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

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

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

The Asinine Politics of Aid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House Can Pass that Aid and Ukraine Can Still Win

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

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

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

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

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

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is a total disaster for Russia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are three key reasons to suppose this idea…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian Isolation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some “no-limits” “friendship.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future Looks Better

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.) A Tale of Maps

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

3.) Russia’s Insanely High Casualties

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

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

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

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

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

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

6.) Logistics, Logistics, LOGISTICS

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

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

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

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

7.) Morale

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

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

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

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

8.) Leadership (or Lack Thereof)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Pyrrhus and “Pyrrhic Victory”

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

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

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

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

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

Russia’s Pointless, Pyrrhic Bakhmut Campaign

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

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

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

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

Pyrrhus As a Warming to Putin and Prigozhin

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

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

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

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

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

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

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

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

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

(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) December 26, 2022; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; adapted and updated excerpts of this article were published by Small Wars Journal on January 16, 2023, titled The Depth and Breadth of Russia’s Losing, on January 10, 2023, titled Russia’s Shrinking and Deteriorating Arsenal Meets Ukraine’s Growing and Improving Air Defenses, on February 1, 2023, titled Russia’s Losing a Constant as Its Ukraine War Settles into Predictable Alternating Phases, and on February 9, 2023, titled Putin’s War of Self-Destruction, Zelensky’s (and Biden’s) War of Exceeding Expectations; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

SILVER SPRING—As the barbaric exponential escalation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s years-long imperialist and colonialist war against Ukraine enters its eleventh month—people keep forgetting this war was really started by Russia in 2014 and has been fought by Russia and its separatist Donbas allies ever since—now is a good time to take stock of where we were, where we have been, and where we are going when it comes to this conflict.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase A:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Depth and Breadth of Russia’s Losing

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

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

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

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

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

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

The losses also include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

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

© 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. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

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

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

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

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

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

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) 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!

(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), August 25, 2022

SILVER SPRING—As someone who has studied and written about Ukraine and Russia on-and-off for some two decades, and with a solid and ample track record of my own work being rather prescient and highly accurate on the war and surrounding issues, I’d like to think my opinion as to who has some of the best accounts to follow would carry some weight.  Here, then, are five people’s accounts that make me often feel humble about my own accomplishments and abilities.  There may be better accounts in Ukrainian or Russian or another language, but, as I admittedly don’t speak any of those, I’m going with my top five in English.

1.) Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, U.S. Army (Ret.): Twitter @MarkHertling

I feel like I follow a lot of different accounts of military experts who offer analysis, but I have found none to offer the consistent level of superb-quality, clear, well-written, big-picture analysis of the war in Ukraine.  He is also often on CNN, with his commentary invariably among the best on the entire network when it comes to Ukraine.  His often long, yet deeply-informative while simple-to-understand threads blow away the competition and offer the most prescient analysis I have seen throughout the war in a snazzy, easily-digestible format.  The man spent 37 years in the U.S. Army, including as Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army, including seeing Ukrainian forces up close in Iraq and as they reformed over the years, and also including liaising with Soviet/Russian forces.  He knows the Ukrainian military, he knows the Russian military, he knows Europe, he knows NATO and he knows military equipment, strategy, and tactics, all this clear from his one-of-a-kind threads.  And, compared to other retired military folks, he sounds more like a normal American and is less jargon-heavy than, and not robotic like, many of his peers, making sure to introduce and explain the jargon when he does use it for the rest of us layfolk.  Filled with telling anecdotes from decades of his military career spanning Europe and Iraq that tie into the current conflict in Ukraine, if you only follow one account, follow him.

2.) Trent Telenko: Twitter @TrentTelenko

Trent is a retired U.S. Department of Defense civilian logistics expert, and man, does that expertise show.  The guy can write long-threads on tires, mud, or transport and make them interesting.  Nobody goes into as much detail as he does on the nitty-gritty of the logistics of this war in Ukraine, and if you consume Trent’s threads on these logistical topics, on everything from weapons and training capabilities to truck fleets and targeting, you will walk away with far deeper understandings of these systems and dynamics in a way that will help many other aspects of the war make that much more sense (logistics is tied to literally everything).  Gen. Hertling and some of the other accounts I mention here also go into logistics and delve into it well, but none plow into the minutiae quite as deeply and like Trent, and his is, thus, one of the most unique and must-follow accounts when it comes to this war in Ukraine.  Just learning from his threads on logistics has made me that much more confident in my understandings on a number of logistics-related topics when it comes to this war in Ukraine.  This man should have a damn blue checkmark already, Twitter!! (Full disclosure: Trent has said some nice things about my work on Twitter)

