(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).

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) 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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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) December 26, 2022; *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; adapted and updated excerpts of this article were published by Small Wars Journal on January 16, 2023, titled The Depth and Breadth of Russia’s Losing, on January 10, 2023, titled Russia’s Shrinking and Deteriorating Arsenal Meets Ukraine’s Growing and Improving Air Defenses, on February 1, 2023, titled Russia’s Losing a Constant as Its Ukraine War Settles into Predictable Alternating Phases, and on February 9, 2023, titled Putin’s War of Self-Destruction, Zelensky’s (and Biden’s) War of Exceeding Expectations; 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 barbaric exponential escalation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s years-long imperialist and colonialist war against Ukraine enters its eleventh month—people keep forgetting this war was really started by Russia in 2014 and has been fought by Russia and its separatist Donbas allies ever since—now is a good time to take stock of where we were, where we have been, and where we are going when it comes to this conflict.

Putin’s War of Mistakes, Zelensky’s (and Biden’s) War of Exceeding Expectations

Let’s be clear about one thing: Ukraine’s resilient President Volodymyr Zelensky, by the odds and by Russian design, should now be in exile, in prison, or in the ground.  That he is not is a testament, first and foremost, to himself and his team, his people and his country, and then to his and Ukraine’s friends and allies around the world, first and foremost among them the United States and its President Joe Biden.  And on December 21, the two wartime leaders finally met for the first time since Putin’s massive escalation beginning February 24, and met here in Washington at the White House before Zelensky’s historic address to a special joint-session of Congress.

Russia, on paper the second most powerful military power in the world, should have taken Kyiv and much of the rest of Ukraine rather quickly; by the odds and by the takes of most pundits at the time, Ukraine should have lost the war months ago, Ukraine’s military and leadership crushed (and clearly Russia hubristically expected and planned on this, too, and Putin certainly did not expect the unified and robust support of a West and NATO led by Biden).  At best, it was thought Ukraine might to be able to offer some level of heroic and persistent nationalist guerilla insurgency against Russian occupiers much like the case when Ukrainian anti-Soviet partisans kept fighting from the mid-1940s into the mid-1950s in the wake of World War II and the Soviet Union’s reimposition of unwanted Soviet rule over Ukraine after Hitler’s German Army’s temporary occupation and misrule. 

Even today, the official Russian “history” is that there were no genuine Ukrainian nationalists with good reasons to want to overthrow Soviet rule: there were only Nazi-aligned “Banderites” (the complicated fascist rebel Stepan Bandera was the most prominent of Ukrainian resistance leaders, hence the term).  Putin, as I have noted previously, has very much doubled down on this false narrative and extended it laughably to the conflict today, in which he is constantly calling for “denazification” against the “banderites” and “(neo-)Nazis,” Putin’s term for (Jewish!) Zelensky and his government and for all Ukrainians (the vast majority) who stand against Russia and support Zelensky and the war for national liberation from Russian occupation and influence.  As I have also previously discussed, much like Stalinist delusions about Finland during the Soviet Union’s disastrous yet ultimately somewhat victorious war against Finland in 1939-1940, the blind assumptions about “fascists” in Ukraine today were deeply enmeshed in Russian war planning and are a major factor in Russia’s disastrous, losing performance in Russia’s current war.

Before Putin’s escalation, he and Russia were viewed as strong.  Zelensky, meanwhile, had seen his initially very high popularity falter and seemed hapless to achieve any breakthroughs in the stalemate in Ukraine’s east with Russia and Ukrainian separatist backed by Russia.  And Biden seemed headed for a “red wave” midterm loss and at least appeared weak on the international stage in the wake of an optically disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal (I have earlier argued that the reality of that withdrawal was more impressive that the most salient visuals, but few saw or see it that way).

Yet, in part because of the aforementioned and many other ridiculous mistakes on the part of Russia and at least as much in part because of the leadership of Zelensky and Biden, instead of Russia’s military crushing Ukraine, Ukraine has crushed Russia’s military.  Zelensky was well-known—and sometimes dismissed—as a (literal) comedian before becoming president, but it is now Putin who is viewed accurately as a belittled clown while Zelensky has become a titan of a folk hero both in Ukraine and internationally, already cementing his place in history as a far greater man than Putin.  Now, it is Biden who is seen as strong on the international stage (and having helped staved off a midterms disaster domestically) and Putin who is greatly diminished, the latter losing sway among traditional Central Asian allies (former vassals), even taking disrespect to his face at international forums with their leaders.

Just this past Wednesday, Zelensky gave the most important address by a foreign leader to a joint-session of Congress since Winston Churchill came to address a joint U.S. Congress late in December, 1941, after Imperial Japan’s attack against the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor and against other U.S. bases in the Pacific.  Like Churchill (and leaving aside his blatant, gross, racist imperialism, charges of any similar nature being inapplicable to the Ukrainian president), Zelensky has come to rally U.S. public and lawmaker opinion against a looming fascist threat that targets not just nations but democracy and freedom itself.

What Has Been Going on Since My Last Major Ukraine Piece?  Pretty Much What I Wrote Then, But the New Context Matters and Deserves Elaboration

It has been some time since I have put out a major analysis on the Ukraine-Russia war because there is not a whole lot of new stuff to chew on: yes, Winter is Coming (and I did put together shorter analysis noting winter will hurt the Russian military far more than the Ukrainian military, giving Ukraine another distinct advantage in the winter months), but overall, we are seeing two main phases being repeated, exhibiting dynamics that I have discussed in great detail before and that are overlapping at times to various degrees.

The inputs can be adjusted—a wave of ill-trained, ill-led, and ill-equipped (and thus oft-doomed) recently-mobilized Russian troops here, additional HIMARS units or some new weapon for Ukraine (and occasionally for Russia when it comes to drones from Iran, drones that have apparently been somewhat defective) there, but the dynamics in their main essence remain unchanged.  And those dynamics nearly all operate—almost mathematically—in a significant net favor for Ukraine, and keep moving along the track of Russia losing more strength, capability, and territory while Ukraine gains more strength, capability, and territory.  We can see some milestones here and there that stand out or portend certain things, but the mechanics are fairly set.

Since Russia’s rapid collapses on three fronts outside Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy from the end of March through the first week of April, there has been a lot of repetition, but the general pattern is clear:

Phase A:

• After massive, rapid victories by Ukraine, Ukraine takes time to rest, refit, redeploy, and figure out where and when and how to strike next
• As this is happening, Ukraine is simultaneously using advanced Western-supplied weapons and daring raids to target Russian positions on the front lines and deep behind them to soften up the Russian positions and inflict serious casualties, which also helps to limit its own casualties as Ukraine carefully advances until an opportunity for a breakthrough presents itself (as I termed it, “Ukrainian prudence meets Russian limitations”)
• Concurrent to all this, Russia keeps up ineffective, essentially suicidal assaults that make little to no progress (and often little to no sense, hello Bakhmut!) until, lo and behold…

Phase B: The next big breakthrough(s) for Ukraine come(s) and the cycle resets.

The major changes that occur here are that Russia significantly increases it losses in men, territory, and matériel (depleting Russian manpower, logistics bases, ammunition stocks, and Russia’s best weapons systems) while Ukraine gains that same territory Russia loses while receiving more advanced—and new and increasingly superior—weapons systems from its Western allies, significantly increasing its capabilities over time and its overall comparative, qualitative advantages over Russia.

Specifically, the way this has played out has been for Russia to lose catastrophically on multiple fronts, first outside Kharkiv; then in Izyum, Kupiansk, and Lyman; then in Kherson.  Before, during, and after these successful counterattacks, Ukraine has been able to sink the Russian Navy Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, the Moskva (which I seem to have been the only person to predict in an article that Ukraine would sink, just days before it happened) and conduct other attacks on the Russian Navy without even really having a navy of its own.  Ukraine has even shown that it can strike major Russian bases and logistics hubs in Crimea (including the Crimean/Kerch Strait Bridge in October, which I predicted would happen all the way back in April) and other parts of Russian-occupied Ukraine.

But Ukraine has also demonstrated it can attack several major bases far into Russia, including, rather spectacularly, the Dyagilevo base in Ryazan—just some 100 miles from Moscow—on December 5 and another base deep inside Russia, the Engels Air Base, the same day; another Ukrainian strike the following day was against Russian fuel tankers near an air field in Kursk, Russia; and the Engels base was just hit by Ukraine again yesterday even as I was writing this!  All these strikes in Russian territory were carried out not with Western-supplied weapons but with some of Ukraine’s own Soviet-era drones that it had repurposed and upgraded: Ukraine continues to surprise and impress (there is also not unreasonable speculation that Ukraine may be behind some dramatic accidents throughout Russia, especially those concerning key utilities).

Conversely, Russia only continues to be predictable and unimpressive.  It has been able to reinforce itself, yes, but primarily with the pathetic newly mobilized Russians, sometimes-defective Iranian-made drones—those drones terrorizing Ukrainian civilians but having little effect on the battlefield—and, increasingly, mercenaries from Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s private Wagner Group (a de facto extension of the Russian military), which is increasingly recruiting desperate men from Russian (and even Central African Republic) prisons; in its military efforts—now particularly focused on Bakhmut—Wagner is thus far failing miserably, even with rockets and missiles it has purchased recently (and embarrassingly) from North Korea.

Russia’s Shrinking and Deteriorating Arsenal Meets Ukraine’s Growing and Improving Air Defenses

Which brings us to another major point: Russia may very well be running out of both its modern long-range missiles—especially its Kalibr cruise missiles and Iskander missiles—and artillery rounds, forcing Russia to use degraded munitions from half-a-century ago and well-past their expiration date.  In its desperation, it seems Russia is also getting artillery ammunition from pariah North Korea and is trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to get missiles from Iran (to add to Russia’s current humiliation, not that long ago, Iran and North Korea were under Moscow’s sphere of influence as a partial vassal and a supplicant client state, respectively, an indication of how low Putin has dragged Russia).

To focus more on the issue of these missiles and drones, in the face of being unable to generate any serious lasting major advances for nine months even while Ukraine has undertaken multiple major wildly successful counterattacks on multiple fronts, Russia has resorted in recent months to devoting much of its offensive operations to using these long-range missiles and drones to target civilians in major cities along with their vital power and water infrastructure in the midst of the harsh Ukrainian winter (“offensive” being doubly appropriate here as these attacks are clearly war crimes).  Unable to properly target the Ukrainian military or defeat it on the battlefield, the inferior Russian military instead does what it can do best: target often defenseless civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Except Ukrainian cities and facilities are increasingly not defenseless.  The supposedly mighty Russian Air Force has been cowed and is largely absent and not in a terribly dissimilar way to how I correctly predicted the Russian Navy would be cowed and largely absent, just with air defenses instead of anti-ship missiles, so for longer-range strikes, that is currently leaving Russia with the options of long-range attack drones (it does not have much of its own technology here, so it is getting many of them from Iran, as noted) and missiles.

But over time, the effectiveness of these Russian missile and drone attacks has been drastically decreasing: Ukraine’s frantic calls for more, and better, air defenses have been answered system by system, round by round, contributing country by contributing country, most recently with a pledge by the U.S. to transfer one of its premier missile defense systems, the longer-range Patriot missile system, to Ukraine and to train Ukrainians to use it (this is on top of an earlier delivery in early November of the very same missile defense systems the U.S. uses to protect Washington, DC: the highly-effective NASAMS, part of the reason for the dramatic increase in the effectiveness of Ukraine’s air defenses).  Yet even before this recent announced addition to Ukraine’s air defenses, the decline in effectiveness of long-range Russian attacks has been pretty stark (a sampling below):

• The October 10 first major missile and/or drone attack in these new rounds of long-range attacks involved 84 Russian cruise missiles, of which 43 were intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses (over 51%), and 24 drones, of which 13 were shot down (over 54%)
• Let’s jump ahead to Russian strikes on November 15, after the delivery of the U.S. NASAMS to Kyiv: of 96 Russian missiles fired, 77 were shot down (over 80%)
• On December 5, 60 out of 70 Russian missiles were intercepted (almost 86%)…
• …and 60 out of 76 on December 16 (almost 79%, lower than several previous averages, but including 37 out of 40 in the Kyiv area, or 92.5% there)…
• …and 30 of 35 Iranian Shahed drones on December 19 (almost 86%)

Keep in mind: both the drones and the missiles are from finite, dwindling stockpiles, and Ukrainian air defenses are only growing in quantity and quality, with a U.S. Patriot missile battery on the way and likely more soon after, along with more air defenses from other nations.  That will likely put the intercept rate for Ukraine against Russian long-range air attacks at well over 90%, making such attacks by Russia expensive and wasteful at the same time.

As I have noted before, in a military sense, the main accomplishment of Russian missile and drone strikes of the past few months has been to expose the impotence of Putin and Russia for all to see.

The Depth and Breadth of Russia’s Losing

That’s not very good or (cost-)effective for Russia, not at all, and also remember that this is one of the few cards Russia has left up its sleeve, with its best troops and equipment mostly destroyed and its navy and air force mostly sidelined.  Masses of brand new and badly outfitted troops led by the same callous and careless fools who led better forces to disaster and destruction (or sometimes now led by their successors who are faring little if at all better) will not change these stark facts.  These troops will be supported by and will operate inferior equipment and will have little air or naval support because of Ukrainian anti-ship and anti-air defenses.  And Russia is expending its quantities of these missiles and drones against non-military targets in such a way they there will be little left to support Russian forces in Ukraine when fighting intensifies later.

So, no matter how you look at it, things are going to just keep getting worse for Russia and it will continue to sustain massive casualties and equipment losses while gaining nothing Ukraine won’t be able to take back relatively quickly with improving forces and equipment.

Some fools have opined that the U.S. and Europe are “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”  In reality, Ukraine is fighting Russia to the last Russian with U.S. and European help.

And, very tellingly, there have been no major Russian advances since March, the first full month of the war.  That kind of tells you everything you need to know: one month of major Russian advances, and nine months of Ukraine pounding Russian positions or pounding Russian positions while pushing them far back.  The main reason why?  Because Russia CAN’T: it simply does not have the capability to carry out large offensives that succeed, let alone then hold any new significant amounts of territory successfully from counterattacks; throughout the war, Russia has not even been able to hold much of the territory it gained since February 24.  And even where Russia has held and is holding territory, there have been and are effective resistance and guerrilla movements.  Between partisans, Ukrainian intelligence, and Ukraine’s long-range precision weapons, there is nowhere safe in Ukraine for the Russian occupiers.

All this just means Russia cannot win.  And will lose (as I have argued since early March and throughout the ensuing months).  Sure, it is theoretically possible Western support could be greatly diminished if, say, Trump ejects Joe Biden from the White House Grover Cleveland-style, but I doubt strongly that this will actually happen.  And for the most part, Europe has not wavered even in the face of a historic energy crisis, despite Putin’s efforts (and Biden’s leadership in holding Europe together cannot be understated here).  Far more likely is that Western support will keep coming (indeed, Biden just had Congress pass an amazing nearly $45 billion in aid for Ukraine, bringing the total U.S. aid given to Ukraine since February 24 to a historic $110 billion) and Ukraine will be able to eject Russia fully from its territory (unless Russians tire of this nonsense and losing and eject the loser Putin from the Kremlin first).  And it is entirely possible, I would argue even likely, that Ukraine can accomplish this before the end of 2023 (I have earlier laid out how a total Ukrainian victory would likely unfold, if you want to delve more into that topic…).

Obviously, these are not even exchanges in terms of what each side is gaining and losing: Iranian drones with high rates of being faulty do not equal the latest new toy from the U.S. for Ukraine in the form of a Patriot missile air defense battery.  And while Ukraine’s losses are not insignificant even if they are not known publicly with specificity, Russia’s losses are mind-blowing and unprecedented for any major power over any comparable period of time in the history of modern warfare over the past half-century and then some: by Ukraine’s estimate (which I have noted should be treated as quite credible), over 102,000 killed and wounded* so far (passing the 100,000-killed-and-wounded* milestone as of December 22), with nearly 18,000—or close to one-fifth of all Russian casualties—being inflicted in those furious first five weeks of the war through late February and all of March and much of the assault on the gates to Kyiv, and well over 80,000—some four-fifths—of these casualties* coming in the nearly nine-months since the beginning of April.

