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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) October 31, 2022

SILVER SPRING—Almost by happenstance, I ended up at one of those DC Insider Parties this past weekend, hosted by one prominent scholar and thinker, Shadi Hamid, at the invite of one Ani Chkhikvadze, a journalist.  While the details, shenanigans, and gossip of the conversations had at this private party shall remain sacredly private, I was delighted to have a moment of sheer serendipity when I was reviewing some of the work of the two en route to their party.  Ani had recently tweeted an article she had penned for the Spectator World during a recent sojourn to Kyiv, while Shadi had recently posted to his Twitter an article of his for The Atlantic from 2017.

Unbeknownst to either of the two friends, their two pieces, written half-a-decade apart, synergized on some key themes spectacularly, causing inspiration to erupt deep within me in an almost primal way.  Thus, I highly recommend you read both articles, first Ani’s, then Shadi’s, as together they amplify each other’s messages’ profundity beautifully, before continuing here.

Ani

Chkhikvadze is from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and works for the U.S.’s Voice of America (VOA) .  While in Kyiv, Ani was inspired to put together a piece for another publication, as mentioned.  The result is short, powerful, and struck me to my core.

Early in her article, she described the atmosphere in Kyiv:

Journalists and volunteers, fighters and chancers, people from all walks of life are drawn to a city in the spotlight of history.  Visiting grandees make stops in Irpin and Bucha to see with their own eyes the horrors of Russian occupation.  Foreign fighters mix with Ukrainian soldiers at the train station. Ukrainian flags fly on the balconies, murals of the war cover apartment buildings, barricades and sandbags block entrances to government buildings.  On the streets, you hear English, French, Polish and of course Georgian, my native language.

My immediate reaction (while reading on my small phone screen and unable to see text that came after until I scrolled down) was that this must have been what the spirit and atmosphere were like in Republican Spain, in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War.  And lo and behold, Ani’s very next sentence made the same comparison: “There is, I imagine, something of the feel of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War.”  My heart raced as I came across a writer that, at least on this subject, was a true kindred spirit.

My next thought, naturally, turned to what Orwell might have made of the current situation in Kyiv, and I was certain that the same Orwell who flocked to the Spanish Republican banner would have just as enthusiastically—likely even more so—joined the cause of Ukraine today.  Chkhikvadze then upped the ante on my feeling a sense of connection to her as a fellow writer in her next sentence:

“It is the same in all wars,” George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia.  “The soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.”  Those lines ring true today.  Things are clearer cut in Ukraine, but as with Spain in 1936, Ukraine has become a magnet for believers in search of a cause.

I was so eager to read the article I didn’t even notice at first that the title was “Homage to Kyiv,” an obvious homage to Orwell’s work form his time in Spain.  As I kept reading it seemed almost like my writer’s spirit was communicating with Ani’s. 

The rest of Chkhikvadze’s short-but-sweet piece is really inspiring, particularly for those wary and weary of the excess cynicism of our age, even with her dispatch coming out of a Ukraine in the midst of a horrific war in which the Russian military’s killing of defenseless civilians and endless stream of war crimes are constant realities throughout the country.  Because, as Ani notes, something special in history and not felt for some time on this scale is happening there.

Ukrainians know full well this is not simply a defensive war for them against an archaically colonialist and imperialist Russia; it is, more than any major conflict for many years, a war of “freedom over slavery,” democracy against autocracy, good versus evil, fought for Europe and the West against genocidal Russian fascism.  Thus, Ukraine fights not for just itself, but proudly for Western civilization and for the whole world against the most reckless of the major powers of our era, one that is antithetical to notions of freedom and justice and that seeks to destroy the Western-democracy-led post-World War II international order.

Like Gondor against Mordor in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Ukraine is a buffer between us and Russia and its fight against Russia benefits and protects the rest of Europe, the West, the world.  Like Gondor fighting against Mordor, we see a Ukraine that prizes life and the lives of its people fighting against a Russia that is callously careless and barbarically cruel even to its own soldiers, called often by Ukrainians “orcs” in homage to Tolkien’s world (and, in perhaps the most Russian thing ever, two decades ago, a Russian scientist wrote a new version of The Lord of the Rings in which Mordor and its orcs are heroically fighting against the evil Western imperialists, led by a very different Gandalf).

And plenty outside Ukraine also realize this, hence, not only the tremendous international governmental support, but the support of thousands of non-Ukrainians coming to fight as volunteers within the Ukrainian military or to tend to Ukraine’s wounded.

Ani engages in a beautiful exploration of why: 

It’s easy to be cynical and dismiss these people as mere adventurers and war tourists, but there’s something honorable happening here too.

The war in Ukraine has given concepts of humanity, democracy, and freedom genuine meaning at a time when in the West many have become sarcastic about them.  We find it hard to still believe in the idea of inner honor, the sort that makes you die for your friend.

Orwell explained his decision to join the anti-fascist cause with a characteristically simple phrase: “common decency.”  This is what I encountered again and again in Kyiv. Common decency.  A desire to stand alongside these people as they face down the threat of oblivion.  Amid all the misery that Putin has unleashed on Ukraine, that is an encouraging thought.

When Chkhikvadze quoted Orwell—“common decency”—I teared up, overcome by emotion. And I did the same, again, when reviewing this section to write my piece you are reading now.  That Ukraine has brought out within much of the collective West a sense of “humanity, democracy, and freedom”—of the “common decency” in standing up for these things in the face of those who would trample them in pursuit of narrow ideas of imperialistic power exercised over others against their will—and has done so in a way we simply have not felt in any grand sense in a very long time—decades, even—cannot be denied, no matter what the cynics say.

It reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies: Gettysburg, when Lt. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, commander of the 20^th Maine Volunteer Infantry, discusses the motivations of himself and his men in fighting the U.S. Civil War: “All of us volunteered to fight for the Union, just as you did.  Some came mainly because we were bored at home, thought this looked like it might be fun.  Some came because we were ashamed not to.  Many of us came because it was the right thing to do.”

It also reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in all of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, when a despairing Frodo asks Sam near the end of The Two Towers, “What are we holding onto, Sam?”  Sam replies: “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

Shadi

While Shadi’s piece, though written five years before Putin’s current major escalation of the war in Ukraine, did not make me tear up, it is also deeply relevant to this aspect of the Ukraine war in ways similar to Ani’s even if his does not discuss Ukraine at all.

His piece is titled “The Political Thrill of Having an Enemy.”  Shadi—a scholar at The Brookings Institution—opens by writing: “I didn’t have a cause to die for.”  But many of the Egyptians he talked to during the Arab Spring and after, including to a Muslim Brotherhood member who had been imprisoned in Egypt, felt they had a transcendent cause in standing up to what they viewed as unjust governments supported by an unjust international system propping up those governments.  “I want to break the international order,” the man told Hamid. “No matter how hard it is, this is the goal I want.  That’s what I’m living for, even if I die in the process of fighting for it…Why am I entering this conflict?  Not because of this life but because of the next.”

Hamid notes that, when witnessing in person back in 2011 the initial joy in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the early, heady days of the Arab Spring in Egypt, he was “almost feeling a certain envy” of their joy in this moment of history, which was theirs and apart from him; he writes: “I wondered what it would feel like to be part of a revolution, to be denied freedom your entire life and then to feel even a whiff of it.”  He considers that it is often in stable Western societies where “boredom” permeates politics: nothing too threatening, nothing too existential is coming from the government.  This is a boredom, he notes, that is foreign to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members suffering from or fleeing the murderous persecution of General Sisi’s Egyptian dictatorship.  Shadi deftly quotes Andrew Sullivan to note that an authoritarian dictatorship can seem like an omnipresence that overwhelms you on a daily basis, invading your very psyche.

For Americans, this means that, in the era of Trump, many were experiencing something akin (but obviously not fully) to the non-boredom the Egyptians talking to Hamid described; the oppression and anxiety felt generated a level of excitement and purpose to life—at least political life—that has been generally absent in large proportional quantities in the West in recent decades.  Some even wanted Trump to win for thrill of the chaos he would create, apart from his politics or agenda.  Channeling Fukuyama, Hamid asks us to consider if the end of ideological competition would always only be temporary because without such competition, public intellectual and political life seems far less interesting, and that people would foster some new ideological conflict just to make things exciting again.

Next, Shadi references the late, great Christopher Hitchens as one of the prolific romantics of our era, who clearly felt a constant desire to be connected to humanity through one great struggle or another, to stand up to some great evil, in a way that defined much of who he was in life as both a writer and a person.  Hamid quotes a reviewer of one of Hitchens’ last books published before his death from cancer at the end of 2011 to put out the idea that people like Hitchens replace God with themselves, but I’d like to think they replace God with a humanist cause.

Near the end of his piece, Hamid pens the following phrase that is also the article’s lede: “Knowing what you’re against has a way of clarifying the mind and sharpening the focus.”  He concludes his entire piece with the following: “Being in a constant state of alarm, wanting to be alarmed, can be unusually thrilling.”

While Shadi is right, Ani’s piece makes me think how much better it is to be feeling just as strong that you are for something, not just for destroying or stopping another thing, but really for something in a positive sense.  America fought two significant wars in recent decades against the brutal Taliban in Afghanistan and against Saddam Hussein’s brutal Iraqi regime, its remnants, and other brutal terrorists in Iraq, whether al-Qaeda, ISIS and its precursor, or other sectarian elements.  But for much of those sad conflicts, it was hard to feel much passion for a lot of what we were fighting for: an inept, terribly corrupt Afghan government, not much good at fighting without U.S. support?  A weak Iraqi government riven by sectarianism?

Like Shadi’s article, Ani’s piece certainly makes us aware than an enemy like Russia can inspire unity.  But what is the even more powerful takeaway from her eloquent discussion, what is exponentially more inspiring and unifying is a Ukraine fighting against an enemy like Russia.  Some say “Putin united the West.”  I prefer to think, even more so, that Ukraine did.

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.

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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, 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).

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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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), September 19, 2022

SILVER SPRING—I must admit from the outset that I never planned on writing an essay about this admittedly grand historical event.  Yet the passing of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom the magnificent state ceremonies commemorating her passing pulled me in quite unexpectedly and, in spite of myself, I found I was filled with some rather profound (at least to me) thoughts on the whole symbolism of this moment, and the importance, at least, of that symbolism of perhaps not so much the institution of the British Monarchy here and now but of what it once was: one of the grand monarchies in world history, one that ruled over a vast empire, at times the largest and most powerful in the world for its time, even though for much of that time, the monarchy was constrained, and increasingly so over time as the British Parliament exercised more and more power over time at the expense of the monarchy.

Today, the day of the Queen’s funeral and interment, it seems so much more preferable to quote J.R.R. Tolkien—who himself was named by Queen Elizabeth II in 1972 (a year and then some before his death in 1973) a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and suffered so much in the trenches as a soldier in World War I, surviving when many of his friends did not—than Churchill, who was an ardent acolyte of British imperialism and near-gleefully described shooting Sudanese from the days of his military service in the 1898 Battle of Omdurman in the era preceding World War I.  In the Appendices of Tolkien’s magisterial The Lord of the Rings (spoilers to follow), after Aragorn becomes Aragorn II Elessar Telcontar, the king not only of Gondor but also of Arnor and thus the High King of the Reunited Kingdom of Arnor and Gondor, it is noted that he rises to heights for a human not seen in Middle Earth in literally thousands of years and not ever seen again after his reign of well over a century, with Tolkien beautifully describing him in his eventual passing as “an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.”

That line has been popping up in my head ever since the Queen’s passing.

I am not sure how many people realize this, but Elizabeth II was the last major living historical figure linked to a bygone era that was itself after the twilight, indeed, during the dusk, of the era of great kings and empires and their accompanying trappings.

The degree of global interest, attendance (of both “commoners” and world leaders), and splendour (to use the British spelling) of these ceremonies surrounding the Queen’s passing have not seen anything to rival it in a generous generation’s full lifespan: very few people are currently alive to be able to claim to have witnessed anything similar, from afar on television and let alone in person.  The sights, sounds, and solemnity of the occasion is not like anything I have ever seen and I am forty-years-old.  This must seem even more fantastical in the eyes of the younger rising generations.

The only other comparable institution to the British Monarchy today is the Roman Catholic Papacy, but as Francis has only been pope since 2013, Elizabeth as a figure of stature over time dwarfs him, as the Queen has reigned since 1952, longer than any monarch in British or English history.  That says a lot for a kingdom that has existed for over one thousand years, since the 920s (and even longer if you go back to Wessex).  With the pope, there are no marriages or balls even if there is ceremony and ostentation.

