for Ukraine to take.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others. See all of Brian’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine here.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) May 31, 2023; see related June 28 follow up after Prigozhin’s Wagner revolt Putin’s (and Russia’s) Naked Weakness; also see related June 13 article The Coming Siege of Crimea?; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—“As Russia fought a war that was unpopular, disastrous, and self-destructive—all increasingly so—to the point of unraveling its social contract between ruler and ruled, Russians began to desert the military and revolt, even fighting against the Russian government to overthrow it and raiding and taking territory from the jurisdiction of Russian authorities.  It was not long before Russia’s ruling elites were deposed and replaced by new blood.”

That could be a near-future account of the end of the Putin regime (the positive effects of which I have mused on before), but incredibly that would also be a fitting description of the Russian Empire in 1917, a time I am thinking a lot about while reading Antony Beevor’s excellent account of the period in Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921, but sadly, I am speaking of Russia now in 2023.

Well over a year into Russia’s massive escalation of this war, Russia finds its own capital under attack and its border regions threatened by Ukraine and Russian rebels, clearly things Putin did not anticipate.  The longer this war goes on, the worse it is for Russia, and if Putin cannot defend Russia itself, how can he defend Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine?  The answer is that, over time, he cannot, and that will be his undoing.

Setting the Stage for the Meaning of Russia’s Latest Shocking Setbacks

For many months, it has been clear that Russia’s failure of an army is incapable of mounting competent offensives (see its ten-month Pyrrhic Bakhmut campaign as a prime example).  Rather, for the most part, Ukraine has been setting the tones, times, and places of fighting (e.g., it was Ukraine’s deliberate strategy to maintain resistance in Bakhmut in the face of a massive Russian onslaught so as to bog down Russian forces there and allow it to keep wasting lives, equipment, and supplies trying to take Ukraine’s fifty-eighth largest city by a 2021 official estimate while neglecting, basically, everywhere else).  Ukraine chose to take a more patient and prudent approach to preserve far more of its own men overall while allowing the Russians’ stupidity and limitations to destroy themselves as Ukraine itself used its advanced, precise Western weapons and munitions and its clever ingenuity to strike hard at Russian targets of opportunity, all while allowing the harsh months of “General Winter” to further whittle down Russian forces equipped, led, and supplied far more poorly than Ukraine’s.

While exhausting itself in the east, and losing a huge net amount of territory over an entire yearlong period, Russia had already shown it was vulnerable on its own soil to Ukrainian drone strikes against bases deep inside Russia months earlier.  And there was that very minor drone strike from early May against a Kremlin dome in Moscow that is still murky as to its origins and perpetrators.  But the most recent attacks—with 1.) Russian rebel ground forces penetrating into Russia and holding Russian territory for days before withdrawing and with 2.) airborne drones hitting the city of Moscow itself—mean that Russia’s position is even more helpless and pathetic than it was before.

Five weeks ago, when Ukraine finally successfully crossed and established a presence across the Dnipro River from Kherson city, it was a momentous moment which, as I noted at the time, meant that the whole of the south of Ukraine that was occupied by Russia was now vulnerable to being retaken by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.  Back in April 2022 I noted that Crimea would eventually be quite vulnerable (a “perfect understanding” according to Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky) and built upon that understanding in August and again in October to note that, after Ukraine would retake Kherson city (which happened over a month later) and the eventual crossing of the Dnipro River there (which, as noted, happened late last month), the rest of the south would be open to Ukraine.  As part of that analysis, I noted, too, that this would essentially be the beginning of the end of the war—not in terms of a quick resolution but in terms of setting the stage for shaping the final main campaigns of the war.  As I have argued, it comes down to a mathematical equation and Russia is going to lose out badly no matter how it tries to arrange its numbers and factors on its side of the equation, which cannot handle what Ukraine with the help of its allies is going to throw at it.  In other words, more major collapses of Russian positions are inevitable.  As I noted in July, the defeat of Russia may very well take time, but it is coming.

Part of the reason is that Russia’s shambolic eastern campaign in particular has left it spread perilously thin throughout Ukraine and suffering from severe and chronic manpower, equipment, and ammunition shortages (perhaps most famously broadcast in the screaming tirades directed at Kremlin higher-ups from Wagner mercenary group warlord Yevgeniy Prigozhin), with those issues already huge problems for Russia even long before it began this battle for Bakhmut at the beginning of August.  As has been well documented, for many months, Russia has been throwing untrained conscripts into battle in Ukraine with decades-old, obsolete equipment (even just before Russia’s February 24, 2022 escalatory invasion, Russian soldiers who would lead that invasion were being given expired rations!).  And the key point is this: when Ukraine crossed the Dnipro River in late April and was finally in a position to seriously threaten the south and even Crimea, this meant that Russia’s already poorly supplied and overstretched military forces had to now consider adjusting in major ways its deployment of forces, which in the position it is in now is a lot like playing a game of Jenga but with thousands of soldiers’ lives instead of blocks.  

Now, keep in mind that this was clearly the situation a month ago with Ukraine’s crossing of the Dnipro and establishing a presence on its south/east bank, before the recent ground raids into Russia and yesterday’s Moscow drone attacks.  Also keep in mind that not long after that Dnipro crossing, Russia had just started trying to grapple with new British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles with twice the range of the already devastating HIMARS ammunition, meaning their contingency plans for dealing with HIMARS strikes as far as they had and implemented them at all became somewhat obsolete, the Storm Shadows being used to devastating effect.

Why the Borderland Ground Raids and Moscow Strikes Are Amplifying Problems for Russia

But with those twin developments of the ground raids of last week and yesterday’s drone strikes, the effects along the nature of what I italicized above are only going to be significantly worse and will lead to even more catastrophic losses for a Russia that cannot handle much more severe misfortune for its war and regime to continue.  Before, Russia had to worry about cannibalizing already weak positions to meet threats to its occupied territory in Ukraine’s south, one of Russia’s most undermanned sectors in Ukraine.  But now, Russia has to worry about shoring up ground defenses throughout the regions on much of its border with Ukraine and has to worry about air defenses all the way to Moscow.  In short, these developments make already critical and debilitating problems for Russia far worse, adding more pressure on the already weak infrastructure of its entire war effort.

And that is a total disaster for Russia.

In its hubris, Russia likely thought Ukraine would not dare think of attacking Russia itself, let alone be capable of such.  But significant parts of Russia’s border regions with Ukraine are remote from major cities and do not have major highways near them, making it hard for Russia to reinforce and repel even small unanticipated attacks across such a large area.  It is entirely possible for Ukraine or the Russian rebels Ukraine is supporting to actually take Russian territory from Russian government control and hold it for some time, forcing Russia to panic and divert large amounts of troops and equipment to retake its territory and perhaps giving Ukraine more leverage with which to bargain after it pushes Russia out of all its territory and meaningful negotiations can begin (if it comes to that).

Russia also needs as many air defenses near the front as possible, as Ukraine has been adept with its precise artillery, munitions, reconnaissance, and intelligence at destroying enough Russian air defenses to actually give Ukraine air superiority during some key moments when coupled with its own advanced Western air defenses that severely limit Russia’s ability to use its own air force, even fifth-generation aircraft like the Su-57.  With yesterday’s mysterious drone attacks on Moscow, Russia and its people are flat-out freaking out and the Kremlin will be forced to place substantial air-defense resources throughout the hundreds of miles between Moscow and the Ukrainian border.

At an absolutely critical moment in the war shortly before a big Ukrainian counteroffensive that will see even newer advanced Western weapons come to bear against their outmatched Russian counterparts and that was already going to be a disaster for Russia even without those new weapons systems in the hands of Ukraine, needing to divert troops and air defenses to cover large sections of European Russia is just about the last realistic development that Russia can handle.

So when two groups of Russian rebels fighting inside Ukraine against Russia government forces—the Russian Volunteer Corps (R.D.K.) and the Free Russia Legion (also translated as the Freedom of Russia Legion or Liberty of Russia Legion)—conducted ground raids last week into the two Russian oblasts (provinces) of Belgorod and Kursk (the former lasting several days), the aforementioned results are precisely what happened: mass panic and a mad rush by Russia to throw whatever it could into the areas to appear to be fulfilling its responsibility of defending its own territory, including taking troops from front lines in Ukraine where they were badly needed.  Earlier tiny raids by R.D.K. in March and April of this year were rather insignificant, but the newer raids signify what is essentially a new front for Russia to defend inside Russia at a time when it will barely be able to defend what it is desperately hoping to hold onto in Ukraine.

Likewise, the drone attacks yesterday in the Moscow region—which Ukraine is coyly denying—are another area where Russia did not imagine it would have to play defense well over a year into what Putin assumed would be a very short and easy operation.

And if Putin does not weaken fronts in Ukraine to boost Russia’s border regions’ defense or divert more air defense systems to protect the hundreds of miles of Russian territory from Moscow south to the border with Ukraine, then Putin faces an even more fraught domestic situation and will be blamed for not doing more to protect Russians in Russia.  And keep in mind this is lose-lose: this is not a situation where Russia’s prospects look good in one area by denying resources going somewhere else, but a choice of degree and speed of losing in one place versus another.

Either way, when the raids and drone strikes come so soon one after the other, the psychological blows are pretty bad for Russians, including the Muscovites Putin has sought to shelter from the effects of the war in order to stave off unrest and threats to his rule in the capital, with Putin himself barely mentioning the war publicly.  But after these drone strikes in Moscow, it is hard to see how anyone can think that the war is going well for Russia now, and criticism of Russia’s leadership and the conduct of the war will only grow.  And this will only accelerate even more than the coming counteroffensive was already going to accelerate the process of Russians collectively turning on Putin and deciding he is a loser who needs to go so Russia can ends its pointless losing war effort that brings Russia nothing but loss and suffering.

The frustration and rage will not only be with Russian citizens and the bureaucrats of the Kremlin, but the military itself.  With the Russian military about to suffer one or more major defeats from Ukraine’s looming counteroffensive, there is a real possibility for morale in Russian formations to collapse yet again, causing whole fronts to collapse yet again, as Russian soldiers see Putin being unable to protect Russians near the border and even Moscow itself from attack.  Russians that surrender or desert may increasingly defect and be willing to fight against the Russian military (whole units turning on the Russian government of first the tsar and then later factions, from the Bolsheviks to the Whites, became a common feature in 1917 and years following once things went past certain points of awfulness, as Beevor’s book catalogues).  One thing that is certain is that with each major setback for Russia, morale gets lower and lower and there is a floor for that, as in all wars, beyond which soldiers will no longer fight: any group of men in any army have their breaking point, and Russia’s army is obviously nowhere even close to being one of the best or most resilient.

Yes, things were bad enough over a week ago for Russia.  And even as I finish writing this, reports tell us (very likely) Ukraine with another drone attack has successfully hit the Afipsky oil refinery close to Krasnodar, Russia, and not far from one of Russia’s major oil exporting seaports, Novorossiysk on the eastern Black Sea (an attack that comes four days after another drone attack targeted a station of the major Druzhba oil pipeline northwest of Moscow in the Tver region).  But the two very recent developments I have highlighted—the drone attacks in Moscow and the border raids in Belgorod and Kursk oblasts—have especially ensured a cocktail of a negative feedback loop that is going to speed up:

1. the fracturing and overstretching of Russian military resources
2. the cratering of Russian military morale
3. the weakening of support of Russians for Putin and the war
4. the actual losing of the war
5. the process of a Russian revolution of sorts that must occur for Russia to stop losing this war so badly with no serious gains being made but with plenty to lose, more and more so, over time.

I cannot tell you when these breaking points will be reached, but they will come significantly sooner with the Rubicons of drone strikes Moscow and more-than-cosmetic raids into Russia now crossed, with more of those actions to come and at greater and greater psychological and material cost to Russia.

