Misconceptions about “winners” and “losers”, two different wars, mismatch in war aims, getting high on your own supply, the failed counter-offensive

Niccolo Soldo

Jan 23, 2024

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Note: This is a very long essay, with a lot of historical context that many of you have either seen before, and/or are already well-acquainted with. For those not wanting to read that section, skip down to “A Mismatch in War Aims”.

Last month, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned the military alliance that it should be “prepared for bad news” to come out of the war in Ukraine.

This official warning is the culmination of a series of events stemming not only from the battlefield itself, but also in the diplomatic realm, on the economic front, and at home in the political world of key backers of Ukraine’s effort to defend itself from Russia’s invasion. Stoltenberg went as far as to present the possibility of a Russian victory in the war, saying that it would be a “tragedy for Ukraine” and a “danger for the allies”.

Gone is the audible exuberance and sunny optimism that coloured the public pronouncements of Ukraine’s government and military only this past summer, an enthusiasm shared by many of its backers in the West, especially its mainstream media outlets and social media cheerleaders. We were assured that the Ukraine military’s summer counteroffensive would be able to punch through Southern Zaporizhzhia and reach the Sea of Azov, cutting Russian forces into two and isolating the Crimean Peninsula, leaving it a sitting duck for its eventual liberation from occupation. This would result in the defeat of the Russian invasion, and would lay the groundwork for the overthrow of Vladimir Putin and his regime in Moscow, as such a catastrophic loss would turn the Russian people away from its discredited leadership.

None of this has come to pass. The much-anticipated counteroffensive was a miserable (and very costly) failure, with the front line barely budging. Instead, Ukrainians are now complaining of not just a lack of weaponry, but also significant shortages in manpower to be able to hold the front as the Russian forces continue to engage in a war of attrition against them, one that they are much better suited to pursue, and more importantly, to endure, than Ukraine. Alarm bells are now ringing loudly throughout Ukraine, and across much of the West as well….but not everywhere.

A serious misconception is now spreading widely because of this present state of affairs; the notion that the USA has ‘lost’ its proxy war, and has somehow ‘failed’ in achieving its main objectives. This is an incorrect reading of the situation as it stands today, and although the USA has not ‘run the table’, it has clearly won this conflict when you zoom out to take another look. The USA is the “big winner” in this conflict, with the Russians the “smaller winner”, the EU being the “small loser”, and the Ukrainians being the “big loser” (there are other winners and losers as well). This two-part essay will attempt to explain why I score this conflict the way that I do.

A Tale of Two Wars

On February 24, 2022 Russian forces invaded Ukraine. This was a clear cut case of aggression against an internationally-recognized sovereign state that is also a member of the United Nations, and is also recognized as sovereign by the invading power. Many weak arguments were made to justify the invasion. Examples include that of accusing the Ukrainians of “genocide against the Russians/peoples of the Donbass”, a spurious charge with no merit whatsoever. This invasion is the ‘first war’.

The ‘Second War’

It is only within a larger context that Russia’s invasion can be arguably justified, that being the ‘second war’: that of the US-led West against Russia. This conflict began when the USA reneged on its promise to Mikhail Gorbachev to not expand NATO eastward if the Soviets pulled out of Eastern Europe:

Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.

The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”[1] The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”

President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989 that the U.S. would not take advantage (“I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall”) of the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet interests; but neither Bush nor Gorbachev at that point (or for that matter, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl) expected so soon the collapse of East Germany or the speed of German unification.[2]

The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’” The Bonn cable also noted Genscher’s proposal to leave the East German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.[3]

That was the promise made to the Soviets (and for those already protesting what I have said: note that the source of the excerpt above is the NSA), and it was a promise broken when Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland were admitted to NATO in March of 1999.