The losses also include:

• Over 3,000 tanks
• Over 6,000 armored personnel-carriers
• Nearly 2,000 artillery pieces
• 550 planes and helicopters
• Collectively thousands of other vehicles, drones, ships, and other pieces of equipment

What was essentially the Russian military prior to February 24 has, in large part, been destroyed: for the near and even medium-term future, these are not recoverable losses in men and equipment, in experience and training: raw recruits cannot be thought of as replacements for elite soldiers and their units, nor decades-old tanks as replacements for Russia’s newest tanks.  Even if Ukraine’s estimates end up being off, the losses for Russia are still obviously incredible.

The Current State of the War (that Russia Is Losing and Will Lose)

As my existing work already well explains the aforementioned dynamics and phases in detail, and that the current Ukrainian advances in the south and the east, though paused, will quite likely be the ones to eject Russia out of Ukraine, I have not felt a great need for some time to produce a major new analytical piece on the current situation in Ukraine.  But that very absence of the need for any new sweeping analysis is telling in and of itself and merits some discussion, so that has inspired the piece you are reading now along with the requests of many a faithful reader.

Right now, we are in one of those phases in which Ukraine is poking and testing Russia while defending stalwartly against costly but ineffective Russian attacks.  Even though this is the less intense of the two major phases, Russia is still taking huge losses in equipment and men—both from its unproductive assaults and from precision Ukrainian strikes—if not territory, but those territorial losses will be added into the mix as the other losses intensify when the next of the alternating phases opens with whatever will be the next major Ukrainian offensive or offensives.

And if Russia is stupid enough to try to reopen a front near Kyiv, there is no chance it will fare much better now than in the opening days of the war, when Russia threw its best troops and equipment at Kyiv against far-less-well-equipped and far-less-experienced Ukrainian troops.  Indeed, any Kyiv assault from Russia would either be a horribly reckless and wasteful feint or an even more horribly reckless and wasteful genuine assault.

As to the question of Belarus joining in such madness, if Belarus’s hapless, buffoonish President Alexander Lukashenko is dumb enough to do anything other than bluff and host Russian forces but tries to actually invade Ukraine with Belarusian troops, he will likely see the implosion of his regime.  After all, Lukashenko has had a precarious grip on power since a profound and massive protest movement erupted against him in Belarus in 2020-2021 when he stole an election from the opposition and persecuted his opposition.  Unlike Putin, he is deeply unpopular in his own country and was so even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is also deeply unpopular with Belarusians, some even sabotaging at great personal risk Russian efforts to supply its military in Ukraine from Belarus, other Belarusians—hundreds—even going farther and volunteering to fight in Ukraine against Russia, which has used Belarus as a staging area for its invasion.  Large swathes of both the Belarusian people and military would likely refuse to fight or rise up at the same time rather than stand by quietly or face a clearly well-trained-and-equipped and highly motivated Ukrainian military, respectively.  Belarusian forces would also be facing off against far more experiences Ukrainian forces and have been able to see how badly Russian forces have fared, with thousands of wounded Russians filling Belarusian hospitals and dead Russian bodies moving into and through Belarus.

And it would be fairly easy for Ukraine to arm Belarusian rebels if Belarus invades (as noted, Ukraine is already arming some to fight with it against Russia), which would only be fair game at that point.  And while it would be problematic for Western nations to directly arm Belarusian rebels, they can sidestep that issue if they give extra weapons to Ukraine and then Ukraine arms them.  

Lukashenko knows all this, which is why even Putin’s pseudo-BFF he has staunchly resisted actually sending any of his troops into Ukraine: he knows that would likely be the death knell for his regime and possibly even his own death, and Russian forces based in Belarus could likely be easily ejected by rebel or defecting Belarusian units.  All of which is very unlikely as it is, again, very unlikely Lukashenko will have his small army invade Ukraine with Russia.

Thus, a heavily-sanctioned Russia stands pretty much alone and losing ground, with only rogue and pariah regimes offering tepid support, and Ukraine advances backed by many of the most powerful countries in the world.  Against this backdrop, the dynamics on the ground in this war have been lopsided for most of the war so far against Russia, this trend only increasing over time.  It is Ukraine setting the pace and tone of the combat, and Ukraine that will choose when and where to successfully strike.  Even now, it is prepping and inflicting massive casualties on the front line in places like Bakhmut, behind the front lines with HIMARS, M777s, and other precision distance weapons, and even striking deep inside Russia repeatedly just this month.  Ukraine’s battlefield achievements grow more impressive as Russia’s behaviors grow more pathetic and desperate, and the writing is on the wall.  Freedom-loving people around the world can be sure there will be more massive breakthroughs coming for Ukraine and Ukraine will do plenty of damage to Russia in the run-up phase, which we are seeing now.  And there are no indications to seriously think that Russia will win or Ukraine will lose. In fact, Ukraine is as good at winning as Russia is good at losing, which is very, very good, indeed.

2023 is going to really, really suck for Putin and Russians.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) October 6, 2022; *UPDATED October 8, 2022 to reflect that my earlier April 24 Crimea article that predicted then the destruction of the Crimean Kerch/Strait Bridge by Ukraine, which began today; discussed by SOF News October 30; updated version published by Small Wars Journal on October 12 as Impotent Missile Strikes Can’t Reverse Russia’s Losing as Beginning of the End of the War Unfolds; see ensuing article from December 26 Russia-Ukraine War Settles into Predictable Alternating Phases, But Russia’s Losing Remains Constant and other related articles from September 27 Why Putin Has Doomed Himself with His Ukraine Fiasco and September 10 Russian Army Collapses—and Revolution—Near-Certain as Russia Loses War: When/Where Harder to Predict; also, since the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on October 7 to Ukrainian activist Oleksandra Matviichuk and her organization the Center for Civil Liberties, listen to my April podcast with her here discussing war, Russian war crimes, human rights, and democracy in Ukraine.

SILVER SPRING—Since early march, I have been bullish—very bullish—on Ukraine’s prospects for victory, but even I am continually thrilled and elated at how often Ukraine surprises me by exceeding even my high expectations.  And, after the latest events, it is clear to me now that in many ways, we are seeing the beginning of the end of the war, at least in terms of major ground combat operations in Ukraine not on the border with Russia.  I don’t mean to imply that this is soon, but that these current operations will lead to and include both the climax and most of the denouement, even if it takes months, half a year, or longer.

How I Got to Here

Back in April, after Russia had collapsed quickly on the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy fronts, I realized that if (when, for me) Ukraine could retake Kherson City and the rest of the west bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast, that would mean that the bulk of Russian forces would have been exhausted, weakened, damaged, or even destroyed, with little to stop for long a determined Ukrainian advance along the additional sixty-ish miles to the northern border of Crimea with Kherson Oblast.

While in April I was focused on the eventual coming of Crimea into play (*UPDATE October 8: including how Ukraine would very likely take out the Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge)—itself inspired by my piece analyzing how anti-ship missiles would soon sideline or even destroy the Russian Navy (and in which I was probably the only person, at least in English, to predict the sinking of the Moskva in an article before it happened)—by late July, with Russia having stalled in a spectacularly pathetic fashion, I was focused on explaining why Ukraine will win and then, in early August, the logical follow up:how Ukraine will win.

At the time, Russia had already begun moving significant numbers of troops—including some of its remaining better-quality troops and equipment that hadn’t yet been destroyed or routed—from the eastern theater to the southern theater, from the Donbas line running through the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts, mainly to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts, neither of which were fully under Kremlin control (indeed, the regional capital city of Zaporizhzhia Oblast was and still is not under Russian control).

I noted then that this was taking troops from more easily defended terrain and more entrenched positions and moving them to less defensible terrain and less dug-in positions.  Furthermore, just as strikes with advanced recently supplied precision Western weapons—designed specifically in years past to counter the very weapons Russia was deploying against Ukraine—had decimated Russian logistics, ammunition dumps, command posts and headquarters, and communications on the Donbas front (both on the front line and well-behind the front in the Russian rear) to the point that Russia had lost all major offensive capability there, that had all also started to happen on the Kherson front in the south.  In fact, even before Russia’s reinforcements began arriving in the south, these attacks were so effective that damage to key regional bridges across the Dnipro River along with all the other attacks had effectively trapped thousands of Russian troops on the west bank of the Dnipro and largely cut off their escape and resupply. 

Knowing how poorly-led the Russians were, Ukraine took its time, announcing far ahead of time that they were coming large, hard, and fast for Kherson, baiting the Russians into committing more troops into an easily-cut-off position so that they added thousands more to the troops stuck on the west bank of the Dnipro River, waiting to more severely disable all the bridges so that now, there are as many as 25,000 Russian troops that are effectively cut off and in the process of being encircled.

And, in a masterstroke the type of which I anticipated (but not its location), while all this was unfolding, Ukraine saw a major target of opportunity in the Kharkiv sector and smashed Russia’s entire Kharkiv front back literally thousands of square miles in a just days.  I had noted in my early August piece that Russia’s redeployments from the east to the south would weaken its strength there and provide just such targets of opportunity, on which I fully expected Ukraine would sniff out and capitalize; it was somewhat mathematical.

The intrepid and swift Ukrainians exceeded even my expectations, though, with this Kharkiv sector smashthrough (“breakthrough” doesn’t really do it justice) and it continuing through to the important nearby Russian logistics hub of Lyman in Donetsk and beyond.  Both a tertiary-, relatively-sideshow front compared to the Donbas and Kherson fronts but also and extension of the Russian Donbas line, the Kharkiv front presented the Russians to the Ukrainians at their weakest, with the Ukrainians completely surprising and outmaneuvering them.  Throughout the Kharkiv sector fighting, it was clear that advanced Ukrainian weaponry supplied by the West, which had destroyed Russian air-defenses and also gave Ukraine effective air-defenses, had actually given Ukraine air superiority—and not Russia—on the front lines (still one of the great ongoing stories of this war).  Thus, during these offensives, Russia has been unable to provide effective air cover or reconnaissance for its inferiorly-equipped troops (who have far less night-vision equipment than their Ukrainian counterparts).  All these and other factors explain why the fighting has been so one-sided of late.

Thus, Ukraine’s Kharkiv offensive was a total rout of the Russians.  But even more importantly, it allowed Ukraine to take most of its forces from the Kharkiv front and position them to be able to join the northern Donbas front and hit the Russian lines there in such a way as to push back and take out its northern sector, eventually outflanking and hitting the rest of the Donbas front from the side and/or rear.  We are seeing that play out now, and, at the same time, this is happening just as the Kherson front is also beginning to collapse.

The timing could not be worse for Russian President Vladimir Putin, coming days after his farcical moves to annex these regions, perhaps the first time in history a nation formally annexed territory it did not fully control and then proceeded to lose control of significant parts of that territory in the very first days immediately after a big annexation ceremony.

Pathetic as a label does not do this performance of Russia’s justice.

I did not anticipate such a bold, major breakthrough actually being able to threaten the entire Donbas line from the north through breaking the Kharkiv line; indeed, I had expected that Ukrainian forces from the south would eventually be able to join the southern Donbas front in Donetsk, after moving through Kherson and pretty flat and open Zaporizhzhia Oblast separating Kherson Oblast and Donetsk Oblast. 

Now, instead, this process has begun first from the north, but it is a long line and there may be plenty of time for the units on Ukraine’s Kherson front to be able to still push through and join the final major battles in the east.

Retaking Crimea a Second Priority to Reinforcing the East

While most of the Ukrainian forces breaking Russia’s Kherson line would try to push through Zaporizhzhia to liberate the part of that oblast occupied by Russia and to link up with Ukrainian forces on the southern part of the Donbas line in Donetsk, along the way, Crimea, to Kherson’s south, can easily be sealed off with a minimal number of troops.  These troops can dig in and deploy heavy equipment, enabling them to turn any Russian counterattack coming out of the narrow entryways of the Crimean Peninsula into suicide, all while they keep striking at Russian positions in Crimea with artillery and rockets, drones, and perhaps even airstrikes.  This would create both a sort of siege and a second pocket like the one on the west bank of the Dnipro in Kherson, easily sealed off (the only land route after sealing off Crimea’s northern border is the Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge into Russia and, especially if Ukrainian units have boxed in Crimea from its northern border, missile systems in possession of Ukraine could hit the bridge easily).

Also like the situation with the west bank of the Dnipro River, it may make sense for Ukraine to allow Russia to reinforce through the Kerch Strait/Crimean Bridge so as to trap more Russian military forces on the Peninsula before damaging the bridge enough to prevent such reinforcements from entering Crimea.  While keeping the bridge operational, it will allow the Russian Federation on the other side of the bridge to keep supplying its forces and bases in Crimea with men and equipment that can then be cut off.  As for naval resupply, because of Ukraine’s anti-ship missiles, any such effort on the part of Russia is risky and risks a repeat of something like the embarrassing sinking of the Moskva (this is why much of the Russian Navy is now avoiding Crimea and it main naval base of Sevastopol, even submarines); and, as far as air resupply, Ukrainian air defenses moved to the northern Crimean border the southern coast of the Sea of Azov once that area is liberated can make that risky, and, along with precision destruction of Russian air defense systems in Crimea by HIMARS strikes or special operations or partisan sabotage efforts, Ukraine’s air force may also be able to threaten any air resupply.  Thus, as I noted all the way back in April, the isolated peninsula is quite vulnerable to being cut off and big questions the answers to which will be interesting to learn will be if and when Ukraine ends up taking out the Crimean/Kerch Strait bridge, Europe’s and Russia’s longest bridge and one of Putin’s grandest achievements as leader of Russia (that almost makes it too tempting to not attack it for the Ukrainians).

A main reason for Ukraine besieging Crimea and continuing with most of its Kherson-area troops east is that there is no real Crimean front, but many Ukrainian troops are fighting and some dying in the east.  Bringing as many reinforcements to there as possible will minimize casualties on that Donbas front and maximize casualties for the Russians, as that combined Ukraine force operating in sync on that front would be overwhelming for any Russian defenders left at that point.  And such overwhelming force would shorten combat in what seems to have been the deadliest theater of the war for Ukraine and basically end the bulk of the fighting while the smaller Ukrainian force sealing off the norther Crimean border can mostly safely sit in entrenched positions and dare the Russians to attack them from a position of relative safety.  If any assault is necessary, the Ukrainians, like they did on the Kherson front and have been doing on the Donbas front for months, can take their time weakening and degrading the Russian rear and Russia’s supply, ammunition, command, communication, and other bases in Crimea.  Sealed off and seeing their fellow Russian soldiers to their east in Zaporizhzhia and the Donbas losing to the Ukrainian onslaught, they may well surrender, or at least a good many of them.

But, in the end, Crimea can be a second priority, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has himself repeatedly stated the war will end in Crimea: “This Russian war against Ukraine and against all of free Europe began with Crimea and must end with Crimea—its liberation” and “It started in Crimea, and it will end in Crimea, and this will be an effective revival of the international legal order.”  For all these reasons, expect Ukraine to focus on liberating its east before liberating Crimea.

Finishing in the South or East First?

How would that final fighting in the east look?

First, we have to figure out how things will get to that point.

I want to say that it is less likely that the current forces there, including those coming from the Kharkiv front and about to flank Russia’s northern Donbas line, will be able to turn, smash, or compel to retreat that entire line before Ukraine’s southern forces are able to link up with the Ukrainian units in Zaporizhzhia, smash or push back the Russian lines there then push with the linked-up forces into southern Donetsk to the south and even rear of the main Russian line there—Russia’s southern flank of its entire Donbas line—but Russian performance is so bad that I do not want to rule that possibility out.  Certainly if Russians on the Donbas front faced major attacks on their front and that outflanked their line to the north and south—the latter including combined forces coming off success in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—that would be a disastrous situation for Russia.