Russia’s Border Areas with Ukraine as the Battlefields to Come

Raids and strikes against targets deeper inside Russia are very much in the future of this war: as Ukraine pushes more and more Russian forces back, it will eventually drive them back to the Russian side of the border, as Russian forces are unable to consistently defend against Western-supplied Ukrainian precision distance weapons like the HIMARS, M777s, and Caesars.  Once Ukraine reaches the border in force, the range of those weapons range will be able to create a logistical dead zone and no man’s zone on the Russian side of the border inside which it will be hazardous for the health of Russian soldiers and be very difficult for Russia to supply them.  Ground raids on the border regions of Russia will be an important part of establishing such buffer zones, and drone strikes or Storm Shadow strikes will wreak havoc on Russian logistics hubs farther back trying to support any Russian troops attempting to push back through the buffer and into Ukraine again.  That is, if Russians do not get rid of Putin before he forces things into such an embarrassing point for Russia…

The consequences of Putin’s disastrous mismanagement are piling up and cascading one into the other, and the avalanche will bury him and his failing war one way or another, when enough Russians—including soldiers and government officials—tire of losing and realize this insanity must be stopped.  Losing has consequences—ask the ghosts of Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Qaddafi, or the Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, Tsar Nicholas II—and those consequences are coming for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.  And much like I argued that both Kherson and Bakhmut have set up this coming Ukrainian counteroffensive as bookends, so similarly will both the drone strikes deep inside Russia and the raids on the ground help to unravel both Russia’s war effort and the social contract between Russians and Putin that enable him to prosecute it.  Until that happens, it will only be more misery, death, and losing for Russia.

Also see related June 13 article The Coming Siege of Crimea?

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others. See all of Brian’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine here.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) May 8, 2023; see earlier April 24 article Ukraine Crossing Dnipro River a Big Deal and General Assessment upon which this article greatly expands; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—Hardly an institution to prematurely declare changes on the ground in Ukraine based on specious information, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) on April 22 noted, having consulted various corroborating sources, that Ukraine had established “positions” across the Dnipro River (or Dnieper) from the Kherson City area on the bank of the river east and south of the city after months of a static front, with one of ISW’s lead analysts—George Barros—posting a map the next day showing several positions on that side of the river controlled by Ukraine.  In its typically responsibly cautious style, ISW was careful not to call the “positions” a “bridgehead” in a subsequent post, but, rather, “an enduring presence.”

In the two weeks since, while the longer sliver of penetration has pulled back to close to the river, Ukraine has expanded its presence on the other side of the river in a far wider band running west along the entirety of the part of the south/east bank of the Dnipro across from Kherson City.  Russia has shown zero offensive capability in this region for months, and Ukraine’s presence on this bank over the past two weeks will continue to grow with a Russia incapable of marshalling resources to mount an offensive here unless it cannibalizes forces from elsewhere to disastrous effect, and, since most of Russia’s forces constituting “elsewhere” are in the east, and given that ICC-arrest-warrant-winning Russian President Vladimir Putin has resoundingly prioritized the eastern theater, that is not going to happen.

Indeed, building on this point, it is clear that with Putin’s manic, obsessive focus on Bakhmut that there has not been any significant Russian ground offensive activity anywhere outside of Ukraine’s east for many months because Russia simply has not had that kind of offensive capability elsewhere because of this focus, and control maps make this reality painfully obvious.

Note that I did not write successful offensive capability, just offensive capability, as even that capability in the east has been pitiful and Pyrrhic in the extreme, with progress coming at a snail’s pace if at all, mostly in or near Bakhmut.  As I have noted before, these Pyrrhic advances coming at a terrible cost in lives and resources have done more to open Russia to counterattack than to cement any lasting major strategic gains for Russia.  And with the panicked public theatrics between Wagner mercenary tin god Yevgeniy Prigozhin, Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, and the hapless Russian military leadership, it is clear the Russians seem to have finally realized this and are flailing to try to meet this looming threat.  All are de facto or de jure supposedly part of a unified military in theory, but in practice, all are a doing a fine job demonstrating the dire dysfunction of the Russian military that is the product of two decades of Kremlin policy under the firm if incompetent military hand of Putin.

In the southern central theater, since Ukraine recaptured the north/west bank of the Dnipro in Kherson Oblast from Russia in the first half of November, Russia has not even really tried to retake anything on that side of the river.  At the time, it was noted that many of the surviving Russian troops that were withdrawing from there were in a sorry, beat-up, poorly-supplied state, and the bulk of Russia’s resourcing since then has been directed towards Bakhmut.  While Russian troops are clearly digging in on the south/east bank of the Dnipro, Russia’s best troops and equipment should not be expected to be among them given Russia’s focus on Ukraine’s east and the horrific casualties it has sustained. 

Furthermore, as Russia is now spread thin throughout Ukraine after taking these grievous losses and still persists in mostly futile offensive activity in the east, it cannot be expected to be offering much in terms of defense in depth, as fortifications need actual troops to man them and, in one example, satellite images from February progressing through late April show a major Russian military hub in Crimea having nearly emptied itself of troops and supplies.

On that south/east bank of the Dnipro, Ukrainian troops are, as usual, using their huge advantage in precision ranged weaponry to hit Russian logistics targets in the area and beyond, deep into Crimea and Melitopol in neighboring Zaporizhzhia Oblast, softening up the overall Russian positions to pave the way for an eventual assault, just like they did before they pushed Russia out of the north/west Bank of the Dnipro back in November.  It is also crucial to note that the Dnipro is the last major natural barrier between Ukrainian troops and Crimea, as, with their new positions across the Dnipro, Ukrainian troops are now just some sixty miles (as the crow flies) of flat, difficult-to-defend coastal plain from Crimea’s northern border…

Relatedly, retired American Gen. Mark Hertling has repeatedly noted that Ukraine has to move troops and supplies around much shorter interior lines as opposed to Russia, which has to do the same over far longer exterior lines, making the task far easier for Ukraine and far harder for Russia.  That means, in the coming counteroffensive phase, it will be relatively easy for Ukraine to move troops and their supplies quickly to surprise Russia and keep it off-balance even as Russia will struggle to reinforce or redeploy, and Russia’s far longer transit routes leave its columns vulnerable to Ukraine’s HIMARS, M777s, Caesars, and other precision weaponry that Russia lacks.

Russia now has a conundrum pretty much exactly the same as one I have discussed earlier that it suffered from this past summer and fall: Russia only has bad choices, and whatever adjustments it makes are going to come at dear cost.  After all, Russia is not performing well on the battlefield anywhere, for, as noted, its ground assaults are either only making gains that come at staggering costs in just a minute number of areas or are completely failing.  This means that if Russia moves troops from or diverts reinforcements going to one area in order to reinforce anywhere else (in this case, its remaining positions in Kherson Oblast), it will leave itself weaker and more vulnerable at that first front.  But if it does not do this, it will hurt its odds at mitigating whatever is coming at it from Kherson, which Ukraine can time based on what Russia is and is not doing as far as redeployments and reinforcing.  All the while, Ukraine could also easily be preparing an (additional?) onslaught where Russia is not anticipating one, as happened in the Kharkiv area late last summer while Russia was expecting the hammer-blow at the time to come for Kherson City, which still came anyway after devastating Russian losses in men, equipment, and territory from Ukraine’s Kharkiv-front counteroffensive.

As I have pointed out regarding previous counteroffensives, it comes down to simple math: Russia’s numbers are weak on both sides of the equation and it is basically left to choosing how badly, how quickly, and where to lose in shuffling resources from one location to another.  For, as I have argued previously, the rest of the variables in the equation are also bad for Russia and increasingly inferior to those of Ukraine’s qualitatively superior forces, especially morale, training, weapons, logistics, decreasing vs. increasing capabilities, how they have been performing over time as well as recently, and leadership. 

I noted late last year that this war had long ago settled into two alternating phases: Ukrainian counteroffensives and the preparation of them.  Whether this is the end of the latter or the beginning of the former still remains to be seen, but that does not change the momentous nature of Ukraine’s crossing of the Dnipro as well as Russia’s failure still to fully take Bakhmut, as the Prigozhin/Kremlin public squabbling emphasizes for the latter.  What Ukraine does and when on the south/east bank of the Dnipro—and how Russia reacts to that—will likely have ramifications throughout Ukraine, in Bakhmut and beyond, just as Bakhmut’s campaign has been having ramifications far beyond its local theater as Russia nonsensically hemorrhages men and supplies there to the detriment of its efforts everywhere else in Ukraine.  Ukraine seems to understand how to synergize its operations across various fronts and sectors, while Russia does not, no small part of the equation that has Ukraine winning and Russia losing this terrible war.

What is clear is that Ukraine establishing itself on the east/south bank of the Dnipro across from Kherson city potentially puts the rest of Kherson Oblast as well as Zaporizhzhia Oblast and the Crimean Peninsula into play in the near future.  The Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, like the parts of Kherson Oblast Russia still occupies, are mostly hard-to-defend flat coastal plains, and as the last oblast between Ukrainian forces in the south and Donetsk Oblast in the east where the heaviest fighting has been taking place, Zaporizhzhia is the last obstacle Ukraine would need to overtake before its forces in the south could link up with its forces fighting fiercely in the east (including Bakhmut).  In turn, that may allow Ukraine to outflank and overwhelm Russian positions in the east throughout the Donbas and all the way to the Russian border.  Thus, these developments on the Dnipro River and Bakhmut and their consequences may snowball into other key parts of Russian-occupied Ukraine sooner rather than later in ways that can alter the strategic and tactical caluculi of the entire war.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) April 24, 2023; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—As it quite credibly seems Ukraine has finally established its “presence”* over on the east/south bank of the Dnipro River across from Kherson City, liberated by Ukraine from Russia earlier this past November, now is a good time to take stock of where the Ukraine war has been, is now, and is going, with my past work serving as an excellent guide to understand all this.

While there is an infinite amount of drama in war—life and death struggles, emotional and harrowing experiences short of life-and-death that are still hard to put into words, and the dreaded waking reality of being aware than any calm can be shattered at the speed of a missile strike—when viewed from afar, some phases can be seen as more “eventful” or “important.”  But what is often not clear from afar is that without the less-“eventful” and “important” phases, you wouldn’t have the other more momentous phases.  For example, there is no D-Day in 1944 in World War II without the massive supply operation transferring troops and resources to the United Kingdom during key parts of the Battle of the Atlantic beforehand, nor any Yorktown in 1781 in the Revolutionary War without the many skirmishes and smaller battles leading up to that fateful siege.

More so than any other pieces I have written about Ukraine, the following two explain how this relates to Ukraine.

Late in December, amidst all sorts of talk of “stalemate” and concern that Ukraine’s war effort was flagging, I noted how the war had then taken on (Russia-Ukraine War Settles into Predictable Alternating Phases, But Russia’s Losing Remains Constant, December 26, 2022) a clear dynamic (and had since fairly early in the war) of alternating between two major phases: one in which Ukraine was prepping for major successful offensive action and one in which it was executing such action, with Russia stupidly and rather unproductively continuing across both phases its costly assaults that made little to no progress, Putin too proud to know when he should play defense and too callous to care about wasting many thousands of his countrymen’s lives to take insignificant amounts of territory near strategically insignificant places.

To get into more details on why this is playing out this way, another piece of mine from the summer (Ukrainian Prudence Meets Russian Limitations: Explaining the Current Pace and Nature of Russia’s War on Ukraine,August 23, 2022) explains how Ukraine cares deeply about its soldiers and takes great effort to preserve their lives and use them efficiently; this, of course, means that Ukraine does not mindlessly throw its troops into battle with few or no supplies as Russia does, so this in turn means that Ukraine takes more time in planning its attacks and setting them up for success.  At the same time, Russia’s limitations mean it is barely able to advance or unable to advance at all.  This gives the impression to impatient twitterati, journalists, and analysts that there is a “stalemate,” but, in reality, it is simply Ukrainian prudence meeting Russian limitations, with Russia’s spread-out, poorly-led, poorly-equipped, and poorly-armed forces being able to be targets over time as Ukraine precisely strikes repeatedly against them on and behind Russian lines until they have hollowed out, weakened, and demoralized the Russians, Ukraine striking in full after—not before—reducing Russia’s defensive capabilities so it gives its own troops a better chance to survive a major offensive rather than attacking in full earlier without degrading Russia’s military positions.  Since I wrote that, this dynamic has been repeated and now we find ourselves in Ukraine’s preparation-for-offense phase and at perhaps the beginning, perhaps even farther into, the transition to a major offensive, an alternation the previous article discusses.