The accession of these former Eastern Bloc states was the result of a broken promise, but it was not as aggressive an act as what would follow that same year: the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the forcible detachment of the Serbian province of Kosovo, and integral part of that country. NATO not only moved from being a defensive military organization to that of an offensive one, but it also violated international law (and the concept of national sovereignty that underpins it) in the eyes of not just the Russians. The war against Yugoslavia in 1999 showed that the USA and NATO were willing to engage in offensive war to partition a country, one with strong historical and cultural ties to Russia. It was the launch of the attacks on Yugoslavia that year that led to the famous incident in which then-Russian Premier Evgeny Primakov turned his Washington-bound plane around over the Atlantic Ocean in protest after hearing the news. The lesson that the Russians drew from that conflict was that territorial integrity was subjective to the Americans.

However much of a hit the accession of the Magyars, Czechs, and the Poles to NATO was, it was at least somewhat tolerable to Moscow in that they could live with it. The entry of the Baltic States into NATO in 2004 was viewed as a much more direct challenge to the new Putin regime. These were former Soviet states that were part of the USSR. Amplifying the insult, Vladimir Putin explored the idea of Russian membership in NATO as early as 2000:

Acting Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an unexpected gesture to the West, suggested in a television interview today that Russia would consider joining NATO if the Western alliance agreed to treat Russia as an equal partner.

“Why not? Why not?” Putin said when asked by BBC interviewer David Frost about Russian membership. “I do not rule out such a possibility . . . in the case that Russia’s interests will be reckoned with, if it will be an equal partner.”

“Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe and from . . . what we often talk about as the civilized world,” Putin said. “Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.”

This was confirmed in late 2021 by ex-NATO chief George Robertson:

Vladimir Putin wanted Russia to join Nato but did not want his country to have to go through the usual application process and stand in line “with a lot of countries that don’t matter”, according to a former secretary general of the transatlantic alliance.

George Robertson, a former Labour defence secretary who led Nato between 1999 and 2003, said Putin made it clear at their first meeting that he wanted Russia to be part of western Europe. “They wanted to be part of that secure, stable prosperous west that Russia was out of at the time,” he said.

Rejected by NATO, and then seeing that same military alliance park itself on Russia’s inner border (Poland’s accession put NATO on the border of Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave) raised the alarm in Moscow.

This NATO expansion was not an isolated incident either. In 2003. the CIA managed to topple the somewhat Moscow-friendly Shevardnadze regime in Tbilisi, Georgia, installing a very anti-Russian and pro-NATO/American government in its place. This was the first so-called “Colour Revolution” that occurred on the soil of an ex-Soviet republic. You can read all about here:

Special Series

Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” (2003)

Niccolo Soldo

·

April 7, 2023

Previous Entry – Serbia’s “Bulldozer Revolution” (2000) “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” -G. Michael Hopf in “Those Who Remain” This very Spenglerian view of history appeals to many people, which is why this quote has taken on a life of its own on the internet these past few years. It assumes that ‘good times’ are actually possible, that they have existed in the past, or that they can happen again in the future. The optimism implied in the quote immediately betrays the author’s western background, as life in the West has for long stretches been ‘good’.

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Sensing Russian weakness in the late 1990s, the USA was by 2004 on a roll when it launched another Colour Revolution, this one much more ambitious than the one in Georgia:

Special Series

Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” (2004-05)

Niccolo Soldo

·

April 22, 2023

Previous Entry – Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” (2003) By this point in the series, you should be able to detect a pattern present in each and every one of the historical examples of regime change that we have covered thus far. The pattern is comprised of the following elements:

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Ukraine, a country of some 40 million people with a huge military industrial sector, and massive natural resource wealth, was the ‘big prize’ to pry away from the Russian orbit. Why? Let Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski explain:

Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south. China would also be likely to oppose any restoration of Russian domination over Central Asia, given its increasing interest in the newly independent states there. However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.1

Without Ukraine, Russia is no longer a Eurasian power, but is instead reduced to that of an Asian one, and therefore is relegated to the level of a regional power.