3.) Illia Ponomarenko: Twitter @IAPonomarenko

Illia is a Ukrainian journalist reporting from Ukraine who himself hails from the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east, suffering from war at the instigation of Russia since 2014.  He works for Ukraine’s flagship local English paper, The Kyiv Independent, and his reporting on the war in his Twitter feed is full of humor, but also at times great rage and sorrow over what is happening to his country and his people, yet also pride and the thrill of soundly beating a hated invader on home turf.  His articles for the Independent are well-worth reading (and are sometimes cited by Gen. Hertling), but also amazing are the photos he takes and posts to his twitter thread, demonstrating his clearly amazing access to his fellow countrymen serving on the front lines.  A man with the common touch, Illia is not afraid to personalize and share his own story, but generally keeps the focus on the heroes fighting on the front lines, the victims of Russia’s imperialist ambition, and leaders carrying Ukraine through this nightmare of a war with Russia.  Whether cataloguing quiet moments with troops on the front lines, a rescued cat, Russian war crimes, or Ukrainian victories, his English-language reporting on the ground as a Ukrainian in Ukraine stand out in his own category.  While obviously emotionally tied to the events of the war, his analysis, though often optimistic, is optimistic based on what is actually happening and is generally more sober and less hyperbolic than those of many others who are, quite understandably, not neutral as their Ukraine is ravaged by Russia.  With an excellent combination of heart, head, and humor, Illia is certainly one of the most important accounts to follow on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

4.) Dr. Phillips P. O’Brien: Twitter @PhillipsPOBrien

Taking a bit more of an academic and wonky approach than the general, logistician, and local reporter—he is, after all, a Professor of Strategic Studies at Scotland’s prestigious University of St. Andrews—Professor Phillips P. Obrien is still definitely one of the most important accounts to follow.  He posts more and more often than many other academics, often tweeting about details but then bringing them into the wider picture in a more analytical, academic sense than the other accounts.  Not as specialized on military equipment or logistics, not as on-the-ground as a reporter, Dr. O’Brien nevertheless covers many of the various dimensions of the war well, offering broad commentary on a variety of aspects and tying them together or making them more understandable for the non-professorial class and in easily understandable language.  His measured analysis is also, like the other accounts here, more prescient than that of many others, cutting through the “hot takes” and noise and keeping the big-picture in mind in a way whereby we can follow the war unfolding through him and not lose sight of that big-picture, covering the conflict with knowledge, context, and precision.  Give this man a blue checkmark already!!

5.) Rob Lee: Twitter @RALee85

Rob is PhD student at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London who is also a literal veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and a number of prestigious schools and institutions.  He may not yet have his doctorate, but he has quickly established himself as the premier cataloguer of open-source intelligence in video and photo form of vehicles and equipment in action in Ukraine and of their losses for this whole conflict.  I have yet to find a more comprehensive presentation of all the available photo/video data on this stuff for this conflict, and Rob is careful to cite sourcing and, at times, corroborate geolocation.  You can trust that if Rob posts it, it is often vetted, and he notes when info is not verified.  He is usually just posting and cataloguing this photo and video evidence, but he also does sometimes offer his own analysis and when he does, I’ve found it to be thoughtful and spot on and cutting through some of the confusion or bad takes.  He knows his stuff and you should follow him, and his career will only get more and more interesting.  But if you want to see videos and photos of equipment in action in Ukraine, Rob’s account is the account to follow.

Of course, there are some other great accounts to follow, and it must be said that Ukraine’s official accounts are incredibly well-managed/produced and engage in some grade-A trolling of Russia: so, here’s an Honorable Mention for fun:the official account of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine: Twitter @DefenceU.

Some top Ukrainian officials’ individual accounts are also grade-A trollers of Russia.  And, of course, for inspiration, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s account is also a must-follow, but when it comes to really understanding the war and its dynamics, the five accounts I have named are the five to follow in my opinion.

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) By Brian E. Frydenborg, June 7, 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 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022

SILVER SPRING—Apart from the main themes I have already discussed in this series (hubris and delusions about “fascists”), there are a number of other noteworthy similarities between the two conflicts apparent from Trotter’s early chapters.