In many ways—though hardly all—Elizabeth’s institution and her carrying out of her royal role was looking backwards in time, emulating and carrying on the literal symbols of the monarchy—titles, crowns, scepters, etc.—that came from generations past, when such things were far more common, the way of the world.  In many ways, she and the monarchy itself lived in the past and was the living past presented to us in the present: to quote Tolkien again, “an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.”

To be clear, it is truly a blessing that the age of great monarchies wedding the state and religion together to terrorize the masses, ruling from inherited privilege over vast swath of unconsenting populations, some conquered by seats of power continents away, is no more.  To quote the late great Englishman and British citizen turned American, Christopher Hitchens, the World War I era was “the greatest fall of monarchies in history,” and even Princess Elizabeth (before she was queen) was born just after this era (and a few years after the peak of the British Empire’s power and extent, today just a shell of that), but, again, to be clear, in many ways she and her institution sought to represent much from that era, ever gazing back upon it to present an image of its legacy to the present.

Charles III will never equal the stature of his mother for numerous reasons, and, I am certain that—not wanting to even attempt to outshine his mother—he will not have his own passing commemorated with nearly as much fuss as that of this mother.  Perhaps the bloated Saudi monarchy, as contrived and “new money” as it is, may try to match the expense when the current king passes, but that would certainly not match Elizabeth’s passing’s ceremonies in gravitas, nor in the degree of awe and respect felt by much of the rest of the world.  For a sad comparison to the current royal sendoff, consider the comparative whimper with which former Soviet Premier and President Mikhail Gorbachev—once a giant on the world stage and a revolutionary leader of the second most powerful nation then on earth—was laid to rest in Russia exactly one week before Elizabeth’s death.

As for Elizabeth herself, in her lifetime, we shall not see her like again.  And though numerous other members of the British royal family brough much scandal upon themselves, throughout it all, Elizabeth never sullied herself within these scandals, managing to stay above them.  As for her being a symbol of the aggression, conquests, and rule all soaked in blood of an aggressive empire, of the rule of royals instead of people ruling through democratically-elected representatives, and of the problems with the modern British monarchy, more than any of her predecessors, she bears the least responsibility for the sins of empire and autocracy.  As this Irish-American author is happy to admit, the Queen is the first and only British or English monarch to offer anything even close to an apology for the evils the English and British have inflicted upon the Irish people, perhaps the first people to be colonized in a modern sense (if one doesn’t count the Crusades) and certainly the longest-suffering people under colonialism, a colonialism that began in 1169 and still persists to this day.  As a result, even leaders of Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein—the longtime Irish political party that was in the past the political wing of the terrorist Irish Republican Army that conducted insurgencies against British rule in Ireland—offered appreciative remarks (Michelle O’Neill: “Personally, I am grateful for Queen Elizabeth’s significant contribution and determined efforts to advancing peace and reconciliation between our two islands.”) and urged supporters to be respectful in the wake of her death.  Even Sinn Fein and Irish Republic officials, as well as Catholic clergy, attended her state funeral today; this would have been unthinkable after the death of (nearly) every past British or English monarch.

So though she was a largely symbolic leader, she made real achievements of substance.

Is monarchy in its historical sense an evil?  Undoubtedly, yes, a backwards horror from a time when humans were regarded largely as property and blood flowed as easily as torture and theocracy.  And yet, in our far more democratic era, where in many places the masses have rightfully risen and formal aristocracy is thankfully no more, democratization of politics has led to a dressing down of ceremony, architecture, dress, art, music, literature… pretty much everything.  Gone are the days of royal balls and weddings, we will have to settle for the fake ones in Game of Thrones or Bridgerton or historical shows like The Tudors, Versailles, The Great, and other king-and-queen focused shows and movies (my favorite scene of such is Aragorn’s coronation as Elessar in The Return of the King, for what it’s worth).

There is something we as humanity are collectively are losing knowing the grandeur, regality, and ornateness of the great kings and queens and emperors and pharaohs of history, their courts and lives and events—are, simply, more or less gone.  The ancient ruling institutions that are either gone or diminished have often been responsible, however problematic the costs or means of production, for creating some of the greatest artistic achievements in arts, architecture, and fashion that are now forever a thing of past creation or fantasy.  The type of formality and levels of etiquette and politeness they embody are essentially gone, too: we are ruder and more familiar culturally than any time in recent centuries. 

Today, there are no more new pyramids, no new Roman Colosseum, no new imperial palaces, no new larger-than-life statues like the relics we see still standing today or remnants of which we see in museums (and that is not even getting into the many more that were destroyed and exist only in the history books), no new grand cathedrals or temples.  These were all monumental achievements in human history, their modern successors far simpler and blander, and there is a sadness in knowing that part of part of our history is now relegated to history’s dustbin, but I wouldn’t have it any other way: better the oppression, massive concentrations of power and wealth, titanic scale of war and death, feudalism, imperialism, colonialism, and slavery that produced them are gone.

But that doesn’t mean we cannot separate the art from the artist and mourn the loss of the ability to produce such things, for what society would rightfully spend so much public money on such ornate but unnecessary things with all the problems we now face and with governments finally existing in an era where they must respond to the needs of the people or get voted out of office or overthrown, at a time when people feel loyalty not to monarchs appointed by “god,” but to their own sense of worth as individuals?  The answer is none, no society would choose to fund a Versailles or Pharaonic- or Mayan-style pyramids today and for good reason.

Has, and is, the coverage (at least in English-speaking media) been wildly overblown?  Yes.  To channel the spirit of Hitchens (who once remarked: “It’s always struck me as rather bizarre that there’s this cult in the United States of English royalism—just the sort of thing that I left England to get away from.”), I could do without 95% of the coverage I’ve seen of the British royals in my lifetime: the absurdities of endless coverage of Diana in life and death, the royal babies and marriages and silly scandals, the endless television specials and magazine covers (every time I am at a supermarket or drug store, they are there), and even much of the near non-stop coverage in between her death and her funeral (when major developments in Russia’s brutal colonialist imperialist war in Ukraine occurred and should have been covered with a higher priority).

Having said all that, I appreciate the coverage of her death the day of, the day after, and during the funeral.  I appreciate the person who was Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and how she carried out her duties.  I appreciate the grandeur of an era that is hard to comprehend even for me as a historian, and even more the horrors inflicted upon us by the rule and fiats of theocratic autocrats draped in fine robes with bejeweled crowns, but, at this moment, when the last true link to that era passes, I choose to reflect on the unique if costly beauty of that era that has, with Elizabeth II’s passing, now mostly been consigned to memory.  Her funeral and the related proceedings are truly “an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world,” and we should all reflect on that splendour (I’ll again keep the British spelling here) and its problematic beauty in all its glory, presented here one last time for all the world to see.

© 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 and 600,000 on 9/8/22!!

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), September 16, 2022; with an excerpt 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, 2022, 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 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

SILVER SPRING—Going back through some of my earlier work from just before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 24 escalation against Ukraine, I am struck by how little has changed and how much of my work from then explains what is happening now.

My coverage began with two long articles for Small Wars Journal, one published on February 21 (three days before Putin launched his massive escalation of the war) as The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine and the other on March 8 (less than two weeks into this escalation) as The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt.

I broke the first piece from February 21 into four separate articles for my own site here, going into the reasons behind Putin’s timing and how much he miscalculated in thinking U.S. President Joe Biden and the West would not be up to the challenge of supporting Ukraine robustly with a united front; explaining how Russia has no one to blame but itself for why Eastern Europe was so eager to move away from Russia and towards the West; refuting Putin’s whole NATO narrative as nonsense; and about the utter banality of the centuries-old Russian imperialism and colonialism that were the main motivating drivers behind Russia’s military aggression and war crimes against Ukraine.  These themes keep coming up over and over again in the discourses around this war, and these pieces can be considered evergreen as some of the strongest explanations or arguments on these fronts.

When I wrote the first piece, I was dreading the war on behalf of Ukraine, and while I thought they would put up a hell of a fight, I, like many, thought the Russian military would overcome Ukrainian resistance take over Kyiv, with slaughter to follow.

But that was not what happened, and writing my March 8 Small Wars Journal piece was one of the most thrilling pieces I’ve ever written, one I certainly did not expect to be writing as I watched Putin’s escalation first unfold.  But certain things were just so clear from what happened in the first few weeks, even weeks before Russian forces were pushed back from Kyiv and other fronts, that have defined the entirety of the war then and still do now.  This article was highlighted by Real Clear Defense and discussed by The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest.  Though my perspective highlighted therein is now becoming increasingly popular to have now, at the time my article was criticized by the In the Thick of It blog of Russia Matters (a project of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs) and in a report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; the latter was written by George Beebe, now the “Grand Strategy Director” at Quincy and years ago an advisor to then-Vice President Dick Cheney and a top Russia person at the CIA (seriously, I am available for hire…).

I broke that second piece into four separate articles for my site here, noting how barbaric and disgraceful the Russian leadership’s treatment of its own soldiers was; remarking on how insanely high Russia’s casualties were and why we could mostly take Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties as credible while ignoring the lies of the Kremlin; explaining that sending Russian soldiers home in body bags would be the most effective way to penetrate Putin’s propaganda ceaselessly inflicted upon his own people and reveal how he and his war are failures, destroying the social contract Putin has with his supporters; and how all this could unite the Russian people and military with much of the rest of the world in being against Putin, setting the stage for a revolt and a revolution or coup that would overthrow him.

But it was not until now that I realized I never adapted my substantial introduction in this piece for Real Context News.  So, below is that excerpt, which I feel has aged quite well as a frame for the war and still holds up today:

(excerpt from March 8)

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

I’m not going to speculate on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s health and mental state to the degree that far too many others have (I heard him referred to as “puffy Putin” recently on CNN—amusing—but I’d be remiss in not pointing out I myself have gained fifteen pounds during the pandemic and have certainly had my own mental struggles as a single man essentially living alone the past few years and covering COVID, Trump, and other horrors).

But clearly, Putin is more agitated and emotional than we have been used to seeing him in his more than two decades in power.  As for whether he is suffering from some sort of (terminal?) disease or is literally going through insanity, let’s all take a step back from such diagnoses, as anyone so powerful and cooped up for so long like Putin was bound to exhibit some level of eccentricity mixed with not many (insert a certain curse word in the plural form) to give.

What is clear is that Putin is letting out some long-held frustrations and perceived grievances like we have never heard or seen before, and that does give reason to worry, aside from the actual Ukraine invasion/war itself.  That this behavior has been coupled with his reckless use of force in launching the largest war on European soil since World War II is even more troubling.

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

(end excerpt)

It turns out my optimism was well-founded, well-founded indeed, with the Russian war effort and Putin’s position and domestic support only worsening.  And my record since then has also been one of the most accurate: I predicted the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, several days before that happened (possibly the only person to do so in an article) in a piece anticipating the near-irrelevance of the Russian Navy, and, later that month of April, I made a strong case that Crimea could very much be retaken by the Ukrainian military (one praised as a “perfect understanding of the situation” by an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, one Mykhailo Podolyak.

After, I outlined key and deeply illuminating similarities and lessons between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and summarized the long history of Russian and Soviet atrocities in Ukraine, as well as some of the complicated history of Ukrainian resistance against the Soviet Union.  I took on the myopic arguments that arming Ukraine is somehow “escalation.”  More recently, I have explained in detail the dynamics that have Ukraine winning handily and Russia losing badly, that the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south could create opportunities for counterattacks in the east (over a month before Ukraine’s Kharkiv breakthrough now being celebrated). 

Throughout, I have been indebted to some excellent analysis from a number of individuals, the five best of whom—Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.), Trent Telenko, Illia Ponomarenkno, Dr. Phillips O’Brien, and Rob Lee—I highlighted here and all of whom you can follow (along with me) on Twitter.

Stay tuned, there is more to come, and while the war will be won by Ukraine and Russia has already lost, the fighting continues and could drag on for some time; there may, sadly, be much more death and destruction to come.  I just met yesterday with Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois—a stalwart member of the January 6 Committee and one of the only sane Republicans left when it comes to stopping the slow-moving coup attempt by Trump and his cultist followers to overthrow the Constitution, undo a lawful and legitimate presidential election, and replace American democracy with Trumpist fascism (my words and not necessarily his, to be clear)—and he made it clear that he believed it is crucial to continue supporting and to increase support for Ukraine, as the fight may be far from over.  Rep. Kinzinger is fighting to save democracy both here at home in the U.S. and in Ukraine, and we must follow his example, as I have noted for years that Putin’s efforts in Ukraine are just one front in a global war prosecuted by him and his ilk to destroy Western democracy: the fight of Ukraine against Russia and the fight to preserve democracy in America are, thus, one and the same.