Luckily enough for the Russians, the Orange Revolution failed due to the petty bickering of the coalition that brought it into being (with A LOT of assistance from the US State Department and CIA). Ukraine fell back into Russia’s orbit not too long after.

A very clear pattern was emerging: the USA was using offers of membership to both the EU and NATO to expand its zone of influence at the expense of Russia’s. Nowhere was this more transparent than at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, Romania, where the Americans urged their allies to put both Ukraine and Georgia2 on the path to membership in the organization. This was interpreted by Moscow as a direct challenge to the continued existence of the Russian Federation.

A year prior, Putin had already publicly stated his misgivings about the intentions of both the USA and NATO at the 2007 Munich Security Conference:

“I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?”

It was this speech that drew a line under the Russian perception that NATO was gunning for them. It cannot be any clearer than this. Those who choose to wave away Russian concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion are purposely engaging in the act of obfuscation.

The Maidan Revolution of 2014 succeeded where the Orange Revolution failed; it managed to once and for all detach Ukraine from Russia’s orbit. At the same time, it also invited the wrath of Russia, which quickly annexed Crimea, and then reluctantly at first, backed ethnic Russian rebels in the Donbass who were fighting Ukrainian armed forces. Despite some silly claims about the post-Maidan regime being a “Nazi” one, or that it didn’t have the people behind it, a clean break was made with Moscow thanks to the violence that broke out in February of that year. Ukraine now had a path to integration into Euro-Atlantic economic and security structures.

Time and time again, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko publicly sought NATO membership for his country. In 2014:

Ukraine’s president said in Warsaw on Wednesday he would propose to walk away from the country’s nonaligned status to eventually join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union.

“Ukraine’s non-aligned status announced in 2010 hasn’t guaranteed our security and our territorial integrity which is why in this chamber today I made a decision that the country will return to the Euro-Atlantic security direction.”

….which was then followed by a new law:

The Ukrainian parliament has repealed the law barring participation in NATO. As a sovereign state Kiev is entitled to ask to join the transatlantic alliance.

At the NATO Summit that year:

The Ukrainian press quoted Poroshenko as saying that Ukraine has been promised by NATO countries the delivery of non-lethal, but also lethal weapons, including “high-precision weapons”.

He also said that the issue of Ukraine’s membership to NATO will be raised once the country makes the necessary reforms.

“When the country will answer to all requirements for membership, the citizens will decide how and when the accession of Ukraine to NATO could take place”, the Ukrainian Pravda quoted Poroshenko.

…which came with a warning from Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underlined Moscow’s opposition to Ukraine joining NATO, warning that attempts to end the country’s non-aligned status could harm security. He accused the United States of supporting “the party of war” in Kyiv.

In 2017:

Ukraine’s president has asked for discussions to begin on an action plan that could eventually lead to membership of Nato.

Petro Poroshenko said the will of the Ukrainian people was to eventually join the Western military alliance.

……….

Mr Poroshenko was speaking after holding talks with Mr Stoltenberg in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

“Ukraine has clearly defined its political future and future in the sphere of security,” he said.

“Today we clearly stated that we would begin a discussion about a membership action plan and our proposals for such a discussion were accepted with pleasure.”

…….which immediately elicited another Russian reaction:

Reacting to Mr Poroshenko’s remarks, a Russian government spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said: “For many years Russia has been worried by Nato’s military infrastructure moving closer to our borders, potentially this could be the next step.

“It will not boost stability and security in the European continent.”

…and in 2018:

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has reiterated that Kyiv is seeking a Membership Action Plan (MAP), a formal step toward joining NATO.

Poroshenko, in a post on Facebook on March 10, said a MAP was Ukraine’s “next ambition” on the path toward eventual membership in the 29-country Western alliance.

“This is what my letter to Jens Stoltenberg on February 2018 was about, where, with reference to Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, I officially [set out] Ukraine’s aspirations to become a member of the Alliance,” Poroshenko wrote.

