About some results of the special military operation in Ukraine
The special military operation in Ukraine, launched on February 24, 2022 to disrupt a large-scale Ukrainian offensive planned for March 8 on Donbass and Crimea, has overcome a three-month milestone. During this short time, the fighting took on a character that can be considered a certain standard of state's wars in the first half of the 21st century. As well as a trigger for changing the domestic military doctrine and priorities of the military-industrial complex. In addition, it is possible to fix a number of things that may have been predictable for the General Staff who developed Operation Z, but for most analysts they turned out to be a surprise.
It's not Russia that the war of attrition is killing
First and perhaps most importantly, it turned out that it was not Russia that was losing the full-scale war of attrition that began in March-April. It was assumed that the special military operation in Ukraine is a quick operation that should be completed without Russia's transition to a "mobilisation" economy.
Based on this, in late April-early May, it became fashionable in the Western media to replicate the point of view of individual Western political speakers that Russia "did not achieve the goals of the operation”. And the Russian economy is about to collapse under the pressure of unprecedented sanctions that have been imposed against Russia. US President Joe Biden frightened the world community with stories about “$1 for 200 rubles" and other grave consequences for Russia.
It turned out that it's the West who was losing the war of attrition. A large-scale fuel, energy, and partly food and social crisis has emerged in the US, Britain and the European Union. Negative phenomena will clearly grow in amplitude, generating secondary crises, which entails political consequences – the approval ratings of unfriendly presidents, prime ministers, chancellors, and so on have collapsed to a level that could be called critical.
Whereas Russia has launched a qualitatively new round of "import substitution". This is not only a replacement of Western technical solutions with domestic products, but also a fully-fledged delinking - the country's exit from the established web of trade, economic, cultural, informational, cognitive and other communications. On a global scale, every day it is increasingly consolidating the multipolarity of the world, which will never be the same again.
Moreover. There is a situation when it is advantageous for Russia to prolong the conflict in Ukraine in order to maximise the negative economic consequences for the West. Who has now driven itself into a trap – the political framework of "we must support Ukraine" has generally deprived the ruling elites of the West of manoeuvre. The socio-economic situation in the US, the EU and Britain is not getting better, and autumn and the arrival of a new heating season in winter will inevitably deal a new blow to the mood of the population.
Only the lazy haven’t written about the upcoming global food crisis – but so far none of the analysts has been able to answer the question of how to solve this problem while keeping Russia "out of the equation" of the negotiation process. Paradoxically, Russia, which a few years ago was ridiculed for trying to claim equality with its "only 2-3% of world GDP”, turned out to be a key element of world stability.
The flow of weapons that arrived in Ukraine before the special military operation, and was poured into it with renewed vigour after February 24, 2022, also turned out to be not as effective as it seemed to Kiev, Washington, London and Berlin.
Literally in 2 months of hostilities, the Ukrainian's own stock of weapons was exhausted, and now the UAF is maintaining combat readiness due to "injections" from the Polish city of Rzeszów. Since March, the Polish border settlement has turned into a powerful transit hub for the transfer of Western weapons to Ukraine. For which the Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky even awarded Rzeszów the title of "saviour city".
Our forecast that the conflict in Ukraine will very quickly turn into a proxy war with the whole of NATO has been confirmed. However, it turned out that NATO itself is not so united in the desire to fight against Russia. Against the background of the radical loyalism of Finland and Sweden, who voluntarily decided to become targets for nuclear weapons, the position of Turkey and Hungary looks like a special contrast. Budapest has given up oil and gas sanctions against Russia in an ultimatum, and Ankara has presented a large list of demands, without which it does not intend to discuss the application of Sweden and Finland to join NATO.
The erosion of Europe should not be ignored. London is openly trying to drag Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia into a new bloc that will be a hybrid of NATO and the EU. This does not promise anything good for Berlin and Paris, which are increasingly moving into the category of secondary geopolitical players.
Whose military science is better
The nature of the fighting has seriously changed in three months. If at the beginning of its war the Russian army tried to fight, "hardly shedding enemy's blood", avoiding harsh pressure, then at the end of May the conflict acquired recognisable features of a steamroller, which slowly but surely grinds the manpower of Ukrainian units. The realisation that Ukrainian Nazism is a mass disease, and not just a disease of individual soldiers and officers, arose and became entrenched. Although this realisation at the first stage had to be paid for with losses that were completely unnecessary.
It turned out that the collective military intelligence of NATO, which controls the Ukrainian grouping, numerically superior to Z units, cannot give a solution to intercept the initiative as a whole. The Russian army, as at the beginning of Operation Z, acts based on its tasks, and not on the situation that the enemy is forming.
The Russian army has already demonstrated a number of brilliant operations, such as the capture of the airfield near Gostomel, a number of successful breakthroughs to key points and taking them under control. It became obvious that modern missile weapons are the norm for Russia, and contrary to Kiev's propaganda, "Kalibrs", "Kinzhal", "Onyx" and the "Kh" family of the Russian Armed Forces do not end in any way.