Author’s note: I challenge readers to compare my work to the work of other analysts out there; some exceed my work, to be sure, but that is not the case for the bulk of journalistic and “expert” analysis you will find, against which I am confident you, dear readers, will see my work stacks up rather well.

If I come off as rather non-humble, I can understand that impression, but as a one-man show here, I have to promote my own work and achievements since few others do: I do not have the marketing and reach of a major television station, magazine, newspaper, or think tank, and without support from people like you, dear readers—including donations—I would not be able to produce this level of quality work; as it is, I am trying very hard to highlight my work that it may also land me a long-term position with just such a prestigious outlet or institution so that I do not constantly have to (as they say) “toot my own horn” just to get by.

See 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).

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, 600,000 on 9/8/22, and three-quarters of a million on 9/27/22!!

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; 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; traduction française)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), September 10, 2022; article discussed in Brian’s interview with the French publication Atlantico published September 14; adapted excerpt published on September 12 by Small Wars Journal as Ukraine Writes the Textbook on Twenty-First Century Warfare, Conducts Masterclass, which, in turn, was featured by Real Clear Defense on September 16; see follow-up October 6 article This Is the Beginning of the End of the War and related articles from September 27 Why Putin Has Doomed Himself with His Ukraine Fiasco, September 16 I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March, and September 7 Why Is Russia Losing on 3 Fronts? Math (the Short Answer); 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—When this war began, I barely slept for weeks.  What I and most others understood to essentially be the second most powerful military on earth had finally brought the hammer down on Ukraine, and was clearly going for regime change and who knows how much outright conquest (a lot; even before February 24, I noted it was clear Russian President Vladimir Putin was determined to have Ukraine at best be a vassal and at worst be annexed by Russia as part of a growing tsarist-like Empire).  I was afraid that at any point in time, Kyiv would be turned into Grozny/Aleppo, killing thousands and thousands of civilians in the process, or that we’d find Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dead, strung up on a lamp post or shot in the head by assassins.

I thought Ukraine might put up a decent if brief fight, but that there was very little hope for fending off the Russians, and my dread was all consuming.

But then, even very early on, it was clear that Russia was taking horrific, historic casualties (as I pointed out, in not even two weeks, apparently more than U.S. forces suffered in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined).  It was clear the Russian soldiers were not being well-led.  It was clear that their logistics were terrible.  It was clear that Russian troops did not have enough food or water.  It was clear that their communications were not secure and their combined arms coordination was poor.  It was clear that they did not have enough troops to take, let alone occupy, Kyiv.  It was clear they did not maintain their vehicles well.  It was clear they had no answer to or defense against Javelin and other anti-tank missiles. And then, starting in late March, there was that spectacular collapse of Russian forces on the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy fronts.  Not long after, the sinking of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet flagship, the Moskva (I am likely the only person who predicted in an article that it would be sunk, at least in English), made it clear it could not defend against anti-ship missiles (and once you understood that, it was only logical that Crimea would be in play, as I noted in April).

What we were witnessing, in the social media age in an unprecedented way in its ultradocumentation, was one of the most thrilling upsets in military history, and it was only just getting started.  It was the most surprising, remarkable thing I have witnessed in my entire adult life.

Russia would obviously have to change up its entire tactical and strategic approach to avoid utter disaster, because doing the same thing over and over again would be literal suicide. If it did not adjust, over enough time, this would destroy the Russian military and bring down the Putin regime; the military and the government would be killing themselves with nothing to show for it.

But Russia did not meaningfully adapt.  It just insanely kept doing much the same thing over and over again, as if it was mentally incapable of adjusting.  Instead, whatever adjustments have been made are minor and there is more continuity of what has produced failure than discernible changes that can be described as effective; since late March, Ukraine has retaken far more territory from Russia than the reverse; total defeat for Russia in Ukraine is far more likely than any sort of negotiated settlement, as I note here.  Existing Russian leadership and the current Russian military have amply demonstrated that they do not have the ability to adjust enough to turn things around and win, and there are no examples in history of such colossal failure in war without deep and lasting consequences for the losing side; defeats of this magnitude normally result in imperial collapse and regime change from within, not the long continued rule of those who marched with hubris into folly.

Ukrainian Victory: A Mathematical Equation? Ukraine Writes the Textbook on Twenty-First Century Warfare, Conducts Masterclass

On March 8, less than two weeks into the war, Small Wars Journal published my piece stating that, this time, Putin had gone too far and this war would be his downfall.  And absolutely nothing has happened since then that has made this less likely; dynamics are only making this more likely every day this war continues.

The Russian failures were the almost natural outcomes of years of Putinism, years of one man above all others running the show.  This Ukraine war is the pinnacle of years of Putin’s rule, the best representation of him and the system he built, the people he elevated, the institutions he molded, the natural outcome of his leadership, and it will consume him and his system, an utterly predictable Frankenstein monster utterly predictably doing its father and creator in as can only be the case at this point.  No one can, should, or will be blamed more inside Russia (let alone the rest of the world) for this debacle, just as he would have received most of the praise from Russians had this “special military operation” succeeded (calling it a war in Russia can get you arrested).

Thus, the terrible casualties and horrific reversals in March and early April exposed that the Russian military was not, in fact, the second most powerful in the world, that its training and the effectiveness of its tactics, the quality of its poorly-maintained vehicles, and the shoddy treatment of its own soldiers meant that what existed on paper and in intelligence estimates was not what Russia had in reality.  “Impressive” against the tiny country of Georgia and poorly-armed Syrian rebels, when faced with a stronger foe in the Ukrainian Army, it was not impressive at all.  In fact, the Ukrainian military is clearly better than Russia’s in a qualitative sense.  And nothing will ram this home for Russians more than the vastly-mounting body count, the dead Russians with families in Russia; at some point, a critical mass will be hit and Putin will lose enough support that he will find massive protests making it impossible to govern, the bargain of taking Russians’ freedom in exchange for making them strong and stable at home and strong and respected abroad already null and void, it is just a matter of how bad the economy has to get (short-term measures to prop up Russia’s economy cannot be sustained and Russia’s economy will only get far worse over time), how many Russians have to die in battle, before the Russian people or those surrounding Putin rise up.

A lot of Russia’s best troops and equipment were destroyed in that first phase.  The whole world watched Russian soldiers go into battle without enough food or water, carelessly led into ambushes time and time again.  They watched as captured troops say they were lied to about where they were going and what they were doing.  We saw perfectly good Russian tanks abandoned because they could not get fuel or ran out of ammunition because of terribly-run supply lines and logistics (just see Trent Telenko’s excellent threads on this topic).  We saw poorly maintained equipment and vehicles fail and a lack of precision from Russian weapons systems.  We saw terrible training, morale, and discipline.  We saw Russian units run into the ground to the point of destruction and dissolution.  And each one of these could be contrasted against essentially the opposite situations with Ukraine’s military.  As I noted before, the dynamics are set, with things only getting worse for Russia and better for Ukraine.

Also remember that using HIMARS, drones, M777s, and other advanced Western equipment that Ukraine has been able to hit targets deep behind the front lines.  That means that the support systems and defensive lines behind the front line will for Russia be particularly weak and that exhausted and demoralized troops without adequate supplies (the norm now) are not that far from their breaking points, that any serious breakthrough or pushback against Russian can quite easily result in the type of routs and rapid collapses we saw from late march to early April.  We are seeing something like that happen now near Kharkiv and Izium and we will see more of these before the war is over unless the military revolts en masse.  On the other hand, since that early phase, Russia has only been able to make small, slow gains, as Ukraine’s situation behind the lines is much better (Russia seems to not realize that lobbing missiles into cities may kill civilians but does little to hurt Ukraine’s military capabilities).  And, as retired U.S. Gen. Mark Hertling keeps pointing out, Ukraine’s forces are operating with interior lines that are easy to reinforce and supply versus the much longer exterior lines of Russia.

And Ukraine is clearly in the driver’s seat: it is dictating the pace and location of fighting, and Russia is now only mostly able to react rather than initiate.  As I have argued, Ukrainian prudence—methodically using comparative advantages to inflict high casualties at minimal risk and being able to react and take advantage of great opportunities as they arise, as we are seeing near Kharkiv and Izium now—is meeting Russian limitations, a set of deteriorating capabilities to define and dictate the course of the war. Much of what we are seeing unfolding thus has a mathematical quality to it, inputs and outputs favoring Ukraine and setting Russia up for failure.

So it was inevitable that large parts of this Russian military would simply break down and melt away if they were not destroyed after half-a-year of troops being poorly fed, not being properly briefed or trained. These were Russian troops who could tell after seeing Ukraine in person that their government was lying to them and their families about why they were going to war, who were seeing their lives thrown away carelessly and their friends and leaders die beside them, who had the bad luck to be led by the cruel and incompetent, who were being given slipshod equipment that was not reliable and that broke down often, who were not given enough ammunition or food or water, and who could not defend well against more modern weapons that Ukraine was using very effectively… these things all degrade morale and cohesion.

About Those “People’s Republic” Forces…

And let’s not forget that many of the troops in the east were Donetsk and Luhansk separatists (from their so-called namesake sham “People’s Republics”), mentored by this shoddy, third-rate Russian military, who could only inevitably be of relatively inferior quality to their already inferior mentors.

It is important to remember that the Ukrainian government was essentially not prosecuting the war against the Donetsk and Luhansk Russian proxies for two main related reasons: the Minsk agreements that Russia never honored were still something the Kyiv government was trying to more or less follow to prevent escalation and bloodshed, and that Kyiv nervous about the possibility of Russia becoming even more directly involved as a response to any major successful offensive against those proxies.  Had Russia been not involved heavily and looming over Ukraine’s east, it is likely Ukraine could have put down the Donbas rebellions fairly easily, but obviously other factors were at play.

Russia’s self-defeating stupidity truly knows no bounds: a great way to help its imperial project work would be to invest in seriously training the Luhansk and Donetsk rebels well, equipping them well, and treating them and the people it was occupying well.  This did not happen; indeed, the Russians instead are conscripting many people there against their will, are barely giving them any good equipment or training.  Almost like they are insulting the very people they claim to be liberating, they are giving some of them World-War II-era, or even tsarist-era­, rifles and are cruelly using these people as “cannon fodder” to feel out enemy positions, including against artillery.  Instead of winning people over to their cause or maintaining levels of support where Russia already had relatively high levels of support before February 24, the Russians are steadily alienating the very people at the center of their propaganda and their claims to being the good guys in this conflict.  If the goal is to make these places part of Russia over the long-run, mistreating the people you are going to “liberate” is only going to sow the seeds of your own failure.

In this case, it is even doubtful that many of the original tens of thousands Donetsk and Luhansk separatist militia troops allied with Russia are left standing, and it is certain that the replacement conscripts from there would not be terribly good or motivated fighters, especially with how they have been treated by Russia (indeed, it seems plenty are resisting conscription or are deserting).  Their morale was already low and Russia was earlier having problems getting them to fight.  Add to that the fact that some of the best Russian troops in the east were redeployed to the south, and the quality-level of Russian and separatist troops in the east right now is probably the lowest of any sector of fighting.  The morale of conscripts from those areas and any remaining from the original separatist forces must be horrible and there are likely more than a few who are willing to provide intelligence to Ukrainian forces or even switch sides.  On top of that, remember that even the superior regular Russian forces are not even that good, either, and that their morale is also extremely low.  So it would actually be surprising if the Donbas lines and Russian/separatist positions in general did not collapse at some point in the face of a well-led, determined attack from Ukrainians.

The Beginning of the End of Putin

Poorly-equipped, poorly-trained, poorly-supplied, poorly-led troops who are fighting for a government with essentially no allies that lies to them for a cause that rings hollow to conquer and kill people in another country who essentially hate them are fighting well-equipped, well-trained, well-supplied, well-led troops who are defending their homes and families, fighting for their freedom, and are highly motivated to prevail, all with the help of many allies around the world.

The eventual rout of the first group in the face of the second is all but a mathematical equation, as history shows us what happens in these situations.  And Russia has literally nothing it can do to increase the quality of the equipment, training, logistics, leadership, or morale of their forces: those are baked hard into the equation at this point.  The truly sad part is that Russia has already lost, but much fighting and death happens in war when the result is essentially a foregone conclusion, from the ending of World War II to the ending of the U.S. Civil War to the Vietnam War, and sometimes the worst battles happen close to the end.  At least in this current case, there are no horrific battles for Berlin or Okinawa or Siege of Petersburg where a desperate enemy regime is putting up a last-stand type resistance in its home cities; instead, Russia is losing heart fighting on Ukrainian territory and, in the end, can just go home with almost zero realistic chance Ukrainian forces will continue the war into Russia proper in a bid for conquest.  For Russia, this is no Great Patriotic War—Russia’s term for World War II—with Russia saving itself from annihilation in Stalingrad and Leningrad; no, Russian soldiers can just pack up and go home and return to their families here while it is the Ukrainians that are fighting for their survival as a nation.