A Membership Action Plan is a multistage process of political dialogue and military reform to bring a country in line with NATO standards and to eventual membership. The process can take several years.

Poroshenko’s comments came after NATO updated its website to include Ukraine alongside three other countries — Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, and Macedonia — that have declared their aspirations to NATO membership

“Countries that have declared an interest in joining the Alliance are initially invited to engage in an Intensified Dialogue with NATO about their membership aspirations and related reforms,” the NATO website said.

There is zero room to disagree with the fact that post-Maidan Ukraine was seeking to join NATO, a military alliance viewed by Moscow as targeting Russia. The Americans never once publicly ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine (and Georgia), even if both countries’ desire to join the alliance was rejected by member states like Germany and France.

Some will argue that the failure of Ukraine to join NATO after Maidan somehow erodes the credibility of Russia’s argument regarding the ‘existential threat’ posed by the alliance to it. Upon first inspection, this does have some merit, but it is quickly overcome by understanding what key NATO members were doing in Ukraine in the meantime.

Operation Orbital was a UK military program that began in 2015 with the goal of training Ukrainian armed forces to “….increase the capacity of the Ukrainian military to help it better defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” In this UK House of Commons research briefing (.pdf), we learn just how deep this program went from 2015 to 2021:

In early 2015 Operation Orbital was launched. A non-lethal training and capacity building operation, it provides guidance and training to the Ukrainian armed forces through several advisory and short-term training teams. Initially comprising 75 non-combat military personnel, its initial focus was on medical, logistics, general infantry skills and intelligence capacity building.4

In March 2015, the MOD acknowledged the shortfalls in the capacity of the Ukrainian armed forces,5 and announced the gifting of a further package of non-lethal equipment, to increase Ukraine’s defensive capacity and tactical awareness on the ground.6 Then Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, said at the time, “Ukraine is our friend, it is in need and we should respond to requests, whether they are for equipment or additional training”.7

In a press release on 6 March 2015 the MOD set out the UK’s overall policy with respect to military assistance to Ukraine:

UK policy since the start of the crisis has been to provide non-lethal assistance to Ukrainian armed forces, in line with HMG’s assessment that there must be a political solution to this crisis. The MOD will continue to focus on support and assistance that will reduce fatalities and casualties amongst members of the Ukrainian armed forces, whilst building their capacity and resilience.

Next came the expansion in the program:

Several new agreements followed:

Followed by an expansion into developing naval capabilities:

That was just the British contribution. What about the rest, you ask? This is from a triumphalist report in the Wall Street Journal from back in April of 2022:

This was just one piece of a little-publicized effort by countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that transformed Ukraine’s military up and down the ranks, from foot soldiers to the defense ministry to overseers in parliament. It is one big reason why Ukraine’s nimble fighting force has surprised the world by fending off a much larger and better-equipped invading army, say Ukrainians and their Western advisers.

Through classes, drills and exercises involving at least 10,000 troops annually for more than eight years, NATO and its members helped the embattled country shift from rigid Soviet-style command structures to Western standards where soldiers are taught to think on the move.

In confounding Russian invaders today, Lt. Kulish says his comrades-in-arms “are definitely using procedures they learned during the training with NATO.”

The Western assistance, while never secret, wasn’t trumpeted to avoid riling Russia. It also remained low-key because it was a valuable source of intelligence for the U.S. and its allies. Ukraine has been fighting a shooting war with Russian-backed separatists in parts of its east for years, meaning Kyiv fields some of Europe’s most battle-hardened soldiers. Their front-line experience made them sponges for NATO training—and offered NATO commanders a window into what it would be like to fight Russia, say Western officers involved in the programs.

By the time Russia invaded on Feb. 24, training of Ukrainian forces had become so extensive that, although at least eight NATO countries participated, much of the hands-on training was being done by Ukrainian instructors. To NATO commanders, that was a sign Ukraine had internalized their teachings.