Winter weather will certainly slow troop movements, but it will also exacerbate Russia’s catastrophic logistics situation.  So I am not sure if Russian troops can hold out that long in the east even for those Kherson and Zaporizhzhia troops to join assault on the eastern Donbas line, and while I don’t expect any kind of epic Russian resistance through Zaporizhzhia, I also don’t know if we are talking weeks or a few months in terms of how long that part of the campaign will take.

Maybe Ukraine will surprise me, and the eastern forces will be so successful that they can finish in the east, then a large part of them can turn south and west to join the fight there.  But, especially as the border with Russia is in the east, and factoring in how there still could be much fighting in the east, plus not being sure about what kind of winter storms will or won’t happen, I think it will be more likely that Ukraine’s troops from the south will reach the east and join the fighting there than the reverse.  And even now, there are rumors (discussed below) that a new Ukrainian offensive in central and/or western Zaporizhzhia may be coming, further complicating gaming out these theaters…

Another note: defying sanity, Russia has continued fruitless and costly attacks farther down the Donbas line against Bakhmut.  This is one of the best symbolic examples of sheer Russian incompetence: facing collapses the south and on the same line to the north, instead of conserving lives and resources, instead of further digging in and playing to a defensive advantage, or instead of using troops that were used in the failed Bakhmut attacks to reinforce the northern Donbas line that is facing a critical test it is near-certain to fail, the Russians sent troops to their deaths, time after time again in the context of these other developing catastrophes, against the well-positioned Ukrainians in Bakhmut to little or no avail.  It’s as if there is no major coordination, as if Russian commanders are simply fighting in vacuums and not as part of an army, another reason I don’t think we will see massive, energetic, organized redeployments.  We have had reporting telling us that Putin is micromanaging this war and taking decision-making away from commanders on the ground, so that would help to explain this, but to what degree it is hard to tell; what is not hard to tell is that these repeated Bakhmut attacks carried out while other fronts are collapsing are insane.

Gaming Out the Endgame in the East

How will the fighting in the east wind down?  Right now, Ukrainian troops have pushed through Russian hubs in Izyum, Lyman, and Kupiansk and towards positions at the northern end of the Donbas line in southern Luhansk in a way where they are threatening already problematic Russian supply, logistics, command, & communications lines (indeed, Ukrainians have already severed the main direct connections between Belgorod—the main Russian staging hub for the region on the Russian side of the border—and the Donbas line, and will likely soon do the same for a secondary hub on the Russian side, Valuyki; Belgorod is itself subject to repeated Ukrainian strikes).  As a result, Ukraine’s forces will soon be able to hit a now-more poorly-supplied northern flank of Russia’s Donbas line, or even maneuver further to hit it in the rear (or from multiple sides simultaneously).

Russia is left with two bad options here: withdraw and leave well-entrenched positions or stay and face attacks from multiple directions at once.  Even if they try to extend or bend the line, they will not have much time to dig in.  So the collapse or abandonment of the line in the north is imminent, basically as soon as Ukrainian forces can regroup and amass after their smashing of the through Lyman and other nearby towns, but some of the troops will likely also continue into central and northern Luhansk and liberate the easily-maneuverable territory along with its people.  Perhaps Ukraine will consider focusing on liberating as much of those parts of Luhansk as possible—most of its defenders will be the survivors of the smashed Kharkiv/Lyman front and will have difficulty putting up much of a fight or reorganizing into a strong line, as they are pursued closely by Ukrainian forces.  But flanking the main Donbas line in Luhansk’s south will almost certainly be too tempting a target to avoid, especially as giving too much time to the even incredibly slow and dull Russians could allow them to reposition themselves.

Whether there is more of a focus on pushing directly east on that vector into northern and central Luhansk first, an equal focus on that and collapsing the northern Donbas line in southern Luhansk, or more focus on that northern Donbas line remains to be seen.  But sometime soon, we should see the hammer come down on the northern Donbas line in southern Luhansk and see it rapidly smashed.  Russia’s only hope is if it suddenly becomes magically competent and pulls back those troops and forms something of an east-west- or northeast-southeast-running line from those northern-Donbas-line troops, or to pull back to previously constructed lines form earlier fighting or from the stalemate lines from before February 24, 2022, to avoid being outflanked.  Yet even that would present problems and the existing Ukrainian forces facing them directly across the line now could then pursue and disrupt such a move if the move was not conducted quickly and secretly, something difficult given Ukraine’s seeming air superiority there and superiority with night-vision and logistics.

So, yeah, bet on that part of the Donbas line in Luhansk collapsing soon.  This will be happening while Ukraine is retaking Kherson, first the west bank of the Dnipro, including Kherson City, then the east bank and the rest of Kherson Oblast to the northern Crimean border.

I can’t tell you if the Russians will wise up during this and do something other than just mostly stay in place, mostly stay in place and retreat in panic when it is too late to do so in good order and without suffering heavy casualties, or at some point realize most of the line is not defensible from the flank and rear and adjust further down the line ahead of time with at least some time to do so in an orderly manner and to reform a solid defensive line, but whatever the Russians choose, they are in an forceful and determined Ukrainian assault they will not be able to stop.  And they will know while this is going on that their brothers in Kherson are being defeated and defeatedly.

Panic can be sudden in armies, loss of morale spreading like a wildfire, entire or nearly-entire armies breaking in something of an instant; if both of Russia’s main fronts in Ukraine are losing badly (and they are), it’s possibly at any time one or both fronts may just break and run or even mass-surrender in disastrous routs.  Obviously, if this happens it will speed things up.

So it is hard to tell how long it will take for Ukraine to roll through southern Kherson on the east bank of the Dnipro, but one thing I am confident in predicting is that Russia will not empty whatever troops are still in Crimea to hold southern Kherson because that would make it too easy for Ukraine to recapture Crimea, which is far more important to Russia than Kherson.  Thus, whatever reinforcements come from whatever is left in Crimea would be minimal, and whatever troops are sent from Zaporizhzhia will make that oblast’s defenses that much weaker when Ukraine does start to come through there.  Again, since it is low-lying coastal steppe with no forests, it is not particularly defensible, especially compared to the hillier Donbas.

A wise Russian commander with actual authority would abandon both Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to reinforce positions in Crimea and/or the Donbas, the idea being to buy time so that, in theory, troops being mobilized in Russia now can arrive over time and, in theory, stop the Ukrainian advance.

In practice, the Russian military has shown an inability to cuts its losses and redeploy at the right time to avoid heavy losses, and, instead, has kept pressing ahead on multiple fronts, destroying many units and persisting in this until whole fronts break; it has happened before, it is happening now, and, as I have noted before, it will happen again.  So I don’t expect any rapid or clever moves by Russia; I do expect more of the same: keep on fighting until its too late and the line is routed.

Also in practice, Putin’s mobilization is a farce: throwing unwilling troops into the field without proper training, equipment, food, or ammunition.  As I argued in detail, it will harm Putin at home more than any kind of help it gives Russia on the battlefields of Ukraine, as such troops will be practically useless and are more likely to just surrender (we are already seeing this) or even defect or revolt, lowering Putin’s standing even more than it has been in the eyes of the Russian people.  As far as any possibility of whole new formations being able to be assembled inside Russia to counterattack somewhere else on the border—say, towards Kharkiv—even if such a force could be formed and led and attack, it is likely to be little more than unwilling rabble, as poorly trained and equipped and as badly treated as the other mobilized troops.  And Ukraine as well as powerful Western intelligence agencies will be keeping an eye on what’s going on over the border with Russia, so there will not be some sudden surprise attack from across the border that catches Ukraine unawares.

So even if Russian commanders on the Donbas line in Ukraine miraculously reposition competently because they are able to wise up and/or are allowed to make their own decisions, the idea that they can buy time and that any major level of reinforcements of any degree of competent skill-level are coming from the mobilization in the next few weeks or even the next couple of months that can halt the Ukrainian advance or even reverse it is absurd.  There is no way these new troops will be as good as the ones currently fighting on the Donbas line, where most of Russia’s troops and most of its best troops and best equipment are deployed; they are certain to be worse, and likely far worse (not that the current troops are anything special).  But some of the Russian troops in Ukraine, desperate for any semblance of hope, may delude themselves into fighting on and holding on as hard as they can so that the mobilization can save them (it won’t).  Yet still, as we are already seeing plenty of Russian troops break and run during Ukraine’s latest offensives, I think that is what will happen more often than not.

On the Timing of Joining Fronts and Zaporizhzhia

So the northern Donbas front is about to be smashed by Ukraine.  At some point after that, Ukraine’s forces will have taken care of Kherson and will push east into the Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia.  If Ukraine doesn’t take the bold but riskier move to actually seriously try to assault Crimea as soon as they are able, the main question is, what Russian forces will remain in Zaporizhzhia and what kind of fight and defense can they put up?  I expect Ukraine to be able to push through no matter what the Russians do there, but another question is, how much time will it take Ukraine, because the question after that will be: what will the state of the Donbas line be by the time Ukraine’s forces that are currently in Kherson make their way through Zaporizhzhia into Donetsk and link up with Ukraine’s forces now on the southern Donbas line in Donetsk?  Will any of that line as is be intact by then? Again, because of the sheer concentration of Russian troops and equipment there, I think it will take some time for the whole line to be rolled up and that, therefore, there is a decent chance that Ukraine’s troops coming from the west will be able to join the fight in Donbas.

Maybe the whole Russian line will have fallen back by then, or maybe the southern Donbas line in the Donetsk will still be intact.  The current line does not go all the way down Donetsk to the coast: it bends to run to the west through northwestern Donetsk and into Zaporizhzhia Oblast.; that means that, again, unless Russia starts repositioning large portions of its line, the Ukrainians troops pushing into Zaporizhzhia will hit many of the Russian forces on the flank and in the rear and disaster for the Russians in the form of rapid collapse will ensue.  However, because the Russian line in western Zaporizhzhia follows the southern bank of the Dnipro River there, if they were to choose to redeploy many of those troops into a new north-south axis, the could prepare a better line to meet the Ukrainian troops coming from Kherson head-on and avoid being outflanked by them; Ukrainian troops on the other side of the Dnipro will not be able to easily pursue as the Russia troops would reposition as the river is at least over two miles wide (often more) throughout this area and there are no bridges across there, either.  So even the incompetent Russians will likely reposition themselves at least partially, but who knows how well and how far ahead of time they would do so.

Unfortunately for the Russians, there is no more Dnipro River as a barrier in the rest of Zaporizhzhia Oblast beyond the western part, as the river comes from the north to bend west in western Zaporizhzhia, and there are Ukrainian forces right across the land from the Russian lines there.  So withdrawing from there, as with the Donbas line, is fraught with peril, and it is likely the line will eventually be hit from the side and rear as the Ukrainian forces now in Kherson eventually make their way there.

Further complicating the situation are that, as alluded to earlier, rumors of an impending Ukrainian counterattack are apparently spreading through Russian sources.  If those rumors turn out to be true, it could be another Kharkiv-like breakthrough in a sector that, though Ukraine has made some slow, minor gains, had not been the focus of the heaviest fighting recently.  Or, this could also be a ploy to weaken Russian positions that would move to reinforce the area, to keep troops on Russia’s Zaporizhzhia line pinned there and unable to leave their east-west axis so as to render them unable to effectively redeploy in time to avoid being hit from the side and rear by the Ukrainian troops coming in from Kherson, or to sow general confusion in the south; even the appearance of just some reinforcements there could reinforce this rumor and make it more damaging.  Or it could be that both attacks are coming.  Time will tell, but if there is a Kharkiv-like breakthrough in this part of Zaporizhzhia towards Melitopol or Berdyansk, that would be another of the great Ukrainian surprises of this war and would totally muddle up the positioning of Russian troops in the south.  If such an attack succeeded, it could case a collapse of the whole Kherson front as Russians would race to avoid being cut off from the rest of the Russian army and supply systems in the east and/or join a desperate attempt to stave off Ukrainian success in retaking either Melitopol or Berdyansk.  It would be another crushing blow of a psychological and substantive nature for the Russian military, the Russian people, and the Putin regime.

Climax: The Comin Merging of the Fronts by the Ukrainian Armed Forces

New counteroffensive from the north in Zaporizhzhia or not, once those Russian troops in Zaporizhzhia are beaten back and are broken or flee from whatever direction the attack or attacks come—and it is unlikely they will be able to establish any kind of a solid defensive line where the line in Donetsk breaks west, to form a new line running south to the coast—that means that the Ukrainian forces moving east originally from Kherson and now Zaporizhzhia will be able to come into Donetsk below the Russian line and hit it from the side and/or even maneuver through the south and turn north into the rear of the Russian line.

Again, if the Russian line is still where it is there now, this will mean the south of the Russian line is being hit on the flank and rear even as the rest of the line will have been suffering defeats and losses by the Ukrainian forces coming from the north and from the Ukrainian troops that have been facing off against those Russians this whole time on the north-south Donbas line.  Pressed hard from the north, west, south, and perhaps even rear, the whole line is likely to collapse or be (mostly) encircled, suffering from mass casualties.  They will be driven back, most likely unable to reform any strong positions as they are hotly pursued by Ukraine and hit by its precise Western artillery and rocket systems, save for perhaps a few pockets that will not last.

This will essentially end major ground combat operations in Ukraine (save for whatever may happen in Crimea, if it not itself retaken already by this point).

If the line is not where it is now in southern Donetsk and the Russians adjust or pull back their line in advance of the Ukrainian onslaught from the southwest, there is a risk that HIMARS, M777s, and other advanced Western systems in possession of the Ukrainians can inflict heavy casualties on Russian forces as they are moving and more vulnerable.  And even if they are able to reposition, they will still be facing an overwhelmingly superior combined Ukrainian force, qualitatively better and better-equipped man-for-man, with far higher morale, more firepower and precision, and they will not be able to stand long against such a force.

This, too, would end major ground combat within Ukraine (save possible, again, for Crimea).

Either way, the Russian army could be essentially destroyed or, in a best-case scenario, just a mere shadow of its former self.  Either way, the end is the same: once Russia’s final line (or main formations if that line is broken into piece) are broken, all Russian forces that aren’t killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or that defect will be pushed to and across the Russian border with Ukraine.  There may be some fierce pockets of resistance, but those are likely to be surrounded amidst the general defeat; the best outcome for those pockets is that they are able to fight their way out, or surrender intact.

Denouement: The Light at the End of the Tunnel and Driving the Russians into Russia

Once Ukrainian forces reach the border, they can drive Russian forces further away with their precision longer-range weapons, even taking out air defenses so that Ukraine’s air force can help enforce the de facto no-man’s-land that is sure to emerge on the Russian side of the border.  That no-man’s-land extending miles into Russia is simply going to be the natural outcome: Ukraine can stop its advance on Russia’s border, dig in, and the aforementioned weapons systems can kill and destroy any Russians that get too close, which will force them back, and, additionally, those weapons can destroy ammunition depots, command centers, etc. as they did in Ukraine to make at least the first few dozen miles into Russia unsafe and unusable for Russians.  That will also severely limit Russia’s ability to set up any counterattacks against Ukraine.  For any such attacks to have a chance, it would take not weeks but months to properly set up a force that could break through in any lasting way what will be a very strong line.  But, Russia being Russia, Putin will probably pressure his people or order them to put together attacks far too prematurely, meaning there will be a decent number of suicidal attacks across the no-man’s-land.  Eventually perhaps Russia may penetrate the line, but it should be relatively easy for Ukraine to counterattack and plug any temporary holes in the line.

While all this is going on or perhaps soon after, at some point, Crimea surrenders or is stormed successfully and that ends that.  The war will de facto be over save for long-range Russian missile attacks and border skirmishes, perhaps occasional border battles.  But the line in the east should hold.

If, somehow, the southern Ukrainian force is still fighting its way to Donetsk when the eastern Ukrainian forces rout the Russians out of Ukraine there, a lot of those troops can stay to secure the border while the rest swing south and west to hit the Russians the southern Ukrainian forces are fighting from the rear.  Although at that point, cut off from their own country and facing overwhelming odds, they may surrender en masse before those forces coming from the east would join the fight.  In the unlikely event that Putin holds on and amasses a considerable force in the future, he will run into a wall of Ukrainian—and perhaps some allied—steel on the Ukrainian border; a second invasion would fail with a Ukraine only far more prepared this time, with a first-class army equipped with first-class weapons under first-class leadership waiting for hapless Russian troops.