Thus, the main hope I have is that Russian forces will just get tired of fighting and dying for lies and nothing more, will start refusing to fight in Putin’s disaster of a war, and, that, much like Russian units that mutinied against Tsar Nicholas II’s regime in 1917, will turn around and march on Moscow to end the war by ending the rule of a tyrant—as has been my hope since early March—or, that someone in the Kremlin will do a truly patriotic duty and we will have an announcement that Putin has died peacefully in his sleep.

Regimes that treat their soldiers so badly for so long and keep losing tend to not survive long, and this is one of the basic facts of history.  From the very beginning it was obvious Russia was callous and careless with the lives of its troops, and, at a certain point, the Russia military will hit its breaking point if this war continues.  We may be seeing that moment now, or it might be a series of separate breaking points, but it is happening and the Putin regime’s days are numbered.  Perhaps it can avoid a 1917, but after such a horrible outcome, it may end up at best like the warmongering, genocidal Milosevic regime, with its downfall not long after a disastrous war and coming from its own people in 2000 (Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic was a client of Russia’s at the time, notably).

Considering all this, more collapses like the one we are seeing now should be expected.  It remains for Ukraine (not Russia) to decide where and when this will happen, where and when they will focus their pressure, but in all cases, do not expect the Russians to be able to put up any prolonged, effective resistance when Ukraine does advance in force after much softening up of the Russian positions with Ukraine’s skillful use of superior Western-supplied systems.  Still, though Russia has already lost, how the loss plays out is yet to be revealed.

See related articles from September 27 Why Putin Has Doomed Himself with His Ukraine Fiasco, September 16 I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March, and September 7 article Why Is Russia Losing on 3 Fronts? Math (the Short Answer) and 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), 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, 600,000 on 9/8/22, and three-quarters of a million on 9/27/22!!

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) 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 23, 2022; adapted for and published by Small Wars Journal as Russia’s Limits Meet Ukraine’s Discretion to Slow the War Down to Ukraine’s Advantage on August 25; see related articles: July 30’s Russia’s Defeat in Ukraine May Take Some Time, But It’s Coming and Sooner Than You Think and August 3’s How Ukraine War Will Likely Go Rest of 2022, or, Kherson: The Beginning of the End for Russia and September 7’s Why Is Russia Losing on 3 Fronts? Math (the Short Answer)

SILVER SPRING—We are at an interesting time in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a moment where we are seeing two grand overall trends unite to heavily propel things in Ukraine’s favor.  These two overarching trends are that Ukraine is contributing prudence and Russia is contributing its deteriorating capabilities to the conflict in ways that are dictating the pacing and nature of much of the conflict at the moment, especially as most of the energy is now being directed towards the southern theater of action.

First, an introduction to the situation is in order.  I have gone into detail with many sources over both much of the why behind the way the war is unfolding and how the war is very likely going to play out as a result, so herein will mostly be a discussion of certain previously stressed features of this conflict and how they are now progressing, but with some new points that build upon my previous work.  I strongly encourage anyone wanting to know more or where I have obtained my information to check out these two pieces especially, but also some of my other previous work (especially two articles from April regarding Crimea’s vulnerability and why the Russian Navy would be mostly sidelined or destroyed; on both counts, recent events have proven me quite prescient).

All Eyes on Kherson

Anyway, the context of the past month and then some has been that Ukraine has been loudly advertising its intention to conduct a massive counteroffensive in its southern territories occupied by Russia.  Using advanced weapons system mainly supplied by the West, Ukraine began a series of impressive, pinpoint attacks on targets in Kherson Oblast (province), home to the only regional capital city Russia has taken since its major escalation began on February 24: Kherson, the oblast’s namesake.  These targets included at first ammunition depots and command centers—replicating its success on the Donbas front—and branched out to include major bridges in the river-crossed Kherson Oblast that also borders the waters on the northern side of the Crimean Peninsula.

We shall skip an extensive geography lesson here, but simply state that, the way Kherson’s geography goes, if you destroy the right bridges, you can effectively cut off any troops in certain parts of the area from effective resupply and reinforcement, isolating large pockets that can then be weakened—cut off from ammunition, unable to be effectively reinforced without exposing reinforcements to great risk, and unable to retreat without similar risk, nor with their heavy weapons and vehicles—and maybe even destroyed or compelled to surrender.  Even in the first month of conflict, it was clear Russia was bad at supplying food and water to its troops, so that those basic necessities may also be an issue in such a situation.

If even the best troops in the world are under such conditions over time, they can still be destroyed or forced to surrender relatively easily.  And we have to keep in mind we are talking about far from the best: the Russian Army, which has demonstrated an appallingly low-quality logistics operation even without bridges being blown and having its troops cut off from supplies and reinforcements.

That is the situation with apparently some 20,000 or so Russian troops on the west/north bank of the Dnipro River, on which the oblast’s main city—Kherson (and Kherson will from now on refer to this city unless it is specified that we are talking about the oblast)—lies, and they have already been in this situation for some time as Ukraine has damaged bridge after bridge in the oblast until more recently hitting the last one, though the other bridges closer to the city of Kherson had been damaged for some time and, thus, it was already a challenge for Russia to resupply and reinforce its now isolated troops and it has only become more difficult to do so every day the war continues as Ukraine keeps striking at Russia’s logistical lifelines in the region (indeed, a recent Ukrainian attack hit Russian trucks carrying supplies of ammunition as they were on the key Antonovsky Bridge, not only destroying the much-needed ammunition but further seriously damaging the bridge, which the Russians were repairing at the time).

Russia’s Response: Playing into Ukraine’s Hands

Furthermore, after this process started, Russia took a large number of troops from the slugfest on the Donbas front, where Russia has for months concentrated most of its troops and effort with relatively little to show for it—and moved them to the south, including Zaporizhzhia Oblast and Crimea, though reports on the latter were of Crimea being more of a staging area since it is a big hub for Russian military logistics.

Russian troops in the Donbas were on more elevated, hillier terrain with longer-established, more heavily fortified lines, and also fairly close to Russia, so supply lines were also shorter (though still problematic and coming under precise and devastating Ukrainian attacks time and time again).  Russia’s current main war aim is to secure the entirety of the Donbas region—the entire oblasts of Luhansk (more or less accomplished—for now) and Donetsk (definitely not accomplished), but here Russia is actually weakening its main effort to adjust to an announced counterattack by Ukraine.

An even more important takeaway from Russia’s redeployment is that Ukraine is dictating to Russia the way the war is now going, never a position you want to be in when your side is the one invading a country, a telltale sign of Russia’s weakening position as now it must compromise its plans and aims and be reactionary when it is supposed to be dominating the dynamics and flow of the war.

It should have been clear to Russia that its troops in Kherson—city and oblast—were in a weak and vulnerable position, especially after it learned the hard way of the amazing capabilities of Ukraine’s new Western weapons in action in the east on the Donbas front, which had more or less halted Russia’s offensive there or, at best for Russia, reduced it to a snail’s pace.

But what does Russia do?  Put more troops it can ill afford to lose, taken from its main-priority theater, into that more vulnerable situation, more troops into areas that can easily be cut off and isolated.

The limits of Russia’s capabilities not only see it stall in the east, not only have its navy mostly too afraid to do much more than lob cruise missiles from far away on account of Ukraine’s effective anti-ship missiles (many supplies by the West), but now mean both that it will likely fail with any major attempt to keep its Kherson troops supplied/connected to other Russian forces and that any new troops moved there will be facing the same problems that Russia is generally incapable of addressing effectively to begin with.

In short, Russia has essentially just gifted Ukraine more Russian troops that can be easily trapped.  And that is what is happening now.

As I quoted Forrest Gump in one of my recent pieces on all this: “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Crimea Is Also a Trap Waiting to Happen

I am also still surprised few people are realizing how the same treatment Russian soldiers are getting in terms of being isolated on the north/west bank of the Dnipro can easily be replicated in Crimea, a relatively isolated peninsula with only two land routes out of its northern border into the rest of Ukraine through Kherson Oblast and one long bridge—the Kerch Strait Bridge, also known as the Crimean Bridge—connecting its eastern tip to Russia, a bridge that Putin had opened only in 2018 (its construction began, illegally, in 2016 after Russia had already been occupying, and had illegally annexed, Crimea from back in 2014).

Now, a series of Ukrainian strikes throughout Crimea are erupting, involving targets from the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol to multiple military bases to Kerch, the Crimean entry point to the aforementioned Kerch Strait Bridge.  These attacks are causing panic among Russian colonists, collaborators, and sympathizers in Ukraine—causing many thousands of them (helpfully for Ukraine) to flee to Russia, undoing some of the demographic engineering Russia has long been undertaking there—and are wreaking havoc not only on Crimea itself but on its ability to offer logistical support to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts.  Eventually, after Ukraine retakes Kherson city, just some sixty miles from the northern Crimean border, Ukraine should be able to seal off the two routes out of Crimea and into Kherson.  And Ukraine already has demonstrated that it can hit the Kerch area, so it is likely just waiting for the right time to strike the bridge there to Russia and render it inoperable for Russia’s military.  And, at that point, Crimea would be cut off by land and, with Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and air defenses supplied by the West, it would be quite risky for Russia to supply or reinforce Crimea by sea or air.

On Slicing and Sieging

Simply put, Ukraine is in the process of slicing and dicing a big chunk of Russian-held territory into three sectors that will soon be isolated from and unable to support each other: 1.) Kherson Oblast (including the city of Kherson) west/north of the Dnipro River; 2.) Crimea; and 3.) the rest of Kherson Oblast along with Zaporizhzhia Oblast, where Ukrainian strikes against key Russian targets have also been succeeding and repeatedly so.  Isolated from each other more and more, soon, it will be likely that eventually only Zaporizhzhia can receive supplies and reinforcements from the Donbas or Russia itself after the Kerch Strait Bridge is damaged significantly by Ukrainian strikes-to-come.  This process has been, thus far, slow and creeping but this pace is allowing Russia to stretch out its men and resources more and more over time and expose its forces more and more over time to being cut off or give their anxious commanders time and inclination to order generally fruitless assaults that simply weaken Russian forces in the sector and fail to push Ukraine back or would do so only than temporarily.

Taken to its extreme end point, the concept of siege warfare is to surround and starve an enemy into submission without fighting, to achieve victory without placing your own side’s troops at risk from actual battle.  You may be able to take a city faster with a direct assault but this would be at a much higher cost in lives lost for the attacking side; if time is not a particularly important factor, siege or tactics approaching a siege are a way to inflict maximum casualties on the enemy while sustaining minimum casualties for your own forces.

Sieges and attrition-focused tactics and strategies are generally not as sexy for journalists and analysts as battles (though some can involve battles as one side or another tries to break the lines of the opposing force throughout), but Ukraine using these tactics and strategy means it is happy, for now, to keep using its longer-range precision weapons to devastating effect, killing Russian troops, destroying Russian vehicles and supplies, ruining Russian logistical arteries and supply missions, and bleeding Russia’s overall positions out to make them weaker and weaker over time, so that when an assault does come (if the Russians do not withdraw or surrender), the Russians will not be able to put up much effective resistance and will crumble all the more easily in the face of any attacks.  And, to be sure, as the situation for Russian forces deteriorates, opportunities for some low-risk, high-reward infantry-led strikes will also present themselves.

If this type of progress is being consistently made by Ukraine (and it is), hollowing out the core of Russian positions in entire sectors, why would Ukraine risk high casualties in a costly wider infantry assault while there are still targets that HIMARS, M777s, drones, and other longer-range weapons can take out at little to no risk, all while the enemy’s morale, numbers, and supply situation weaken?  Many of these targets are far behind the front lines, meaning there is now nowhere Russian forces in the region can feel safe, a situation disastrous for morale.  Weakening the positions behind the front lines also means that if the main line collapses, much more than just that main line will collapse and it is more likely the whole sector could fall quickly.  Instead of weakness or any inability, this methodical, deliberative targeting by Ukraine signals confidence in its ability to continue to damage Russia at times and pacing of its choosing, a mature patience on the part of Ukraine that will yield significant results over time at relatively low cost.