“The lesson learned is that support and help over many years had a significant impact,” says NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

This can be viewed as “Incremental NATO” or “NATO by Stealth”. The point is that Ukraine was already being integrated into Euro-Atlantic security architecture de facto rather than de jure. The Ukrainians were preparing for the next round of fighting with the Russians, which made perfect sense from their position. The presence of NATO advisors on Ukrainian soil also underscored Russia’s argument about its encroachment on its borders.

In the meantime, Russia was building up diplomatic alliances, but just as importantly, it was also building up its war chest in order to “sanction-proof” its economy:

From the Brooking Institute:

By 2022 (and frankly, much earlier than that), Russia had a difficult choice to make thanks to successful US foreign policy planning. Its options were the following:

1. allow Ukraine to eventually join NATO, thus creating an existential threat to the Russian Federation
2. invade Ukraine and try to topple its regime, thereby inviting a long list of painful economic sanctions, a potential bloody war and the domestic unrest that it risks, an end to its access to the European market for its natural resources and other exports

As we all know, Russia chose the second option and launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

A Mismatch in War Aims

By backing Moscow into a corner and forcing it to choose one difficult option over the other, the Americans had created the desirable “win-win” situation for themselves. Everything that has happened since in this conflict must be seen through this prism. Whichever choice the Russians made would result in a “win” for the Americans.

If the Russians chose to let Ukraine proceed to integrate with Euro-Atlantic economic and security structures, it would result in the further expansion of NATO, and the further encroachment on Russia’s borders. It would thus lead to Brzezinski’s goal of reducing Russia’s status from that of a global power to that of a regional one.

Because the Russians chose the other option, it allowed for the severing of its economic ties to Europe (best symbolized by the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline), the tightening of America’s grip on that same continent, the further expansion of NATO (Finland, and Sweden soon), the reorientation of Europe’s economy toward the USA, the leveling of sanction after sanction to destroy Russia’s economy, the placing of the burden of European defense on the Europeans themselves in order to allow the Americans to “Pivot to East Asia” i.e. China, the portrayal of Russia as a rogue state intent on military expansion by force, and with the added benefit of “bleeding Russia out” via using western-trained and supplied Ukrainian forces to fight Russia’s army for as long as possible.

For Russia hawks, regime change in Moscow was the ultimate ambition:

Consider the following quotes. On 24 February, during a White House press conference on the first day of Russia’s invasion, Biden said sanctions are designed not to prevent invasion but to punish Russia after invading “…so the people of Russia know what he has brought on them. That is what this is all about.”

On 27 February, James Heappey, UK Minister for the Armed Forces, wrote in the Daily Telegraph: “His failure must be complete; Ukrainian sovereignty must be restored, and the Russian people empowered to see how little he cares for them. In showing them that, Putin’s days as President will surely be numbered… He’ll lose power and he won’t get to choose his successor.” Finally, on 1 March, Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said the sanctions on Russia “we are introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.”

These statements reflect long-standing US strategy for regime change in Moscow, with Ukraine as the pivot. On one hand, send sufficient military and other equipment to Ukraine to sink the Russian military in a quagmire. On the other hand, impose severe, far-reaching sanctions on Russia so as to cause major disruption to the Russian elite and a major contraction of living conditions for the Russian middle-class. The combination should last long enough for Russians to rise up to overthrow Putin and install a Yeltsin-like President more sympathetic to the West.

But this weapons-plus-sanctions strategy needed a cause. Putin’s invasion was the required casus belli.