One major parallel involves command and control, combined arms coordination, and communication.  Notes Trotter:

Nor did the Red generals appreciate the amount of trouble the Wehrmacht [i.e., German Military] had taken to perfect tactical coordination between the component arms, to ensure a reliable and redundant network of communications, and to instill in its frontline commanders a sense of drive and individual initiative.  Those very qualities, if displayed in the Red Army, were more apt to earn a man a trip to the gulag than a pat on the back.  Many of the battalion and regimental commanders who would lead the Russian attacks were by this time little more than groveling flunkies whose every battlefield decision had to be seconded by a political commissar before orders could go to the troops. (36)

As for the Ukraine war today, it has been amply noted (including by me) that these elements have been a resounding disgrace for the Russian military: troops using easily trackable sim cards in their cell phones, thus revealing their positions/relative strength; troops communicating with totally unsecured and easily monitored methods, such as those cell phones; a general getting killed because Ukraine could track his phone calls; command posts getting hit regularly by Ukraine; a lack of coordination overall and between different military branches, including air support that does not arrive; poor, mercurial, and unclear command structures (if a recent report that Putin may be micromanaging things on the battlefield, this only makes this last problem exponentially more insurmountable); and the list could go on…

For another similarity, Stalin was fairly isolated, having not-too-long-before committed a series of massive purges of the Soviet military, intelligence, political, and bureaucratic leadership.  To say that the survivors and replacements were hesitant to tell Stalin something that he did not want to hear would be a massive understatement.  In particular, his main diplomatic man in Helsinki, Vladimir Derevyanski, was a constant source of wildly rosy, inaccurate views of the real mood and situation on the ground in Finland.

Putin, too, especially in this pandemic era, is a pretty isolated leader: his long meeting tables with himself and the guest sitting on opposite ends and the vast separation from his council at major government meetings are only the most obvious representations of this isolation.  Along with this isolation, it is almost certain that he has been getting from advisors afraid to tell him the truth a fantastical version of the situation on the ground on Ukraine on which he based his plans and adjustments and on which much of the massive failure of Russia during the early phase of the war can be blamed.  His senior advisors, like Stalin’s inner circle after the purges, nervously fear being imprisoned or worse (as is already happening) and very likely adjust what they tell Putin accordingly; the same can be said for many of their sources.

For Stalin’s man in Helsinki, Derevyanski, we can substitute Ukrainian Viktor Medvedchuk as Putin’s man in Kyiv, whom I have profiled before.  Like Stalin’s Derevyanski, Medvedchuk is thought for years to have been providing Moscow with bad information that is far from the reality on the ground, contributing to the gross misjudgments of Putin’s that have the world in the situation with Ukraine that it is now.  Medvedchuk is so close to Putin that the Russian president is even godfather to the man’s daughter; her godmother is the wife of Putin’s temporary successor to the Russian presidency from 2008-2012, Dmitry Medvedev, now the top official on the Russian Security Council after Putin himself (notably, Medvedchuk’s wife—Oxana Marchenko—seems to have had financial ties through a super-shady Ukrainian “businessman”—Igor Anopolskiy—who was seriously involved with the scandal-plagued, ill-fated Panama City, Panama, Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower, a hub of money laundering for the Putin-allied Russian mafia and Latin American drug cartels alike).

One of the longtime leaders and orchestrators of the pro-Russian political faction in Ukraine, Medvedchuk has been trying to hand Putin influence in Ukraine through his corrupt politics and media operations, most recently in Ukraine’s parliament as the main opposition figure to Zelensky.  The coalition party he leads—Opposition Platform—For Life—runs multiple disinformation television stations in Ukraine that are like a mix of Fox News and RT (one of the Russian government’s top disinformation/propaganda outlets), on a mission to undermine his political foe Zelensky and the West while boosting Putin and Russia.  U.S. intelligence has said Medvedchuk is part of a plot to overthrow Zelensky, and he has been charged with treason in Ukraine.  Unsurprisingly, he fled his house arrest, only to be captured by Ukrainian forces last month, after which Zelensky’s Instagram account displayed this photo of Medvedchuk in handcuffs:

If people spend so much time creating an alternate reality, they might actually just believe in it, and while it is impossible to tell from the outside to what degree Putin and his minions believe what they profess even as it changes so often, reality has certainly to a significant degree eluded them.

A further interesting parallel, this one between Finland then and Ukraine today, involves their preparations for war.  The political leadership of both nations professed publicly that they did not take Moscow’s threats entirely seriously, that it was bluffing as a negotiating strategy more than actually preparing for a serious war.  In the case of the Finns, this mentality very much characterized the actual beliefs of Finnish Prime Minister Aimo Cajander, President Kyösti Kallio, Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko, and the rest of the Finnish leadership team, with the main exception being Gustav Mannerheim, the man who would actually lead Finland’s military effort during the war.