Yet plenty of experts and reporters seem puzzled, as massive formations of Ukrainian forces not pouring into Kherson city and forcefully pushing the Russian lines back mean, from their perspective, there must not be any real Ukrainian counteroffensive or that it is stalled.  But Ukraine is not basing the timing of its operations to satisfy the impatience of itchy Twitter fingers of reporters and analysts who find it easier to tweet, write, and comment about heavy “action,” and it seems many takes on the war in the south are missing the bigger picture.

Contrary to such views, the offensive is very much underway, with Ukraine simply taking a prudent, risk-averse strategy while it can still easily hit Russian targets far behind the front lines.  Unlike Russia, Ukraine actually highly values the lives of its soldiers, a major factor in morale, as Ukrainian soldiers can count on their commanders to not throw their lives away carelessly or needlessly, unlike the clear, callous indifference that permeates Russian command (which I have detailed before).  And the very nature of the conflict is now defined by Russia’s inability to produce anything but marginally successful advances (if any progress at all) and Ukraine’s purposeful approach to strike Russian targets one-by-one with precision, distance weapons while keeping its own forces as much out of harm’s way as it can where it can.

And Ukraine can do all this knowing it is and will be getting more and better weapons and equipment from the West as we well as more well-trained Ukrainian troops from an increasing Western series of training missions.

Cutting off a larger enemy force from supplies and reinforcements, and cutting that force into smaller pockets that can be defeated militarily, is an approach that can have spectacular success.  Such tactics worked incredibly well for a far smaller Finnish force against two whole Soviet divisions at the battles of Suomussalmi and Raate Road from late November 1939 to early January 1940 during the Soviet-Finnish Winter War within World War II, a conflict I have noted at some length is rife with parallels and lessons for the current Russo-Ukrainian war.  In this conjoined pair of battles, nimble Finnish ski troops were able to slice into the columns of Soviet forces that, because of the deep snow and thick woods in the remote wilderness of Finland, were forced to stay near the only roads in the area.  The Finns would use the first waves of ski troops to cut the long, road-bound formations into pockets and would then immediately heavily fortify and reinforce where they penetrated the Soviet lines.  Cut off from supplies and reinforcements, running out of ammunition and weakened from starvation in these pockets (mottis), two whole Soviet divisions comprising about 50,000 men were destroyed, suffering massive casualties, by just a few thousand Finns, who incurred just a tiny fraction of their foe’s casualties. 

While the weather elements are not nearly as extreme for Russian forces in Kherson Oblast and Crimea today, nevertheless, they are still significant formations that can still be relatively easily cut off and, thus, brought to their knees or worse by Ukrainian troops.

Conclusion

We have seen here how Russia’s weakening capabilities on the battlefield are meeting Ukraine’s patient risk-averse tactics and strategy to slow down the pace and intensity of this war, at least for the time being.  But while some analysts have seen this as weakness or inability on the part of Ukraine, it seems more likely that Ukraine knows it has a big comparative advantage with its ability to strike precisely at a distance with superior Western technology and that it is content to keep weakening Russia’s positions and logistics—keep baiting it to send more resources into bad satiation for Russia—as long as Russia keeps presenting juicy targets, targets that, if taken out methodically and patiently by Ukraine before any general infantry-led assault, will mean less resistance from Russia and fewer casualties for Ukraine.  Ukraine is biding its time while increasing its capabilities and all while continuing to degrade Russia’s capabilities.  This is what is called “good generalship” in a war, and it can easily lead to both a large part of Kherson west/north of the Dnipro River and, eventually, Crimea being cut off from other Russian-controlled sectors and from each other.  The fall of both to Ukrainian forces could follow and also open Zaporizhzhia and the Donbas to come under this Ukrainian counteroffensive in a way that could more or less end the war, as I have argued before.

Ukraine’s prudence is meeting Russia’s limitations, and this prudence will carry the day with more Ukrainian soldiers alive at the end than without it, than with a more rushed general assault that would occur with still more Russian targets Ukraine could have taken out before that assault.  Contrary to what some think, Ukraine knows what it’s doing and is still in the driver’s seat of this war thar Russia started and is now clearly losing.

See related articles: July 30’s Russia’s Defeat in Ukraine May Take Some Time, But It’s Coming and Sooner Than You Think and August 3’s How Ukraine War Will Likely Go Rest of 2022, or, Kherson: The Beginning of the End for Russia; and see 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 coming soon) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), August 9, 2022

SILVER SPRING—Not just from experts, but from many members of the general public are drawing some sharp comparisons between humanitarian efforts for Ukraine on one hand and for other parts of the world outside of the European world on the other.  For many of those pointing out major differences, the Middle East has been a region rife with examples.

With few exceptions, the only discussions comparing aid efforts (mostly centering on admitting refugees) that I have seen or been able to find with moderate effort in article or report form are emotional appeals often based on racial/ethnic/religious/cultural differences and/or that adopt a moralistic tone but are not terribly analytical.  And, to be fair, this is fair ground for discussion and exploration.

But to assume bigotry and racism is the primary foundation for the different approaches without exploring these other dimensions may score some points with certain aggrieved crowds, but it is not a serious exploration of the determining factors behind the different responses.  In the end, it is hard to get into the mindsets of different leaders of NGOs and governments, to be a proverbial fly-on-the wall for their internal deliberations (as opposed to public statements, which are often a mix of public relations efforts and genuine efforts to offer explanations).  But just as it would be reductionist to assume “the reason” for the different response levels is racism, it would also be naïve to assume cultural or worse biases play a minimal or no role: this dimension, too, deserves serious consideration, not just feel-good virtue signaling written from a perspective of (sometimes understandable) moral outrage.

The following exploration will look at some of the broader (and some specific) (geo)political considerations driving some of these differences between humanitarian efforts for the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war and those for the Iraq in general and, specifically, the battle for Mosul, in 2016-2017 to narrow down a point of reference for that long series of crises in that nation. 

While the most intense fighting and the Mosul campaign are long over, with more finality to those operations, the Russia-Ukraine war is still very much ongoing, so the level of analysis and the finality of that analysis will be very different for the two conflicts.

Still, while in some senses, the two are apples and oranges, their comparison still offers a chance at valuable insights.  In this sense, the small introductory exploration here intends to be a gateway for further exploration.

*****

The “Politics” of Considering Humanitarian Responses in Ukraine 2022 and Mosul 2016-2017

Politics is both messy and complicated, geopolitics even more so since it is broader and transcends national boundaries.  And in this sense, security, logistics, and economic/financial concerns cannot be separated, nor should they.

In an ideal world, every region and culture would have an equally strong, equally experienced professional humanitarian crisis industry (and never have a need to use those skills).  Obviously, that is not the case, and the West, especially European- and North American-based centers of its gravity, have a disproportionate history of creating, organizing, and leading the world’s major international humanitarian organizations and responses.  Indeed, international humanitarianism as practiced today is a Western-originated, Western-developed concept, with even many of the more senior non-Western staff in the sector having some combination of education, work experience, or residency in the West.  Today, it is still largely Western or Western-led organizations backed largely by Western governmental donors that lead and dominate international humanitarian responses (governments by far provide most of the funding compared to private donors and most of the largest government donors are by far Western; of the ten largest donors by governmental organization in 2021, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were the only non-Western countries in the top ten by one accounting for 2021; Japan is not European but is Western in its government, and Turkey’s funding mainly went to refugee camps on its own so it is literally asterisked in a relevant report for 2020).

Of course, this comes with certain inherent problems, not least among them the that there is this very real racial hierarchy that comes from the fact that particular parts of the world dominated by one particular race (Caucasians) are dominating an entire international industry, with all the history that such past and, though in evolving ways, present domination entails.  Certain imbalances, inequalities, and problems “naturally” result from such unequal histories and structures, not least from racism but also not least from the lack of required specialized capacities in many host nations of both host country authorities and available staff hires within the local population—particularly in remote areas—in spite of a very real, robust-though-hardly-perfect effort within the industry towards localization.  Overall, solutions to these issues are generally more easily theorized than specifically developed and implemented and the very safety of aid workers themselves can be an issue.

It is of note, even in Ukraine (a developed, so-called “first world” European country), that the relevant conflict creates zones that are far more accessible to humanitarian workers and those that are far less so; even before the relatively recent February 24, 2022, escalation by Putin, major United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports noted that “non-Government controlled areas” (NGCAs) were really hurting in terms of needing aid and were not getting it, namely the parts of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts under control of Russia and/or its separatist proxies, a situation made even worse by COVID-era restrictions.  Thus, even in Ukraine, some places where people needed the most help were less safe for aid workers, and this was the case in 2016-2017 while the Mosul campaign was well underway in Iraq.  During this battle in Iraq, which began in mid-October 2016, it took a month for the first major international-organization-aid convoy to get to the city of Mosul.  Yet even in this current Ukraine war, Russia is routinely blocking and obstructing humanitarian corridors for civilians during some of the worst violence of the conflict.  Thus, access is a problem in both locations.

But not equally so.  As a continent, Europe is the most advanced human development location by far and also has the most advanced logistics network of any continent.  So moving supplies, staff, and volunteers quickly and safely is easier in Europe than anywhere else in the world as far as dealing with a larger regional response, and these problems are usually regional, with people fleeing from one country to others, with humanitarian staging areas and headquarters often needing to be out of harm’s way.  And, as mentioned, many of the most capable, well-funded organizations are Eurocentic in their history and organization, so having a major operation on the European continent has some natural advantages that translate into a much easier-to-run operation just from those cultural leanings and familiarity that come with the territory.

While some of the nations surrounding Ukraine are also problematic (especially autocracies Russia and Belarus), others have been robust democracies for years, with the lowest-scoring democracy by Freedom House’s 2021 methodology (Moldova, 62) still far, far higher than the highest-scoring (by far) of Iraq’s neighbors (Kuwait, at 37).

Along those lines, even though Ukraine has only been a democracy since the end of the Cold War and has been at war since 2014, outside of the Donbas front lines from then until the late-February 2022 escalation by Russia, it was similar to other European countries in terms of freedom of movement and press freedom; the 2021 Reporters Without Borders ranking for Ukraine was 97^th most free for the press (106^th after the war’s 2022 escalation), compared to 163^rd for Iraq in the same year and 172^nd in 2022; in Freedom House’s 2017 rankings (the report has had no new editions since), Ukraine was 111^th compared to 155^th for Iraq; while issues with Ukraine were mostly related to restrictions on Russian media and oligarchic ownership, Iraq was considered one of “the world’s deadliest places for journalists.”  Yes, aid workers and journalists play different roles in conflict zones, but the nature of their work has enough similarities—especially in ways they have to access dangerous areas and multiple parties—that the rankings are at least somewhat indicative of aid workers’ ability to operate.

So the parts of Ukraine not under Russian occupation have, for most of three decades, been a place that operated in a European context where relatively free movement, modern governmental institutions, and safety for international operators all existed; even now, as the recent escalation by Russia has unfolded since the end of February 2022, the heaviest fighting is centered on a few specific fronts now that this escalation seems to have narrowed somewhat geographically, meaning most of the country is now and has for months been relatively safe (save for somewhat random missile strikes) and under the control of the Ukrainian government, which fostered the aforementioned conditions favorable to international actors, including humanitarian workers, for years.

The same cannot be said for Iraq.

For years after the U.S. invasion of 2003, Iraq was and still is a fractured and weak country, without a tradition of Western democracy and in a neighborhood of other Middle Eastern countries that are highly problematic when it comes to freedom, with safety for international actors often an issue in countries that are severely repressive and not places where international actors can operate freely or without considerable challenges (Saudi Arabia is deeply repressive and closed in many ways; Iran is also repressive, restrictive, and very anti-Western; Syria is like both of those but with a civil war raging on top of that).

Within Iraq, a nascent Iraqi government struggling to become a democracy respecting of human rights vied for control with Iraqi sectarian and ethnic militias representing Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, as well as Iranian militias and coalition military forces led by the U.S in addition to various terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda and ISIS and Saddam Hussein regime loyalists.  It was not always clear who could be trusted or even approached when it came to negotiating terms for humanitarian operations, and violence could derail anything at any time (full disclosure:  I was proud to be an extra in director Greg Barker’s Netflix film Sergio, about Sergio Vieira de Mello, the brief leader of UN humanitarian operations in post-Saddam Iraq until he was killed by a terrorist attack in August, 2003, and I highly recommend the film for a window into the perils of humanitarian work).  This was the operating environment for would-be humanitarian service providers, and there is no question that the challenges involving safety, logistics, navigating cultural differences, even Iraq’s extreme climate together mean that the present Ukrainian environment is one in which most large, well-funded aid organizations would find it easier to perform their missions, even allowing for Ukraine’s challenges.