Now, for some further explorations of mine.

The best exemplification of Ukraine patiently and prudently allowing Russia to degrade its own military while prepping for a counteroffensive is Russia’s Pyrrhic Bakhmut campaign, which I discussed in January (Russia’s Pyrrhic Advances at Soledar Near Bakhmut Setting Up Ukrainian Counteroffensive, Not Russian Victory, January 13, 2023; I even pointed out in a brief offshoot-piece how just looking at the control maps: THE TWO MAPS SHOWING WHY RUSSIA’S BAKHMUT CAMPAIGN IS UNDENIABLY A MISERABLE FAILURE [including Soledar], January 14, 2023, tells you so much about how much “progress” Russia had made over month after month of wasting lives in trying—and failing—to take the small, strategically insignificant city of Bakhmut.  In short, Bakhmut Holds!).  And Ukraine decided to hold onto Bakhmut despite heavy costs for Ukraine because Russia was pouring nearly all of its ground offensive capabilities there to the point of imbecilic distraction from nearly everywhere else and because Ukraine could continue to defend the city at an exponentially higher cost for Russia, denying Russia any morale boost or ability to control the battlefield narrative while whittling down Russia’s already severely degraded and depleted military, all while Ukraine continues to make preparations for a far sounder offensive or offensives than Russia’s (a very recent and fine article for The Atlantic by Dr. Phillips O’Brien—one of my top five accounts to follow on the Ukraine war—and Mykola Bielieskov makes a similar case as to why holding Bakhmut is incredibly useful for advancing Ukraine’s war goals).

So yes, we are in a relatively “less-eventful” phase of the war for now, but as those above pieces explain, this is part of the strategy, tactics, and dynamics that will lead to the next spectacular Ukrainian victories as they have in the past led to other spectacular Ukrainian victories.  Most recently, in February I discussed eight main dynamics driving why Russia’s current offensive was going to be a miserable failure (Offensive Smensive: 8 Reasons Why Russia’s Expected Offensive Cannot Succeed, February 16, 2023).  Those dynamics—

1. Recent and cumulative tends
2. Who has gained/lost territory and when
3. Russia’s ridiculous casualties
4. That Russia already failed with a much better military early in the war
5. Ukraine’s increasing capabilities alongside Russia’s decreasing ones
6. Logistics
7. Morale
8. Leadership

—are all overwhelmingly in favor of Ukraine and it is not even close.  Throughout the period prior to my writing this, much of the conventional wisdom was that this Russian offensive should be greatly feared, casting doubt at to whether Ukraine could weather through it, let alone the winter, another bad take that I demolished (Winter War in Ukraine: Seeing Through the Blizzard of Bad Takes, November 28, 2022).

Specifically, as Russia has shown itself unable now to keep Ukraine from penetrating the east/south bank of the Dnipro River across from Kherson City and has destroyed much of its own offensive capability assaulting Bakhmut, Russia’s position is ripe for failure and to allow Ukraine to dictate the pact and location of fighting, as well as to bait and switch Russia’s forces, which happened in the late summer and the fall as Ukraine took massive amounts of territory on two separate fronts and managed to take smaller amounts of territory on a third front (relevant discussion of mine: Russian Army Collapses—and Revolution—Near-Certain as Russia Loses War: When/Where Harder to Predict, September 10, 2022, and in an updated/expanded excerpt, Why Is Russia Losing on 3 Fronts? Math [the Short Answer], September 7, 2022, from an earlier predictive piece; that earlier piece of mine was a general “how” prediction of the course of the rest of the war: How Ukraine War Will Likely Go Rest of 2022, or, Kherson: The Beginning of the End for Russia, August 3, 2022, itself the natural follow to a “why” piece on the deep-dive of the dynamics of the war: Russia’s Defeat in Ukraine May Take Some Time, But It’s Coming and Sooner Than You Think, July 30, 2022.  The “how” piece I wrote a second, updated version of a few months later: This Is the Beginning of the End of the War, October 3 [note I said beginning and I writing in terms of how the paths of the major campaigns were being set]).

In both those “how” pieces, I noted how once Ukraine crossed the Dnipro near Kherson, that would put it just some sixty miles to the northern border of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimea, the spiritual heart of Russia’s grand imperialist designs for Ukraine (and I had noted Crimea’s eventual extreme vulnerability—being an isolated peninsula—a year ago today: How Ukraine Can Take Back Crimea from Putin’s Reeling Russian Military, April 24, 2022).  This means not only the rest of Kherson Oblast (province) is in play, but also soon Crimea and Zaporizhzhia, as the farther into the part of Kherson Oblast south and east of the Dnipro River Ukraine proceeds, the further its HMARS, M777s, and Caesar precision artillery can hit the key positions and logistics hubs supporting Russia’s occupation of those regions, including, eventually, the Crimean/Kerch Strait Bridge and Russia’s main regional naval base at Sevastopol—both of which Ukraine has already demonstrated it can target more creatively, if less easily, with other types of attacks, and the latter of which was just hit again by Ukraine as I was writing this.

And as I noted in some of my aforementioned earlier work, Putin and the Russian military are damned no matter how they react to Ukraine’s crossing of the Dnipro: the war is not going well for Russia anywhere, so it if take troops from or diverts reinforcement going to one sector to reinforce the other, it leaves the first sector even weaker and more vulnerable to counterattack while also exposing the troops being moved over long exterior lines to Ukrainian strikes en route and additionally forces those new troops to acquaint themselves to unfamiliar situations.  But if Putin does not reinforce or divert troops to Kherson Oblast, he also hastens the demise Kherson oblast and the opening of new fronts in Crimea and Zaporizhzhia.  And you can be sure that Ukraine has multiple plans in place depending on what Russia does and does not do, plus, it must be remembered that since Ukraine has shorter interior lines and that Russia lacks the abilities to overcome Ukrainian air defenses or precision artillery—systems that are only increasing in quality and quantity for Ukraine—it is far easier for Ukraine to rapidly redeploy troops from one position to another, increasing its ability to fake out, deceive, or surprise Russia.

Indeed, history may be repeating itself and setting Ukraine up for another major delayed-two-pronged offensive, as most of Russia’s reinforcements have already been directed towards Bakhmut but have been exhausted, depleted, and/or destroyed in that Pyrrhic campaign even as Ukraine has now crossed the last major natural barrier—the Dnipro River—before Crimea and being able to seal off Crimea from the north, what could be the first step in the Siege of Crimea if Ukraine does not knock out the Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge first…

Yes, that Dnipro crossing is a big deal.

And the wider geopolitical context?  After Ukraine’s next offensives, we will be much closer to the implosion of Putin’s regime and a free Ukraine, something I discuss in detail here (The Post-Putin World Will Be So Much Better than This One, February 28, 2023) but a likelihood I acknowledged elsewhere before in early March 2022, for Small Wars Journal and in related expanded/adapted and original work for my own site.

So, even if it seems to some that almost “nothing” has been or is happening except for Russia’s Pyrrhic and suicidal assaults and nihilistic, terroristic air strikes against civilians, you now know better: Ukraine is getting ready for even more major victories, moving its pieces into place and biding its time for phenomenal effect as it has repeatedly before.  Think of this piece as less a victory lap for my own analysis, though, than a victory lap for Ukraine and for freedom-loving people the world over (ok, one more shameless plug but one that focuses on expanding on that sentiment: Capturing the Unique Inspirational Quality of Ukraine’s Fight Against Russia via Two Writers, October 31, 2022).

*Correction appended to reflect a “presence” and not firm bridgeheads

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) February 28, 2023; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

SILVER SPRING—Much has happened in this momentous yet cataclysmic past year, and almost a year ago, shortly after Putin launched his escalatory invasion, I wrote the following and absolutely still stand by it today:

After well over a year of isolation induced by the COVD-19 pandemic, it seems Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has become so detached from reality with his wild Ukraine gamble that he may finally have adventured too far, stumbling into a trap entirely of his own making.  Surprising as it is, this time it is distinctly possible his aggression, ultimately, will not provide him with any way to save face: no “offramp,” as the media seems to love to refer to a possible endgame that leaves him comfortable and not in a weak and unstable position at best (for him) or ousted at worst (obviously, the latter would be ideal for us)…

…I’m optimistic like never before that Putin’s end is coming and coming soon even as that optimism is surrounded by the dread of an increasingly bloody and lawless conflict.  I truly think this is the last gasp for a very long time of the Great Power conflicts on European soil, of the major wars that have been constant on the continent since the ancient Greco-Persian wars through today, with the two main exceptions being the Pax Romana and the Pax Americana; this war in Ukraine will either be the end of the Pax Americana in Europe or the one great interruption of it for some time to come.

I have expanded on this feeling, that Putin has absolutely violated the implicit social contract he made with his people—give up their democracy in exchange for strength, stability, and respect from the world—that this this war really has doomed him, that Russians know who has been in charge for years and who created the system that produced this disastrous performance on the battlefields of Ukraine and will eventually appropriately blame Putin, that even the military may revolt against him, and that revolution is going to come because Putin will destroy the Russian military and economy if he is not stopped since he will not give up his losing war effort that cannot succeed, that Putin has finally bitten off more than he can chew and will choke on his hubris.  And from the Russo-Japanese War to World War I to Afghanistan, Russian defeats in war tend bring about serious consequences domestically for Russia of the revolutionary type.  So in the first days after the one-year-anniversary of Putin’s escalatory invasion, it is fitting to contemplate a world without Putin and how much better it will be.

There are three key reasons to suppose this idea…

1.) Russia under Putin is by far the most powerful bad actor in the world, constantly working to undermine the U.S.-led rules-based international world order in place since the end of World War II

It is no exaggeration to say that Russia under Putin is easily now and by far not only the chief antagonist of the United States and the West, but is also the largest impediment to global cooperation and world stability.  And this has been the case for a solid decade-and-a-half.

Apart from the obvious example of Ukraine, Russia has also for some time been supporting some of the worst factions and adding to instability in a series of regional and local interventions.  Militarily, most notably with its occupation of Transnistria in Moldova and its intervention to support dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria but also the “private” military contractor Wagner Group (really an extension of the Russian military and the Kremlin’s will) also in Syria and throughout Africa, especially (including Libya, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, Mali, and Sudan, though Wagner is also intervening in less-militarily-explicit ways in other African countries).  Politically, Russia has interfered to support the very worst of the far-fight throughout Europe, the U.S., and Canada, whether movements, individual figures, or political parties, movements that often not just brush up against fascism but veer headlong into it.  In the same places, Russia is also fostering far-left movements (the kind that try to tear down the part of the left that can actually do something).   It is even pumping up secessionists movements, from Catalonia and Scotland to Texas and California.  I have discussed much of this in detail—citing many, many sources—before.  And, of course, there are Russia’s cyberwarfare campaigns—including disinformation and what I termed in 2016 the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar—related to all of these, which I have also discussed at length and before most others would, as far back as July 2016; even now, Russian propaganda accounts are buying up blue checkmark status on Twitter from Elon Musk, just another example of how Musk clearly doesn’t give a damn about actually policing actual misinformation

As I argued long ago, it is time to get even tougher with Russia, which has for a decade-and-a-half clearly been a bad-faith and faithless actor on the world stage, that fighting back isn’t escalation but merely long-overdue defense against such rampant aggression, that countries voluntarily joining alliances with the West is not aggression but Russia actually invading countries to dismember them and annex their territory is.