With Ukraine today, at least one telling interview with CNN’s excellent Matthew Chance convincingly supports the idea that while Zelensky publicly downplayed the threat of a Russian invasion, he was privately deeply worried one was coming and did not only downplay the threat to help Ukrainians keep calm, but by design to bait the Russians into a sloppy, rushed, overconfident approach to their invasion (I would say this claim of Zelensky’s is well-supported by how events have played—and continue to play—out).

In the cases of both countries, though, the military leaders were planning meticulously what to do in the event of an invasion launched by Moscow, well aware of their relatively small size and fewer resources available (in contrast, the Soviet planners never thought they might be fighting a war against only Finland; their planning had envisioned much grander conflicts, ones in which Finland was quickly co-opted or occupied itself by a major Western power and used as a staging area for invasion).  Whatever Finnish or Ukrainian politicians were saying, whatever they meant, then, the military folks in both Finland and Ukraine took the opportunities to plan, train, and prepare during the years in the run-up to the actual invasions very seriously and to incredibly good effect; to quote Mark Hertling, Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe and the Seventh Army in 2011-2012, “during my assignment as commander of U.S. Army Europe, I also spent a significant amount of time with the Ukrainian Army and was amazed as I watched them grow in professionalism and effectiveness.”  He had also seen them over the years in other capacities, which makes that already considerably weighty statement carry even more weight.

Sill another situation where commonalities are present is a related similarity involving how both Finland and Ukraine would explain their position to the rest of the world.  In this vein, the following passage of Trotter’s on Mannerheim’s and his subordinates’ strategy struck me powerfully:

In the long run, Finland’s only real guarantee of continued existence was the conscience of Western civilization.  Finland, it was hoped, would be regarded as a vital outpost of everything the Western powers stood for, and as such the country would not be allowed to vanish from the map.  Thus was born a strategy designed to enable Finland to hang on long enough for outside aid to reach it. (39)

Both Finland and Ukraine had plans, too, for continuing to fight against Russia even under occupation and/or if the West did not come to its aid or aid came too late to prevent the fall of the country to the invaders.  But it is the overlap from Ukraine today with the above-quoted themes that is most striking, not least in terms of the rhetoric we are hearing today from Ukraine matching Finland’s characterization in 1939-1940 of itself as the defender of Europe and the West and its values—the defender of freedom and democracy—in the face of rampant aggression from Moscow.

A final key parallel involves how the wars began.  Ever the propagandists, the Soviets even went through the trouble of a false flag attack (an attack committed by one party but blamed on another for propaganda purposes), firing artillery barely into their own territory—perhaps some 800 meters from Finland’s border—on November 26, 1939, then claiming it was the Finns who fired to start the war:

The…shots, [Khrushchev] claimed, were set up by Marshal of Artillery Kulik, a brutal and cretinous NKVD general whose military incompetence would cost the Soviet Union terribly during the first weeks of the German invasion.  It is logical to assume that Zhdanov and Stalin both knew of the fabrication and condoned it.  Khrushchev deals coyly with the question of who fired first at whom: “It’s always like that when people start a war.  They say, ‘You fired the first shot,’ or ‘You slapped me first and I’m only hitting back.’  There was once a ritual which you sometimes see in opera: someone throws down a glove to challenge someone else to a duel; if the glove is picked up, that means the challenge is accepted.  Perhaps that’s how it was done in the old days, but in our time it’s not always so clear who starts a war.” (22)

This seems to be similar in spirit to how Putin started his massive late-February 2022-through-the-present escalation against Ukraine: shelling from his Russian military and the pro-Russian separatists Russia supports in the Donbas all across the main lines there, coupled with (nearly-certain-to-be) disinformation that Ukrainian forces were initiating escalation by firing intensely into separatist territory or even sending “saboteurs” into Russian territory (among other inane claims).  The Ukrainians, far more credibly accusing Russia of lying and even carrying out a false flag attack, denied the relatively absurd claims that they as the far-smaller and far-weaker party—the one that wanted to avoid war—somehow managed to deliberately start the war and provoke the far more powerful party of Russia, to whatever inconceivable ends.  After all, Zelensky has shown himself to be no fool and Moscow is the party here with a history of false flag attacks and gaslighting about its own roles in participating in various conflicts.  The Biden Administration along with Boris Johnson’s British Government has rather deftly publicly called out Russia’s disinformation and false flag efforts preemptively and consistently, further undermining the Kremlin’s game plan to make the world think Ukraine was the aggressor and one-upping Putin on the information war front with an unprecedented, bold approach to releasing and sharing intelligence.

