by James Tweedie for the Saker blog
Ukrainian troops enjoying their momentary "victory".
Britain, 12th September 2022
The Pro-Russian online commentariat has been appalled by the retreat from north-eastern Kharkov in the face of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
But they may take comfort that Special Military Operation (SMO) has begun to live up to President Vladimir Putin’s paraphrasing of the ‘classic’ Bachman Turner Overdrive (BTO) song ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’.
Never mind that the Russian Ministry of Defence has not yet claimed responsibility for whatever happened to power stations in the eastern half of the Ukraine on the night of Sunday September 11 — a date which helps Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claim to his US audience that the Kremlin is run by “terrorists”.
“The gloves are finally off!”, some will rejoice. It’s a bad metaphor: if you box without gloves then you end up breaking your hands on your opponent’s skull. Aircraft and cruise missiles can’t take and hold territory. Even if you wipe out the enemy, troops on the ground must finish the job.
News of the Ukraine "victory" are splattered all over the NATOstan media. Here's Newsweek (US):
Bloggers and YouTubers like Andrei Martyanov, Larry Johnson and Brian Berletic have argued cogently that the Russian-led forces made a tactical retreat from the north-east of Kharkov oblast as part of a ploy to inflict several thousand more casualties on the Ukrainians and their foreign mercenaries.
Whether or not that is true, others such as Dima of Military Summary and Alex Mercouris of The Duran say the manoeuvre will prompt a crisis of confidence among the Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population, who previously saw the Russian forces as their protectors and saviours from the Nazis. If those people don’t support the military intervention, what is the point of it?
It has also raised questions over the strategy of using the smallest number of regular army troops in direct combat, rather than in artillery and air support roles. Mercouris points out that the slow pace of the SMO has allowed the Ukraine to regain the initiative, and asks how Russia could spare 50,000 men for joint military exercises with China in the far east. There is a clamour among the ‘armchair generals’ of Telegram for the big Russian tank divisions to roll over the border and put things to rights.
That might even be one of the Putin government’s aims: the Kremlin made sure it had overwhelming public support for the SMO before acting, and it may be seeking another such mandate before risking thousands of casualties on a blitzkrieg offensive from Kharkov to Zaporozhye that would settle the issue.
Over-Claiming
The Ukrainian counter-offensives in Kherson and Kharkov over the past three weeks have discredited the daily MoD reports of progress in “demilitarisation and de-Nazification” — in other words casualties and material losses inflicted on Kiev’s forces.
The Ukrainians succeeded in keeping tens of thousands of its best troops and hundreds of tanks and other armoured vehicles in reserve for those operations.
The hundreds of Western-supplied M113 armoured personnel carriers, armoured Humvees and MRAPs, which had hardly been seen on the Donbass front, finally hove into view in Kherson and neighbouring Nikolaev.
As predicted, these aluminium spam cans and bullet-proof trucks didn’t fare very well against modern anti-tank weapons, and there are pictures and videos of them blown apart, burnt out and half-melted. The Russians claimed to have destroyed around 500 of them. Even if that number is exaggerated two-fold, the losses are significant.
But the MoD had already claimed the destruction of tanks, big guns and planes that the Ukraine had at the start of the conflict and has received from the West since — even when the most dubious reports of covert aid are taken into account.
The fledgling air forces of the First World War had stringent criteria for confirming their ace pilots’ aerial victories. To be credited with shooting down an enemy aircraft, the act had to be witnessed by others or the wreckage recovered. Manfred von Richtofen, the famous ‘Red Baron’, had a room full of trophies taken from the planes he downed, including scraps of fabric with aircraft numbers on, a machine-gun and even a rotary engine block converted into a ceiling lamp.
But in the Second World War those rules were relaxed, and as a result it became normal for fighter squadrons to claim to have downed two or three times as many enemy aircraft as they actually did. This wasn’t just a case of propaganda or personal aggrandisement — often two or three pilots would be shooting at the same plane when it went down, or they would assume a damaged aircraft trailing smoke was a goner without seeing it crash.
So over-claiming is normal in warfare. But the big problem is that, with the snail’s pace of territorial gains, the daily clobber list was the only indicator of Russian progress. And when the Russians start to give ground in their war of attrition, the crisis of confidence sets in.