We are rivals with China but not enemies, but Russia under is clearly our enemy and acts like it. 

2.) Russia under Putin now is incredibly isolated, and there is little reason to think other major powers would follow Russia’s example after Putin is finished; most notably, China will likely be more cooperative and less oppositional

Russian Isolation

While countries like the U.S. and Ukraine have many friends that actually admire them on immensely deep levels, Russia does not even understand these concepts: Russia has a few alliances of interest and convenience, but that is really it: Russia has no real friends—and only has itself to blame for that.

But let’s take a look at the nations supposedly close to Russia, just to drive down how pathetically isolated it is internationally.

Putin’s big “ally” in this war has been Belarus, formerly a part of the Soviet Union and led by its quite unpopular and buffoonish dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who was weakened by massive domestic protests in 2020-2021 after he stole an election to stay in power and has now let Russia use Belarusian territory to base troops and launch attacks against Ukraine (he has notably declined to deploy his military alongside Russia’s in Ukraine, as that could very well be the end of his deeply unpopular regime).  Polling tells us Belarusians are against Russia’s invasion and that Russia’s war of aggression is very unpopular; indeed, there are Belarusians fighting for Ukraine against Russia, Belarusians in Belarus sabotaging logistical systems used by the Russians, and, just a few days ago, it was apparently Belarusian partisans that critically damaged an expensive Russian military aircraft on an airbase outside of the Belarusian capital of Minsk (an A-50U Mainstay—one of seven in Russian service and modern upgrades of the A-50, with only nine of those A-50s “in service” for a total of “sixteen” of these types of aircraft “operational” for Russia—likely fewer with Russian maintenance woes—planes with advanced detection equipment that are essential to monitoring enemy aircraft in the battlespace and in preventing surprise air attacks, essentially the counterparts to the U.S. E-3 Sentry AWACS).

And as far as “friends” and allies, for Russia, Belarus is as good as it gets.

What about China?  Shortly before Putin’s February 24 invasion, China declared “friendship…has no limits” with Russia but has very much set limits on this friendship, refusing so far to support Russia’s military with lethal military aid or vote with Russia in key United Nations votes on the Ukraine war.  At most, China has helped Russia with some economic and technical support and on the one-year-anniversary of the invasion offered a piece of paper with a twelve-point “peace” plan paying lip service to some Russian talking points but offered no concrete military aid to Russia in its war effort (I’m sure Putin was hoping for much more than a piece of paper; so much for “friendship…[with] no limits”).

What about Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic and the government of which Russia helped by deploying troops to quell a massive series of protests just the month before Putin launched his escalatory invasion?  How has Kazakhstan responded after this help from Russia?  By breaking from Russia and Russia’s positions on Ukraine and the war, sending aid to Ukrainian civilians, giving sanctuary and shelter to over 100,000 Russians fleeing conscription/mobilization into Putin’s war and/or persecution, and also not voting with Russia at the United Nations.  Other former Soviet republics long-deferential to Russia even after the fall of Soviet Union are now beginning to finally distance themselves from or to assert themselves publicly against Putin or are seeking patronage from elsewhere, including America.

What about Iran?  Iran has provided drones that have been used against Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure (yet are ineffective against Ukrainian military targets and Russia may be even running out of those drones) while Iran has thus far declined Russian requests for more powerful missile systems and has also declined to vote with Russia at the United Nations.

In reality, Russia is incredibly isolated: in five key United Nations votes on the Russia-Ukraine war—including the latest one on February 23, 2023, demanding Russia withdraw from Ukraine, 141 countries voting for it, only seven including Russia against, and with thirty-two abstentions; also including a General Assembly vote on October 12 of 143-5 against Russia, a 10-1 Security Council vote against Russia on September 30, a March 2 General Assembly vote of 141-5 against Russia, and an 11-1 Security Council vote against Russia on February 25, 2022, right after Russia’s escalatory invasion—China has refused to vote with its supposed BFF; instead, it has chosen in each instance to abstain.  Kazakhstan abstained in those three General Assembly votes and Iran and has behaved the same way with two of those General Assembly votes (including the latest February 23 vote) and did not vote in a third.  That means no country of any significant power or clout has stood by Russia diplomatically: 141 to 7 most recently (Russia along with Belarus, Syria, North Korea, Eritrea, Mali, and Nicaragua; that’s it) and similar results from the other General Assembly resolutions, plus Russia being the only veto on the two Security Council resolutions described, tell you a lot about what you need to know about Russia’s standing in the world after its Ukraine invasion.

With “friends” like this, Russia really doesn’t need enemies, but it has them in a Ukraine that is smashing Russian dreams of imperial conquest and a West that is happy to aid Ukraine not just diplomatically and economically but, unlike China with Russia, militarily in its fight for freedom and self-determination.  And Even if the Biden Administration sometimes gives lip service to the general concept of eventual negotiations, it knows full well and has stated that Russia is not a party it can ask Ukraine to negotiate with because Russia does not act in good faith.  So think about this, then: both U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are shunning the idea of talking to Putin or his Russian government, that doing so is pointless, that Putin is not worthy of direct engagement at this time.

Essentially alone in their war against a Ukraine with many steadfast and true allies and friends, 2022 for Putin and Russia was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year and, as I have been arguing, 2023 will only be worse.

China’s Conundrum on Russia and the West as It Ponders Its Path Forward

Considering this dramatic isolation, I am a big believer that, without a Putin running Russia to stand next to, or even hide behind, that China would take a different, more cooperative approach on the international stage.  That is not to say that everything would be great between the U.S. and China and they would not have fierce disagreements still.  Yet if Russia were to stop being a rogue nation, but a responsible, good-faith actor instead that is not knee-jerk opposing the West but seeks cooperation over confrontation, peace and trade over war, democracy over autocracy, human rights over oppression, China would not want to look like a lone spoiler, isolated as some sort of pariah among the major nations.  With Russia at its side, it can avoid this, but with a Russia under a different, more sensible leader, it cannot.

Another thing to consider is that China and Russia do not have a shared culture and history, do not have any deep-seeded shared values.  China’s tepid “support” for a full year of Russia’s escalatory invasion of Ukraine after proclaiming “friendship…[with] no limit” just before that invasion tells you how deep that relationship goes.

Indeed, apart from neo-Marxist-educated, Chomsky– and Gramsci-devoted disciples of anti-Westernism and their students, fans, and offspring—the crowd Christopher Hitchens described as the “masochistic…Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter”—not many people will really miss Putin’s Russia (and, as I have explained before, most of the people who do are, sorry-not-sorry, too stupid to know the difference between Putin’s Russia and the Soviet Union—the latter opposed fascists and the former is fascist).  These people are so myopically trapped in Cold War-era thinking that they have not realized their ship has sailed, their train departed, their flight taken off; they fail to see how the world has adapted and changed, how the postcolonial-rebellion era is now over, how Putin’s Russia is not an anti-imperialist nation fighting against empire and colonialism but is, in fact, a neoimperialist and neocolonialist empire, the only major power to be doubling down on such a backwards, long-expired ideology.

People try to argue (rather unconvincingly) that the U.S. just another old-school empire, China has an economic empire, and while there are obviously various dimensions, I’d argue that influence and alliances and mutual agreements are not the same as empire: there’s no substitute for empire-empire: actually stealing land by military conquest with the intent of annexation and colonization.  Say what you will about America’s Iraq War and War in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 era, but neither Iraq nor Afghanistan were ever going to be the fifty-first or fifty-second state or a U.S. Territory.

The tsarist era is calling, Vlad, and it wants its ideology back.  This chauvinistic ethnic Russian “Eurasianism” is moving Russia backwards in time, and the totality of its former vassals that have broken free are having none of it, with even the people of Belarus disgusted by it as they are of their own cartoonish dictator, Lukashenko.  Few states of any stature are going to look at how Russia’s horrid war of revanchist imperialist and colonialist expansion goes and will want to imitate it, with Putin’s failing and sooner-rather-than-later to be failed war—itself the last gasp of such anachronistic justifications—to leave an even greater distaste for such thinking and behavior than before he embarked on his futile folly.  Hopefully, this war will be the last hurrah of old-school imperial wars, this war the last imperial war, at least for several generations.

If anyone will truly miss Putin’s Russia, it will be China, but not out of any love; rather, it will simply be that Russia constantly made China look good.  Sure, China can be pretty awful—just look at its genocidal treatment of its Muslim ethnic minority Uighurs—but people could always point to Russia and say “see, at least China isn’t that bad” when it came to international behavior beyond its borders.  To quote a RAND report title: “Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue,” i.e., China has a considerable amount of economic power that Russia does not even approach (in 2021, China’s GDP was nearly ten times Russia’s and U.S. GDP was nearly thirteen times larger than Russia’s) and China does not seek to destroy the current international order, just to shape it more in its own image and offer competition with and an alternative to the U.S. even while generally operating within the system’s rule (the big exceptions being trade, intellectual property theft, and maritime borders).  Conversely, as noted, Russia is relatively weak economically and cares little to nothing for the rules, even seeks to destroy that rules-based international system.

China loved having Putin as the lighting rod to absorb most of the West’s ire even while China moved as a force often opposing the West, making China the “good one” of the two major autocracies.  China enjoyed a position where it could be both an ally to Russia but also present itself to the West as a more moderate country than Russia, as a country that could be a mediator and interlocutor between the West and Russia that was still happy to have Russia as another major pole in the multipolar world order aligned against the West, a with which China enjoyed a much better relationship than Russia with which China has far, far larger economic ties than it does with Russia.

It’s not even close, as the charts below show (The Observatory of Economic Complexity’s excellent visualizations are deeply revealing and they were kind enough to provide me with the latest data free of charge; 2019 and 2020 data is available without a subscription, but I have provided images of some of the 2022 data; in datasets, OEC counts both Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate trading partners and I am counting Taiwan as Western since it is de facto independent and a Western democracy, whereas Hong Kong is de facto and de jure part of China).

In 2022, Russia was just the sixteenth-largest partner (2.12% of the total) in China’s export market (compared to 16.1% for the U.S. at number-one); excluding Hong Kong (second-place) as part of China, the top three Chinese export recipients are firmly Western, as are six of the top ten and eight of the fourteen ahead of Russia; for comparison, in 2019 before the pandemic, Russia also ranked sixteenth but at a lower overall percentage: 1.87%; the U.S. was still first but at 16.4%.  Russia was only the seventh-highest importer to China, with 4.14% total of Chinese imports; the U.S. was significantly higher, in third place at 6.54%, and the top five importers were firmly in the Western alliance and the sixth was actually China reimporting to itself; for comparison, in 2019, Russia was the eighth-largest importer to China (3.7%) to America’s third-ranked spot (6.56%).

Russia has not been releasing important elements of its economic data for most of 2022, hoping to hide the effect of sanctions, but the incomplete data we do have tells us that in 2022, China was by far Russia’s largest export destination and import source, with the value of Russian exports to China apparently sharply increasing from 2019.  Back then, China was also by far Russia’s top export (14% of all Russian exports) and import (20.6% of all Russian imports) partner.  For the U.S. in 2022, China is its third-largest export destination (7.39%) and its largest source of imports (16.7%); China was also similarly third for U.S. exports in 2019 (6.82%) and first that year in imports (18.1%).  Despite some rising tensions, Chinese-American economic ties remain indisputably strong and profoundly stronger than Chinese-Russian economic ties.

Simply put, Russia needs China way more than China needs Russia, then.

Even in this context, China calculated that it still made sense to align itself in politically in general with Russia, and, in this spirit, it backed Russia just before Russia’s nightmarish disaster of an escalatory invasion of Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022.  China probably thought like many others that in a few days, weeks, maybe a few months, Russia would triumph in Ukraine: the war would be over quickly and China’s relationship and substantial economic ties with the West would not really come into play or be too strongly negatively affected.