Moscow over the years seems to do far more than most nations to prove the old saying that “truth is the first casualty in war.”

Dumfounding Déjà Vu

What is crazy about all this is that this article and others in this series simply arose out of reactions to just the beginning of Trotter’s book on the Winter War.

One thing that is clear: in trying to understand the events between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939, for Trotter:

Motives, true feelings, and lines of responsibility are not very clear at this level of the Soviet command even today. The whole Finnish campaign was an embarrassment to the officer caste, and even half a century later there is little discussion of it in print on the Russian side. (34)

Three decades after Trotter’s book was published, Putin’s pathetic execution of his war in Ukraine demonstrates clearly that there has been little serious high-level discussion or understanding of any sort in the Kremlin of the First Soviet-Finnish 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!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, June 5, 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.

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 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin 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—George Santayana famously wrote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Marx expanded on the thoughts of a fellow German when he wrote in an essay that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”  The ancients Aristotle and Polybius found history to be cyclical, as did Ibn Khaldun of the Middle Ages.  The saying “the past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” is attributed to Mark Twain.  And Stephen Hawking gave us this zinger: “We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity.”

Today, Russia is proving all of these, and rather pathetically.  I have seen or heard some casual comparisons of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current campaign in Ukraine to the Soviet-Afghan War or the recent U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but such comparison are off when compared to a little known war within World War II that would be overwhelmed and dwarfed historically by the much larger conflicts of World War II, this sub-war being a relatively small sideshow.

I am writing of the so-called Winter War, or the First Soviet-Finnish War, which lasted from November 30, 1939, to March 13, 1940, especially apt to consider now as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression. 

Just in the early pages 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)—the mind-numbing parallels are shocking, and will be dissected throughout this series, this piece focusing on the parallel hubris (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.  For a far brisker take on the big strokes of the entire war with a bit of comparison to Russia’s current Ukraine war and post-Soviet Russian-Chechen wars, see John Sipher’s smart summary in The Bulwark).

Soviet Hubris in 1939

At a final internal meeting just before the Soviet-Finnish War began late in November 1939, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and his innermost circle clearly felt that the coming fight against the Finns would be a cakewalk, that if there would be any resistance, it would be brief before they gave in to Soviet demands.

There was one particular faction in the Kremlin led by Andrei Zhdanov, the zealous political leader of Leningrad, that urged rapidity against Finland.  As Trotter succinctly summarizes, Zhdanov’s Leningrad District crew

based its hasty and slipshod operational planning on two misconceptions: one being the belief that Finland did not have the capacity to offer more than token, face-saving resistance, and the other being the hoary Politburo [senior Kremlin decision-making council surrounding Stalin] delusion that the Finnish working class would rise up and paralyze its exiting government, if not actually turn its guns on them, just as soon as the Red Army came across the border. (18)

I was reading this passage well into the current Ukraine war and my jaw literally dropped: in terms of the planning, you could switch out “Finland” for “Ukraine” and “Finnish working class” for “Russian-speaking-as-a-first-language Ukrainians” and it was essentially the exact same situation!

Explains Trotter, the Finnish “populace was supposed to be so restive already that Soviet planners expected their efforts to be augmented by a large ‘fifth column’ deep inside the country.  What happened was something very different” (36).

The subordinates for the main planners for the Soviet war against Finland—Zhdanov and his staff and the military commander he oversaw, Gen. Kirill Meretskov—did not think they needed resources beyond what was already built up in the Leningrad District and expected victory in mere days.  Writes Trotter:

Some idea of the optimistic mood that prevailed, and of the power wielded by political officers [commissars] over their military counterparts, can be gleaned from an anecdote published in the memoirs of N. N. Voronov, a gentleman who, by World War II, had risen to the rank of chief marshal of artillery. Voronov was in charge of logistics for the guns, a task that would prove herculean, and it was in this capacity that he paid a visit to Meretskov’s headquarters during the waning days of November.  Meretskov welcomed him, then kept his mouth shut; most of the talking was done by the artillery officer Kulik and a commissar named Mekhlis. These two asked Voronov what sort of ammunition stocks they could draw on during the coming campaign. “That depends,” replied Voronov: “Are you planning to attack or defend … and by the way, how much time is allotted for the operation?”