America’s war aims did not and do not align with those of Ukraine. Kiev seeks to re-establish its sovereignty over the whole of its recognized territory. It also seeks assurances for its future defense, which it sees best served by membership in NATO. This mismatch in war aims is what allows us to conclude that the Americans have come away from this conflict as winners while the Ukrainians are definitely its losers. Without Ukraine, the USA can (easily) survive. Without the USA, Ukraine cannot. Here is a breakdown of US aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the war:

The Americans are by far the biggest suppliers of military support to Ukraine:

There can be no doubt whatsoever that this conflict is a battle between Russia and US proxy forces in Ukraine. When there is a mismatch in goals between allies, the more powerful partner will win out as it holds the most trump cards. In the case of the USA and Ukraine, the alliance is so lopsided in the Americans’ favour that Ukraine is entirely at the mercy of its ‘ally’. With most of its objectives already being met, the question is: “how long will the Americans continue to pursue this proxy war?”

US Internal Policy Debate

There is still some debate as to whether the Russians actually sought to “de-capitate” the Zelensky regime in the first days of the invasion via its strike force that invaded Ukraine’s north from Russian and Belarussian soil, or whether that drive was to draw Ukrainian forces north in order to allow Russian forces in the south to establish and land bridge from the Donbass to Crimea. History will at some point answer this question for us.

What we do know is that the Russians violated one facet of the Powell Doctrine when they launched their invasion of Ukraine; the requirement of having an overwhelming strike capability. Instead of going in with a massive force, the Russians instead opted for a light touch. Some argue that this suggests that Russian intelligence services had a larger role in planning the invasion than did the Stavka. I find this argument to be the most likely reason why the Russians chose not to send in more men at first.

(blue indicates areas where Russians forces have withdrawn from)

What we also do know is that this choice did succeed in allowing the establishment of a land bridge between the Donbass and Crimea, it also led to a loss of prestige for the Russians as they were incapable of toppling the regime, and even worse, they were forced to pull their forces out of the Sumy, Chernigov and Kiev regions, and then later on, out of Kharkov and much of Kherson as well. In the eyes of the casual spectator, the Russians had underperformed militarily. For Westerners drowned in pro-Ukrainian propaganda, Russia showed itself to be a paper tiger, much weaker than it appeared to be at first.

This perceived Russian weakness blew wind in the sails of US officials with maximal goals regarding Russia, foremost among them being regime change in Moscow. This has long been the Holy Grail for neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists. Russia’s military blunders left the appearance of ‘blood in the water’, allowing Russia Hawks centred around Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland a fair bit of leverage in how to further pursue this conflict. “Bleeding Russia out” wasn’t enough for this cohort. To them, Russia could both be defeated on the battlefield, and destabilized at home to the point where Russians would rebel and topple their own government. Some people in the Administration and abroad were so excited by this point in time that they began holding conferences on ‘de-colonizing Russia’ aka partitioning it:

Geopolitica

Delusion

Niccolo Soldo

·

June 22, 2022

(Note: check your spam box or promotions tabs for emails from this Substack that you might have missed recently, as they seem to not be landing in inboxes lately. Thanks.)

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Why not press the advantage while you could do so?

It was this mindset that was dominant in many US foreign policy circles, in many western capitals, in much of mainstream western media, and in Ukraine too when the much-anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive was launched in the Summer of 2023.

The Counter-Offensive Debacle

“We have only to kick in the door,” Hitler said, “and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”

From the now-legendary Washington Post post-mortem of the failed counter-offensive:

The year began with Western resolve at its peak, Ukrainian forces highly confident and President Volodymyr Zelensky predicting a decisive victory.

Russia Hawks were high on their own supply when Ukraine launched its long-awaited “Summer Counter-Offensive” against well-dug in Russian forces in Zaporizhzhia and around Bakhmut in the Donbass region:

“Zelensky, on the war’s first anniversary in February, had boasted that 2023 would be a “year of victory.” His intelligence chief had decreed that Ukrainians would soon be vacationing in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia had illegally annexed in 2014.

This offensive was already late in being launched. This provided the Russians ample time to build up their defenses all along the front. It didn’t help the Ukrainians that the focus of their offensive was the worst kept secret in the world:

By March, Russia was already many months into preparing its defenses, building miles upon miles of barriers, trenches and other obstacles across the front in anticipation of the Ukrainian push.