But to China’s dismay, a year later Russia’s war is failing and the Russian pole in the multipolar order is now shattered, Russia having exposed its weakness, China obviously having buyer’s remorse and knowing it has backed a loser and now a pariah, not at all what Chinese President Xi Jinping had bet would happen.  With Russia desperate for help, China is still clearly declining even now after an entire year of massive military escalation to send Russia any weapons or direct military support.  China appreciated having Russia as a useful pole bent away from the West (and its utility is now fast diminishing), but it’s not like it likes Russia.  If it liked Russia, it would be doing far more to help Putin’s war effort, like just about all of the West and even places like Morocco are helping Ukraine (yes, Morocco has offered more military support for Ukraine than China has offered Russia).

Some “no-limits” “friendship.”

Instead, China must feel like it has hitched itself onto the Titanic and does not want this Titanic to ruin its far stronger, far more important economic ties with the West at a time when the economy and COVID policy in China have the domestic situation there faltering, and, in reality, it is obvious China has been and is considering all of this heavily or it would already have been voting with Russia at the United Nations and been sending it weapons to help crush Ukraine if it really, truly believed in its alliance with Russia as a true alliance and not an alliance of mere convenience.  Sure, China could technically still throw a lot more support behind Russia, but why would it risk a major economic fight with the West now after a whole year of keeping its distance from Russia’s war when Russia is clearly losing that war and at a time of increasing domestic woes in China?  It would be highly irrational for China to do so and would not further China’s national interests.

In fact, Xi and the Chinese leadership have to be looking at Russia and seeing the dreaded potential for what they fear most in their own country: revolution.  The Chinese Communist Party has already lived through the demise of one communist regime based in Moscow in 1991 and has to see the similarities between then and now in Russia as well as with the 1917 revolutions in the midst of another major war for Russia, revolutions that brought down the Russian tsar and ushered in communist Bolshevik rule followed by the terrible years of the Russian Civil War.  The point is, if—in my view, when—Putin goes, the Chinese will have had some time to think about how they will adjust, and they will know that increasing their isolation and following Putin’s path will not be in their interests.

I asked one Brookings scholar at a live event in early February what she thought of this scenario, and her answer was that China would likely look to replace Russia with others.  Except there is no replacing Russia with any other state of similar stature because all those states, even if not fervently pro-Western, are not really anti-Western and enjoy playing both the West and East off each other for their own advantages and interests, even while still overall being closer to the West: we’re talking the rest of the BRICs, that is, Brazil and India, along with a number of other nations in the Global South of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.  Neither India nor Brazil neither wants to be or be seen as anti-Western.  The other large non-Western G-20 economies of Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia do not want to be anti-Western with the possible exception of Turkey (at least to talk that talk but less so walk that walk), but even NATO-member Turkey has been and will very likely try to play both sides rather than veer so far as to be anywhere near as anti-Western as Russia (even less anti-Western if would-be Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can finally get voted out of office in May).  Outside the G-20, there are non-Western states of Iran, Thailand, and Nigeria to round out the top 30 economies in the world, and with the obvious exception of pariah Iran, they do not want to be anti-Western.

So China’s best bet for a new BFF to replace Russia is…Iran?  Meh.  Maybe Turkey?  Doubtful even if possible.  While both Muslim-led countries have been conspicuously and relatively silent on China’s genocide against the Muslim Turkic Uighurs to try not to rock their relationship with China too much, that hardly means Turkey will want to become the new anti-Western power to replace Russia and China is not going to be thrilled about cozying up too much more to an isolated Iran pursuing terrorism and nuclear weapons and even it likely won’t end up supporting Putin’s war against Ukraine dramatically more than it is already, save for another weapons system or two added to the so-so drones it has already supplied.

With Putin’s Russia out of the mix and is led by a different person, then, frankly, China just doesn’t have any good options but to become less antagonistic and more cooperative with the West.  That hardly means that China cannot compete and fight for its interests with the United States, that China must be subservient to the U.S. or cannot pursue its own path and oppose American policies, sometimes sharply and persistently.  It just means that all this talk of two major blocs opposing each other, one led by the U.S. and Europe, the other by Russia and China, that has gripped analysts for years will be a thing of the past.  Sure, China could go it alone among major world powers in pursuing a sharply anti-American path, but then China will suffer from some of the same problems that are bringing Russia down today.

In short, it just doesn’t make sense and isn’t likely for China to become the next Russia in terms of anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, to take up the flagging banner now being dragged by Russia though the mud and blood of its Ukraine war.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has united the U.S. and Europe even more intensely than before, the narcissism of its small differences always being exaggerated (even now, the coverage of the recent Leopard/Abrams tank tussle reminds me of the coverage of Biden’s infrastructure bill debate in the U.S.: the commentariat highlighted the differences, then myopically did not properly appreciate the success of those differences being overcome), so China’s hope of driving a wedge between Europe and America must be fading fast.

3.) When Putin is finally finished—dies, is killed, or deposed—it will be because Russians—the Russian people, the military, and the elites around Putin in the Kremlin—are absolutely exhausted and have learned the hard way that a different course is needed

I have encountered numerous commentaries stating we may very well end up with someone worse than Putin if Putin is taken out, but I don’t buy that.  Maybe temporarily and briefly someone worse ends up in charge, but when the dust settles and leadership stabilizes after Putin is overthrown/replaced, I think it is far likelier we would see someone better than Putin running things than someone worse.  When Putin is gone —and I am saying when because I cannot think of a time in recent centuries when a leader of a major state fails so badly in a major war and just stays in power with no major consequences, and I am convinced Russia has already lost this war, it’s just a matter of how much longer and how many more dead—it will absolutely be a reflection of a national exhaustion with Putinism.  By Putinism, I mean the man himself, his stooges, his system, his war, all of it; Russia will not be looking for more of the same and will certainly not be wanting to double down a failing war that has already cost hundreds of thousands of casualties, including, by Ukraine’s credible estimate, nearly 150,000 killed and wounded*, and who knows how many more ruined in mind and spirit.

There is also the reputational damage.  The nation of Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, and Pajitnov is being led barbarians who have created a barbaric culture that has created a barbaric army that is behaving more like ISIS than a respectable army (this is not meant as some kind of hyperbole: the atrocities happening throughout this war are exhausting to consider and massive in scale, pure barbarity of the terroristic variety—as I discussed with Ukraine’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Oleksandra Matviichuk—atrocities in line with centuries of atrocities committed against Ukraine by Russia, centuries I summarize here) and yet, somehow instead of being truly fearsome, these barbarians are only good at killing innocent civilians and fare far less well against the Ukrainian military.  Thus, the Russian state’s military that so many feared for so long has exposed itself an object of ridicule when it comes to actual military prowess, the Russian Army getting slaughtered to advance mere miles in months while losing far more territory and the overhyped Russian Navy and Air Force largely cowed by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and air defenses, respectively.

Russia is a pathetic state with a pathetic military, pathetically losing a war handily to a former part of its empire that is far weaker and much smaller than it.  Every single day this war drags on is additional humiliation not only for Putin but for all of Russia and all Russians.  This is one of the greatest military upsets in world history, no doubt about it, and it is hard to think of many parallels for a mighty nation to have lost its reputation so rapidly (France in 1940 and Persia in last few years of the 330s BCE are two that come to mind). 

Then there’s the economic costs.  The international sanctions ensuing from Putin’s invasion, while not bringing Russia to its economic knees in a matter of months, are still hurtling Russia’s economy into a prolonged era of pain.  Despite extreme, unsustainable measures taken by the Kremlin to hide and minimize the very real effects of the sanctions (basically, don’t trust Russia’s official numbers), Russia’s economy is, in fact, struggling and will only be degraded more over time.  With more sanctions just imposed and more sure to come, the substantial effects are already widespread in Russia and are shrinking Russia’s role in the global economy, with an energy revolution (one I called for some time ago) rapidly unfolding in Europe and fundamentally altering and diminishing Europe’s relationship with Russia (please feel free to consider the sources above in this paragraph as rebuttal-central to the idea that the sanctions are “not working”).

While regular Russians will feel the economic pain the most, Russia’s elites—including those staffing the Kremlin and in Putin’s inner circles as well as social and economic elites—are also worse off for this war and will hardly stand by Putin forever, especially as things will go from bad to worse; indeed, the process of them despairing and turning on him has already begun, and I have argued this before, with this paragraph of mine worth quoting here:

It is clear that the Russian military—rank-and-file and officers alike—are more aware of Putin’s failures than anyone as they wade through their own blood.  But this war is not just affecting them and regular Russians: the lifestyles of the elites—powered by luxury goods and lavish vacations—are also suffering; nobody in Russia is benefitting from this war and nobody will.  And nobody knows how bad things are going more than the very people surrounding Putin in the Kremlin, not just those closest to Putin, but the layers of bureaucracy underneath them.  When those types of mid-level government officials gave up on the Soviet system, they were happy to dismantle it from within to find some power to grasp onto amidst the system’s collapse and did not work to preserve it but to preserve themselves, one of the fatal five reasons Stephen Kotkin gives for the Soviet Union’s collapse.  Thus, the spawn of the crisis of legitimacy in Moscow that Mikhail Gorbachev faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s is ready to return with a vengeance, this time targeting Putin and his regime.

And as I read the new book (Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921) of another great historian, Antony Beevor, I am relearning how the same happened in Russia 1917 as Tsar Nicholas II’s autocratic regime gasped its last spasmodic breaths in its final months and days.  Russians successfully resisted the powerful tsar and the dreaded Soviet state; they can handle the weaker Putin when they are of a mind to do so.  And today, there is already dissent and resistance, active resistance in Russia that is only going to grow over time, however small or ineffective it seems now.

This is all hitting Russians hard both psychologically and materially and, again, goes a long way to destroying the tacit deal Putin made with Russians to Make Russia Great Again if Russians just let him take their freedom.  Since he is failing miserably to uphold his end of the bargain, since in one year he has undone everything, he has accomplished in two decades of holding power and with the worst yet to come, Putin has outlived his usefulness for Russians even if many or even most do not realize it yet.  But at some point—when Russia suffers more major defeats and Ukraine takes more and more territory back from Russia up to perhaps all of it if it gets to that point or even maybe when Ukraine has driven Russia out fully from its sovereign international recognized territory and Russian counterattacks against the Ukrainian border fail and fail and fail repeatedly (scenarios I laid out several times), sometime around that point or before with some good fortune—enough Russians will realize this Putin product is expired, hazardous, and must be tossed into the garbage, like a piece of rotting food that is stinking up the refrigerator and will make anyone foolish enough to still try to consume to retch it back up the hard way.

Putin is, simply put, a disease not only in the Russian body politic but the global body politic.  The sooner the Russians realize this and do something collectively about it (or the sooner one brave person or a few brave people around Putin do a great patriotic duty, perhaps inspired by growing public unrest), the fewer dead Russians, the less damage to Russia’s economy and reputation, and the sooner Russia can begin building a better future for itself, for all Russians, and for Russia’s long-abused and weary neighbors, most of all Ukraine.

All nations and people’s have breaking points, and Putin is well on the way to pushing Russia and Russians to theirs.

So when this man is finally ejected from a decision-making capacity for the Russian state, yes, I am highly confident Russians will not opt for a Putin wannabe or anything close, not someone to his right who will raise the stakes even further and force even more Russians to keep fighting a losing war, no.  Russians by then will want to envision a future where they become a part of the world again, travel without drawing contempt, buy the things they were used to buying, be with relatives and friends who are alive and not buried in some crater in Ukraine or a cemetery in Russia of living in exile in foreign lands, begin the path to becoming accepted among the nations of the world again not as monsters but as peaceful and friendly good-faith people.  They will not want to continue the war but will want the war to end, as they did during World War I and the Soviet-Afghan War.  They will want to move in the opposite direction into which Putin had dragged them.  They will want to transcend this horror and start anew.