Close observers of the SMO are left second-guessing how far the MoD claims are exaggerated. Is it by 50 per cent? 100 per cent? The best one can do is draw graphs of the daily figures and see if the curve is levelling off. It was for tanks and planes before the Kherson counter-offensive. then the graphs ticked up sharply. It remains to be seen how much armour Kiev can muster for the anticipated Ugledar offensive in Donetsk, and how many tanks and infantry fighting vehicles will end up as scrap metal — in real life as well as on paper.
Body-Counts
The same goes for casualty figures. The MoD claims to have killed almost 87,000 Ukrainian troops and foreign mercenaries in six-and-a-half months (I added all their reports up in a spreadsheet). Assuming twice that many wounded, the Ukrainian army should be on its knees and the generals ready to arrest Zelensky and start peace talks. Those ‘leaked documents’ talking about 200,000 dead are also not credible.
But it is becoming clear that since early in the conflict, Kiev has been manning the trenches in Donbass with those wretched Territorial Defence conscripts, middle-aged men (and now women) with no proper training, uniforms or weapons. They’ve been doing the bleeding while the professional troops were held in reserve.
The USA had no idea how to fight its war in Vietnam, so it resorted to counting the bodies of the Vietnamese dead. Those counts became inflated with the corpses of innocents as the huge US armed forces failed to control territory. Russia has clearly tried to avoid getting large forces bogged down in the Ukraine or drafting young men into the army, but it must avoid the trap of substituting body-counts for real progress.
The original aims of the SMO were very straightforward: to pre-empt a major Ukrainian offensive against the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples’ Republics, and to stop the Ukraine joining NATO. “Demilitarisation and De-Nazification” are just code-words for those goals. The first was an existential question for the DPR and LPR, the second was a matter of life or death for Russia. Both threats remain, and both justify maximum use of force.
In Russia’s defence, one should always keep something in reserve. That can mean military forces and supplies, or it can be some way to escalate the hostilities — to deter the other fellow from escalating. Turning the lights out in the eastern Ukraine is an escalation. Doing the same west of the Dnieper is a card Russia still holds in its hand, along with others.
Very Select Comments
If in fact the notion that most of the Ukraine forces until now in the east have been territorial reserves – which I take with a 50-gallon barrel of salt for the simple reason that absolutely no one knows the Ukraine Order of Battle any more than they know the Russian Order of Battle – is true, all that matters is that most of the Ukraine reserves have been killed rather than all of the regular army soldiers.
Big deal!
The reality is that any way you count it, the Russian daily reports are almost certainly accurate (more or less by some small percentage) and that means Ukraine has been losing a minimum of one thousand troops per day for the last six months. Do the math. That is 30,000 dead and wounded per month, or 180,000 – which comes close to the “leaked” documents, if not the 200,000 dead and 300,000 wounded I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere.
All you have to do is read the MoD reports properly. They used to list the operations differently than they do now somewhat, but it’s still pretty much the same read. They list a couple overall specific operations which result in 200 dead hjere, another 100 dead there. Then – and this is the main point – they start listing the air, missile and artillery strikes separately without counting the dead.
But do you imagine that all these places they hit did not have at least one Ukrainian standing next to the “concentrations of manpower and equipment” which they list having hit in between 100 and 200 locations across Ukraine? Not to mention the “command posts”? Of course not.
So you have to ADD all those strikes to the initial counts? And then you have to estimate the wounded which is between 1 and 4 times that number.
This easily brings you to a number which is a minimum of one thousand a day.
And the losses Ukraine suffered recently have at least doubled that number, in the Kherson and Kharkiv regions.
The more men Ukraine packs into a given area for an attack merely increases the body count because the bulk of the Ukrainian dead are not being killed by Russian soldiers in man-on-man or unit-on-unit conbat. They are being killed from artillery, airstrikes and missiles.