Whether any formal peace or cease-fire emerges is harder to tell, but those would be doubtful if somehow Putin manages to stay in power (but, for reasons I discussed in my last piece, it is hard to see how that will happen).  We may for some time—years, even—end up with a Korean-like DMZ, the conflict frozen in time.

Two x-factors, the first far, far more likely than the other: if Putin is overthrown, there could a negotiated, peaceful withdrawal of Russian forces (not along Elon Musk’s absurd lines; and I am convinced that when Putin is gone, Russians will be exhausted and will just want to be done with this war), or it could be because the Russian army or parts of it had mutinied and marched on Moscow to overthrow Putin amidst massive unrest in Russia.  And frankly, as things keep getting worse for Putin, Putin should be overthrown, one way or another.  It may be in the form of an announcement that Comrade Putin has died peacefully in his sleep as internal Kremlin dynamics remove him the way the ancient Roman Praetorian Guards would remove a mad emperor; it may be massive unrest in the streets and a storming of the Kremlin; it may be a brief civil war or military or security service revolt; whatever way it transpires, Russia cannot long endure Putin, as his staying in power will see its army and maybe even its state disintegrate.  Whether all this happens during what I described or after Ukraine secures its eastern border and/or takes Crimea is hard to predict and depends on how long all that takes.

Another x-factor would be Putin using a tactical nuclear weapon, but I seriously doubt this will help Putin, as, while I won’t go into detail on this, it would simply mean his swift end, let alone not actually help Russia alter the outcome of the war, and could kill or expose to fallout many Russians, Belarusians, Turks, Caucasians, or Europeans living in NATO countries, all of which would produce severe reactions not in Putin’s interest of self-preservation and that would see the Russian forces in Ukraine annihilated quickly by international forces.

Anyway, that’s how I see the different options for how this war ends and their likelihood of happening.  It’s hard to see anything dramatically different from happening.  What is certain is that Russia will lose.  It was clear the southern rebel army was beaten and both the German and Japanese armies beaten for years before the war ended: loses fighting a losing war when there is no hope of victory is not a rarity in history.  But lose they will, and Ukraine will be free and strong, able to keep Russia at bay, its friends standing behind it all throughout.

What remains to be seen are how long this takes, when these different events happen relative to each other, and how many people have to die, how much destruction occurs between now and the end.  What’s sad is how pointless so much of this is on the Russian side, but, as I noted back in early March:

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.

Putin sought to drag Europe and, indeed, the world back to an era of no-holds-barred, naked colonialist imperialism, of mass atrocities and war-crimes being a normal tool of war, to the nineteenth-century, not the twenty-first.  He sought to destroy much of what the post-World War II international order led by the U.S. stood for, even if imperfectly and consistently, since 1945.  He has failed and the future, in spite of all the blood spilled and yet-to-be-spilled, looks brighter for Ukraine, Europe, and the world as the end is sight and it is Ukrainian victory over Russia, democracy over fascism, freedom over fear.

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.

© 2022 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.

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), September 27, 2022, the same day Real Context News surpassed three-quarters of a million all-time content views; *update 11:09 PM; adapted October 2 for Small Wars Journal as Putin’s Ukraine War Had Doomed Him; Mobilization Only Weakens Him More; *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; see follow-up October 6 article This Is the Beginning of the End of the War and related September 16 article I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March; also, since the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on October 7 to Ukrainian activist Oleksandra Matviichuk and her organization the Center for Civil Liberties, listen to my April podcast with her here discussing war, Russian war crimes, human rights, and democracy in Ukraine.

SILVER SPRING—Before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s massive February 24 escalation of the war in Ukraine, few people who follow the conflict gave Ukraine much of a chance against Russia.  I myself felt Ukraine would put up quite a fight but still felt Russia would be able to take most of Ukraine, with a best-case scenario being Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would survive a Pyrrhic Russian victory in Kyiv and lead a robust insurgency that would succeed partially over time (years) with Western help.

But not even two full weeks after February 24, I was experiencing one of the most dramatic surprises of my life: during the second week of the war, it was clear to me that Russia’s leadership, government, and military were not only systemically failing in their approach to the war, but were, collectively and institutionally, incapable of any grand adjustments that would change their failure to success, that even if they adjusted their strategy, their tactics doomed them to a poor performance.

Russia and Its Military: Dysfunction Exposed Early in War Persists

Ukraine had performed as well as possible, Russia as poorly as possible in any realistic sense, and the consequences of this would only explode exponentially over time as the war would drag on.  Even less than two weeks in, it was clear:

• Russian tanks and vehicles had no defense against Javelin missiles and other Western-supplied anti-tank weapons the Ukrainians were receiving or would receive
• Russian troops were poorly supplied, without enough food, water, or fuel, with a terrible logistics system that was highly vulnerable (follow Trent Telenko on Twitter and you will understand just how bad the Russians are at logistics)
• Russian troops were poorly led, lied to by their superiors and unprepared for the resistance they encountered, their lives wasted in repeating disastrous tactics time and time again, with little proper coordination between different branches, leading to horrific casualties, while Ukrainian troops were much better led and protected by their leaders and had far higher morale
• Russian equipment was inferior, poorly maintained, and thus performed poorly at high rates
• Russian hubris led Russia to attack on many axes, spreading their troops thin, and Russian losses in the early days included some of their best troops and equipment
• Russia had virtually no international support or aid, while Ukraine has tremendous international support and aid that would only grow parallel to Russia’s isolation and depletion
• Russia could not economically withstand Western sanctions or support this war over long periods of time (unsustainable short-term measures and myopic analysis notwithstanding)

If you put these on one side of a mathematical equation and add to it Putin’s dogged determination to persist, on the other side of the equals sign, you end up with not only Ukrainians victory, but the end of Putin and his regime: Putin, proud man that he is, would be unwilling to admit defeat and would double down on failure until it brought him down, destroying most of the Russian Army in the process unless it or his people revolted against him first.

Hence, I could posit in my article for Small Wars Journal published March 8 that this war would be “the beginning of the end for Putin.”  Many analysts and pundits would be dismissive of such claims, including specifically of my own argument (among them George Beebe, an advisor to Dick Cheney when he was vice president and a former top Russia specialist at the CIA) but all of those dynamics have persisted, and indeed, increased since then, exploding (literally) in disaster after disaster for Russia.  And while I recently briefly revisited how I thought back then that Putin would doom himself with his hubris, now is a good time to do a full reexamination of that notion.

From the total collapse of Russia’s Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy fronts to the sinking of the Mosvka, from Crimea becoming vulnerable to Ukrainian forces—the last two of which I predicted in April—from the counteroffensive in Kherson to the total collapse of Russia’s Kharkiv front, it has simply been one disaster after another for Russia since late March, with only minimal, gradual gains for Russia (some of which are already being reversed) alongside numerous sudden, dramatic victories for Ukraine.  In fact, the totality of the conflict since February 24 has seen Russia initially make quick but often costly gains up to the gates of Kyiv, then saw that and other fronts in north-central Ukraine to collapse suddenly with catastrophic losses beginning by the end of the fifth week of the war, and, in the nearly half-year since then, Ukraine has taken far, far more territory than what Russia has gained (and that was true even before Russia’s dramatic collapse on the Kharkiv front).

All the while, Moscow’s body count has continued to grow, astoundingly all throughout, perhaps as high as 57,000 killed and wounded*, with that number set to only increase and increase dramatically.  These dead Russians have friends and family, and it is hard to hide such death; even without official notification, official silences reveal much.  And those friends and family are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the conduct of the war, the war itself, and Putin himself; with more combat deaths comes more people with more anger.

Russia’s military is so desperate to bring in new recruits to bolster its beleaguered force that its de facto extension, the Wagner mercenary group run by Putin henchman Yevgeniy Prigozhin (known as “Putin’s chef”), is recruiting inmates from prisons, with predictably pathetic results for Russia.

Mobilizing Myopia and More of the Same (Dysfunction)

And no dysfunctional mobilization—“partial” (as just announced by Putin) or otherwise—on the part of Russia can alter these dynamics anytime soon, especially rushing to train and deploy old or untried troops still operating as part of this exceptionally ineffective system as describe above.  Protests are now erupting in reaction to Putin’s “partial” mobilization announcement (which he has already lied about), and authorities are arresting many people, some of whom they are forcing into the military; that is hardly the way to build a motivated fighting force.  As it is and as noted earlier, the Russian government has been unable to properly train, equip, supply, and lead its existing military, and there is nothing whatsoever from what we have seen thus far that should lead anyone to think it can competently so now for an additional 300,000 troops.  Thus, while there are no rational reasons to think that the troops-to-be-mobilized will perform or be treated any better that the already poorly-performing Russian military currently operating in Ukraine, we have multiple reasons to conclude rationally that they are likely to perform and be treated even worse.  And there is the further conundrum that the longer the Kremlin waits to deploy these troops-to-be-mobilized, the worse a losing situation they will be thrown into, but also that the faster they are deployed, the less-trained, less-prepared, and more poorly equipped they will be.

Part of me feels as if “partial” mobilization of Putin’s is half a public relations attempt to show that he is doing something to respond to the obvious fact that Russia is losing and he, as leader, must be seen to do something while also being half an actual attempt to actually do something that would, in theory, help the war effort, but that, in the end, it is a half-assed approach to each, a move that will fail to restore the approval and stature he has lost and is losing in the eyes of the Russian people and will not appease hardliners even as it angers nearly everyone else, a sorry measure that will not actually reverse the tide of overall failure Russia has been experiencing for almost the last six months of this seven-month war.

Because more and more, the failures outlined above are going to be obvious to all but the most credulous of Putin’s supporters and sooner rather than later (if they are not already); the rest of Russia might be going through stages of grief when it comes to their support for Putin (those that still do support him enthusiastically).  Through the acts of defiance of municipal politicians to the plea from queen of Russian pop music Alla Pugacheva, from the cracks in the normally-solid wall of Russian state television propaganda to the increasing refusal of Russian soldiers to fight in the war, it was clear earlier this month clear that Putin was losing support among the Russian people and losing it dramatically. 

Now, as hundreds of thousands of young Russian men flee their country to avoid serving in a military that will mistreat them and throw their lives away carelessly in a war they do not want to fight, Putin’s hold on power has never been weaker.  Russia’s FSB (one of the successors to the dreaded Soviet KGB) apparently counted over 260,000 men fleeing Russia from just this past Wednesday to Saturday; prices of flights out of the country are skyrocketing and flights are selling out; and traffic leaving Russia is backed up in gridlock for some ten miles on the border with Georgia, with a long line of cars also building up on Russia’s border with Mongolia and even Kazakhstan offering sanctuary to Russians fleeing Putin’s mobilization.

Mobilizing Resistance

There appears to even be something of an insurgency—or “partisan” movement—breaking out as I write this in Dagestan and perhaps elsewhere, with people resisting security forces coming to conscript men into the military and even some attacks against recruiters and recruiting centers.  Unrest, protests, and even resistance are growing particularly in regions with large non-Russian ethnic minority populations, especially Dagestan: in a sick sense, Russia is focusing disproportionately on recruiting and conscription from these communities within Russia as well as from Tatars in Russian-occupied Crimea as a way to ethnically cleanse Russia and Crimea of “undesirable” non-Russians, acts that are nothing new in the history of the Russian and Soviet Empires, as I noted some time ago.  This should not be surprising, as Putin’s ideology and system, like that of the tsardom of the Russian Empire and the worst practices of Stalin, is heavily imbued with white Slavic Russian-supremacist racism, this being a big part of the reason why Russia is by far the most violently racist country in Europe.  The disproportionate use of ethnic minorities in the military in this war is also an attempt to shield Putin’s supporters among better-off ethnic Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg from the war’s effects. 

These dual aims expose the parasitic colonialist and imperialist nature of the Russian Federation towards its own citizens, especially in regions remote from its two aforementioned largest cities.  But these efforts come at a cost, causing unrest throughout the constituent parts of the Russian Federation, unrest that is spreading rapidly.  Even Putin’s local ally, Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, seems to be refusing to comply with the new mobilization following recent public criticism on his part of Kremlin.

*Update 11:09PM: I have been trying to wrap my head further around why the Russian mobilization is proceeding as it is, and came to an additional conclusion that also, in part, these are not only are punitive—meant to take men who would form a more liberal opposition (active protesters) and more traditional insurgents (sometimes ethnic minorities, though this is also a Russian prejudice against minorities much like the heinous “dual-loyalty” accusation anti-Semitic bigots hurl at Jews and also reminiscent of Stalinist purges of largely innocent minorities like the Crimean Tatars)—not only to see these people somewhat politically purged or ethnically cleansed, but is also preventive, to put such people under government control and take them away from their home regions where they could form the core of any rebellion or insurgency, either to overthrow Putin directly or to carry out a separatist movement on behalf of some of the largely non-Russia republics within the Russian Federation; credit to Dmitry (@wartranslated) for pointing this out. But yes, this is also Putin showing he is afraid of the people, afraid or rebellion, separatism, and being overthrown, and thinking he is somewhat preempting such movements, though, like so many of his recent decisions, its effect may have the opposite one from what he intended.

(end update)

The rapid decline of support for Putin and his war is because the social contract he made with Russians who supported him is now null and void.  “Give me your freedom, your democracy,” he winked and nodded, “and, under me, Russia will be respected and feared again, powerful at home and abroad, strong economically and stable, and reversing the collapse of the Russian Empire.”

But now, Russia is less respected than at any time in living memory.  The Potemkin Russian military has been severely degraded and roundly humiliated by the far smaller Ukraine, until recent decades a vassal of Russia’s.  States deeply under Russian influence not long ago—Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Armenia—are now distancing themselves from Moscow, defying Russian peacekeepers, or seeking American support, respectively, while other former Soviet states Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan just saw a deadly military flare-up between them.  Even though China told Russia their friendship “has no limits” early in February, the opposite is increasingly becoming the case.  And the Russian economy is already now bringing back memories of the nadirs of the Yeltsin days, with only far, far more economic pain for Russians—elites and masses—to come in the ensuing months.

These are all the things Putin essentially promised he would keep from ever happening again if Russians surrendered their freedom to him, yet here they are, happening again.  Instead of pride, now, all Russians can feel is humiliation; most of the them know this, and the whole world sees this.  And, as this has clearly been Putin’s Russia for decades, though there may be some “It’s Rasputin fault, not the tsar’s”-syndrome, most Russians will know Putin is responsible, blame him, and blame him harshly.

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 Gorbachev faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s is ready to return with a vengeance, this time targeting Putin and his regime.

Revolt, rebellion, revolution, resistance, whatever you want to call it, its smell is in the air.

See related article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, 2022, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; also see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

And 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; 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.

© 2022 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.

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) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) September 7, 2022; adapted, updated, and excerpted from August 3, 2022, article How Ukraine War Will Likely Go Rest of 2022, or, Kherson: The Beginning of the End for Russia

SILVER SPRING—In my August 23 article, I built upon previous work to explain that two major factors were at play in explaining why the war had slowed down and was unfolding the way it was then:  Russia’s weakening capabilities were running into Ukraine’s prudence in methodically and patiently picking a series of targets on and behind Russian lines to soften up Russian targets before an announced counteroffensive in the south.  After a period of devastating attacks by Ukraine against targets in Russian-controlled parts of the Donbas with advanced, distance, precision weapons provided by the West (hello HIMARS and M777s), Ukraine had by later August been replicating that success from the east on the southern front, in Kherson Oblast.  I had noted back in April that that Kherson and Crimea were both vulnerable to an eventual Ukrainian counterattack, and since then we have seen both come under increasing Ukrainian attack, first Kherson and (to the surprise of many but not me) then Crimea. 