Even if someone like Putin or someone worse came to power immediately after Putin’s fall from grace, that person would not last long.  That person would not command the loyalty of the army or government officials, let alone the people.  Putin was the singular force above all others and there is no one approaching him in terms of that stature, yet his failure will mean those most closely associated with him will be horribly tainted even as not one can truly fill his shoes in his role as it has been up to now.  Likely the only outcome most people will accept, from the insiders to the common folks, will be an end to the war and the killing as well as the repression, something approaching free and fair elections in its place, and the ability to breathe a big sigh of relief, maybe shed a few tears, and begin to move on the only way possible: one step at a time, with the desire for it to be one free step at time.

It won’t be easy—it never is—and yes, freedom was scary in the 1990s, but better to try again after the alternative has produced the current nightmare of a reality that is now consuming all of Russia and ruining a proud nation and a proud people so that they have little left of which to be proud.  Something other than that will probably find it close to impossible to impose its will on the Russian project overall. 

Still, there may be some instability and fighting over what comes next.  There may even be some separatist movements that gain (further) steam within the Russian Federation, given how awful its history of its treatment of minorities is, how minorities are disproportionately being used as cannon fodder in this war (as imperialist and colonialist as anything about this war), and that some minorities are concentrated in particular regions.  And yet, I do not see some prolonged civil war: in the end, it should not take terribly long for a consensus—of the public, the battered military, and the elites who are souring even now on the current regime—on a more peaceful, stable, and cooperative way to engage with the wider world to emerge.  And when that happens, Russia will have to focus on remaking and rebuilding itself, leaving China without any major partner to carry any sort of anti-Western banner.

A lot of people are understandably bearish and quite cynical when it comes to betting on the Russian people, and I get it, especially with Ukrainians.  But history can be our guide here, as I have mentioned; and if the credulous, ignorant, superstitious peasant masses can turn on the tsar in the early twentieth century, if the masses of relatively better-educated Russians choking on Soviet totalitarianism can turn on Soviet communism, then, yes, you better believe Russians today can turn on Putin and the war as a whole, you better believe it is more likely than not that what will finally settle into and run the Kremlin after Putin will be better and not worse.

The Future Looks Better

When you take out the trash, the air is clearer, smells nicer.  Such will be the case for the world with Putin, with a man at the head of a state with a large nuclear arsenal that wields (irresponsibly and often alone) a veto on the United Nations Security Council, a state that is a declining power with a bad addiction to revanchism, and, for the reasons outlined above, the tone and tenor of major-power statecraft will be redefined for the better with his absence.  That doesn’t mean Xi or China can’t and don’t make mistakes—clearly more so presently than before—but China is very likely going adjust in a way that is best for China, and, as argued, that will not be fighting and being confrontational with the West even more than now while alone among major powers in a post-Putin world: it will mean confronting the West less—significantly less—paving the way for a new era of relative cooperation, perhaps at a level never seen before in human history.  The unipolar moment after the end of the Cold War was brief, but this emerging era should be a lot longer than a moment.  And together—especially without the Russian knee-jerk veto at the United Nations Security council—the great powers of the world can accomplish so much more working together than opposing each other.

A quick Taiwan aside: even if China were to invade Taiwan—and that, of course, would be a disaster on so many levels—given the differences between China’s and Russia’s imperial history and the far, far larger scale of Russian revanchism that does not end with Ukraine, whereas China’s (excepting some nearby tiny islands and reefs) would seem to end with Taiwan, I do not think that would doom the world to another dysfunctional era of the type Putin wants to create.  That is not to say war over Taiwan is likely—and I would argue Russia’s performance in Ukraine and the Biden-led West’s response to it makes that far less likely)—just that I would expect more norm-abiding and normalcy from China relative to Putin’s Russia even after such an horrible potential event, given time for the dust to settle.

In conclusion, I will not-so-humbly proclaim that one year after Putin’s massive escalatory invasion of Ukraine, the world is one year closer to a post-Putin world and, therefore, a better world.  Let’s keep up and keep increasing support for Ukraine to ensure Putin falls on his face and falls on his face sooner, as I know Russian leaders doing so in Russian history can often find themselves falling “into the dustbin of history,” a phrase made famous by communist Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky just days before the 1917 Bolshevik October Revolution when he shouted “You are miserable bankrupts.  Your role is played out.  Go where you belong from now on: into the dustbin of history!” at the leader of the rival Menshevik communists, Julius Martov, as he and his crew walked out of a meeting of the Second Congress of Soviets and into irrelevance.  That was the fate of the backwards tsardom, the backwards Soviet Union, and it will be the fate of Putin’s backwards regime, as Putin is doing so much to advance himself and his regime down a similar path: “into the dustbin of history.”

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) February 16, 2023; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; updated March 7, 2023, with an updated Bakhmut campaign map; adapted/updated version published by Small Wars Journal on February 20 titled The 8 Reasons Why Russia’s Much-Hyped Coming Offensive Will Fail Miserably, which was featured by Real Clear Defense on February 21; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

SILVER SPRING—As the phase of the war in Ukraine marked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 24, 2022 incredible escalation of the war beyond long-contested parts of the Donbas and Crimea is closing in on hitting its twelfth month, or one-year-mark, there is much hullaballoo about some sort of coming large-scale Russian offensive, presumably in the coming weeks or months.  But when considering this potential Russian offensive, there are a number of obvious and clear factors that mean whatever may be Russia’s offensive will not succeed, but, instead, will fail spectacularly.  Here they are…

1.) “What Have You Done for Me Lately?”

I think a sports analogy works pretty well here.  If you are big sports better and a team starts its season with 5 wins, and then goes onto lose every game or match for months straight after that, you would not want to bet on that team given the more recent trends in its performance.  It’s the same thing with investing: if a company’s performance has been poor for many quarters in a row, a few quarters of very strong performance before that long, consistent period of poor performance will not be a major factor in the minds of investors, who would avoid investing in a company that had not been performing well lately.

As far as Ukraine, it should be noted that out of nearly twelve months since Russia’s major February 24, 2022, escalation of its 2014-launched war of imperialist, colonialist, and genocidal war of national annihilation against Ukraine, Russia has had roughly just five weeks of major winning, all in the beginning from the end of February until late March; the rest of this period of escalation, Russia has been almost entirely losing.  That’s right, that’s little more than five weeks out of over fifty weeks of Russia winning with over ten straight months of Russia losing, its miniscule gains coming at such terribly Pyrrhic costs that considering them “victories” is a stretch.  So when trying to ascertain how Russia will perform in the coming months, as with many things, recent history is the best indicator especially when compared to more distant history and the recent history tells us not to expect much from Russia’s military as far as winning.

2.) A Tale of Maps

In a directly related point, for more than ten months straight, Russia has experienced a massive net loss of territory that it occupies in Ukraine: nearly all of its gains were made in the first five weeks of Putin’s “special operation,” as he dubs the February 24 escalation of this war, and since then, since the end of March and beginning of April, Russia has lost far, far more territory than the tiny amount of Pyrrhic territorial gains it has made.  If Russia has been unable to make significant gains of territory for more than ten months, why should we expect that to change anytime soon?

3.) Russia’s Insanely High Casualties

From early in March through the present, I’ve noted repeatedly how ridiculously high casualties on the Russian side are, and why I essentially trust Ukraine’s casualty estimates for Russia.  That estimate passed 100,000 killed and wounded* on December 22 and is now over 140,000 killed and wounded*, and that may not even include non-combat deaths, which are considerable in any major conflict and are going to be worse for Russia than other nations because Russia is… Russia (former U.S. Department of Defense civilian logistics expert Trent Telenko puts forth a serious effort to calculate these additional losses and comes up with a rough-yet-plausible 1.33 multiplier of an additional third of combat deaths to be added to the total combat deaths to account for noncombat deaths).  Beyond the massive personnel human losses, there are nearly 3,300 tanks, over 2,300 artillery systems, over 6,500 armored personnel carriers, nearly 300 planes, nearly 300 helicopters, and thousands of other vehicles lost by Russia.  Mainstream analyst estimates of total Russian casualties—killed, wounded, and missing—range from 200,000 to 270,000*.  The more Russia attacks, the more it loses, and in nearly every case since the beginning of April, those losses have come with zero territorial gains, with only a few exceptions yielding pitifully small gains over long periods of time.  Any military that takes casualties like this even over years, let alone months, is going to have serious problems with its performance, and there is no reasonable analysis that expects Russia’s military to perform better—let alone not worse—as a result compared with when it was intact before February 24.  Even if Ukraine’s estimate is significantly exaggerated, Russia’s losses are still obviously catastrophic—unprecedented for decades for any major military over such a short period of time—and far, far worse than Ukraine’s.  Russia’s manpower issues are, therefore, endemic and here to stay, and absurd, desperate measures like recruiting prisoners form within Russia have not and will not bring Russia success.

4.) Russia Already Tried Offensives with a Much Better Military and Still Lost

This next point is deeply related to the last point: Russia‘s military at the beginning of the war and in other early months was in a far better state than it is now: it used many of its best troops and equipment in the initial assaults and in the months after, and, as I have previously discussed, most of its best troops have been killed or wounded or shattered, sometimes their entire units destroyed, leaders and equipment no more.  There is no replacement for experienced troops and leaders.  Even normally-trained recruits would not be replacements for more experienced troops, but Russia is even rushing that training now or is barely even training new recruits, who are often barely equipped (or even have to pay for their own equipment), some even given tsarist-era rifles and tanks taken out of long-term storage that are a 1961 model (T-62) upgrade of a 1958 tank (T-55) or a 1983 upgrade of that 1961 model (T-62M).  That is because, as this war has dragged on, much of Russia’s best equipment has been wiped out, including most of its military truck fleet and at least a very large portion—perhaps most—of its best tanks, among thousands of other pieces of equipment, vehicles, and weapons system, with far, far more Russian equipment confirmed destroyed than Ukrainian.  Russia even lost its best ship in its Black Sea Fleet: the flagship Mosvka (the sinking of which I predicted a few days before it happened).  And as I have noted, Russia is so afraid of Ukraine’s anti-ship missiles and air defenses that both its navy and air force have been cowed largely into irrelevance save for lobbing cruise missiles from a distance.  Russia is even running low on such missiles and (non-expired) artillery rounds.  It is also important to note the examples discussed in this paragraph are not just recent trends but trends that have been ongoing for many months.

Basically, Russia’s military is currently in shambles, and its effort we saw early in the war is by far the best Russia is going to be able to offer in this war (and even that was not very good); it will not be able to attack with better troops and better weapons and better leaders than it had in the early months of the war as those men are dead and that equipment destroyed.  In fact, as time goes on, Russia’s capabilities will only continue to decrease in most significant areas (even when it has increased them in the case of receiving Iranian drones, those drones along with Russia’s cruise missiles are rather impotently not effective against military targets and are instead being used—increasingly ineffectively—to target civilian and civilian infrastructure).  Time is simply not on Russia’s side, despite some thinking to the contrary.

5.) Ukraine’s Military Keeps Getting Better as Russia’s Keeps Getting Worse

Conversely, Ukraine’s military keeps getting better and better—better trained and better equipped, increasingly nimble and adaptable—so that now, just about any Ukrainian military unit lined up against its Russian equivalent will be qualitatively superior.  One major example of this is the newer Western air defenses being sent to Ukraine dramatically reducing the effectiveness of Russian cruise missile and drone attacks.  Another is the very-near-future arrival of advanced Western tanks, with Ukrainians currently training in them.  There is also the case the Ukraine is more and more nearing parity with Russia on the number of artillery shots fired when earlier in the war Russia enjoyed an overwhelming advantage.  Those are just a few of many examples on top of numerous earlier ones that have already had a huge impact on this war, and there will be more and more such capability increases for Ukraine with its allies standing by it steadfastly throughout the war.  And, unlike Russia, Ukraine actually values the lives of its troops and tries to take care of them, planning its battles so as to avoid and its minimize casualties, while the Russians do not take even basic steps to care for their troops and waste so many of their men’s lives needlessly, even cruelly.