The notion that Russia hasn’t destroyed the bulk of the Ukrainian armor, which numbered over 2,000 tanks to begin with, is risible. One problem I have with the Russian total count of destroyed armor is that they don’t break out the tanks from the AFCs. Then there’s the several hundred tanks the West sent in. So we don’t have an actual accurate count of tanks Ukraine had let alone those destroyed. However, it is clear that the couple hundred tanks Ukraine has sacrificed in these offensives are only about ten percent of the forces they had. If they had more, they would have used them. So they don’t have them. And now they’ve lost another hundred or more.
This “crisis of confidence” is the result of only one thing: ignorance of how war is actually fought. Andrei Martyanov has been harping on this daily for months now. I recommend his latest two videos for those who don’t understand that.
It doesn’t matter what the “armchair strategists” and “military fanboys” think, or even what the Russian critics of Putin think. They don’t know what they’re talking about.
The only people who really know what is going on in this war are the Russian General Staff (the only ones with the complete picture), the Ukrainian General Staff (at least as far as where forces are actually located), and possibly the US National Reconnaissance Office (if their analysts are any good.)
Everyone else is flailing for two reasons: 1) they don’t have complete intelligence, and 2) they don’t understand how war is fought.
The only knowledgeable observers I think are reliable are Andrei Martyanov, Larry Johnson, Brian Berletic, and the host of this blog. Everyone else appears to have succumbed to the “crisis in confidence”.
I remind everyone that 1) it is impossible for Ukraine to defeat Russia, and 2) it is impossible for Ukraine to defeat Russia even with the limited forced Russia has committed so far. This is the meaning of the term “military balance.”
So people need to get a clue.
People keep using this 3 injured for every 1 killed ratio. That I believe is based on small arms exchanges. Anyone who has the stomach for it should go look at what an airstrike or artillery/mlrs salvo on enemy troops looks like. Bodies within a dozen meters of the blast are blow to pieces. Several times that distance they sustain injuries incompatible with life. Ukraine isn’t engaging in small arms exchanges with Russians. They’re coming under air and artillery bombardment, so the dead to injured ratio is closer to 1:2. Because of the third world situation with Ukrainian hospitals, critical injuries like an arm blown off are almost always fatalities. How many pictures of crippled Ukrainians have you seen? None. Magic! There’s a darker side to this, Ukrainian leadership sees no point in saving someone who can no longer fight, because that person then has to be financially support as a cripple. EU certainly won’t take a cripple. There’s stories of people being left in hallways bleeding out, with injuries that shouldn’t be fatal.
The death toll is huge, but we’re never likely to know how huge. Another dark side, if Ukraine acknowledges deaths, then they also have to pay pensions to the family. Everyone is a deserter if they die!
The 3:1 ratio is still valid I believe. Even in WWII most deaths and injuries were caused by artillery. When you use more powerful artillery the kill radius is greater as is the injury radius. so the ratio roughly holds.
To my experience, bogus body counts etc. generally only occur if the US is involved in something. It doesn’t occur to honest people to lie about everything from genital size to the safety of aircraft … like the US.
Speaking of WW2 and the US, in WW2 fully 50% of US war casualties happened on the mainland of the US, before they went anywhere. The next 25% happened in training near their objectives. One quarter of their casualties were in combat. They were, and still are, their own worst enemies.
One out of four Americans didn’t fire a shot in WW2. I wonder who actually won the war.
My favorite part of the Vietnam war was when they added up all the televised body counts, on every night of the week, and discovered they’d killed more Vietnamese than were alive in the country. Love the smell of BS in the morning.
What fever dream did you get those ridiculous made-up statistics from?
I agree.
As another point, the killed to injury ratio is all over the place. It actually ranges from 1:1 to 1:4 historically and possibly higher depending on the specific conflict. The 1:3 is just an average. This operation may set a new historical top.
I agree. The body counts are more or less accurate and body counts are the most direct means of demilitarising (a declared aim of the SMO) Ukraine.
Russian dead and injured counts are estimates rounded off to figures like 100, 200. I thought that was obvious. Exact figures would be.68, 375 etc.
In some cases body counts can be done but not in all cases. It also depends how people are killed, sometimes they are just shredded or burnt to death by ammunition. The tactic of holding back Ukraine and nato’s good forces and recently sending in shitty fodder was a good one.