At certain points, war can be confusing, but at other points, it can be mathematical, a series of related inputs and outputs.  Before Russia had even redeployed troops from its east to the south, it had already seen its offensive there stall amidst heavy casualties on its side and very minimal progress.  That was the equation then, and the numbers on both sides of the equation are more perilous for Russia after that redeployment, as I discuss below is an excerpt from my August 3 article outlining how much of the rest of the war would unfold; as I was writing that part, potential Russian redeployments I was outlining actually happened, and, as I wrote back then, combined with Russia’s tendency to engage in fruitless attacks, Russia’s redeployments from the east to the south “could even leave itself vulnerable to counterattacks in the east (if it hadn’t already even before this redeployment) while the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south progresses.”  Simply put, Ukraine’s recent successful counterattacks in the Donbas and Kharkiv fronts over the past few days reflect Russia’s poor mathematical calculations as outlined below, giving Ukraine targets of opportunity of which Ukraine is now taking advantage.

Considering Russia’s Redeployment (excerpt)

July has seen the end of one phase of the war and the beginning of another, with Russia now trying to stave off disaster in the south by taking troops from the east that are still much-needed in the east, and yet, Russia has little choice: if it does not reinforce the south, it risks having almost all of its position there being steamrolled rapidly by the coming Ukrainian onslaught.

I wrote most of this before Russia moved troops from the east to the south, but while I was busy finding specific sources I had come across over the past month to cite throughout, it happened.  But before it was clear Russia was pulling troops from the east, I was writing that the best Russia can probably do is weaken its eastern front to slow down the Ukrainian advance in the south, but not enough to really stop it, because that could precipitate a collapse on the eastern front.  So far, that seems to be the path the Russians have chosen: weakening one front even after they had pretty much already stalled there to reinforce another front where they would have been crushed relatively quickly if they did not reinforce from that first front, with the most likely result that they will lose on both fronts, just less quickly in the south and now more quickly in the east (as opposed to really quickly in the south and less quickly in east).

Such is the dilemma—the trap—in which Russia has found itself: choosing how quickly or slowly to lose on one front or another, any serious victory out of reach regardless of any decisions about conventional forces (unless Ukraine starts suddenly making disastrous choices on the battlefield) and I seriously doubt Putin will use nuclear weapons, which could hurt Russia in the long-run more than any imagined gains Putin thinks their use would get him.

As much as anything else, Russia needing to move forces from one front where things are already going badly to another where things are going even worse is as much a sign as anything else of Russia’s generally weakening, losing position in the overall war, which the Kherson counteroffensive is about to expose for all to see beyond doubt.

When it comes to this reinforcement effort in the south, consider that most of those troops are in units that have been fighting in the east for a long time, taken many casualties, are exhausted, and will have to travel in a long radius around the front line to get to the south and may come under fire in transit, that will be fighting in more exposed, less defensible terrain with fewer fortified positions than in the Donbas and with longer supply lines to maintain than that front.  So the idea that they are going to fare well against the extremely well-executing, highly motivated, and well-equipped Ukrainian troops that are currently having success after success near Kherson is quite a hard sell.

Additionally, if Putin and their commanders are dumb enough to focus on attack and, as a result, Russia likely suffers heavy casualties, they will be wasting an opportunity to buy time by having those troops play it much safer and dig in where they can to defend southern Kherson Oblast and Zaporizhzhia; after such failed attacks, reduced Russian forces will be even less able to defend than if they had not attacked, but, again, with the dynamics as they are, it is mostly a question of how much Russia can slow Ukraine down and exact a higher cost on Ukrainian forces in the south than actually stopping Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

While all this is going on, if Russia is not careful (and let’s be honest: when has it been?) it could even leave itself vulnerable to counterattacks in the east (if it hadn’t already even before this redeployment) while the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south progresses.

(end excerpt)

See full August 3 article from which this is excerpted, How Ukraine War Will Likely Go Rest of 2022, or, Kherson: The Beginning of the End for Russia, related August 23 article Ukrainian Prudence Meets Russian Limitations: Explaining the Current Pace and Nature of Russia’s War on Ukraine, and all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed half-a-million content views on 8/27/22!!

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) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), August 3, 2022; *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; greatly condensed version published by Byline Times on August 16, 2022, as How Ukraine’s Southern Offensive Could Lead to the End of the War; adapted version featured by Small Wars Journal on August 4 within Why Ukraine Will Defeat Russia and How, from Kherson to Crimea, from Zaporizhzhia to the Donbas, in turn cited by the German news site Buzzard; see the previous July 30 sister article Russia’s Defeat in Ukraine May Take Some Time, But It’s Coming and Sooner Than You Think

Morale is the greatest single factor in successful war.

Dwight E. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe

If we had only deployed our forces against the Finns in the way even a child could have figured out from looking at a map, things would have turned out differently.

Nikita Khrushchev, on relative Soviet failure in the Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940, Khrushchev Remembers

Stupid is as stupid does.

Forrest Gump

A Russian soldier enters Heaven.

St. Peter: “So you’re dead…”

Russian: “Oh no—Soviet spokesmen say I’m bravely advancing on the Finns.”

Finnish joke/@realtimewwii/Twitter

SILVER SPRING and WASHINGTON—In my last article, I already went into why the specific, major dynamics of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s absurd war will be favoring Ukraine more and more over time for the foreseeable future—why Ukraine is winning and Russia is losing—but here, I would like to get into what specifically this means for the current and foreseeable future: how Ukraine will win.

To revisit some of those dynamics I discussed earlier, Ukraine has obviously recently been making steady advances in the south towards Kherson as it advertises a massive counteroffensive there, even as it has decimated Russian ammunition depots and command centers well-behind the front line there and, especially, in the eastern Donbas.  At the same time, as new Western equipment—especially HIMARS and M777s—have significantly altered the dynamics overall, including in the Donbas region with the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts (i.e., provinces) that have been the scenes of fighting since 2014, with the Russian advance there—which had only been creeping forward unevenly and pitifully over the course of three months—having all but come to a complete halt, some minor Wagner “mercenary” success in Novoluhanske and at its nearby Vuhlehirska power plant notwithstanding, until the past few days.  Yet even the most recent minor advances in the east do not portend any effort Russia can sustain, let alone that can yield major breakthroughs.

I will explain how, the more time that goes by, the more the fates of the eastern and southern fronts will be connected (indeed, even as I have been writing this over the past week, this has become only more clearly the case).

From Kherson to Crimea and Beyond

Back in April, I noted the possibilities that both Western weapons in Ukrainian hands could be a huge threat to the Russian Navy and that Kherson could fall to Ukraine, and that both would threaten Russia’s eight-year occupation of Crimea.  Fast forward to now and every day (even today!) there is more and more reason to believe that Ukraine should take Kherson—city and oblast—relatively soon.  Once this happens, then the rest of Russian-occupied territory in the south of Ukraine opens up to that continuing major counterattack by Ukrainian forces.

Yet, where the Russians should just play defense and conserve manpower in the south, they have been engaging in attacks that have failed and cost them lives, only weakening their defensive capabilities against Ukrainian forces.  In recent days, Ukraine has even damaged the vital bridges near Kherson enough that Russia cannot use its military vehicles or equipment on them, aiming to cut off its troops on the north/west bank of the Dnipro River, on which Kherson (from now on city, unless otherwise noted) lies.  After theses precise HIMARS strikes against key regional bridges, thousands of Russian troops low or soon-to-be-low on supplies are thus about to be cut off by advancing Ukrainian forces if they are not already, being set up for death or surrender unless the Russians find a creative and safe way over the river or to keep supply lines open, all under Ukraine’s watchful eyes, with pontoon bridges Russians are trying to use being vulnerable and easily-anticipated attempts at workarounds.

Kherson is only about sixty miles from Crimea’s northern border.  Unlike the war-torn east with its separatist enclaves, Crimea was formally annexed (illegally) by Russia in 2014, and since then, has seen Russia only beef up its considerable presence, not just in terms of military bases and equipment and its Sevastopol Black Sea Fleet naval headquarters (which was itself hit by, apparently, a drone a few days ago), but in terms of moving many Russian security and intelligence personnel and their families even while suppressing native Crimean Tatars, altering demographics in Russia’s favor.

When Russia has been beaten back on some other fronts—Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv—it has been with heavy casualties on the Russian side and not some orderly retreat (Ukraine estimates over 40,000 Russian soldiers have been killed and wounded*—and I argued that Ukraine’s estimate in a general sense is relatively credible—while U.S. intelligence believes there are over 75,000 killed and wounded Russians, equivalent to roughly half the original Russian force deployed, either estimate an astounding casualty rate for a large modern army over such a short period of time; open source investigations have also confirmed at least 5,000 Russian vehicles have been lost, with obviously further vehicular losses difficult or unable to confirm—or unknown in the fog of war—still having happened).

Thus, if past is at all prologue, we should not expect large formations of intact, well-supplied and well-equipped Russian troops to just be leisurely making their way back to Crimea from the Kherson front to defend it.  Rather—as is already occurring—Russia is panicking as it knows it has committed most troops in Kherson Oblast and Crimea to the front and that it has very little to defend either should Ukraine break the Russian line at that front, so they are moving large numbers of troops to Kherson from the Donbas front and also from whatever was left in Crimea even as it is also moving troops to Crimea (perhaps just as a staging area or perhaps because they fear its loss too—as they should).  They are also moving some of these troops into neighboring Zaporizhzhia Oblast, very recently increasingly coming under heavy Ukrainian fire, a sign of its inclusion in the general Ukrainian southern counteroffensive.  (Zaporizhzhia is the last oblast between Kherson Oblast and Donetsk Oblast, the southern of the two Donbas oblasts, Luhansk being the northern one.  This shifting of Russian troops from the east obviously is weakening Russia’s position in the Donbas before Russia has achieved its objectives there, a move Russia would not make if it was not nervous about losing the south.

Ukraine very likely is going to able to cover the short distance from Kherson city to the Crimean border (even if perhaps slowly and carefully: Ukraine prefers to actually be careful with the lives of its troops, unlike—as I have noted before—Russia), as the terrain is not particularly defensible, just low-lying fairly flat coastal plain devoid of forests.  Once this happens, that means Ukraine will have sealed off the isolated Crimean Peninsula’s few land routes north with ease, cutting it off entirely from land reinforcement routes… except for one special bridge.

A personal vanity project of Putin’s and a boast of modern Russian engineering, the (rushed and not to code, so to speak) Kerch Strait Bridge (also known as the Crimean Bridge) it not only the longest bridge ever constructed in Russian history but is the longest bridge in all of Europe, some twelve miles long.  Especially using HIMARS, Ukraine could render it inoperable as it has the bridges around Kherson city and especially as Ukrainian forces move closer and closer to the Crimean border with Kherson Oblast.

When that border is sealed off by Ukrainian forces and the Kerch Strait Bridge to Russia is damaged enough to prevent resupply and reinforcement to Crimea, the Siege of Crimea could begin, with a minimal number of troops protecting the few routes north into Kherson Oblast and HIMARS, Harpoons, and other Western-supplied weapons systems keeping Russia’s Black Sea Fleet at bay or even destroying more of its vessels à la the Moskva (the sinking of which I predicted here in early April); in fact, it seems skittish Russia has already evacuated a significant portion of its fleet from Sevastopol to a port in Russia (Novorossiysk).  With advanced Ukrainian weapons systems right on the northern border of Crimea after Ukrainian forces establish themselves there, any Russian naval resupply of Crimea would be risky for Russia.

Cut off by land and sea and with air supply vulnerable to Western-supplied Ukrainian air defense systems, Ukraine can dig in, boxing whatever troops remain in Crimea with that relatively small force aforementioned while the bulk of the Ukrainian forces in the south push on through Zaporizhzhia Oblast to Donetsk and the southern portion of the major front line of the war in the east.  As is the case with the territory between Kherson and Crimea, there is not particularly strong defensive terrain helping any Russian defenders in Zaporizhzhia, just more relatively flat and treeless coastal steppe plains—almost entirely open fields—with a particularly low-lying corridor right on the coast and going all the way through to Donetsk oblast, including its main port city of famed Ukrainian Spartan-like resistance, Mariupol, and up to the border with Russia.  Outside of cities and villages there will be nowhere for Russians to hide, nowhere they and their resupply efforts cannot be easily spotted by Ukrainian aircraft, drones, and other forces looking for targets.  Ukraine’s great flat plains have long been used as invasion corridors in all directions as long as humans have lived in the region, and offer today’s occupying Russians the same disadvantages on defense as others have experienced going back to the days ancient Rome with the invasions of the Goths and Huns.

As is the case in most other places, Russia keeps attacking near Kharkiv but has little to show for it, and let there be no doubt that this front is less consequential and at best a sideshow compared to the efforts in the east and south.  It would be more than acceptable for Ukraine to lose some ground there temporarily while making far greater gains in the south and weakening, maybe even counterattacking against, Russia’s Donbas eastern positions, but it does not seem like Russia is poised to make any major gains on this front, either.   

For the reasons outlined in my last piece, the dynamics of this phase of the conflict are pretty set and they overwhelmingly favor Ukraine, with Russia not having the ability to alter them significantly.  This means we can expect steady gains in the south for Ukraine and a generally weakened position for Russia in the east.  Even if it is able to soon deploy replacement troops, they will be mostly green and not particularly well-equipped.

Considering Russia’s Redeployment

July has seen the end of one phase of the war and the beginning of another, with Russia now trying to stave off disaster in the south by taking troops from the east that are still much-needed in the east, and yet, Russia has little choice: if it does not reinforce the south, it risks having almost all of its position there being steamrolled rapidly by the coming Ukrainian onslaught.

I wrote most of this before Russia moved troops from the east to the south, but while I was busy finding specific sources I had come across over the past month to cite throughout, it happened.  But before it was clear Russia was pulling troops from the east, I was writing that the best Russia can probably do is weaken its eastern front to slow down the Ukrainian advance in the south, but not enough to really stop it, because that could precipitate a collapse on the eastern front.  So far, that seems to be the path the Russians have chosen: weakening one front even after they had pretty much already stalled there to reinforce another front where they would have been crushed relatively quickly if they did not reinforce from that first front, with the most likely result that they will lose on both fronts, just less quickly in the south and now more quickly in the east (as opposed to really quickly in the south and less quickly in east).

Such is the dilemma—the trap—in which Russia has found itself: choosing how quickly or slowly to lose on one front or another, any serious victory out of reach regardless of any decisions about conventional forces (unless Ukraine starts suddenly making disastrous choices on the battlefield) and I seriously doubt Putin will use nuclear weapons, which could hurt Russia in the long-run more than any imagined gains Putin thinks their use would get him.

As much as anything else, Russia needing to move forces from one front where things are already going badly to another where things are going even worse is as much a sign as anything else of Russia’s generally weakening, losing position in the overall war, which the Kherson counteroffensive is about to expose for all to see beyond doubt.

When it comes to this reinforcement effort in the south, consider that most of those troops are in units that have been fighting in the east for a long time, taken many casualties, are exhausted, and will have to travel in a long radius around the front line to get to the south and may come under fire in transit, that will be fighting in more exposed, less defensible terrain with fewer fortified positions than in the Donbas and with longer supply lines to maintain than that front.  So the idea that they are going to fare well against the extremely well-executing, highly motivated, and well-equipped Ukrainian troops that are currently having success after success near Kherson is quite a hard sell.

Additionally, if Putin and his commanders are dumb enough to focus on attack and, as a result, Russia likely suffers heavy casualties, they will be wasting an opportunity to buy time by having those troops play it much safer and dig in where they can to defend southern Kherson Oblast and Zaporizhzhia; after such failed attacks, reduced Russian forces will be even less able to defend than if they had not attacked, but, again, with the dynamics as they are, it is mostly a question of how much Russia can slow Ukraine down and exact a higher cost on Ukrainian forces in the south than actually stopping Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

While all this is going on, if Russia is not careful (and let’s be honest: when has it been?) it could even leave itself vulnerable to counterattacks in the east (if it hadn’t already even before this redeployment) while the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south progresses.