6.) Logistics, Logistics, LOGISTICS

As noted, much of Russia’s military truck fleet has been all but destroyed in a longstanding excellent and constantly-improving campaign of precise targeting by the Ukrainian military, with everything from drones to HIMARS.  This campaign been so effective that just by visually-confirmed destroyed equipment, Ukraine is successfully taking out Russian logistics targets by a margin of some ten for every one Ukrainian logistics target hit by Russia.  It is so bad that Russia is throwing in civilian trucks ill-suited to a military environment.

When a military does not have good mechanized truck support for its front-line troops, all manner of crippling issues arise: wounded troops cannot get a casevac (casualty evacuation) in time to save them or keep their wounds from staying minor, resulting in far more dead and incapacitated soldiers; vehicles cannot be fueled promptly in order to keep them useful as opposed to making them stranded easy targets; food and water, let alone ammunition, cannot get to troops quickly; all this means even with many, many troops, it is incredibly difficult if not impossible to advance more than one or few dozen miles with any sense of speed, crushing the ability to even launch any large-scale offensives that actually take large pieces of territory and hold them over time while also crushing the ability to fend off counterattacks, denying the military the ability to quickly move reinforcements to a collapsing part of the line and evacuate men and equipment.  And the trucks and drivers are not being properly cared for, compounding all these issues and adding others (for this discussion on trucks, I have relied heavily on Trent Telenko, the essential person to follow on Twitter regarding logistics in this Ukraine war, as I have noted before.)

But it’s not just the trucks: Russia has been unable to protect vital bridges, rail lines, ammunition depots, communications channels, command centers, and even bases deep inside Russia.  Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s already poor logistical system have been so effective that tactics for Russia resemble Pyrrhic World War I-era, even nineteenth-century-style human-wave attacks, so degraded are their technical capabilities (although Russia’s tactics in general are often an era behind, so in the Russian context the difference may not feel as pronounced).

With a logistical situation like the Russians have, you get results that have a half-year of attacks resulting in single-digit mile gains at tremendous costs (e.g., the Bakhmut area) or practically no gains (just about everywhere else).  It means when defeats come, they come as rapid entire-front collapses as has happened to Russia outside Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy, then Kharkiv, Izyum, Kupiansk, Lyman, and lastly Kherson throughout the course of this war.  This will be repeated, it’s just a matter of where and when, as I have explained before.

7.) Morale

All of this adds up to a situation with miserable morale: it doesn’t take much time for any soldier serving in Ukraine to know that Putin is, to use the technical term, completely full of shit on everything from the reasons why Russia is fighting this war to the performance of Russia’s military in the war; they know people at home are being gaslit as they have been, the gaslighting knowing no bounds.  They literally record videos asking the Russian government to give them proper equipment so they have a fighting chance not to be slaughtered or even just asking to go home, with some specialized units publicly begging to be deployed to do their specialty instead of being used as cannon fodder while other troops are forced into roles for which they have not been properly trained.

There are intercepted calls between Russian troops and their families in which the truth is laid bare, that everything is horrible and hopeless.  Expecting men under such conditions to fight and fight well in a war not in defense or the Motherland but to commit physical, cultural, and national genocide against Ukraine—its people, children, even the very concept of Ukrainian statehood—is a losing bet and Russian history has shown what can happen when leaders mistreat their troops in imperialist wars of aggression while callously treating their men as disposable nothings: I am now reading Antony Beevor’s excellent new account about the massive collapse on the Eastern Front during World War I of the Russian Army in 1917 amidst multiple revolutions back in Russia, when common Russian soldiers turned on their abusive officers killing many of them, surrendered en masse, abandoned their positions, switched sides, and/or became revolutionaries who turned on their political leaders and helped overthrow them, bringing down Russia’s centuries-long Tsardom and eventually getting behind the Bolsheviks to create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union).  We are already seeing a real hate on the part of Russian fighting men for their commanders, some even murdering (“fragging”) their officers.  And there is even a whole unit of Russians—the Russian Legion—in the Ukrainian Army led by Ukrainian officers and composed of Russians who have turned on their government and are fighting for Ukraine against Russian forces in some of the most intense fighting of the war.

Such incidents are examples of the beginning of revolution or at least a revolutionary spirit, and a revolutionary spirit can break out and spread quickly over large masses of men and move them to actual rebellion and revolution: such things can be more contagious than COVID, as history shows us all too well, and Russian’s history of peasant rebellions and revolutions mean that Putin should be watching over his shoulder.  In fact, too few analysts are really considering the possibility of a coup inside Russia, something I have predicted—unless Putin dies (or “dies”)—since early March, for which I have been criticized and even mocked, and yet, the assumption that Russians are some superhumans or such sheep that they will indefinitely allow themselves to be treated as cannon fodder and practically slaves in a losing war of imperial conquest is what strikes me as absurd.

And those Russians will face a Ukrainian foe possessing excellent morale, to boot.

8.) Leadership (or Lack Thereof)

Stalin could make huge mistakes in war, but he showed an ability to adapt, if not quickly, in important enough ways that he could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.  In the Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940—a conflict bearing much resemblance both militarily and thematically to the current Russia-Ukraine war, as I have argued in great detail—it took some two awful months for Stalin to course correct in Finland and quickly bring about a moderate victory after two months of humiliating and costly defeats.  Today, Putin has failed to course correct sufficiently still nearly a year into this war.  Between Putin, his defense minister Sergei Shoigu, Yevgeniy Prigozhin as the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group that is a de facto extension of the Russian military, and the rest of the Russian leadership clown-show in their failing generals and officers—who are taking incredible casualties even among their own ranks—incompetence has been the modus operandi of the Russian military from February 24 through the present, and casualties are actually increasing again and increasing significantly, meaning not only is Russia’s performance not improving, it is actually getting worse.

Specifically, it took almost exactly ten months of war for Russia to hit 100,000 dead and wounded* Russians since February 24 by Ukraine’s estimates, but with the Pyrrhic Bakhmut campaign peaking in terms of Russia’s primitive assaults, 40,000 additional dead and wounded* have been added to the total in about seven-and-a-half weeks: this is more than twice the rate of Russians getting killed and wounded* as the previous ten months of the war, and this can be attributed to terrible leadership from the top—Putin is micromanaging this war in deeply counterproductive ways—down to the bottom in the Russian military, not just Ukraine’s increasing capabilities and skills.  There is far more finger-pointing than problem-solving going on within the Russian high command, and rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic with multiple replacements at the top are having few to no positive effects for Russia.  It is even likely that that number of Russians killed and wounded* since December 22, when the 100,000 mark was hit, will hit 50,000 just a few weeks from now or less, which would mean it will have taken little over two months to reach half of the dead and wounded* that Russia accumulated over the preceding 10 months.

That is the state of the Russian military right now.  This is not a military led by people who know how to win in a major war, this is an army that simply cannot win led by people who simply cannot win.

I don’t blame Ukraine for hyping up this threat: it needs as much Western help as it can get to save as many Ukrainian lives as possible and defeat Russia as soon as possible, and much of Ukraine’s success does come from the historic level of support the West has provided it in such a short time under a coalition led by American President Joe Biden.  The Ukrainians need to keep Western publics and governments engaged and they are doing this masterfully; indeed, many in the West don’t need any encouragement in wanting to support Ukraine.  Thus, it is not realistic that Western support will disappear or lessen anytime soon, and, indeed, we know it will increase, but this is in part to Ukraine’s desperate pleas for help even though Ukraine is clearly not in a desperate situation (though it costs and sacrifices can be tremendously high even if not approaching anywhere near the losses suffered by the Russians).  It’s not much of a sell to say “Hey, this Russian offensive has no chance but we still need a lot of stuff,” so they are making the right pitch, and that supports is absolutely necessary, but as things are going, that support is coming and coming and coming and Ukraine is winning and winning and winning.  If anything, the speculative “Russian offensive” that is now receiving so much airtime and ink is going to far more be a great selling point for Ukraine to receive more aid than it will actually be an offensive that can ever succeed.

Again, that is not to minimize the death and destruction that will result, the lives of brave Ukrainian soldiers and innocent civilians and Russians treated like Mordor orcs that will pay the ultimate price in Ukraine’s righteous war of self-preservation, but as far as any chance Russia has of taking and holding any large parts of Ukrainian territory beyond what it holds now—not that it can even hold that over the long run—this apparently-coming Russian offensive is essentially not any kind of serious threat for the clear, obvious reasons laid out herein.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 14, 2023; updated March 7, 2023, to include new 6-month map of Russia’s Bakhmut-area “progress;” because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

SILVER SPRING—Dear readers, many of you may have seen my latest article from (very early) yesterday, Russia’s Pyrrhic Advances at Soledar Near Bakhmut Setting Up Ukrainian Counteroffensive, Not Russian Victory, the featured image of which was a map collage of two maps from the superb series put together the by the Institute for the Study of War in partnership with Critical Threats: one from the latest available when I was writing, setting the scene for Ukraine’s Donetsk battle lines and zones of control, along with much of the rest of Ukraine’s east, from the data known and estimated for (update) September 7, and another half-a-year later for March 7 (previously January 12, and another map from exactly four months earlier, by the calendar date, for September 12; older map at end of article).  Here is my collage putting the two maps side-by-side, for clarity over time:

If you’re trying to find signs of Russian progress, it ain’t easy.  You almost have to squint (and you can zoom in by clicking on the collage).  Near Bakhmut, at best there are single-digit-mile gains west here and there over the course of these (update) six months (previously four months, more than 120 days), but very few; and Ukraine has taken far more territory in the northeast of the map than Russia taken anywhere else on this map combined.

Looking at this map, you only have to keep in mind four things to have a solid understanding of Russia’s Bakhmut campaign:

• This is Russia’s main effort, its main geographic area of focus
• Russia has suffered horrendous, staggering levels of casualties trying to take Bakhmut and its environs (like Soledar), with many thousands killed and who knows how many wounded
• Bakhmut and its suburbs (including Soledar) are strategically insignificant
• Russia literally has not made any territorial progress anywhere else outside this map, but sure has lost territory to the north and southwest, thousands of square kilometers in each theater

The words of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his minion Yevgeniy Prigozhin (whose private Wagner Group, generally an extension of the Russian military, is leading the Bakhmut/Soledar assault), of the Kremlin and its apparatchiks, are meaningless; they break like “water on rock” against the reality presented by these two maps, much like the Russian troops are breaking like “water on rock” against Ukraine’s defenses day after day, week after week, month after month, dead Russian after dead Russian, dozens of dead Russians after dozens of dead Russians, hundreds of dead Russians after hundreds of dead Russians, thousands of dead Russians after thousands of dead Russians.

The Russians in this Bakhmut campaign have captured virtually nothing of significance and, let’s be clear: Soledar is not significant, a small-town suburb of a small city, which itself is also insignificant other than that Putin has been decided he wants the Russian military to take it at any cost, which these maps make crystal clear it has failed to do.  What is unclear is if Russian troops fully control Soledar or will even be able to hold what they have taken there over time, but, as I argued in my last article that introduced my map collage, it does not really matter much at all, due to its aforementioned strategic insignificance.  Feel free to read that piece in full, which elaborates and sources everything discussed herein.

Also feel free to check out the individual ISW maps that comprise my collage below, clicking on them to zoom if you wish.