Even if you can see people gather in satellite you don’t know fighter quality. Russia may have decided this is a war with NATO better to fight near supply lines and Russia. Given modern weapons that can be a dangerous decision.
You are inviting rte enemy in to you when the enemy can strike directly into Russia from that distance and you have less time to do anything about it. America from miles away after ensuring it’s continent represents no threat.
If s NATO attack was coming – and I’m not sure Russia believed NATO would come in directly, turn distance from Russ should have been a priority. Unless your plan is to retreat. For NATO this is unbelievable access to attack Russia and kill it’s soldiers. While facing no consequences on their own soil. Ukrainian army Russia had a plan for and it work, but these are now NATO troops.
Let’s be clear what’s happening. NATO is in direct war with Russia and it is a dangerous dangerous war.
>>For NATO this is unbelievable access to attack Russia and kill it’s soldiers.
..While facing no consequences on their own soil. I disagree with that idea.
Published Russian military doctrine is simple. Direct attack on Russia to threaten its existence triggers MAD ….. full scale nuclear war. That is a serious consequence …
I agree 100%. Right now the absence of consequences for NATO has emboldened them to take bigger risks of escalation. Russia is grinding the enemy down on the frontlines but this comes at the expenses of its own forces which, even if they manage to inflict heavy losses on the Ukrainians that far exceed its own, are still bogged down and forced to a slow progress and war fatigue.
Now this could still possibly be a winning strategy if Russia was dealing with a finite number of troops and gear on the other side. But that’s not the case (hasn’t been for a while) because apparently the Western world has decided that it’s going to make a last stand on Ukraine.
Scott Ritter, back in May, had warned that RU needed to declare full mobilization because the endless flow of Western weapons and freshly trained recruits and mercs had leveled the playing field. Meaning that Ukraine would be able to bring Russia to a stand still not because it’s equal in power but because has an endless supply of men and hardware, overt and hidden, (most of which doesn’t even make the headlines) And doesn’t care if it all gets smashed. Everybody called him a doomer but he was obviously right. We are seeing that now.
Case in point, that massive column of Crab tanks coming from Poland on the railways that we saw a couple of weeks back. Those same tanks have been spotted in a bunch of recent videos, moving around or being destroyed. How is it even conceivable that a slow moving train wasn’t detected and obliterated before it even made it to Ukraine, let alone the frontlines? Why is Russia letting these weapons make it (and be used) against its own troops?
Why doesn’t it disable Railways, highways and bridges at the border of Poland, Moldova, Romania and Slovakia?
The decision to keep its best Airforce hidden and only use older aircrafts and rely heavily on artillery was the correct one. The US had prepared Ukraine for an air/ground invasion war (tens of thousands of stinger, manpads, NLAWS, Javelins, etc.) so the Russians ground them down with artillery. That was good for the 2nd phase. Right now Russia needs to escalate to full-on annihilations of all areas of concentration. Places like Bakhmut (or any of these small villages that are free of civilians) should be downright flattened so that allied troops can move forward and the psychological impact on the Ukrainians and their Western Psychopath handlers can be magnified.
I have been giving a lot of thought about why Putin is keeping this mission confined to the SMO. I think it has something to do with the stated objectives but also a lot with studying NATO/American tactics and MO’s (while concealing its own) and preserving its best forces and hardware for a possible escalation of the conflict with direct NATO/USA intervention. Makes sense to not squander your potential (which is exactly what the US, as per that 2019 RAND study, is trying to accomplish) early on and then suffer the consequences when the Yankees stroll in chanting Fuck Yeah!
It is also true that in just 6 months Russia accomplished the following:
1) Ukraine is 100-200k men short
2) 100% of their pre-war gear has been wasted
3) Europe and the US are headed for some momentous economic collapse and are about to experience what the words “misery&deprivation” mean.
4) The Dollar is being replaced at light speed in transactions and is being dethroned as the world currency
5) Eurasian integration has become an operative reality.
So superkudos to Putin but now it’s time to show NATO that when you join a fight you are gonna bleed.
And become serious about finishing the job so that Russian soldiers and civilians can breathe free.
Putin, Russian Army and General Staff have their own scripts in their textbook, that totally different from US-NATO which is “bomb-bomb-bomb-kill em all, then declare Victory through CNN”, literally written as the first rule of engagement.