After stinging defeats in the Kharkiv region and Kherson in the fall of 2022, Russia seemed to pivot. Putin appointed Gen. Sergei Surovikin — known as “General Armageddon” for his merciless tactics in Syria — to lead Russia’s fight in Ukraine, focusing on digging in rather than taking more territory.

………

But Russia adapted as the war wore on, digging drier, zigzagging trenches that better protected soldiers from shelling. As the trenches eventually grew more sophisticated, they opened up into forests to offer better means for defenders to fall back, Leviev said. The Russians built tunnels between positions to counter Ukraine’s extensive use of drones, he added.

The trenches were part of multilayered defenses that included dense minefields, concrete pyramids known as dragon’s teeth, and antitank ditches. If minefields were disabled, Russian forces had rocket-borne systems to reseed them.

Unlike Russia’s offensive efforts early in the war, these defenses followed textbook Soviet standards. “This is one case where they have implemented their doctrine,” a senior Western intelligence official said.

Konstantin Yefremov, a former officer with Russia’s 42nd motorized rifle division who was stationed in Zaporizhzhia in 2022, recalled that Russia had the equipment and grunt power necessary to build a solid wall against attack.

“Putin’s army is experiencing shortages of various arms, but can literally swim in mines,” Yefremov said in an interview after fleeing to the West. “They have millions of them, both antitank and antipersonnel mines.”

Ukrainian hesitancy to launch the offensive was due to their desire to get more arms:

The goal had been to strike before Moscow was ready, and the U.S. military had been trying since mid-April to get the Ukrainians moving. “We were given dates. We were given many dates,” a senior U.S. government official said. “We had April this, May that, you know, June. It just kept getting delayed.”

Meanwhile, enemy defenses were thickening. U.S. military officials were dismayed to see Russian forces use those weeks in April and May to seed significant amounts of additional mines, a development the officials believed ended up making Ukrainian troops’ advance substantially harder.

Arguments and frustration:

And yet, the senior Ukrainian military official recalled, the Americans were nagging about a delayed start and still complaining about how many troops Ukraine was devoting to Bakhmut.

U.S. officials vehemently denied that the Ukrainians did not get all the weaponry they were promised. Ukraine’s wish list may have been far bigger, the Americans acknowledged, but by the time the offensive began, they had received nearly two dozen MCLCs, more than 40 mine rollers and excavators, 1,000 Bangalore torpedoes, and more than 80,000 smoke grenades. Zaluzhny had requested 1,000 armored vehicles; the Pentagon ultimately delivered 1,500.

“They got everything they were promised, on time,” one senior U.S. official said. In some cases, the officials said, Ukraine failed to deploy equipment critical to the offensive, holding it in reserve or allocating it to units that weren’t part of the assault.

Ukrainian forces complained about faulty Western gear and inadequate training on weapons systems. Furthermore, many claimed that the NATO training that they received wasn’t the best suited type for this specific war. The Americans lamented the “lack of combined arms pursuit” by the Ukrainians that is core to NATO military training, something that would be repeated post-mortem:

The counteroffensive finally lurched into motion in early June. Some Ukrainian units quickly notched small gains, recapturing Zaporizhzhia-region villages south of Velyka Novosilka, 80 miles from the Azov coast. But elsewhere, not even Western arms and training could fully shield Ukrainian forces from the punishing Russian firepower.

When troops from the 37th Reconnaissance Brigade attempted an advance, they, like units elsewhere, immediately felt the force of Russia’s tactics. From the first minutes of their assault, they were overwhelmed by mortar fire that pierced their French AMX-10 RC armored vehicles. Their own artillery fire didn’t materialize as expected. Soldiers crawled out of burning vehicles. In one unit, 30 of 50 soldiers were captured, wounded or killed. Ukraine’s equipment losses in the initial days included 20 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and six German-made Leopard tanks.

