Ukraine's War Of Independence, Vol. IV
Ukraine's War Of Independence, Vol. IV
An annotated link post
This is an annotated link post of my recent writing on battlefield events in Ukraine.
9 February 2023. Begin in Moscow, where command and control are hardly unified, and military matters are decided by the peculiar insecurities of Vladimir Putin. No one else is allowed to have the centralized command, let alone the competence, to fix what has gone wrong in Ukraine. The best they can do is throw more men and equipment into the fire, hoping it will be enough.
12 February 2023. Russia’s armed forces have been consistent organizational failures. Nothing about the basic problems of Russian military culture — habitual lying to superiors, indiscipline, reinforced failures — has changed, because Putin’s Russia is bad at change.
19 February 2023. Estimating that 200,000 Russians have already been killed, and accepting that this figure will likely surpass a quarter-million by April, the scenario in which Putin keeps fighting until 2026 could add up to a million dead Russians, nor will their sacrifice be enough to defeat Ukraine.
4 April 2023. Being an Old Crow, I can tell the time is nigh because so many Russian electronic warfare assets have been destroyed recently. Creating and exploiting advantages in spectrum capability is key to the art of offensive action in a precision battlefield.
16 April 2023. No one is going to rescue the siloviki of the Kremlin from the strategic trap they have built for themselves. The best outcome they can hope for now is to imitate the Hermit Kingdom.
24 April 2023. No Ukrainians will be harmed by the spilling of these electrons.
5 May 2023. Next Tuesday was supposed to be Victory Day, but no Russian victory is forthcoming in Ukraine. Instead, all the Russians who matter are bracing themselves for defeat, positioning themselves against where Russia will be in the summer, when Ukraine is victorious and Russian armies are broken.
13 May 2023. Disciplined attacks with combined infantry, armor, artillery, and command/control have broken what are supposed to be VDV units on the flanks of Wagner, which is still attacking Bakhmut.
23 May 2023. This is no mystery. It is smoke. Belgorod is a diversionary attack carried out with a revised version of the “hybrid warfare” that Putin used to capture Crimea and occupy the east of Ukraine in 2014. It is working. To what extent it will work remains unclear, but it is definitely working.
4 June 2023. My best guess — and I am admittedly no Kremlinologist — is that Putin has no heir. Violent successions and coups are the bane of peace in Russia. The last thing he wants as a legacy is Russia at war with itself. I suspect that Prigozhin is Putin’s hedge against violent regime change.
9 June 2023. Rescue, relief, refugees, and a long, muddy subsidence will give the Russian forces defending Zaporizhzhia and Bakhmut between two and four weeks in which Ukraine cannot cross the Dnipro in force. Not that it will matter.