Well said. It would be useful to know what the RUS exit strategy is at this stage, however. Ukr can’t defeat RUS but it can bleed it badly. I suspect we won’t know the exit strategy until it is all over, which hopefully won’t be too long, or too costly to RUS.
Yes, US strategy was to bleed Russia, but the RF army has been playing the war by their own rules to maximize their artillery advantages and deal terrible kills ratios on the enemy. US was salivating at the prospect of the Russians performing a traditional head on attack on the defenses they spent nearly a decade preparing. Neither the economic war, nor the military war are going according to western fantasies. The collective West are the ones being bled both economically and militarily.
While all that is true and fine, I disagree with the need to ramp up forces significantly, or that the lives of Ukrainians account for much in this offensive. The West intends to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, and if we take this to the extreme, then Russia could be killing 2000-3000 Ukrainians a day, for years (even decades), before that pool would run out. In that mountain of bodies, you’d find an equal mix of Ukrainians and NATO mercenaries, regular soldiers on leave, and emotion idiots from reddit. NATO nations have the ability to poorly train 75,000-100,000 Ukrainian souls a month, and throw them into the meat grinder. You will never see anyone in the West blink an eye because the news won’t report the losses at all, ever. With a population of 30+ million, Ukraine will have around 1 million reaching military age per year. It could literally take decades. Great plan by the West right?
Bodies are not the goal, and land is not the goal. In fact, no military outcome in Ukraine will directly impact on the outcome of the conflict, because it’s not a war between Ukraine and Russia. The conflict ends when the West capitulates due to minor financial discomfort. In order to achieve this, Russia just has to make Ukraine a weight too heavy for the EU to carry. Any attacks on the financial pillars supporting Ukraine would have a greater impact than fighting in the trenches, because it forces NATO nations to increase financial support in order to keep the project viable.
Taking out the electricity and keeping it out permanently is a good option. The EU is already in a power crisis, and they’d be forced to send power Ukraine to keep the project viable. Ukraine will lose people if there is no power, and the EU will have a refugee tsunami. Ukrainian trains are electric so while the power is off, the bear is essentially savaging Ukraine’s logistical lines. The lights should not go back on in Ukraine until the conflict is over.
Russia should also cut all oil and gas trade with unfriendly nations.
Russia should also start targeting financial interests of Ze’s billionaire backers, and Ze’s own small fortune. Take away the financial incentive for those profiting, and the support for the conflict falls away.
Russia could also start targeting the decision making centers. Fodder is easy to replace, but completely corrupt oligarchs and generals no so much.
Hit every SBU facility with a cruise missile = step 2 or 3. (you insert your own step 1)
Why is the SBU still functioning? Rhetorical question to Vladimir.
Why…..it’s a NATO red line, six months now, and they laugh…..
Cheers M
They are still functioning because Russia doesn‘t want to bomb its own spies
Terrific comment! I agree completely
Winter is coming.
Shut down the Ukrainian power grid plus natural gas and oil infrastructure. Let the Ukrainians freeze as the ground becomes frozen. Frozen ground is perfect for tank warfare. Putin is taking off the padded boxing gloves and putting on his brass knuckles.
No he is not. The strikes on infrastructure so far have not decimated anything. I think we need to be patient.
Russia has to adjust to open war with NATO. Mobilisation takes time and is extremely expensive and will eat massively into Russian surplus. Best to allow time to ensure the right preparation is made. What is sad for the world is that the likelihood of nuclear war just went up. The west are fools and Russia can’t change stupid and evil.
Unfortunately no choice but to fight. As they won’t stop.
Cutting off the supplies of cocaine, meth and KY Jelly would end this mess in 2 weeks.
As long as Russians lead a decent quality of life, and their children have a future, then all is well.
The desperation of a crumbling combined west has peaked; they’ve completely lost it. The natives in the west are way more fragile and getting angrier, more confused by the day. On Sunday, with a quarter tank full of diesel contained therein, it cost my missus £187 ($200); yeah, it’s a big tank but WTF, to fill. I look around me and this old town don’t look or smell too pretty. The food inflation on luxury stuff is now shown in the portion and not price (great PSYOPS), again, squeezing the already butt-hurt middle-class even more. It’s zombie denial limbo-land here. Will we make it till/through Christmas? Many won’t!