The Key Battle to Come After Kherson: The Southern Donetsk Flank

The moment of truth will come when Ukrainian forces attacking in the south push their way to the point of being able to join forces with their fellow soldiers who have been manning the line in Donetsk Oblast at the southernmost area along the north-south Donbas axis.  This could very well be some of the fiercest fighting of the war, for, if Ukraine can push back the Russians there, they will be able to flank the entire Russian line and roll up most or all of the Donbas front, especially if they are able to mount simultaneous attacks from their older 300-mile-line line on that front, where the Russians have already stalled, taken heavy losses, and are at their logistical wit’s end.

Russia has been stalled and exhausted in the east now for weeks until very recently, and it is already having to cannibalize the Donbas-front forces to attempt to prevent disaster in the south.  As stated, it is doubtful those exhausted or any new, inexperienced troops will be able to stop the highly-motivated, larger, and better equipped forces Ukraine is going to throw at them (and the careful Ukrainians will probably advance slowly to bait Russia into attacks that will lead to higher Russian casualties and fewer Russian troops defending when Ukraine does attack).  So, again, it is unlikely those redeployments will be able to prevent this battle from happening.  On either front, the also Russians have no effective counter for Ukraine’s most advanced systems recently supplied by the West.  On top of all this, Ukraine has far more reserves available.  In other words, it doesn’t look good for Russia.

Taking all this into account, when this Ukrainian force finally makes it to the east and threatens to flank the whole Russian line there, this will be after Russian forces overall have taken heavy losses and the Russian soldiers on the Donbas line will still face many of the same imbalances they have already been facing lately but with far more Ukrainian troops engaging them than before.  Simple math suggests it is more than likely that the combined Ukrainian forces, turning the southern front into an extension of the eastern Donbas front, will be able to push back a Russian force currently stalled or making only minimal gains with far fewer Ukrainian troops there now than will be the case when the Ukrainians now outside Kherson finally make their way there and link up with the bulk if their fellow Ukrainian forces in the east.  And in some areas the Russians will be facing attacks from Ukrainians from new lines instead of the ones they have been fighting on, making their defensive positions weaker.  And any new Russian troops arriving there around this time, as is the case in general, will not be elite forces (even if some veterans are among the ranks) but rushed-into service, ill-equipped, barely-trained new recruits.  And while the terrain in the east is somewhat better defensively, consider this: where the Russians have advanced their positions, they will not be as fortified as they would be in their positions long-held before Putin’s February 24 blunder of an escalation.

I would say a best-case scenario for the Russians are that they are pushed back to their old, highly fortified positions from before February 24, but even this seems wishful thinking if you are the Russians: if the Russians are pushed back that much the state of the surviving troops will not be good, and they will likely be facing Ukrainian forces that are able to outflank them coming from the south (and who knows what would happen north in the Kharkiv area, though a static situation is probably the most likely one).  Even if Russia avoids being outflanked in the south, it will almost certainly have to extend its current line in the Donbas to stop this, spreading its forces much more thinly and weakening the entire line in a way in which it might be mostly pushed back all at once, if the Russians have the sense to fall back as line.  If not, one or more Ukrainian breakthroughs would likely result in a general rout—as happened most notably outside Kyiv in early April—or several battles where the Russians are outflanked, thus at a severe disadvantage, and suffer grievous casualties.

The most likely optimistic version for the Russians of this last phase of this campaign would be that Ukraine breaks the main Donbas line but that Russia is able to maintain, for at least a while, some territory in Ukraine near the Russian border, as Ukraine has pledged to the Biden Administration not to use HIMARS to strike targets inside Russia, a move that Biden and his team feel could possibly cause Russia to escalate much more dangerously; and yet, if Ukraine will end up being able to fully push Russia out if it is able to use HIMARS on Russian military targets inside Russia near the Ukrainian border—targets that would be the only thing enabling Russia to hold onto Ukrainian territory near that border—I would think the U.S. might be flexible on that restriction.

And while all this is going on in the east, whatever troops have been holed up in Crimea will either be forces into stupid counterattacks to break out into Kherson Oblast that will very likely fail or those forces will be whittled down to a deeply weakened state that will make any Ukrainian attack that much easier (Ukraine may or may not feel content to keep up the siege, as opposed to carrying out an invasion, depending on a how things are going there and elsewhere).  And, while the locals are mostly pro-Russian, that sentiment will likely have declined and, for reasons I have outlined back in April, I don’t expect those locals to engage in any kind of mass insurgency.

Bet on Ukraine (Don’t Bet on Russia)

That’s it folks: much better, numerically superior Ukrainian forces under much better leadership with much better weapons and equipment, much better morale, and a much better supply situation are going to clash with Russian forces inferior in all of those aspects.  It is hard to not see these Ukrainians eventually make their way to the Donbas and roll up or push back the main Russian line there at terrible, irreplaceable-anytime-soon-for-Russia cost.  It may take a while, and Ukraine will certainly suffer casualties of its own, perhaps also high, but Ukrainians have the will, resources, and leadership to do this and the Russians have none of those to stop them.

If you still doubt that Russia could really lose this badly, ask yourself this: where will Russia get high-quality troops and top-of-the-line equipment, let alone troops with anything approaching high morale, to be able to deploy in the south or the east to stop the coming Ukrainian onslaught?  They can now barely supply their own artillery in the east, their best advantage in this war, and I would challenge anyone to explain how this current situation—already bad for Russia—improves overall and consistently over the coming days, weeks, and months.  Russia has no answer to this question, and thus little hope against their determined and far more confident, qualitatively-better Ukrainian foe that is redefining the playbook on modern warfare.

The battles for Kherson, and the moment when the Ukrainian southern forces can join their brothers in the east and position themselves to flank the entire Russian line or force it to fall back, will very likely be the key remaining fights of this war.  Russia might manage to hold onto some pockets of territory for a while—including a Crimea isolated and under siege—but there is real reason to think the defenders in these places will eventually cave after the rest of the Russian forces are killed or routed, hampered by their consistently awful supply situation and laughable Russian leadership.  And morale matters: when it breaks, many soldiers can be rendered combat ineffective even without being killed, wounded, or captured. 

Any subsequent competent, well-provisioned new attacks from Russia will be coming beyond the foreseeable future (unless Russia is dumb enough to keep wasting raw recruits, and hey, it may very well be) and after Ukraine is able to strongly reinforce and fortify its positions, which will likely be their legitimate, internationally recognized borders with Russia or a small buffer-zone, a situation that would likely be a stalemate over time and once that would cause Putin’s support at home to crater over time, having nothing but defeat to show his people after so much blood and treasure and reputation has been expended, something I argued would be the end result at the beginning of this conflict, back in in early March for Small Wars Journal.

We can sure hope, and while so often hope is placed on flimsy shoulders, I really, really like Ukraine’s odds for all the reasons outlined above.

This article mainly constitutes the “how” Russia will lose; the previous sister article: the “why!”

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

© 2022 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed half-a-million content views on 8/27/22!!

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(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), July 30, 2022; adapted version featured by Small Wars Journal on August 4 in Why Ukraine Will Defeat Russia and How, from Kherson to Crimea, from Zaporizhzhia to the Donbas, in turn cited by the German news site Buzzard; *update August 1: a key reaction with some additional information is briefly discussed; originally submitted July 18 to a prestigious think tank for publication and which a kindly editor there said he intended to review/edit, but, despite a cordial-back-and-forth via e-mail in the interim, twelve days later that still has not happened (understandably a lot going on at the other end) so here I am self-publishing (oh, the perils of freelancing!).  I think it stands well as is, so I have kept the text the same from July 18 (I had made one time-related change but had made the wrong calculation, so 100% of the text before the update is the same from July 18 after my correction), but with a small number of additional sources added and some of the images updated.  You can see that almost-identical version from July 18 with metadata showing that date here. Also see the sister August 3 article How Ukraine War Will Likely Go Rest of 2022, or, Kherson: The Beginning of the End for Russia and July 14 precursor article, THE THREE MAPS SHOWING WHY UKRAINE IS WINNING AND RUSSIA IS LOSING (and why is isn’t even close); follow-up piece on how specifically these dynamics will play out over the course of the next few months coming very soon.

SILVER SPRING and WASHINGTON—I can respect the fact that many journalists are not terribly steeped in military history, strategy, or tactics, but the writing really is on the wall for Russia in its miserable failure of a war.  And while projecting too much optimism may run the risk losing a needed sense of urgency in some quarters, support for Ukraine has not only been stated as a clear and long-term commitment throughout the West but acted upon with vigor over the more than five months of this war, with support only increasing and more and more support surely on the way.  Thus, analysis that misses Ukraine’s success—not just past or tactically, but in forging, driving, and dominating dynamics that have put Ukraine on the path to surprising victory and Russia on the path to ignominious defeat—is not presenting an accurate picture.

As I noted elsewhere, a simple look at a few maps produced by the Institute for the Study of War in conjunction with Critical Threats reveals that, since late March, Ukraine has been more on the offensive than Russia and is taking far more of its occupied territory from Russia since then than territory Russia has taken since then from Ukraine, never a good sign for any invader.

What this demonstrates is that Russia has essentially lost the ability to dramatically alter the dynamics of the war.  After Russia was routed in late March and early April from the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy fronts, the supposedly-mighty Russian Army has for months now—more than three—been able to do little more than inch forward kilometer by kilometer in the east, attack defenseless civilians (or even wheat fields), blockade Ukrainian ports, and lob cruise missiles from extreme distances.

Tactical Realities Dictating Russia’s Shrinking Strategic Outlook

At this point, the Russians’ greatest battlefield asset is their massed artillery barrages (Russia, surprisingly, was never able to achieve air superiority and Ukrainian air defenses are only increasing and improving with Western aid).  And yet, Ukrainian tactics and new Western equipment (M777 howitzers, M142 HIMARS [High Mobility Artillery Rocket System], M270 MLRS [Multiple Rocket Launch System])—equipment literally designed to counter the very equipment the Russians are using—have been an effective counter to undermine this major Russian strength.  The more dispersed and nimble Ukrainians are careful about concentrating many soldiers in vulnerable areas while Russians keep offering up packed headquarters with key officers and ammunition depots as easy targets, both crucial for effective use of Russian artillery (and just about everything else Russia has).  And, indeed, the new Western precision systems and ammunition that are being given (and given in increasing numbers to Ukraine), combined with Ukraine’s innovative and brilliant approach to targeting (an app called GIS Art for Artillery), are already outperforming and outgunning Russian imprecise “aim-in-the-general-area” artillery, inflicting far more military casualties per gun per shot than the Russians, including destroying far more Russian artillery pieces along with the ammunition needed to supply them and Russian S-300 or S-400 air defense systems that seem unable to counter the Western weapons.  The new systems are also further disrupting already severely disrupted Russian supply lines.  In recent weeks, as the new Western weapons have been increasingly rolled out by Ukraine, apart from high Russian casualties, there has also been a telling exponential decrease in outgoing Russian artillery rounds even as Ukraine increases its outgoing fire, the result of weeks of precise and effective targeting by—and an increase in the numbers of—these Western-supplied weapons systems, with more of these systems on the way.

In this context, it is crucial to note that, at this point, most of Russia’s best combat infantry troops are dead, wounded, or in units that have been “mauled” into a non-“combat effective” state through casualties, leadership voids, equipment and supply losses/shortages, or a combination (often so) of these.  In a wider sense, Russia’s endemic corruption very much infecting its military and Russia’s strange conscript-contract hybrid military system contributing to a severe lack of cohesion are big parts of the explanation for these losses.  And the overall numbers of massive casualties suffered by Russia and its Donbas Luhansk and Donetsk proxies along with equipment losses (including catastrophic losses of Russia’s poorly-maintained supply trucks) and ridiculous, consistent supply issues mean that Russia’s outsized imperial ambitions far exceed its current and foreseeable capabilities.

Even so, Russia and those Donbas proxies are resorting to drafting locals in regions of Ukraine they occupy while Russia is also pushing hard to raise troops from remote parts of the Russian Federation populated by down-and-out ethnic minorities and pressure veterans whose contracts are up or have already returned home from combat to go back (getting new recruits in Russia is not as simple or as quick as one may think), and even this will take time and will result in most cases in reluctant, poorly trained-and-equipped troops with low morale or people who will simply surrender or defect at worst.  In some cases, troops are even WWII-era or even late-nineteenth-century bolt-action rifles or are manning obsolete Soviet-era relic tanks recently taken out of storage, most notably the T-62M 1983 upgrade of the 1961 T-62, built upon the 1958 T-55 (this last point strongly suggests that Russia has lost most of its best deployable tanks, or why else would they be dragging out much older Soviet tanks from storage?).  Obviously, none of these new soldiers or units will be anywhere near the quality of the best troops and units that have already been decimated or destroyed in the fighting: those elite troops are basically irreplaceable.

None of these moves by Russia reflect winning.

Thus, there simply are currently no good, fast options to replace Russia’s mounting casualties and Russia is basically running out of not just quality troops, but troops in general.  There are not 50,000—let alone 20,000—fresh Russian elite combat forces arriving well-equipped and well-supplied with high-morale and quality leadership at Russia’s fronts anytime soon, and Russia’s current leadership culture is incapable of patiently and methodically training any large numbers of high-quality troops, especially in its current flailing mode.  Even if Russia’s leaders were focusing on producing well-trained troops, it would be a long time before they could be deployable, maybe even too late to prevent a full loss of all Russian gains in Ukraine since 2014, let alone 2022.  It is also crucial to note that Russia’s military machinery cannot be properly maintained or produced anymore without key components manufactured outside of Russia and blocked by Western sanctions.  Even if Russian President Vladimir Putin hits the panic button and begins a general draft mobilization (politically risky for him), that cannot yield serious results anytime soon, either.

*Update August 1: one of the Twitter accounts to follow on the Ukraine war—Trent Telenko, a former U.S. Department of Defense civilian logistics expert—had high praise for this article after I shared it with him, and responded with a thoughtful thread full of additional information on Russian manpower shortcomings. He cited the his analysis (as I have done throughout this article) and that of Kamil Galeev; Telenko has earlier shared two key threads by Galeev, one going into the overall nature of Russian imperialism and how that effects its force composition, deployment, and how casualties are spread across certain peoples, geographies, and units, and another on how the nature of Russian imperialism means that much of Russia is not that Russian, with implications for recruitment/force composition/identity.*

And, as well-known Russia expert Fiona Hill notes, time is not on Russia’s side: as the quality, capability, outfitting, and morale of Russian troops decrease, the inverse is happening with the Ukrainian military which, even before this current stage of fighting, was qualitatively superior (I have explained before that Ukraine actually has more troops than Russia, that these troops are better equipped and supplied, with higher morale, better and simpler logistics, home field advantage, and major international support and aid that Russia lacks).  Ukraine is now only deploying more and more troops with high-morale and Western-style (or even actual Western) training with some of the best Western equipment available, easily overmatching corresponding Russian troops and technology.  This trend began years ago with Western training missions, funding, and equipment for Ukraine’s military, efforts that have only dramatically intensified during this current crisis.  And that acceleration is happening as Russia is increasingly rushing ill-trained raw recruits with inferior equipment against superior Ukrainian forces, with predictable results.  Ukraine may have less of this new technology than Russia has of its inferior technology, but even this imbalance is being mitigated with each new delivery of Western military aid.

Whatever advances Russia has managed to accomplish in recent months have been painstakingly slow, relatively miniscule, and “uneven”—part of a village or two one day, repulsed another, some small loss of territory after that, a village following that: as representative of Russia’s extremely limited capabilities as anything else and proof its “culminating point” hovers over its operations like an albatross—and even those gains have come at high cost.  Any hypothetical major gains would mean its “exhausted,” bloodied troops will be spread out more thinly, its poorly-managed supply lines extended over longer distances and open that much more to Ukrainian attacks: in other words, not only are any new Russian gains not only not guaranteed to stay in Russian hands long, they make holding onto what Russia held before more challenging and open Russia even more so to counterattacks.