See Brian’s previous map collage article from July 14, THE THREE MAPS SHOWING WHY UKRAINE IS WINNING AND RUSSIA IS LOSING (and why is isn’t even close), and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 13, 2023; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; updated March 7, 2023 to include new 6-month map of Russia’s Bakhmut-area “progress;” because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request. See related January 14 article, THE TWO MAPS SHOWING WHY RUSSIA’S BAKHMUT CAMPAIGN IS UNDENIABLY A MISERABLE FAILURE (including Soledar); my initial Twitter thread that inspired this article was shared and praised by none other than Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe (so much appreciation to him and he and his analysis are definitely worth following):

Update January 13: THE man to follow on logistics and equipment in the Ukraine war—Trent Telenko, one of my top 5 accounts to follow on the war—just generously plugged my initial thread…

SILVER SPRING—The eyes of the world are currently on the small town of Soledar, a suburb of the small city of Bakhmut, “every inch of which,” to quote Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s in-person address to the U.S. Congress in late December, “is soaked in blood.”  Russian advances in Soledar, just north of Bakhmut, come in the context of Bakhmut for months being the focus of Russia’s main ground offensives in Ukraine (Russia being reduced, in most other cases with its offensive activity, to primarily lobbing missiles and drones against civilian, non-military targets—civilians themselves and their water and power infrastructure—since Russia’s military remains largely ineffective against Ukraine’s actual military).  Yet the massive Russian effort to take Bakhmut over these recent months has very, very little to show for it, for, as the increasingly famous meme proclaims daily, “Bakhmut Holds” for Ukraine.

Neither Bakhmut nor Soledar are significant in and of themselves; there are multiple far larger, far more strategically important cities a few hours’ drive or not even an hour’s drive away from them, but they have been made important because Russia keeps desperately attacking there and Ukraine is able to keep defending while inflicting terribly high casualties on the attackers, the Ukrainians themselves having to fight fiercely—and, even the Russians admit, bravely—as Soledar and Bakhmut are both reduced to WWII-like landscapes of rubble amidst brutal fighting that is testing the limits of both sides.

While Russia will mostly have to bring in raw conscripts from within Russia to reinforce its positions here—unless it wants to weaken other positions and invite other Ukrainian counteroffensives—Ukraine is fighting on home turf and is not reinforcing with barely-trained, barely-equipped mobilized like the Russians but with well-motivated soldiers who have been training for some time or even veterans, often equipped with newer Western weapons and equipment far superior to what their Russian counterparts field, which I have repeatedly noted before and has been the case for most of the war.  Reinforcing and resupplying Bakhmut and Soledar positions, then, is a far easier proposition for Ukraine than for Russia, and the better-equipped, better-organized, better-supplied, better-trained, better-cared-for Ukrainian soldiers are also suffering far less from things like trench foot along with hypothermia and the other harsh effects of winter, additional losses that are hard to track but are certainly being sustained.

Throughout its Bakhmut campaign, Russia has been throwing hastily-mobilized, often poorly-equipped troops in what seem sometimes to be human-wave style attacks against Ukraine in Bakhmut and its small suburbs, hoping to overwhelm the Ukrainian defenders with quantity over quality, and not only has it not worked well, the Russian casualties have been staggering.

Earlier, there were more of the “normal” newly-mobilized going into the actual Russian Army and the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist militias involved, but more recently, the private Wagner Group has taken the lead in the Bakhmut area.  Wagner acts as an extension of the Russian military and is led by close Putin ally Yevgeniy Prigozhin—known as “Putin’s chef”—who for many years has been a point man for Russian President Vladimir Putin on everything from pro-Trump anti-Clinton election interference against the U.S., a Russian mercenary attack against U.S. and local-American-allied forces in Syria, and, today, Russia’s “grand” campaign for the tiny city of Bakhmut.

While the 2016 election interference succeeded wildly beyond what could have been expected, on the military side of things, the attack on American and local-U.S.-allied forces in Syria ended in disaster, which is the same result, thus far, for Prigozhin’s military efforts in Bakhmut.  Within the Wager forces, there are some 10,000 “regular” Wagner mercenaries leading some 40,000 recruits from the Russian prison system, prisoners convicted of all sorts of (sometimes horrible) crimes being used in quite cruel and inhumane ways that result in horrific casualties on the Russian side while achieving very little.  Out of this Wagnerian/convict force, recently there have been over 14,000 casualties: over 10,000 wounded, over 4,100 killed, with over 1,000 killed in the very short time “between late November and early December,” an overall casualty percentage approaching (now probably in excess of) thirty-percent

Stupidly yet predictably for Russia, even specially-trained Russian Army forces—like these artillerists begging not to be used as mere cannon fodder—are being used as mere cannon fodder.  As of today, Ukraine estimates that over 113,000 Russian military personnel have been killed and wounded* in the war since February 24, an official estimate I have long argued is worth taking seriously.

On Pyrrhus and “Pyrrhic Victory”

With these attacks by Russia and the level of their costs for Russia, the word “Pyrrhic” comes to mind, which you often hear in the phrase “Pyrrhic victory”—defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a victory that is not worth winning because the winner has suffered or lost so much in winning it”—but I will not use that term because assigning the word “victory” to Russia’s madness in Soledar is premature; we can settle for “Pyrrhic advances” here, but the word “Pyrrhic” and common phrase “Pyrrhic victory” deserve some discussion.

The term is actually from a person’s name, a famous general from antiquity, Pyrrhus of Epirus (319-272 BCE), who, according to Plutarch, was held by Rome’s later great foe Hannibal Barca of Carthage (247-c. 183-181 BCE) to be the greatest general in history.  Already in his time, Pyrrhus was an incredibly famous Greek general at a time when famous generals were sometimes found to be taking up wars upon request from other parties, and Pyrrhus was in intense demand in his day.  One of these requests for aid he accepted involved the Greek state of Tarentum in southern Italy in 281 (the Greeks had colonized southern Italy centuries ago).  Tarentum had found its supremacy in Southern Italy challenged by a rising power from central Italy: the Roman Republic, and the Tarentines requested aid from their fellow Greek, King Pyrrhus, just a short sail from Epirus (western Greece) across to Italy’s boot, on which Tarentum lay.

In the first clash between Rome against a mainland Greek power from the Mediterranean’s east, Pyrrhus fought two major battles against the Romans in 280 at Heraclea (Rome’s first, and disastrous, encounter with elephants in battle) and 279 at Asculum, and both seem to have been devastating Roman defeats, with Pyrrhus coming to “within two days’ march of Rome itself” (admittedly with formidable walls for defense, but still…).  Yet Pyrrhus was distraught, in particular, after his second victory:

The two sides disengaged, and Pyrrhus is said to have remarked to someone who was congratulating him:  “One more victory like that over the Romans and we shall be completely undone.”  For by then he had lost a large part of the army he came with, and almost all his Friends and generals, who were irreplaceable.  He could also see that, while the enthusiasm of his allies in Italy was waning, the Roman army was quickly and easily brought back up to strength—it was as though there were a spring that flowed straight from their home into their camp—and so far from being demoralized by their defeats, the resentment they felt towards the enemy gave them extra strength and determination (Plutarch, Parallel Lives,The Life of Pyrrhus 21).

Rome was saved at that moment by a combination of its own dogged determination but also by Pyrrhus being enticed to go to Sicily to fight on behalf of Greek cities there against Carthage (saved not likely existentially—even if that may not have been obvious at the time for the Romans—but from winning, at that time, supremacy in southern Italy, but that, in turn, could have substantially altered the trajectory of Roman and world history, especially with the Punic Wars against Carthage on the horizon, which would begin in 264 BCE over in Sicily).

Russia’s Pointless, Pyrrhic Bakhmut Campaign

But that above long quote from the ancient Greek historian Plutarch is quite relevant to the current situation in Ukraine: Pyrrhus, sustaining heavy losses even in his victories (exactly where we get the term “Pyrrhic victory”), could not easily replace the high-quality veterans and leaders he knew well and had brought over the sea with him from Greece, while Rome, fighting in Italy on its home turf, could replace its losses and reinforce far faster with men highly motivated to defend their homes, their losses only motivating them further.  This dynamic is very much true for Russia fighting its imperialist war against Ukrainians in Ukraine, and it is more than fair to apply the adjective “Pyrrhic” to anything resembling a Russian victory (Mariupol) or advance (now in Soledar) after the earliest days of this current Russian escalation in Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022 (I say escalation because Putin actually started the war in 2014).

In the age of mechanized war and in light of Ukraine’s sweeping, historic counteroffensives breaking through Russian lines throughout 2022, the issue that should most concern analysts and journalists is not whether Russia has or has not or to what extent has taken Soledar, but to what degree Russian forces have destroyed themselves and thinned themselves out during these offensives and to what extent that has opened up Russia to a new Ukrainian counteroffensive.  Given the incredible and sustained nature of Russian losses in the Bakhmut region, it would seem very likely that Russia is leaving itself very vulnerable to a Ukrainian counterattack, if not right at Soledar or Bakhmut or nearby, then somewhere else on the front lines neglected by Russia with all the disproportionate attention it has been giving the Bakhmut sector (remember, the major Kharkiv and Izyum/Kupiansk/Lyman counteroffensives occurred when Russia was focused mainly on Kherson in addition to Bakhmut—the irrational Russian focus on Bakhmut has been going on for months—with the main Kherson counteroffensive coming after the shock of Russia’s catastrophic territorial losses of thousands of square kilometers on the Kharkiv and Izyum/Kupiansk/Lyman fronts). As I noted in my last major Ukraine piece, the war has settled into two main phases: 1.) major Ukrainian counteroffensives and 2.) in between those counteroffensives, while Ukraine bides its time and prepares for its new counterattacks as it keeps inflicting major casualties on Russia while Russia keeps engaging in mostly ineffective and unproductive yet costly assaults. Guess where Bakhmut and Soledar fit in there…

In the end, it is pathetic if it took this much effort and dead Russians for the Russians to take Soledar.  And, if the Russians have not taken it, well, that is even more pathetic.  Almost as pathetic of months of not being able to take Bakhmut.  Almost as pathetic, in turn, as almost ten months of Russia losing.

And even if the Russians somehow took Bakhmut it would not be any major accomplishment; that the Russians have lost thousands of troops failing, thus far, to take it—again, regardless of if they take it and however briefly hold it in the future—is truly emblematic of the wretched capabilities and leadership of the Russian military.  Maybe that that is why Putin has, yet again (it is easy to lose track), shuffled the general running the war, Sergey Surovikin, to be under a new overall commander: Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian Genera Staff, two men who seem only able to achieve the casualty levels of Pyrrhus without his cunning or victories…

Pyrrhus As a Warming to Putin and Prigozhin

And to return to Pyrrhus, he would end up losing in both Sicily and in his return to Italy in 275 BCE, at the Battle of Beneventum (Maleventum then, but later renamed in part to honor Rome’s victory), losing the war overall.  Just a few years later, in 272, he found himself drawn into a civil war in the mainland-Greek city-state of Argos inside the city of Argos itself, the combat devolving into messy fighting in narrow streets.  With one of his elephants wounded and blocking his and his forces’ exit from the city, Pyrrhus met with this inglorious end:

Seeing the storm and surge raging around him, Pyrrhus took off the diadem which distinguished his helmet, handed it to one of his Companions, and then gave his horse its head and charged at his pursuers. As he engaged them, he took a spear in the chest. The wound was not fatal or even serious, though it pierced his breastplate, but Pyrrhus turned against the man who had struck him. Now, this man was an Argive of no social standing, the son of a poor old woman, who was watching the affray from the rooftops along with all the other women. When she saw that her son was fighting Pyrrhus, she was terrified for him, and she picked up a roof-tile with both hands and threw it at Pyrrhus. It struck him on the back of the head, just below the helmet, and crushed the vertebrae at the base of his neck. His vision blurred, his hands dropped the reins, and he slid from his horse and fell to the ground by the tomb of Licymnius. (Plutarch, Parallel Lives,Pyrrhus 34).

Pyrrhus sought to expand the influence and size of his realm, often using his military more like a private military company (PMC) than a national army.   Thus, both Putin and Prigozhin could learn from Pyrrhus’s Pyrrhic victories that even the great may fall, and not only fall suddenly, but quite pathetically (they may also yet learn to fear the wrath of soldiers’ mothers…).

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!