So all those challenges mentioned concerning the Iraqi context still present major real-world, practical reasons that would inhibit not just international Western-dominate aid groups from more robust participation in aid work, but also local aid groups and staff: if anything, there are situation where more internationally recognized organizations employing people with European Union (EU) and other Western passports can afford those workers more protections than local staff, whose families will often be in the conflict zones and, along with the local workers themselves, will be more vulnerable to threats, intimidation, kidnapping, and actual violence than on average anyone coming from a European capital or New York.  The desperation with which so many local aid workers tried to leave Afghanistan during and after the recent U.S. withdrawal is only the most obvious recent case in point.

Local staff can also easily be caught in a dangerous conundrum: one formal report on the situation during the Mosul battle noted that it was so bad inside the city that it was almost impossible for international staff to operate in the city; and while local staff were far more able to operate, it was extremely risky for them to do so.  Going further, the report noted that in situations where it might seem like local aid workers would have an advantage, “perverse consequences” could be the result.  Another Mosul after-action humanitarian report noted that battle demonstrated that there is a lot of work to do to improve performance and safety across a number of major humanitarian dimensions, as did a study from the RAND Corporation.  Even in Ukraine, though, one British aid worker died just a few weeks ago after being illegally taken captive by Russia’s proxy separatist allies in Donetsk and detained for over two-and-a-half months.  Even in what is considered a relatively “better” operating environment, then, the risks are considerable.  Unfortunately, the harder the environment in which to operate and the more different the environment from what is familiar to the major organizations, the less effective and more problematic humanitarian efforts will be.

One controversial WHO-organized program ended up providing front-line medical services during the battle for Mosul since Iraqi and Kurdish forces did not possess certain medical capabilities needed to save lives, but two of the most prominent humanitarian medical organizations—the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)—declined to participate, citing ethical concerns with being seen to be taking sides during the conflict.  The idea that came out of deliberation after the battle was that such efforts could not be considered “humanitarian” and would have to be labeled differently.  Now, ICRC in particular faces criticism for being “too” neutral in Ukraine.  From Mosul to Ukraine, there are often no easy answers for humanitarian efforts to these deeply complex problems and neutrality itself can become an issue, especially when the likes of terrorist ISIS or the barbaric Russian military are involved as combatants.

On Tribalism

We cannot conclude before admitting the obvious, that there is a natural tribalism to humans that has only been exacerbated in our current era, even before Brexit and Trumpism reared their ugly heads in the West.  Even in the twenty-first century, humans are a very tribal species: e.g., though it is increasing, interracial marriage is not the default norm around the world.  Today, as I have noted, we live in an era of increasing tribalism around the world.  Just in recent decades, in less developed parts of the world, from the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s to the ethnic and sectarian violence that erupted in Iraq after the U.S. invasion of 2003, from, more recently, Bangladesh, India, Syria, and Israel-Palestine to Ethiopia, and Iraq (again), to name a few, tribalism has gone in far more violent and deadly directions than in the admittedly deteriorating politics of West, which so far has begun hinting at, but is not yet devolving into, the type of violence seen in other parts of the world (the Balkans in the 1990s were a big exception but that was at a moment when the nations of the only-just-former Yugoslavia were not yet truly Western even while they were European).

It should be noted in this context that European racism does not only extend to non-white peoples: bigotry towards Eastern European migrant-workers in Britain was one of the drivers fueling the 2016 UK Brexit vote.  And there is no doubt there has been for years and currently is a significant and growing anti-immigrant, anti-non-European racist sentiment among the populations and politics of Europe (and for those keeping score, it should be noted that Putin’s Kremlin has been a big booster within Europe of both the far-right and anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim sentiment).

In this tribal world, it is natural for Kenyans to generally care more about those in their own historic tribe or region within Kenya, to care about Kenyans more than those from other nearby countries, to care about East Africans more than West Africans, to care about fellow black Sub-Saharan Africans more than Arab or Berber North Africans, and so forth.  This is a natural general rule and can be applied to just about any peoples anywhere and this is confirmed by what we can read in the news and see with our own eyes every day.  Is it really surprising, then, that Europeans care more about Ukrainians, as fellow Europeans with some degree of shared history and culture, than for people trying to come to Europe from continents away?  That is not to suggest that this is “good” or desirable, it is simply acknowledging how humans are built and that different responses are not the default anywhere in the world in majority-proportions, not in Europe nor the Middle East nor anywhere else.

In this vein, attitudes within the Middle East should be examined just as robustly as attitudes within Europe.  I lived over five years in Jordan, and I can tell you that the idea of some wonderful lovefest of pan-Arabism in the Arab world is a fantasy.  I would not call it simmering, but there was an undercurrent of hostility in Jordan towards the many Syrian refugees than ended up in Jordan.  There is also discrimination and decades-long tensions directed from the truly local Jordanian population (originating from the East Bank of the Jordan River) towards the many Palestinian refugees who fled conflict with Israel over the decades and many of whom came from the West Bank of the Jordan River (yes, that West Bank) who now are actually the majority of Jordan’s population.  Also, Jordanians (and most other Arabs) also do not like Gulf Arabs (but mainly because they are incredibly snobby and condescending to Jordanians and non-Gulf Arabs).  There are also levels of serious sectarianism in places like Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, where there is tremendous distrust among these various Arab groups, between not only Sunni and Shiite but between Muslim and Christian and Muslim and Druze within specific countries even leaving aside the issue of refugees, and Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East face discrimination.  I could keep going, but you get the point and the problem: even in the Arab Middle East, Arab refugees are not exactly welcome and, indeed, apart from countries right on Iraq’s or Syria’s borders, other Arab countries have done less to take in Syrian refugees than some European countries, like Germany (Saudi Arabia and and other Gulf Arab nations have literally taken in zero Syrian refugees).  Thus, it strikes me as odd that prosperous European countries could so easily be decried as racist when prosperous Arab countries far closer and more culturally compatible are doing far less than a number of those European countries to take care of fellow Arabs.  In any case, these divisions themselves produce significant challenges to any humanitarian aid operations.

A Response to Inspire More Progress, Less Envy

In conclusion, while it is easy to see racism in the differences between various humanitarian responses, at least in the case of Ukraine compared to other examples (in this case—at least a little, in my small effort—Iraq), I will take a controversial position: in a world where crises within certain regions keep coming (albeit for a complex variety of reasons, some of which can certainly at least be partly blamed on the West), instead of decrying Europe’s response to a European crisis as “racist” for being too good, perhaps a more productive mentality for people from people in other regions would be to ask why their own regions have not responded as enthusiastically to helping people from their own regions.  In some cases, obviously a lack of resources is part of the answer, and yet in the Middle East, we have Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s richest nations, not taking in any refugees.  If other parts of the world learn form Europe’s current example in Ukraine, perhaps fewer people would want to flee from far away to Europe and would find helping hands, open homes, and warm hearts closer to home.

Again, that is not to deny that racism may very well be a serious factor—it certainly is a factor—but note that such bigotry is common everywhere and even within the various distinct regions of the world.  There may be far more applicable lessons in the immediate future from looking at Europe with Ukraine as a positive example, and while Europe, the U.S., and the West certainly have more work—far more work—to do in fighting racism within their societies, it cannot be said that all these other regions in the world do not have a tremendous amount of work to do on that front as well.

In the end, while achieving and awaiting further long-term progress on fighting racism in the West and all around the world along with helping to reform humanitarianism to have less Western-bias and less Eurocentric leadership must be priorities, Europe’s response to the Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine can at least provide a hopeful model for how people in other regions of the world can come together to take care of their own to address current refugee crises and sadly, the crises inevitably coming in the future.

See 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

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, June 2, 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; for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated). 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 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• 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—Distorting the Soviets’ pre-planning for the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, among other factors I explain elsewhere, was the issue of a fringe fascist movement in Finland, known as the Lapuans, that tried to have a coup in 1932 but never was competent or numerous enough to pose a real threat and would fragment into even smaller fringe groups, some of which agitated for the part of Karelia on the Soviet side of the border that still was home to ethnic Finns.  One of these groups even created maps of a “Greater Finland” including Soviet territory.  Writes Trotter:

One can easily imagine the impact such documents had when they fell, as several specimens did, into the hands of Stalin’s intelligence operatives.

[Soviet Premier Joseph] Stalin was unrealistically influenced by the headline-grabbing antics of the Lapuans, the grotesque fantasies of the Karelian irredentists, and the exaggerated reports of agents who were eager to tell the Kremlin what they thought the Kremlin wanted to hear. From remarks made during his later negotiations with the Finns, it seems clear that Stalin really did believe that the interior of Finland seethed with class antagonism and fascist plotters and that all of Finnish society was undercut by smouldering grudges left over from the civil war days. Ill feeling persisted, of course—the conflict had been too bloody for all the scars to have healed in just two decades—but Moscow’s estimate of its extent, importance, and potential for outside exploitation was wildly inaccurate. In fact, the old wounds were healing faster than even the Finns themselves realized; with the onset of a massive contemporary threat from the Soviet Union, those old enmities looked remote and historic. (9-10)

The outsized effect of these tiny, fringe groups, with almost no power base and even less political support, are instructive for both what would transpire in 1939-1940 between Finland and the USSR and what is happening now between Ukraine and Russia and the whole absurd “denazification” talk of Putin’s Kremlin, as will be explained.

Official Soviet publications and news services referred to the Finnish government and leaders as “the Fascists” and emphasized the supposedly oppressive conditions of the Finnish working class and their readiness to ally with the Soviet would-be “liberators.”

Soviet official publications and news also trumpeted that “’the Imperialists” (i.e., the West) were already in motion to use Finland as a base for an invasion of the Soviet Union.  Writes Trotter:

This was, and to a certain extent still is, the official justification given to the Soviet Public for why the war was fought.  It permitted the Kremlin to rationalize the apparent lunacy of a nation of 3.5 million souls attempting to invade a nation of 171 million.  These claims also laid the groundwork for later explanations of the failed offensives and staggering casualties suffered by the Red Army.  These could be explained away as being the result of Imperialist aid to the treacherous Finns.  (19)              

Russia’s playbook today clearly draws from the same themes the Soviets used in the Winter War, as nearly 83 years later, the same hubris, the same assumptions of their own popularity in a foreign country, the same lack of due diligence and willingness to subscribe to self-serving narratives—falling for their own propaganda—infested the decision-makers in Moscow planning another war against a far-weaker, far-smaller neighbor without any formal allies, only this time in Putin’s Kremlin, rather than Stalin’s.

Putin and his folks seemed to have really believed that many Ukrainians would not only sympathize with Russia, but would actually join Russia and collaborate.  For Putin, Ukraine is Russia and the Russian speakers in Ukraine are not Ukrainians, they are Russians who have tragically been wrested from the Motherland.  Even ethnic Ukrainians speaking Ukrainian as their primary language are not really Ukrainians to him, just a different kind of Russian.  At Russian gunpoint, these people would feel very differently than he did; in the past, those ethnic Russians especially had voted for the pro-Russian faction in Ukrainian politics, but Putin’s military aggression against Ukraine since 2014 has turned vehemently against both him and Russia the very Ukrainians who used to view both favorably, as I have noted before.

For Finland’s Lapuans, today in Ukraine we can substitute the much-blown-out-of-proportion, glibly-over-simplified Russian hyperbole on the (somewhat formerly far-right) Azov Battalion of Ukraine; anecdotal evidence suggests Russian soldiers are obsessed with ferreting out the unit’s fighters (real or imagined) and supporters as well as other “Nazis” (amounting to “denazificaton”).

As I have noted at great length before, Putin’s brands of revanchist ethnonationalist colonialism and imperialism are utterly banal and thoroughly unoriginal, always playing on old themes from the past.  On May 8, 2022, just before Russia’s grand celebration of its Victory Day commemorating the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Putin accordingly remarked: “Today, our soldiers, as their ancestors, are fighting side by side to liberate their native land from the Nazi filth with the confidence that, as in 1945, victory will be ours,” that, “today, it is our common duty to prevent the rebirth of Nazism.”  On Victory Day itself, Putin devoted much of his speech in the Kremlin’s Red Square to similar themes, calling the opposing leadership in Kyiv “neo-Nazis and Banderites” (I have gone into detail on the history, context, and importance of that very specific latter term, on Stepan Bandera and his nationalist movement, in my last excerpted article as well as the original deep-dive from which both these pieces are excerpted).