Russia has fully mastered the actions of the "long arm", solving a significant part of the tasks of destroying the enemy even before enemy personnel or equipment get to the front line.
The importance of means in the modern conventional war, to which Ministry of Defence, unfortunately, did not pay due attention earlier, has become obvious. These are, first of all, tactical and strategic drones designed for a wide range of tasks, usually related to the observation and defeat of a detected enemy. "Drones of individual destruction" using swarm technologies, as well as means of countering such attacks, will be of great importance in future conflicts.
The lessons of the war will certainly force us to work on saturating the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation with sniper systems, means of secure communication, certain types of individual equipment, such as thermal imagers and other surveillance equipment.
A separate line should be devoted to artillery and MLRS. These types of weapons prove to be a decisive argument in the destruction of enemy strongholds and the rapid support of allied forces. The conflict in Ukraine has identified several points at once where strengthening clearly will not hurt – from the range of ammunition, where active-reactive long-range and "smart" projectiles are of particular importance, to "fast" targeting and correction systems. Soviet artillery systems remain effective in the first half of the 21st century, but without the strengthening of "intelligence", their reserve is clearly coming to an end.
The West will help them
The actual leadership of the UAF actions by London and Washington leads to the fact that significant intelligence and technical means have been thrown at strengthening Kiev. We are talking about streaming intelligence to Kiev, which allows the Ukrainian leadership to focus efforts in the right direction in time. Billionaire Elon Musk's company generously shared Starlink satellite communication terminals and Internet with the UAF, which provided the UAF with communication capabilities even from the blocked “Azovstal” metallurgical plant in Mariupol.
In Mariupol, the allied forces proved that they can perform tasks even taking into account the counteracting of a multi-fold outnumbering enemy sitting in a fortified point. However, in the case of Mariupol, the technological superiority of the enemy in some areas also played against our forces – the already mentioned sniper systems, to which the snipers of the allied forces sometimes opposed not even the Dragunov sniper rifles, but Mosin ones. The Russian industry may well saturate the army not only with modern sniper rifles (for example, Lobaev's company, known for its high-quality world-class sniper rifles), but also with drones and anything else. This requires a managerial and administrative solution.
The Russian army is doomed to have technological and intellectual superiority over the enemy – the UAF is not the pinnacle of what we may face in the near future. As practice has shown, in any proxy war against Russia there will be a huge number of people willing to provide our opponents with a huge amount of weapons, the effect of which needs to be stopped.
Up to the last fighting Ukrainian
The basis of the tactics that the collective West presented to the UAF is the trading of the territory and the lives of the Ukrainian military for time. The term "war to the last Ukrainian" has become almost official, it has been repeatedly voiced by Russian and Western politicians, describing the nature of the conflict in Ukraine. Given the abundance of weapons traveling to Ukraine, the main vulnerability of this tactic is the number of Ukrainian soldiers who are ready to use the provided weapons.
In the last month, the number of surrenders of the Ukrainian military to captivity, panicking video messages to the country's leadership, refusals to carry out combat missions has sharply increased. This was not avoided even by the most radical and ideologised Ukrainian neo-nazis from the nationalist group "Azov", against whose members criminal cases have been initiated in Russia. After a few weeks of "Azov sitting", the militants of the group surrendered, which seriously spoiled the life of Ukrainian propaganda.
The gigantic losses of the Ukrainian side, which reach 50,000-60,000 people by indirect signs, despite the efforts of Kiev, become known to the population, giving rise to a desire to avoid fighting. There are quite a lot of indirect evidence of a serious decline in morale among Ukrainian conscripts, for example, a resonant bill on allowing Ukrainian officers to shoot subordinates "for sabotage" without trial. This bill was rejected, but the very fact of its appearance is symptomatic.
The Russian tactic at the moment looks like a cosmetic change, but very effective one in the principle of "to the last Ukrainian". Russia is fighting in Ukraine "to the last fighting Ukrainian", which, in fact, embodies the task of demilitarisation and denazification.
The "mosaic" development of the liberated territories has become an effective tool in this regard. While fighting is going on near Lisichansk and Severodonetsk, local administrations have already been established in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions of Ukraine, and peaceful life and trade relations with Crimea are being established.
It should be noted that the erosion of the "integrity of the Ukrainian borders" is not only coming from the south – the Ukrainian authorities have officially recognised Poland's claims to the territory of Ukraine, announcing a special legal regime for Poles, who will be privileged compared to ordinary Ukrainians.
In combination with the theses expressed by Polish President Andrzej Duda that there should be no border between Poland and Ukraine at all, this can only mean the inevitable abolition of Ukraine as a familiar geopolitical structure over the past 30 years.
Ukraine was prepared as a battering ram against Russia. One of the main results of Operation Z was to redirect this battering ram against the West itself, and fragments of historical Russia are being gradually separated from Ukraine and assimilated into Russia – they wanted desovetisation, so we helped them. Moreover, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation complete this task efficiently and relatively cost-effectively.