Put the lights out in Ukraine! Quit trying to be reasonable to the vermin controlling Ukraine, the west and most importantly be the ‘tat’ in tit for tat, proactive and not reactive.
I like how the article mentioned Vietnam war. As I find similarity with the Balakliia offensive, with the Tet offensive. Both may be the turning points of their respective wars. Tet was a military disaster, but proved to be a mortal psychological and political blow to the U.S establishment. Balakliia is opposite though, Russians suffered few if any, and were able to rapidly withdraw to new defensible locations, while Ukraine and its allies suffered thousands of deaths. The big psychological blow have been to the pro-russia telegram channels, and youtube bloggers. Yes, Ukraine will conduct reprisal attacks against those who chose to stay, but this is no different than what they have been doing to the people of donbass for years now.
The offensive proved:
1. Ukrainians are totally apathetic to massive deaths, as long as they get electricity, and other comforts they do not care who is in charge.
2. Ukrainians are running out of men to fill their armies. The Balakliia offensive was carried out by thousands of foreign volunteers and mercenaries, many of them lead by NATO Special Forces veterans, and paid for by the U.S state department. This is increasingly a foreign conflict, a la Syria. Instead of CIA paid jihadists, we have CIA paid nazis. I have doubts about the pool of “nazis’ the CIA will be able to sustainably field in west, and mercenaries are very expensive canon fodder.
3. Russian military professionalism, a well organized withdrawal, composure under pressure and small local against overwhelming numbers.
Side note:
I find body counts to be a measure, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be the measurement in winning a war. U.S killed over 2 million Vietnamese in the Vietnam war, but they eventually realized they were fighting against the birth rate of the nation.
““The gloves are finally off!”, some will rejoice. It’s a bad metaphor: if you box without gloves then you end up breaking your hands on your opponent’s skull.”
This is ridiculous. Martial artists can break many times the strength of a human skull with bare hands and not break a single bone. Bare knuckle boxing is a far more skillful fight because the damage is immediate and severe. Gloves were introduced to prolong the fight, both for the spectacle and for the gambling. Fighters end up taking far more damage over the course of a bout with gloves, including much more damage to the brain, because each hit is cushioned, then they do without.
Metaphor refers to time gentlemen wore gloves that would be removed to duel.
The retreat seems to have been worse than I feared. Some of the Russian school teachers that went to those liberated areas were not evacuated and are prisoners of the nazis. They are saying they will be tried as criminals,and Ukrainian teachers that cooperated with the Russians will be tried as traitors:
” Detained Russian teachers to face ‘punishment’ – Ukraine
Teachers who arrived to the Russian-controlled territories of Ukraine have committed a “crime,” Kiev says”
https://www.rt.com/russia/562663-ukraine-russian-teachers-criminal-charges/
The depravity of Ukraine has no bottom. If they abuse these Russian citizens, mostly women, I imagine a special group like Vympel or Alpha would rectify the situation.
They could, but would they be sent. I’m not sure I would count on that.
The prominent feeling in Russia:
The overnight strike on Ukraine’s energy structure hides two important points underneath.
First, it partly relieved the heaviest dejection after the withdrawal from the Kharkiv region. Yesterday, already by evening, the border settlements abandoned by the Russian Armed Forces were occupied and news and videos emerged of terror attacks on civilians who had not had time to evacuate.
Secondly, the powerful attacks that had been expected in Kharkiv and Mykolayiv regions and directly near Donetsk did not take place. However, the latter was most likely abandoned by the Ukrainians after the unsuccessful assault on Peski with the loss of two tanks and infantry.
It is time to go to war with Ukraine for real. It is a question of Russia’s survival. Kiev, to the applause of the US and the EU, is telling us directly that our country will be torn to pieces and destroyed.
We have 146 million Russian lives behind us and more than 4 million people in Donbass, plus the population of the remaining liberated territories. We are a nuclear power. It’s time to remember that.
@SergeyKolyasnikov
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