Putin then went on to portray the current fighting as “unavoidable” because of the West’s support for Ukraine and supposed plans for aggression, condemning that support and NATO.  He falsely blamed NATO and the West for instigating and orchestrating the current conflict, claiming his decision was “timely and the only correct decision.  A decision by a sovereign, strong, independent country.”  When the moment of silence for the fallen was called for, Putin invoked the memory of two groups: those who died fighting Hitler’s Nazi regime long ago and those whom he referred to as “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine today, explicitly linking both the Ukrainian government and current fighting to Nazi Germany and World War II, respectively, something the Kremlin has done ever since Putin’s favored stooge, the now disgraced Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown from Ukraine’s Presidency in the 2013-2014 (Euro)Maidan Revolution.  “Neo-Nazis,” “fascists,” and “Banderites” are terms that have been used to describe both post-Yanukovych presidential administrations in Kyiv, that of Petro Poroshenko and his successor, the now-legend-in-his-own-time Zelensky.

So it is that in the crudest of ways, Putin is trying to link the Great Patriotic War—Russia’s term for its fight in World War II against Nazi-led fascist armies—with the war against “Nazi” Ukraine today.  And he and his crew made similar mistaken assumptions about fascists in the country he was about to attack in early 2022 that Stalin and his crew did in 1939 with Finland.  Putin failed to learn from history, and the results are similarly humiliating for Moscow as they were in the beginning of the Soviet Finnish Winter War.

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!

Ninth Episode on the struggle for democracy and war in Ukraine as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to destroy Ukraine’s democracy with special guest Oleksandra Matviichuk (Twitter: @avalaina), an ardent human rights defender, Head of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties (English, Russian/Русский, & Ukrainian/Український websites), and recipient of the 2016 Democracy Defender Award from 17 delegations of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE); she was specifically handed her award by Zhanna Nemtsova, a daughter of famed Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, assassinated by Putin’s thugs in sight of the Kremlin in 2015.

Matviichuk’s Center for Civil Liberties was linked to above; here is the link to the Euromaidan SOS group in which she is also involved

Update April 5th: On April 4th, Oleksandra testified from Ukraine to the Canadian Parliament’s House of Commons for its Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (SDIR) for a session titled: Current Situation of Human Sights in Ukraine and Russia; here is the video of that session

DONATE TO SUPPORT UKRAINE!!! Слава Украине! Slava Ukraini!

Matviichuk specifically recommended donating to the Ukrainian military, as if its brave fighters cannot win this war, all else is lost, and specifically recommended Come Back Alive, an organization that supports the Ukrainian military.

The government’s central bank, the National Bank of Ukraine, has also opened special accounts for people to donate to both the Ukrainian Armed Forces and for humanitarian assistance for civilians.

Save the Children is one of the premier international aid organizations and, until the end of April, is matching TEN TIMES your donation, so $10=$100 and $25=$250! I highly recommend donating to them to have maximum impact on the humanitarian situation.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is also an amazing humanitarian organization.

The main UN body to help refugees is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which does amazing work all over the world. Another vital UN agency involved in helping Ukraine is the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a deeply experienced organization, provides emergency medical services for the wounded in Ukraine.

Notes

Center for Civil Liberties report: Surviving Hell: Testimonies of Victims on Places of Illegal Detention in Donbas

2019 Center for Civil Liberties Annual Report

It was in 2004 when Putin traveled twice to Ukraine to campaign for Viktor Yanukovych, including for three days just before the election

Brian’s other coverage of Putin’s war against Ukraine and background

The article I wrote in which I opened with the quote from the 300-year old poem I mentioned, in which a Ukrainian poet protests against Russian degradations

I also mentioned Manafort as Yanukovych’s point man for his Ukraine comeback: here are my deep dives on this for Newsweek (shared byline is a mistake, other author served as editor and contributed reporting on federal prosecutor’s views) and for my Real Context News

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

Consider donating if you appreciate this content. Also see Brian’s deeply related 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)!

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, March 19, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his March 8 Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related 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
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see his earlier article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related 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—I noted before that the betrayal of Russian soldiers and their families was being weaponized by Ukraine and should be weaponized by the U.S.-led international community, including NATO.  But most importantly, these injustices must all be seized upon by the Russian soldiers and the Russian people themselves.

The Time Is Ripe for the Russian Army and the Russian People to Reject War, Reject Putin, and Rebel

Despite Putin’s totalitarian-ish crackdown on media and the flow of information, social media (ironically so often the vehicle for the dissemination for Russia’s own disinformation) and, especially, certain messaging apps (e.g., Telegram), are too powerful to be easily silenced fully, and it is hard to stop text exchanges.  Especially among the country’s young people, information will keep trickling in past Putin’s Media Iron Curtain through these means, and with enough holes emerging, the truth will light the way for more and more inside Russia as time marches on.

As this far more accurate and convincing information reaches the Russian people, we can expect some of the “yes” to war and most of the undecideds of the CNN poll mentioned earlier to switch to “no.”  With many of their lives being ruined under sanctions and international isolation, Russians will turn to the people they should blame most of all: introspectively, themselves for being duped by Putin’s propaganda and empowering him, and externally, Putin and his inner circle themselves, who made themselves monstrously wealthy and treated Russia, its resources, its industries, and its military as their personal playthings.  Protests will erupt in Russia in ways not seen since the fall of Soviet Union.

All the devastating Ukraine revelations have happened incredibly quickly, and it will take time for things to filter into enough Russian minds, so expect a gap, but when at least some of the truth does become apparent to a certain critical mass of Russians, expect Russians to revolt from within.

In response to understanding the precariousness of its standing with its own people, in the crackdown alluded to above, Putin’s regime is censoring, (partly?) blocking, banning, or even criminalizing the work of major Western news outlets, independent Russian news outlets, protests, and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter: reporting the truth inside Russia of Putin’s war in Ukraine is now illegal.  Other platforms—such as YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and text messaging—remain.  It is inevitable, then, that word of what is happening in Ukraine and the awful treatment of Russian soldiers will continue to spread among the Russian population, members of which are increasingly taking to the streets in protest despite at least some 4,600 protesters being arrested throughout Russia just on Sunday, March 6, according to the Russian human rights organization OVD-Info, with about 13,000 arrested in total since February 24, some of them tortured.  Among those arrested was Yelena Osipova, a nearly-eighty-year-old woman who survived Nazi Germany’s epic Siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) during World War II.  The protests have the backing of that perennial political martyr and thorn in Putin’s side, Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent dissident opposition leader and anti-corruption activist, currently jailed himself for ridiculous fake “crimes” and facing new state-initiated indignities.

Russian people, businesses, and celebrities (even Elizaveta Peskova, the daughter of Putin’s main spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov) are speaking out and warning their countrymen, customers, and fans of the mendacity and killing that is afoot because of their government and its autocratic leader holed up in the Kremlin.  A Russian senator even complained publicly during a Federation Council meeting that conscripts were being coerced into signing contracts and that, in one unit, only four survivors out of 100 soldiers total returned alive from fighting in Ukraine.  Such acts knock chunks out of the wall of Putin’s Media Iron Curtain.

Soldiers, indeed, whole military units disgusted with their mission—being forced to become murderers and war criminals—will get wind of the massive outrage and civil unrest at home as protests in Russia grow in number, frequency, and intensity.  And these protests will include these soldiers’ mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, romantic partners, children, and friends hitting the streets, even leading the protests.

Hopefully, enough of these troops, their officers, and commanders will realize and collectively decide as whole military units that there is a more important mission than destroying and subjugating Ukraine: to march on Moscow, join the people for whom they should be fighting, and realize that when the military and people are united, Putin is defenseless.  Russia can end an era of gaslighting, delusion, criminality, and kleptocracy through the actions of the Russian people themselves.  Russian soldiers wising up to their abuse and taking a stand, sometimes a stand that echoed throughout history and helped bring down the Russian government at the time, is not unheard of in Russian history, especially in the twentieth century.  Thus, this would hardly be unprecedented.

It is already occurring to Ukraine’s government that Russian soldiers and their families are very much worth engaging, as it is already appealing directly to them and has set up that aforementioned hotline to help reunite Russian soldiers with their families, but there should be a concerted information warfare campaign to coopt Russian soldiers and citizens directed not just by Ukraine but by the entire NATO Alliance and the rest of the democratic world.  The prolific hacking group Anonymous has already gotten into the action, including with a major hack March 6 of all Russian state television stations and several Russian streaming services that put footage of Russia’s Ukraine war, suppressed in Russia, on screens for the whole of Russia to see.  Other hacking groups and tens of thousands of volunteer cyberwarriors from around the world are engaging in similar efforts on behalf of Ukraine (perhaps even including U.S. Cyber Command).  Such acts will do much to lift the veil of gaslighting draped by Putin over many a Russian’s eyes, and should dramatically increase opposition to the war and Putin’s regime over time.

As I have noted time and time again, Putin’s information warfare against the West has been relentless.  Now, let us turn the tables on him, but use truth as our weapon instead of the disinformation so favored by Putin as we give him a coordinated taste of his own medicine.  In turning the tables of cyberwarfare on the Kremlin, NATO should even explicitly add cyberwarfare—including disinformation—to NATO’s collective defense Article 5 in addition to engaging in this targeted information warfare offensive.  And if NATO states adjust Article 5 in this way—as I formally recommend last year—they can even collectively declare Article 5 in response to Russia’s years-long sustained cyberwarfare against NATO and carry out this offensive information warfare campaign as the first cyberwarfare-related invocation of Article 5 and just the second-ever invocation in the Alliance’s history, the only one so far being a response to the 9/11 attacks.

History Has Its Eyes on All of Us

Barely a fifth into the twenty-first century, Great Power autocracy in Europe has reared its ugly head again, ready to destroy Western democracy and the precious post-World War II order of European—and relative global—peace and stability, sometimes referred to as the “Long Peace,” or Pax Americana.  I must admit, when I wrote almost exactly six years ago an article warning of Western democracy being tested like no time since World War II, I did not imagine a major land war in Europe in 2022.  But make no mistake about it, Putin at the helm of Russia has forced this upon us and seeks to drag Europe and the world centuries backwards, with China watching, waiting, and taking notes.

Let’s make sure we provide China a clear set of lessons by encouraging and demonstrating the high cost of actions like Russia’s and encouraging a Russian soldiery at its breaking point, abandoned in so many ways by its Kremlin, to march on Putin in Moscow in support of the Russian people and their shared Motherland.  Not through NATO military forces, but through the Russian people themselves—soldier and citizen joined together—can Russia, now more than ever, seize the moment and rid itself of Putin and Putinism.

And then, having freed themselves from tyranny, Russians would find—should they want to reach out—open arms and extended hands from the West.

Should a Russia free of Putin clasp hands with and embrace the West, the future will be a world in which there is no challenge that Russia, Europe, and the United States working together cannot overcome.  And in such a world, China will not want to be left out.

But for such an era to come about, the first and necessary step is for Putin to be gone and for Russia to no longer be a menace on the periphery of Europe and the free world but to be a partner of both as part of both.  For NATO to attempt to do this itself is the path to World War III, perhaps nuclear war and the destruction of humanity and the world; it is for Russians to remove Putin, but if they do, they will find the same level of global support Ukraine has found.

Under the threat of Putin and the leadership of U.S. President Joe Biden, the West and the free world have awoken and realized they are strong, stronger than Putin and in a position to stare down his challenges to freedom, democracy, and that singular international order set up in the wake of the Second World War.  And they will gladly support the Russian people of a post-Putin Russia in a quest to rejoin the family of nations as a good-faith constructive partner for an era of unprecedented global cooperation.  This support would match the amazing energy present in the current solidarity being expressed for Ukraine, but it is up to Russians to decide if they are willing to fight for a better future for themselves as Ukrainians clearly have.  And by far the best way for this to happen is for the Russian Army—the weakest link in Putin’s current imperialist plans—to become Putin’s worst nightmare.

Putin began his reckless campaign by dangerously overplaying his hand in Ukraine, and now we see him dangerously overplaying his hand at home in Russia.  At the heart of this all are some of the people most wronged not just by his regime in general, but most especially during his Ukraine fiasco: the rank-and-file Russian soldiers fighting—and dying—on the front lines and their families back home in Russia.  The Russian people owe nothing to this orchestrator of the betrayal of those soldiers and their families, but they owe a great deal to the Russian soldiers and Ukrainians being treated as disposable pawns for the geopolitical ambitions of the dictator they empowered.  Only by removing Putin themselves can they restore Russia, in time, to true greatness, but going along with their Dear Leader’s insane playbook will only result in the opposite.