“Between ten and twelve days,” was the bland reply.

                Voronov was not buying that estimate; all he had to do was look at a map of Finland. “I’ll be happy if everything can be resolved in two or three months.” This remark was greeted with “derisive gibes.” Then-Deputy Commissar Kulik then ordered Voronov to base all his ammo-consumption and fire-support estimates on the assumption that the entire Finnish operation would last twelve days, no more. (35)

Soviet plans as executed also had the Red Army invading Finland in the early days of the war from “eight different directions” (39) in “ten separate campaigns” (67) rather than concentrating on few attack corridors.  There were even “sacks of goodwill gifts, presumably for all the disaffected Finnish workers [Soviet] troops would encounter in the woods… the Soviet political assessment was fantastic in its presumptions” (54).  The Soviets were also so confident that they did not even feel the need to give their troops detailed briefings and included brass bands, presumably for parades for the what they presumed would be a welcoming Finnish populace:

many [Soviet soldiers] were so ignorant they didn’t even know the name of the country they were invading.

Whole divisions entered Finland with no worthwhile intelligence estimates of their opposition, guided by hopelessly inaccurate maps, yet fully burdened with truckloads of propaganda material including reams of posters and brass bands. (37)

As a stunning aside that is a testament to the carelessness at hand, this passage of Trotter’s bewilders:

After the war, Marshal Timoshenko, who masterminded the cracking of the [main Finnish defense] line, showed Nikita Khrushchev proof that Soviet intelligence had all along been in possession of detailed maps of the Mannerheim Line; but nobody had bothered to consult the intelligence service before starting the war.  “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.” (66)

Russian Hubris in 2022

Today in Ukraine, similar hubris (and carelessness) is all over the Russian planning and execution of this war.

We know that many ill-used Russian troops were told they were only going to take part in “exercises” and were not even briefed that they would be invading Ukraine until just before they crossed the border; some were told that when they did, they would be greeted as liberators.  Such careless treatment of their own soldiers has characterized the Russians’ approach to this war, as I have in detail noted before. 

Russia’s plan actually had Kyiv falling within a few days and the rest of the country not that long after, a wildly overoptimistic plan that has utterly failed.  Part of this failure involved Russia trying to advance along many fronts at the same time (as the Soviets did in Finland), spreading out their forces relatively thinly and leading to every Russian front either stalling or collapsing (the Kharkiv front being the latest example of the latter).  Some among the early waves of troops were even, apparently, made to bring their formal dress uniforms with them for a victory parade in Kyiv that would have occurred after the anticipated Russian capture of the capital city that did not materialize.

And, as I noted in another article and the parent piece from which both were excerpted, Putin was wildly overconfident about Ukraine’s ethnic Russian population buying his propaganda about their supposed oppression at the hands of Ukraine’s supposedly “Nazi,” “Fascist,” and “Banderite” leadership (see my related explanation, also excerpted from the same parent piece, of the history involved and the term Banderite).  Instead, he succeeded in largely uniting Ukraine behind its President Volodymyr Zelensky and against Russia, when before for years there had been major pro-Russian sentiment amongst a significant segment of the population.  Putin’s miscalculation has pretty much destroyed that sentiment.

Finally, in a broader sense, as I have noted across several pieces before, Putin’s hubris here also extended to the degree he thought that the West and NATO were weak and divided and would simply accept such a challenge from him to its partnership with Ukraine and European security in general.  Instead, the West and NATO have rarely been as united, and Finland—which stayed out of NATO for the entire Cold War and the decades since—and Sweden—which has been neutral for over two centuries, since the late Napoleonic Wars—are both banging on NATO’s door for formal membership in it, demonstrating further grossly hubristic miscalculation on the part of Putin and his people.

History (Inexcusably) Repeating Itself

Historically, I mentioned earlier that this war was a sideshow within World War II.  But it was no sideshow to the Finns or immense numbers of Soviet troops who perished.  And it should not have been a sideshow to Putin or his planners in the run-up to, and now during, this ill-fated, disastrous waste of a war in Ukraine.  Had even the most basic lessons of the Winter War—ones obvious to even anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of tactics and strategy (“even a child,” to requote Khrushchev)—been taken in into account by today’s Kremlin planners, Russia’s current war effort would be far more successful today and Ukraine far, far worse off for that.  Lucky for Ukraine, the free world, and anyone with a respectable conscience, that is not the case.

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!