Even where Russia has gained ground, there has been destruction and massive depopulation—including population transfers by Russia deporting Ukrainians to Russia, acts that could legally be considered genocidal (such transfers are a horrific Russian tradition in Ukraine, as I have noted before)—accompanied by looting and war crimes on a large scale.  Yet Ukraine has already received concrete pledges of reconstruction—with individual regions even being “adopted” by individual allies—while Russia’s extremely-sanctioned economy and lines of outside support are weak, any “allies” practically non-existent.

Examined Closely, Dynamics Obviously Favor Ukraine and Will for Foreseeable Future

In short, this is the best Russia has been able to do and the capabilities of its war machine are only set to decline further while Ukraine’s military is only increasing its capabilities, with the above factors almost mathematical in terms of their combined effects.  Russia simply cannot sustain and supply its current efforts spread out across such wide fronts, let alone find fresh, motivated, and well-trained recruits and new state-of-the-art equipment (indeed, it is already losing ground in the south in the face of the buildup of what is supposed to be a massive Ukrainian counteroffensive there, one that could see Kherson retaken and even put Crimea in play, as I posited in April).   In contrast, Ukraine is set for new waves of well-trained troops and the deployment of much larger additions to the less-trained but still highly-motivated Territorial Defense Forces even as wave after wave of Western equipment arrives.

Non-expert news anchors and journalists should familiarize themselves with these dynamics and how they so deeply favor Ukraine.  To be sure, Russia certainly possesses horrific, imprecise weapons that can kill many civilians when deployed indiscriminately against concentrated urban areas, but that does not equate to rosier prospects on the battlefield, a coherent strategy, sound allocation of resources, effective logistical organization, motivating men to perform well as coordinated teams, and an incoming abundance of both new motivated recruits and cutting-edge modern equipment that stack up very well against opposing forces.  Ukraine has all of these things, Russia none of them.

As I wrote, the writing is on the wall.  Russia is not some magical fantasy power, capable of using sorcery to concoct armies led by fearsome undead Nazgûl Ringwraiths with an endless supply of bloodthirsty orcs.  The world, and especially Ukraine, has seen what this Russian enemy has to offer, and it is not impressive.  In contrast, the Ukrainians are most impressive, and—in spite of their own not insignificant losses and the terror of Russia’s crimes against humanity targeting defenseless civilians—they are the ones who will shape the way this war will change in the coming months, driving dynamics that are very much in their favor.  It is time that the analysis given to the public reflects this reality, especially with Western support clearly continuing and increasing.

This article mainly constitutes the “why” Russia will lose; the sister follow-up article: the “how!”

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

© 2022 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed half-a-million content views on 8/27/22!!

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) By Brian E. Frydenborg, May 25, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—In trying other times to convey the emotion and time-span of the struggles highlighted herein, in the past I have used a particular excerpt from a particular poem and will reuse it here because it is terribly apt and revealing, especially when noting the date:

Great Russia: [i.e., Russia]

Do you know with whom you are speaking, or have you forgotten? I am Russia, after all: do you ignore me?

Little Russia: [i.e., Ukraine]

I know that you are Russia; that is my name as well.

Why do you intimidate me? I myself am trying to put on a brave face.

I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,

Under whose auspices you were born of your ancestors.

Do not think that you are my master:

Your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.

A Conversation Between Great Russia and Little Russia, 1762 by Semen Divovych, Ukrainian Cossack scribe and poet

As the above quote demonstrates, for centuries, Ukrainians have fought for their freedom and to preserve their identity against an expansionist, imperialist, colonialist Russia (something I have discussed at length before). Below is a brief (not by any means comprehensive) history of Russian and Soviet mass atrocities carried out in what are now the modern borders of Ukraine.

Imperial Russia had control over Ukraine’s east for far a longer time than its west (part of that not even coming under Russian control until the mid-twentieth century), and the tsarist era saw systematic top-down suppression of Ukrainian as a language and identity (some Ukrainians even adopting Russian to suffer less discrimination) as well as suppression of the Muslim Crimean Tatars that was so bad that a large majority fled Crimea, leaving the Tatars who remained a minority in the face of colonialist settling of Russians and others in Crimea and other areas within Ukraine’s current borders (especially the Donbas), just some of the tsarist policies collectively known as “Russification.”

A free Ukrainian state finally emerged from the collapse of Imperial Russia at the end of World War I, only to be caught up in a number of conflicts, including the Russian Civil War; when the fighting was over after years of killing in Ukraine, Ukraine’s brief independence had been snuffed out by the time it was integrated as a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, in 1922 (and far from willingly).

The Soviet era would see even more dramatic demographic shifts. 

A decade after being forcibly integrated into the USSR, in the face of both maintaining Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian resistance to Moscow’s policy of collectivization of farming, Stalin took what was a terrible situation with a regional famine and specifically directed and aggravated that famine towards Ukraine, killing millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933 through starvation and its accompanying diseases in the man-made genocidal disaster that has come to be known as the Holodomor (the most detailed estimate approximates 3.9 million dead).  During this genocidal famine, Russians were resettled into some areas where Ukrainians had been starved to death or sent off to gulags, particularly in the east and south, so that the land could still be worked and yield harvests.  As the Donbas area in particular was a center of major industrialization, Russian and other Soviet migration to that region was considerable in this period. 

Understandably, when German armies came rolling through Ukraine in 1941, many Ukrainians with little love for Stalin, Russia, or the Soviets and their Union saw an opportunity in a classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation.  But the Nazis were uninterested in Ukrainian nationalism, so, not long after their invasion of the Soviet Union, they turned on their Ukrainian allies after some of them—Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B—proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state.  Bandera some of his Ukrainian nationalists were caught up in the crackdown, but some of the rest fought the Nazi invaders, even as their old enemies, the Soviets, eventually came back during their great counteroffensive against Hitler’s armies.

Thus, the OUN-B fought the Nazis and Soviets at once (until the former were driven out), eventually forming alongside others the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and fighting a bitter guerilla war against the Soviets that lasted until 1954, the same year Khrushchev symbolically gifted Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, though some tiny numbers of insurgents continued resistance for years after.  Not even including the fighting with the Nazis, some 150,000 Ukrainians—insurgents and civilians—were killed in combat by the Soviet counterinsurgency campaign against—as the Soviets blanketly called all insurgents—the “Banderites,” after Bandera (more on that by me here). 

There was so much killing and depopulation during World War II by the Nazis and Soviets in Ukraine that the people of the Ukrainian SSR suffered one of the highest casualty totals of the war both in proportionate terms and absolutely (about 6.85 million dead, some 16.3% of the total population in the relatively recent accounting of one Russian historian).  Additionally, the Germans deported some 2.4 million people from within Ukraine to work in Germany as forced slave labor (of whom, by some estimates, 400,000-450,000 died from the brutal conditions).  Then, when the Soviets retook Ukraine and other Soviet territory occupied by Hitler’s forces, large parts of populations that had collaborators in their midst or were merely suspected by paranoid authorities of having collaborated or harbored collaborators (or even just because they were seen as troublesome “foreign” elements) were deported to Soviet Central Asia or Siberia under appalling conditions that saw many of those deportees perish.  The deported included all of the Crimean Tatars (estimates range, but quite roughly 200,000) in just a few days in 1944 on the grounds that they had, en masse, collaborated with the Nazis.  In reality, only a small percentage actually had, and the Soviet government even admitted in 1967 that the accusations were false (I did not even realize I was writing this section on the anniversary of the beginning of this genocidal deportation, May 18).  Many ethnic Ukrainians were also deported by the Soviets from Ukraine (over 200,000 from western Ukraine alone, where UPA was most popular).

Few Russians are likely aware of the supremely sick irony of Putin pushing an expansionist, imperialist, colonialist war on Ukraine to reintegrate ethnic Russian populations back into Russia considering those populations mainly came to be in Ukraine’s south and east because tsarist and/or Soviet-engineered oppression, genocide, famine, mass killing, and mass deportations of Ukrainians and Tatars occurred alongside colonialist population transfers of Russians into Ukraine, settled often on the literal blood and bones of the previous inhabitants. 

Apparently true to its horrific legacy, Russian in this the current war has been accused by Ukraine of forcibly deporting some 1.2 million Ukrainians, including well over 200,000 children, to Russia, actions that can only bring back nightmare memories of the past horrors described above (on May 23, Ukraine updated the accusation to a total of 1.4 million Ukrainians, including over 240,000 children).

Thus, Ukrainians’ resistance to Russian imperialism, whether in the past or today, is not inspired by Western support or American manipulation into becoming “proxies” of the U.S., but a deep, lived experience passed on from generation to generation of being at the receiving end of a long history of atrocities that, sadly, in part defines what it means to be Ukrainian.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

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, April 24, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook); *update July 27; discussed in an SOF News update for April 25 and excerpted in Brian’s April 30 article, A Super-Short Guide to Why Ukraine is Kicking Russia’s Ass in Putin’s Ukraine War; a different version with a bit more content published by Small Wars Journal on April 26, titled Why and How Russian-Occupied Crimea Can Fall to Ukraine and, in turn, cited by the Ministry of Defense of Brazil; see see follow-up October 6 article This Is the Beginning of the End of the War that goes into more detail on how Crimea may fall and precursor article from April 10, Ukraine Will Easily Destroy or Sideline Russia’s Navy with Game-Changing Anti-Ship Missiles; also, since the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on October 7 to Ukrainian activist Oleksandra Matviichuk and her organization the Center for Civil Liberties, listen to my April podcast with her here discussing war, Russian war crimes, human rights, and democracy in Ukraine; and see all of Brian’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine here; Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

*Update July 27: In response to my tweeting this article, Mykhailo Podolyak, an official advisor to the office of President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, responded with the following tweet:

SILVER SPRING and WASHINGTON—Weeks ago, we saw Russia’s fronts around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy collapse into full routs, and Ukrainian forces have been successfully counterattacking outside of Kharkiv, preventing any major Russian advances towards Mykolaiv, and should be able to move to retake nearby Kherson in the not-too-distant future.  And, oh, yeah, Ukraine destroyed Russia’s most prized and powerful warship, the Slava class cruiser Moskva (as far as I can tell, I was the only person to predict days before it happened that Ukraine would soon destroy the Moskva or other ships that did not withdraw from Ukraine’s coast out of range of whatever missiles were about to be deployed).

Russia is already spread thinly and has sustained horrific casualties—not even two weeks into Putin’s massive escalation, perhaps (even likely, as I argued) more Russians killed than all U.S. military deaths in eight years in Iraq and two decades in Afghanistan combined, now more than the official (admittedly underestimate) Soviet toll from a decade in Afghanistan from 1979-1989, and, as of April 24, maybe (likely) over 21,000 Russian military personnel killed; the U.S. Department of Defense estimates that, as of April 20, Russia has lost one-quarter of its combat power (combined troops, weapons, & equipment).  Simply put, Russia’s military is not in prime condition. 

As such, it is not likely there are large formations of troops south of Kherson not already being used on the frontlines that are ready to defend the rest of the territory Russia has gained in between Crimea and Kherson or even Crimea itself, so if the Russians are defeated on the Kherson front, there will likely be very little in between advancing Ukrainian forces and Crimea itself, and not a large number of defenders in Crimea, since Russia invaded from there and was expecting to be conquerors, not defenders.  If Russia has to move troops to try to stop any Ukrainian advance if Ukraine destroys or breaks through Russian formations around Kherson, those will likely have to come from other fronts where those troops are needed and Russians are desperate, but generally failing, to advance, and, as the Russians aren’t particularly well-fueled or well-led, such a rapid adjustment of their troops’ positions cannot be counted on to be competently executed or even happen at all.

In other words, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult for Ukraine to take Crimea once it starts experiencing success on the Kherson front, which it already is: even as I am writing this, Ukraine announced that it destroyed the Russian command post for the Kherson region, with some fifty military officers inside at the time, claiming to have killed two generals and badly wounded another.  If true, this would be a devastating blow to the command-and-control dimension of Russian operations in the region and we may be witnessing a momentum shift on this front as I write this.

Why Ukraine Can Pull This off

Looking beyond Kherson, here are the main reasons why Ukraine can take Crimea and end the Russian occupation that has been in place since 2014.

Russian Hubris

We have already seen Russian defenses of Russian and Belarusian territory on the border of Ukraine are weak: multiple successful (apparently Ukrainian) raids have been carried out in Russia close to the Ukrainian border against targets that include a fuel depot and a key rail bridge, while a Belarusian resistance of sorts has helped cripple Russian logistics in Belarus, the country led by the laughable Alexander Lukashenko, Putin’s stooge and the last real dictator in Europe.

This was because Putin did not anticipate any serious resistance from Ukrainians (let alone Belarusians).  As such, there has for much of the war been no strong presence inside the Russian border near Ukraine as Putin has committed nearly all troops initially allocated for this war to the fighting already.  As some of the main axes of advance for Russia, the fronts that moved north from Crimea have also met stiff resistance and taken high casualties, and it is unlikely, with the same type of hubris in effect throughout Russian areas of operations, that much caution was taken in keeping healthy reserves of high-quality forces in Crimea.  And even if Russian combat performance improves significantly (and for reasons that are deeply institutional and cultural this is unlikely), it would be improving from such a low level that performance would still leave oh-so-much to be desired.

Crimea Is Isolated

The Crimean Peninsula is isolated and not easily reinforceable or resupplied.  Reinforcements and supplies can only come by land from one bridge over the Kerch Strait—the Crimean Bridge, or Kerch Strait Bridge—as everything to the north is Ukraine and Crimea is surrounded by sea on its other three sides.  In part to combat this isolation, Russia constructed the Crimean Bridge through the Kerch Strait to join Russia and Crimea by land (this isolation is also one of the reasons the Kremlin wants to carve a land corridor from Russia to Crimea through Ukraine).

Work began on the bridge in early 2016 and it was completed in mid-2018, Putin personally opening it with much fanfare (the railway part was completed at the end of 2019) as the longest bridge built in Russian history and the longest in Europe (12 miles).  But its construction was illegal as well as rushed, its quality and ability to stay intact in its harsh environment questioned by experts.  It is still quite a source of Russian pride, a symbolic and substantive achievement that brings military and economic benefits to Russia.  All this only makes a ripe target even more ripe, one that will probably be easier to destroy because of the rush-job.   

Destroying the Crimean Bridge, then, in multiple locations across its span so that it would take a long time to become serviceable again should be a primary and immediate goal of Ukraine, one that should not be too difficult to accomplish, be it with missiles, maybe low-flying drones coming in over the waters to the south of the bridge, or perhaps even a special operations team.  Indeed, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, recently noted while I was writing this very piece that the bridge would very much be a target (much to the anger of the Kremlin).

True that, for now, Russia controls some of Ukraine north of Crimea and sort of has a land corridor to Donetsk (one of the two regions of the Donbas in Ukraine’s east that Russia has partially controlled since 2014) and Russia, but I doubt that will be the situation for long, given Russia’s track record of abysmal combat performance and that, as far as supplying or reinforcing Crimea by sea, Russia needs to soon withdraw or keep withdrawn Russian surface warships out of range of Ukraine’s anti-ship missiles or soon see them destroyed…

Russia’s Navy Has Been Exposed As Weak and Vulnerable

But, as I noted in my last piece predicting that Ukraine would take out the pride of the Russian Navy—the Black Sea Fleet flagship, the Slava class cruiser Moskva, Russia’s most powerful surface ship—counting on the Russian Navy for supplies, and most other forms of meaningful support, is something that cannot happen for much longer, and may even already be a thing of the past.  The selective use of Ukraine’s own Neptune cruise missiles—two of them connecting on April 13 to destroy the Moskva—suggests, as I noted was a distinct possibility in my aforementioned piece, that the Russian invasion has disrupted the general deployment of Ukraine’s Neptune anti-ship missile program, scheduled for this very month.  But whether more Neptune missiles or the anti-ship missiles promised by the West, plenty more anti-ship missiles are coming if they are not already there.  The days of the Russian Navy operating freely by the coast of Ukraine, including Crimea, are about to be over and, already, Russia has apparently moved whichever of its nineteen remaining large surface ships in the region were still operating off the Ukrainian coast much farther away from the coast in the wake of the Moskva’s sinking

Russia cannot reinforce its combined fleet with any of the ships it has in the Mediterranean—some brought from fleets stationed far away in the run-up to the war—because Turkey has closed its Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits to incoming military vessels in a sign of solidarity with Ukraine (this has left more than a few key Russian ships unable to join their Black Sea-deployed brethren as planned). Only ships from the Caspian Sea Flotilla can reinforce, which has to be done through the Volga-Don canal (and wow, if Ukrainians could engage in a covert mission in Russia to damage the canal and put it out of commission, that would be amazing and would also do significant economic damage to Russia by halting shipping traffic between the Caspian and Azov/Black Sea regions).  And, even if it does bring in ships from the Caspian Sea, like Russia’s other surface ships, they will just be prime targets for Ukrainian anti-ship missiles—on track to join the Moskva on the seafloor—if they don’t stay far away from Ukraine’s coast, all but negating their presence.

