ALEKS—I think first there were considerations to intervene directly in Western Ukraine through Poland. Not to fight the Russians, but to secure territory. And I also think that President Putin made it crystal clear in one of his early speeches during the war that such actions would trigger lightning responses. Most likely he was talking about a hypersonic rain over Poland. These intentions died down afterwards. Nevertheless, it seems that Poland is still eager to seize some parts of Ukraine that Poland considers former Polish territories. This, of course, is an interesting fact.
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ALEKS—Much of what we will discuss in this article will deal with the number of Russian casualties, as alluded to in the introduction. Russia suffered a horrendous number of dead soldiers within the first few weeks of the conflict, maybe up to 10,000. That’s the price of big arrows on modern battlefields with full intelligence/information/reconnaissance/artillery/drone coverage of the battlefields.
However, (up to) 10,000 dead is still a price that would have been worth paying to achieve the goals in Ukraine without going into a full-scale war. Had there been an agreement in Istanbul that would have terminated the conflict, ensured the rights of Russians in Ukraine, and kept Ukraine out of NATO and NATO out of Ukraine, one could remotely argue that “it was worth it.”
We all know what happened instead. As with all agreements that are not guaranteed with a gun on the West’s head, the West will ignore or scrap it at will. As happened with the Istanbul agreement.
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ALEKS—To be clear, I’m not from the military. Nevertheless, I know a lot of people personally who have served. Considering the interest of many people about how villages or towns are usually taken, I’ve decided to write what I’ve learned from people who were intensively involved in assault operations.
As we all know from Carl von Clausewitz: “War is a continuation of politics by other means.”
What does it have to do with storming a town? A lot. There are many ways to capture a town held by the enemy, like siege, destruction, invasion, political pressure, etc.
The chosen method is determined by the available means and political objectives. This leads us back to Clausewitz’s quote.