For too long, Russians have fed Putin’s maniacal, anachronistic ambitions; now is the time for them to act—for soldiers to inspire citizens and citizens to inspire soldiers—to free the world of a madman; waiting may prove fatal for the Ukrainian state and far too many Ukrainians and Russians fighting in the current tragedy created by Putin.  This war in Ukraine is not the first tragedy foisted upon the world by Vladimir Vladimirovich, but let us all—especially the Russian Army and people—ensure it will be his very last.

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) By Brian E. Frydenborg, March 16, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related 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

Also see March 8 follow-up Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related 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

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.

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

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—Underlying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tired articulation of his rationale for invading Ukraine is the same old, same old in all the bad ways coming from Russia in a totally avoidable crisis wholly manufactured by the Kremlin.

As I noted just before this war’s dramatic late-February escalation, what was then the extremely-likely-to-be-pending invasion of Ukraine by Russia would likely be the largest invasion in Europe in over half a century (since the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and, before that, the final years of World War II) and the largest European war since WWII (since Ukraine’s army today seems quite willing to fight along with many civilians, but the Czechoslovak People’s Army did not resist at all in 1968).  Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing apart from the scale of all this is the predictable, soporific banality of Putin’s game plan, one visible from many miles and many years away.

And perhaps nothing besides Ukrainian icy steeliness better explains the pre-scalation nonchalant, yet defiant refusal of Ukrainians to panic, with others seeming to have been more worried than Ukrainians themselves.  After all, Ukrainians had experienced a smaller Russian troop buildup on their border early last year and this current one has been going on for months, so they shrugged their shoulders and lived their lives, with Ukraine’s government in recent weeks even launching a “Keep calm and visit Ukraine” tourism campaign that hearkens back to the famous domestic British morale campaign from WWII.

At least, that is what we were meant to believe to some degree: in an interview with CNN‘s excellent Matthew Chance, Zelensky made it clear that he had actually accepted U.S. intelligence warning of a Russian invasion but wanted to downplay that so as not to tip off Russia to the fact that Ukrainians were furiously preparing a defense, deliberately trying to throw the Kremlin off so that if/when the invasion came, the Russians would be caught off guard, fall behind schedule, and sustain more casualties from a far more prepared Ukraine than anticipated, a point I have yet to see anyone else make.

Public relations aside, the situation before the escalation was dire, with proxy conventional attacks by rebel separatists in eastern Ukraine and Russian cyberattacks having already been underway (in addition to de facto economic warfare as Russia’s troop buildup and naval “exercises” were already causing major damage to the Ukrainian economy).  I noted at the time that it was incredibly difficult to imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin amassing some 150,000-and-growing ground troops along with heavy military equipment, vehicles, and additional air and naval forces just for a failed intimidation campaign that yields no substantial positive results for him; just tucking his tail in between his legs and sending his forces home while losing face after a costly military buildup throughout harsh winter months is simply not in his nature. I wish I was wrong, but that interpretation turned out to be correct.

A Pathetically Predictable Playbook

Also pathetically predictable are both the rationales Putin regularly spews along with his army of propagandists and his methods, containing absolutely nothing new and going back centuries.

In my graduate studies and again in my journalism, I have researched and noted that the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union made it a decided policy to play with, keep simmering under the surface, and manipulate one way or another whenever convenient various nationalisms both within Russia and the Soviet Union and in their peripheries and near-peripheries.  At some times, it would be convenient to heat to a boiling point the majority ethnonationalism, at other instances, the minority ethnonationalisms in any given part of Russia or a (post-)Soviet Republic, sometimes playing one against the other in one era only to switch sides in the future.  As one scholar I quoted in a graduate school paper noted, the

system of ethnic autonomies [in Russia/the Soviet Union] was ostensibly a means of protecting national minorities, but in reality it was a time bomb that Moscow could blow up at its leisure by pushing the “protected” minorities towards separatism. Thus, this situation gave Moscow a means to weaken and destabilize republics whose nationalistic feelings ran high. (Areshidze 2007, 22)

To be absolutely clear, this a tradition in both the Soviet and Russian historical tradition, going back centuries, and is Putin’s favorite playbook among very few.

Within this context, it is just basic reality that many people of many ethnicities all over the world live outside the boundaries of their ethnicity’s nation-state(s) (if that ethnicity is lucky enough to have a full nation state; Kurds, Uighurs, and Palestinians, just to name three, are not).  Therefore, Russia extending Russian citizenship to ethnic Russians and others in regions with ethnic tensions or regions it has occupied in Georgia (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) and Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk, together in eastern Ukraine forming the Donbas area, as well as Crimea) in the cause of ethnonationalist solidarity is absolutely not a legal justification for interference in a sovereign country’s territory, let alone military invasion, occupation, and annexation, regardless of Russia’s and Putin’s longtime policy to award citizenship—complete with Russian passports—to such people in these countries and others, including the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia long wary of Russian schemes to dominate them and undermine their sovereignty.  This Russian policy is part of a longtime strategy to use ethnic Russians and other separatist minorities within the states of the former Soviet Union and that were once part of the Russian Empire at its height to serve the Kremlin’s interests, destabilize any of these states that do not fall in line with Russia’s wishes, and to create a potential fifth column for Putin to incite when convenient for him (just as he is doing with the separatists in Eastern Ukraine). 

While I will not dismiss the idea of genuine concern on the part of Russia and even Putin for their ethnic brethren, it is worth noting that one of Hitler’s main aims in the runup to and also during WWII was to unite ethnic Germans living outside Germany under a “Greater Germany” into which Hitler’s Germany would expand through war, conquest, and annexation (and no, I am not saying Putin is Hitler but it is worth noting what company he keeps in using war for similar ethnonationalist dreams).

Though such tactics have not been very effective in, say, the Baltic states, they have worked extremely well in Georgia and have been key to Putin’s Ukraine policy; indeed, the U.S., UK, Ukraine, and researchers have warned of and called out “false flag” staged or falsely-claimed “attacks” against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine or attacks across the border into Russia as a very possible pretext for a Russian invasion.

But one key difference from the days the czars and Soviets used these tactics is that, in the age of the internet, Russia’s use of hybrid warfare and cyberwarfare enable Putin to use these tactics in an effective and penetrating way far beyond Russia’s periphery in ways of which the czars and Soviets could only dream.  In this way, manipulating nationalism has become Russia’s weapon of choice against the West.  And while this is a multifront war, with cyberwarfare ranging from the U.S. to the UK, Germany, and, indeed, all over Europe, Ukraine is undoubtedly the hottest current front, combining hybrid/cyberwarfare with the kinetic physical warfare of guns, bombs, separatist rebels, and regular Russian forces: the main battlefield of the New Cold War, as I have noted before.

As such, Putin’s current machinations in Ukraine are not only wholly formulaic and predictable, but are so to the tune of a playbook going back hundreds of years, the basic mechanics of which were never terribly original to begin with but quite predictable and hardly unique to Russia (rather common to all nationalistic bullies).  And, to be clear, Ukrainians have endured within living memory such machinations to the degree of a Soviet-made, weaponized famine—the infamous Holodomor (the genocidal nature of which the Kremlin actively and vigorously now denies)—that killed millions of Ukrainians literally by design.  Ukraine also suffered some of the highest casualties of any country both per capita (more than both the Soviet Union overall and Russia specifically) and in absolute numbers during WWII.

Whether the invasion and annexation of Crimea, the intervention in eastern Ukraine, the repeated attempts to corrupt and dominate the Ukrainian political system (to which Ukrainians responded with the 2004-2005 Orange and 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolutions and the subsequent election of two presidents who have refused to bend the knee to the Kremlin), spasmodic cyberattacks (sometimes devastating like NotPetya, the most damaging cyberattack in history), or the current threat of a Russian invasion coupled with very likely further dismemberment of their nation, then, Ukrainians have endured far worse Russian meddling before and essentially live constantly with the prospect and/or the actuality of Russia intervention in one form or another, sometimes in a given period on a daily basis.  Ukraine’s surprising comedian turned president, Volodymyr Zelensky, eloquently said as much in his February 19 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

In fact, Russia’s imperialist and colonialist adventures, whether overt or the more recently sometimes-covert, have rarely waned in the past several centuries, but just because Ukrainians are used to it does not mean they have not also have found ways, even sometimes in the incredibly repressive Soviet era, of also daily asserting their national character and independence, sometimes more symbolically, sometime with rebellions or even, as today, in short eras of Ukraine being independent from an oppressive empire.

Ukrainians know their history, after all, despite the Kremlin’s attempts to rewrite it: as the selection from 1762 poem that introduced this article shows, Ukrainians have been protesting Russia’s trying to have their way with them for centuries and this quarrel is nothing new.

The Western media and leadership class should also know proper history, specifically, Putin’s and Russia’s (as well as their own history of dropping the ball on handling Russia), so while we may be alarmed at Putin’s warmongering towards Ukraine, we should never be surprised.  Rather, we should call out how blatantly banal, predictable, and repetitive it is.  Putin may think his utterly uninteresting, hackneyed callbacks to an antiquated, zombie brand of pan-Slavic and/or aggressive, imposed Russian ethnonationalism are exciting and inspiring, but they are the most overused playbook coming out of Moscow for the past three centuries and find little appeal outside Russia and some ethnic Russians in former Soviet states.

And by far, most Ukrainians are not falling for it.

“Make Russia Great Again” Without Ukraine

Self-determination for a sovereign Ukraine did not have mean war with Russia, and only Russia initiated this war of choice and only it chose to do so.  Its reasoning for war rests upon the most empty, banal, overused tropes from czarist Imperial Russia that claim Russians are an ethnicity above and apart from others, superior and blessed by Orthodox Christian God while destined to rule over the other Slavs and, at the lowest point in the hierarchy, other groups of people that surround the Slavs.  What any of those people want is irrelevant, for it is Russia’s birthright destiny. 

Without the free will and agency of these various peoples who had endured decades, sometimes centuries of oppression under Russian and/or Soviet rule, nothing NATO did would have resulted in countries formerly under Moscow’s sway becoming NATO members.  But those peoples chose for themselves, and, in the case of Ukraine, Ukrainians actually have a say.  And while the West will not die for their right to have that say, it can still support it all the same as they are now by supporting Ukraine in other ways and teaching Putin and Russians that a united West will not let Russia get away with literal murder (among other things) without paying a steeply heavy price, as seriously harmful to Russia as its rationales for its Ukraine mischief are mindlessly tedious.

Either we live in a world where the idea that a democratic nation has a right to freely choose to enter into alliances and partnerships its leaders and people deem desirable without having to face military attacks as a result or sovereignty with the legitimacy of the consent of the governed has no real meaning and war will become an increasingly preferred political tool.

One thing is for certain: Russia’s resoundingly unoriginal appeals to ethnonationalism, whether beyond its borders or within, whether specifically to Russians or more broadly pan-Slavic, have resulted in centuries of bloody war and conquests, most of which have come undone, rendering these struggles mostly pointless.  The people living under the bloody heel of the czarist and Soviet boots were only too eager to throw off Russian and Soviet imperialism the first opportunity they had, sometimes (as in Ukraine’s case) repeatedly, affirming the shallowness of such aggressive Russian ethnonationalism.  The historically blood-soaked lands of Eastern Europe, and Ukraine in particular—all the way through to today—embody this sad, failed history.  It was such pan-ethnic nationalism that propelled Russia into World War I, to utter disaster and a collapse of the Imperial Russian state along with the deaths of millions.  Unlike then, today, as noted, Russia is facing a united West supporting Eastern Europeans that have resolutely rejected Russian hegemony and influence to align themselves or clearly want to align with the West, choosing freely in democratic systems to do so from an informed position knowing full well what the West offers and what Putin offers.

That man would be far better off focusing on building Russia up at home (its economy is still a relic dependent on fossil fuels), for this misadventure might end up hurting Russia—and even Putin himself—far more than Putin was anticipating and, unlike NATO and the West, his friends are few and far between, chief among the them the dictators Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus (perhaps Xi Jinping of China, too, but I am not so sure they are that close yet: on February 19, at the same Munich Security Conference at which U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris met Zelensky and at which Zelensky spoke and was interviewed by Amanpour, China’s foreign minister reaffirmed his country’s longstanding position on respecting the territorial integrity of all nations, then specifically added “Ukraine is no exception.”).

Putin’s effort to revive this repeatedly failed, absurdly outdated ethnonationalist campaign may be laughably banal, then, but we must also take it deadly seriously since the size and power of the military force involved in supporting that campaign and its manifestation in a war of imperialist expansion against Ukraine unfortunately force us to do so.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

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