The Ukrainian Military’s Clear Advantages Over the Russian Military

Versus their Russian foes, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are in a much better overall position and of a much higher quality even though Russia has more and heavier weapons platforms such as tanks, artillery, planes, helicopters, and naval ships (I have explained away that last one already).

Ukraine actually has more troops.  Far more.  There is no shortage of Ukrainians willing to fight for Ukraine; at some points, there have been more volunteers than Ukraine has been able to accommodate, and large numbers of Ukrainians living abroad have been returning home to fight.  So Russia is trying to carry out an offensive against what is actually a numerically superior force.  Not a good strategy at all.

Ukraine’s individual troops are by far better equipped and supplied. They often have weapons that can easily knock out any Russian vehicles (and even, sometimes, Russian aircraft), more body armor, more night-vision goggles.  No wonder the Russians are constantly getting beat when they engage in firefights.

Ukrainian forces have far higher morale.  I have discussed how insanely poorly led, ill-equipped, ill-supplied, ill-trained, and ill-informed Russian soldiers in this war generally are.  They are losing or stagnating everywhere they are fighting.  And many of them have died, many more seeing their comrades die.  Instead of “leaving no man behind,” the Russians frequently abandon their dead and wounded, so disorderly are many of their retreats.  In contrast, it seems Ukraine has suffered far fewer losses, but while the Russians have died for just about nothing, Ukrainians are sacrificing for a very successful effort thus far.  Their morale is high and they are passionately willing to freely defend their homes and families and fellow Ukrainians, which cannot be said to be the same for the Russians.

Ukrainians are fighting on home turf.  Often, units in a particular area are from that area.  They often know the terrain intimately, whereas the Russians do not.  The advantages that play out on the battlefield from this are numerous, resulting in better intelligence and fewer losses for Ukrainians, more losses for Russians, more efficient operations for Ukrainians, slower operations for Russians. 

Ukraine’s logistics and far better and far simpler.  Unlike Russia, which has terrible logistics and needs to resupply or reinforce from Russia or the parts of Ukraine it occupied before February 24, Ukrainians are fighting often where they can easily bring in fresh supplies, new equipment and weapons coming in from the West, and their own reinforcements and new recruits.  As they are often supplying themselves with interior lines, their supplies and troops need to traverse far smaller distances than Russian supplies and troops.  In part as a result of that, those Russian supplies and troops are exposed to Ukrainian units that know their own home turf, resulting in those Russian supplies and convoys often being destroyed or ambushed before they can reach their final destination.  And the next point greatly enhances this point…

Ukraine has a lot of help coming in, increasing help, from the rest of the world (Russia does not).  Recently, this has included MiG aircraft parts that are significantly increasing the number of planes Ukraine can get into the sky.  But it is also increasingly including heavy weapons like tanks (better than what the Russians have) and artillery (also better than what the Russians have), so much so that U.S. defense officials at the Pentagon now estimate Ukrainians actually have more operable tanks in Ukraine than the Russians, and these newest heavy weapons are already having an impact.

How to Take Crimea: The (Coming?) Siege of Crimea

So given all this, how should Ukraine proceed?

Well, first and foremost, they should find a way to take out the pride of recent Russian infrastructure achievements, the Crimean Bridge.  This would make it far more difficult to supply Crimea and Russian forces that have invaded further into Ukraine from Crimea; with the anti-ship missile threat looming for the Russian Navy, that leaves the treacherous land corridor from the Donetsk, subject to Ukrainian partisan attacks and Ukrainian military raids, counterattacks, and air, drone, and missile strikes.  The destruction of the bridge will also further weaken Russia’s low morale, not just its pathetic logistical efforts.

Then, it could be possible for Ukraine, now getting reinforced by heavy weapons and troops that were victorious to the north, to launch an attack to break through the Kherson front and advance to the Crimean border, cutting it off from other Russian forces.  Yet, as Russia seems keen on an offensive in the area, it would be wise to first allow Russian forces to smash themselves into pieces as they have with their offensives elsewhere.  Unlike, say, the situation in Mariupol, where a small number of Ukrainian defenders have held on heroically despite the odds and inflicted outsized casualties on Russian forces, the Russians will find far more, better-rested, better-equipped, and better-supplied Ukrainian troops near Kherson.  If the Russians are stupid enough to attack and repeat their failures near Kyiv and elsewhere in the north, the Ukrainians can play defense and inflict heavy casualties before launching their own counterattack.

But if Russia is slow to attack or is bluffing around Kherson to focus more on the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Donbas, Ukraine may be able to catch Russia off-guard and still launch an offensive from around Kherson that could cut off Crimea from Russian positions to its north and roll back many of the gains Russia has made in south-central Ukraine.  Such a move might prompt Russia to weaken its support for the Donbas offensives to meet the Ukrainian offensive.

Whether it waits for the Russians to mash its battalion tactical groups (BTGs) against better equipped Ukrainian troops or takes the initiative and launches an assault first, Ukraine will be able to seriously threaten Crimea sooner rather than later if it can knock out that Crimean Bridge and destroy or drive off the Russian Navy with anti-ship missiles; indeed, both of these are well-within Ukraine’s capabilities.

With most forces that were in Crimea taking part in the invasion to Crimea’s north, again, we can expect a not terribly strong troop presence in Crimea.  Adding support to the idea that Crimea is not the best-supplied area at the moment is that the Russians are looting grain from granaries in Kherson and elsewhere and moving the plundered grain into Crimea, along with vegetables.

Thus, it would be relatively easy to put Crimea under a form of siege.  With its one bridge to Russia destroyed and Russian naval vessels either sunk from anti-ship missile or fleeing out of their range and into irrelevance, land and sea routes to resupply and reinforce Crimea will be cut off, and, as noted, it is unlikely large numbers of quality troops will have been left behind in Crimea.  Air drops would be possible but aircraft will also be at risk from stinger missiles and Ukrainian air defense systems Ukraine could move to the border of Crimea, including air defense systems recently sent by NATO’s Slovakia.  Russia has its own advanced air-defense systems in Crimea, so airstrikes would be difficult and risky for Ukraine.  Thus, a siege to soften up the Russians before a ground assault would make the most sense, as the Russian troops will begin feeling it over the course of the siege, which would further weaken morale and combat effectiveness before that assault would come.  If Ukraine can neutralize Russian air defenses during the course of the campaign, it could then utilize aircraft with far less risk to help finish the job.

The Siege of Crimea would weaken whatever resistance the Russian troops there—unable to be reinforced or resupplied by land or sea and not able to get much from the air if anything—would be able to offer, and when Ukraine does attack, it can use its more advanced, more precise, and heavier weapons it is now getting or about to get from the West.

It is true that most Crimeans are ethnic Russians who supported Russia’s illegal annexation, with those disagreeing having been mostly silenced, suppressed, “disappeared,” arrested (even for displaying the flag of Ukraine), tortured, or even killed, especially journalists, activists, and Crimean Tatars (who have a long history of persecution and oppression at the hands of Russia).  But contrary to the expectations of many of those supporting Russia in Crimea, prosperity did not come to Russian-occupied Crimea; rather, stagnation, isolation, and sanctions did, along with a collapse of the tourism industry and an overall deterioration in the quality of life.  The population would have declined were Russia not moving in large numbers of military, security, and intelligence personnel and their families from Russia to Crimea.  Morale among those living in Crimea would likely have been much higher right after the 2014 takeover than it is now.  Ukraine will almost certainly be far more careful than Russians in avoiding civilian casualties, as Russia engages in indiscriminate bombings (or, more accurately, deliberate) of civilian areas.  The people there, already suffering under a depressed economy for years, will likely see a further drop in morale during a siege.  Many will try to leave, and, unlike the Russians, Ukrainians are near-certain to allow them to do so.  For the above reasons, it is doubtful that many Crimean civilians will want to fight Ukrainians in the way Ukrainians rose up to resist Russians.  If Ukraine were to invade, Russian troops weakened by the siege and suffering from low morale and the ubiquitous poor Russian leadership, knowing no reinforcements are coming and having nowhere to retreat to, would likely be defeated relatively quickly.

Losing Crimea Would be Russia’s Most Devastating Loss of the War

The loss of Crimea would be a devastating blow to not only morale for the Russian military, it would be quite substantive: one of its main bases in the region, including the main base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, would be in Ukrainian hands.  Perhaps even more importantly, it would shatter Russians’ confidence in their incompetent Putin: the retaking of Crimea was a great source of pride and their faith and confidence in him, and, regardless of what nonsense, mindless propaganda is thrown at them by Russian state television, losing Crimea would make it painfully obvious that Russia is losing the war and losing it badly, even more than the high casualties, even more than the sinking of the Moskva.  It might not even occur to Russians that Ukraine could retake Crimea, but with the approaches I have laid out here, it is a distinct possibility, one that would devastate Russia’s war effort and wake up many Russians with a shock to the simple fact that Russia is failing in its insane war against the people and government of Ukraine, against democracy, and against reality itself.

Note added October 8, the day the bridge was hit by Ukraine: Since the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on October 7 to Ukrainian activist Oleksandra Matviichuk and her organization the Center for Civil Liberties, listen to my April podcast with her here discussing war, Russian war crimes, human rights, and democracy in Ukraine see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here.

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

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.

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) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 13, 2022; excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see Brian’s preceding February 21 Small Wars Journal piece The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine, featured by SOF News on February 26; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—The focus of my last excerpted article was to show how disgustingly careless, even cruel, the Russian military has been with the lives of its soldiers, how abusive and deceitful they have been to these fighting men of Russia and their families.  And the point of this is to acknowledge that, by such unforgivable conduct towards Russia’s own soldiers and their families, Putin and his cronies may have finally sowed the bittersweet seeds of their own demise.  This was one thing with the hundreds of concealed deaths over eight years with “volunteer” deployments into rebel-held portions of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions (known together as the Donbas) in Ukraine’s east (discussed in more detail earlier); it is already an entirely different phenomenon with thousands of deaths less than two weeks into Putin’s exponential escalation in the whole of Ukraine.

Even allowing for the possibility that some of the images and video coming out of Ukraine are not authentic, there is still (as I have noted recently) a lot of real footage of dead Russian soldiers and destroyed Russian vehicles, evidence of Putin’s lies to his own people and his lack of competence in managing and leading Russia’s army, evidence that increasingly destroys his credibility not only with his own people but his own soldiers and their officers.

The dead collectively are something that is very hard for Kremlin spinmasters and apologists in Russia and around the world to explain away, an undeniable public monument to Putin’s astounding failure.  The truth is enormous, visible even from afar, and death on the scale that the Russian Army is experiencing just across a border where many Russians have friends and family cannot be hidden by Putin from his people forever: Russia is not North Korea, its people not North Koreans.

As more and more Russians take in parts of the horrific picture, they will realize how totally they have been gaslit, how pathetically their army has performed under the leadership of a man so desperate to project strength that he literally rides around shirtless on a horse to pose for photos for public consumption.

The key psychological component here is that the foundation of Putin’s regime rests on the idea of restoring Russian strength.  So when the Russian people realize how totally degraded the Russian Armed Forces are after two decades of Putin’s leadership, only able to beat up on Georgia and Syria and utterly humiliated by its first real challenge under Putin’s Potemkin regime in a war with far smaller and far weaker Ukraine—which Russia has always regarded as a little brother, a former vassal of Russia in recent centuries—and understand that thousands of their boys have been needlessly slaughtered in a needless war as Russia hits its economic nadir and apex of isolation under well-deserved historic sanctions, there is going to be massive public outrage.

For Putin’s whole bargain with his people was “Give me your fledgling democracy to discard and I will raise you up and deliver you from the pit of Boris Yeltsin’s humiliated Russia,” yet Russia finds itself now—after only a matter of days into Putin’s absurd war—precisely where Putin promised to move it away from: the weak laughingstock status of the Yeltsin years, not respected, just tolerated because of its nuclear weapons and natural resources.

As more and more Russians realize this, Russians overall will realize that the bargain it struck with Putin repeatedly over the years is null and void, that they owe him no allegiance or support since the little man delivered (after some stability) mainly illusions and repression: the weakness of the Russian military, state, and international standing has now been exposed in a matter of mere days to the whole world as the Ukrainian people kick the Russian Army’s ass, the U.S.-led international order roars into action to show how defenseless the main institutions of Russian daily and economic life are rendered if America and its allies will them to be so, and the world overall isolates Russia as a pariah as no top-tier state has ever been isolated before. 

This last point bears some spelling out: Germany, Japan, and Italy had each other and numerous vassals during World War II.  Today, Russia could only muster the support of four other pariahs—Belarus (essentially its puppet), Syria (its mass-murdering client-state), the Stalinist/Maoist relic of North Korea, and basket-case Eritrea in a historic 141-5 vote at the United Nations condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (China, Russia’s supposed new “best friend,” wanted no part in the historical record of being seen to be emphatically on Russia’s side here, settling for a cowardly pathetic abstention, a choice shared by 34 others).

According to a major CNN poll conducted shortly before Putin launched his full Ukraine war, when asked “Would it be right for Russia to use military force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO,” half of Russians said “Yes,” one-quarter “No,” one-quarter “Don’t know;” if the war was framed as one “to ‘reunite Russia and Ukraine,’” that support dropped to only 36% “Yes,” “No” rising to a plurality of 43%, with 21% as “Don’t know.”

It is remarkable that the numbers for war are not higher when one considers the insane media atmosphere inside Russia and how it trickles down throughout public life in Russia.  It is a constant Orwellian bombardment of an alternate universe, one where Russia is a perpetual victim fighting against the whole world.  Ukrainians with relatives and friends in Russia (as well as the pro-Russian separatist parts of Ukraine’s Donbas and a very Russian Crimea controlled by Russia since that region’s 2014 invasion and annexation) are even having inane conversations with these brainwashed relatives and friends, those relatives and friends telling the dismayed Ukrainians laughable fictions about the reality of the war.  So strong is the pull of Kremlin propaganda that these wayward friends and relatives believe fantasy over their own blood as they dare to lecture on the invasion to those actually living through the bombs and shells of the invasion.  Much like America’s Trumpist Capitol insurrectionists in the U.S. believe in an alternate reality bellowed out by Fox News and its ilk, so, too, does Putin’s base in Russia (and the few Ukrainian regions with high-proportions of Putin-loyalists) loyally and enthusiastically consume Russian state-run television networks’ non-stop barrage of the world according to Putin (and it is no coincidence that the American rightist and Kremlin media ecospheres have tremendous overlap, as I have noted in detail before).

As a result, most Russians actually get their news from state-run media, so most Russians, then, simply do not have an accurate understanding of what is currently happening in Ukraine and believe as fact many absolute falsehoods while rejecting actual facts.  Because of the relentless propaganda, lies, and straight-up gaslighting that is the media and government apparatchik public landscape in Russia, they think that this has been a limited humanitarian peacekeeping operation mostly in the Donbas area of Ukraine with few Russian casualties. 

But there are others in Russia who see past the propaganda and disinformation.  And the brittle reality of the Kremlin’s fake news operations can come crashing down like a house of cards in the face of hard realities, none more likely to cause this than thousands of dead Russian soldiers and their enraged families.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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