Those early encounters landed like a thunderbolt among the officers in Zaluzhny’s command center, searing a question in their minds: Was the strategy doomed?

Western military hardware was chewed up and spit out by the Russians. Minefields were slaughtering Ukrainian soldiers by the dozen:

The Ukrainian troops had expected minefields but were blindsided by the density. The ground was carpeted with explosives, so many that some were buried in stacks. The soldiers had been trained to drive their Bradleys at a facility in Germany, on smooth terrain. But on the mushy soil of the Zaporizhzhia region, in the deafening noise of battle, they struggled to steer through the narrow lanes cleared of mines by advance units.

The Russians, positioned on higher ground, immediately started firing antitank missiles. Some vehicles in the convoy were hit, forcing others behind them to veer off the path. Those, in turn, exploded on mines, snarling even more of the convoy. Russian helicopters and drones swooped in and attacked the pileup.

Troops, some experiencing the shock of combat for the first time, pulled back to regroup — only to attack and retreat, again and again on successive days, with the same bloody results.

“It was hellfire,” said Oleh Sentsov, a platoon commander in the 47th.

By day four, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top commander, had seen enough. Incinerated Western military hardware — American Bradleys, German Leopard tanks, mine-sweeping vehicles — littered the battlefield. The numbers of dead and wounded sapped morale.

It was at this point that Ukrainian General Zaluzhny decided to go off-script and order a change in tactics. From Ukrainian Pravda:

Instead of attempting to break through the Russian defences with a large-scale, mechanised attack backed by artillery fire, as his American counterparts had advised, Zaluzhnyi decided that Ukrainian soldiers would go on foot in small groups of 10, a process that would save equipment and lives but would be much slower.

It was on the fourth day of the counteroffensive that US advisors and Ukrainian military officials were no longer on the same page. They were supposed to reach the Sea of Azov in two to three months, destroying the Russian land bridge between the Donbass and Crimea, isolating the latter and opening it up to a future operation to liberate the occupied peninsula. Instead, the Ukrainians only managed to punch a small 19km hole in Zaporizhzhia after six months of effort and countless lives lost in the process.3

WaPo’s main conclusions from their post- mortem were as follows:

• Seventy percent of troops in one of the brigades leading the counteroffensive, and equipped with the newest Western weapons, entered battle with no combat experience.
• Ukraine’s setbacks on the battlefield led to rifts with the United States over how best to cut through deep Russian defenses.
• The commander of U.S. forces in Europe couldn’t get in touch with Ukraine’s top commander for weeks in the early part of the campaign amid tension over the American’s second-guessing of battlefield decisions.
• Each side blamed the other for mistakes or miscalculations. U.S. military officials concluded that Ukraine had fallen short in basic military tactics, including the use of ground reconnaissance to understand the density of minefields. Ukrainian officials said the Americans didn’t seem to comprehend how attack drones and other technology had transformed the battlefield.
• In all, Ukraine has retaken only about 200 square miles of territory, at a cost of thousands of dead and wounded and billions in Western military aid in 2023 alone.

(The map above shows Ukrainian gains made in the counter-offensive)

The Russian defensive lines held. The Russia Hawks shot their shot, and missed…….horribly. July was the high water mark of Western efforts to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and to shock Russians into action to overthrow their ‘discredited’ regime.

The counter-offensive began to stall almost immediately after its launch, but it took months for many western cheerleaders to admit that it failed. When Western consensus was reached on its failure, the recriminations began, and so did the public divergence between the USA and Ukraine regarding war aims and objectives, and what to do from now on.

In Part 2: Western Media Shift, Recriminations, Doomerism, Moving the Goalposts, Domestic Politics, A New Conflict Diverts America’s Focus, Preparing the Sacrifice of the Lamb, Winners and Losers

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