Russia is conducting a special unification operation
On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a special military operation in Ukraine. At the moment, it is the second week of its implementation, and it is already possible to sum up some results and assess its future prospects.
The current special operation conducted by the Russian armed forces has no analogues in its scale since the Second World War. Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe, with an area of 603,549 square kilometres and an official population of about 41 million people.
For comparison, the area of Iraq is 437,072 square kilometres, the population in 1991 was about 17 million people. The American operation in Iraq "Desert Storm" lasted from January 17 to February 28, 1991 (43 days), despite the fact that mostly the territory of Iraq is a desert with only 25-30 decent cities.
Ukraine is almost a network of urban agglomerations of 450 cities, most with dense residential development. This is the difficulty of conducting a special operation by the Russian armed forces: Russia does not cover peaceful cities with carpet bombing of strategic aircraft, as the United States did in Iraq and the NATO coalition in Yugoslavia.
During the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, about 120 energy facilities and 140 civilian infrastructure facilities, 89 factories and factories were destroyed. Kiev currently has electricity and water, filtration and pumping stations are not targets for the Russian army, and strikes are carried out only on military targets.
In the cities of Mosul and Raqqa, American bomber aircraft wiped out entire neighbourhoods so that the infantry they supported could fulfil their tasks of suppressing enemy resistance, no one cared about civilian casualties. American politicians and journalists still expect that the Russian side is about to start using cluster munitions and vacuum bombs to intimidate the population.
On March 4, at a meeting held by the Institute of Modern Warfare, Russia expert Michael Kofman said: "If you're a military analyst and you see what the Russian military is doing, and many of us predicted this war was coming ... but not the way the Russian military would pursue it. Because it's absolutely confounding and bizarre."
It's just that the Russian army cannot use American methods in Ukraine, because its goal is not to hammer Ukraine into the Stone Age.
The Russian president said that Russian troops "are fighting for Russia, for a peaceful life for the citizens of Donbass, for the denazification and demilitarisation of Ukraine”. "So that no ‘anti-Russia’, created by the West right at our borders for years, threatens us, including with nuclear weapons, as it has been recently”.
During the telephone conversation, Vladimir Putin explained in detail to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that "during the special operation, the Russian military takes all possible measures to save the lives of civilians, and information stuffing about the alleged shelling of Kiev and other major cities is a gross propaganda fake."
On February 26, a missile launched by the air defence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) on the territory of Kiev lost its trajectory and hit a residential building. The Ukrainian media presented the incident as Russia's shelling of civilians. Although eyewitnesses captured the smoky trail of a solid-fuel rocket from the launch area to the point where it hit a residential building.
It should be noted that the Ukrainian media conduct aggressive propaganda among its population, convincing them that Russian troops are going to kill Ukrainians, sparing neither women, nor the elderly, nor children. Even the famous Ukrainian boxer Aleksandr Usyk, who previously made conciliatory statements in relation to Russia and Ukraine, signed up for the territorial defence in order, in his words, “to protect his family not at the front”.
The New York Times is already forced to state that Ukrainian propaganda is saturated with fakes. Information about the Ukrainian pilot “the Ghost of Kiev", who "shot down many aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces", was initially fictional. The story of the Ukrainian military, who allegedly "all as one" died defending the Snake Island, also turned out to be an invention of Ukrainian propaganda.
The authors of the article admit that Western media and social platforms play along with the Ukrainian side, without subjecting information stuffing to critical reflection, justifying this by saying that it increases the morale of Ukrainians.
It should be noted that such total propaganda has its own effect. Already in the first days of March, the thesis began to spread in the Ukrainian information space that the UAF destroyed 70% of the Russian military who entered the territory of Ukraine, and victory is already very close, which inspired the Ukrainian servicemen.
The irony is that almost immediately after this, the Western media distributed pictures of MAXAR with a huge column of the Russian army near Kiev, which stretched for 64 kilometres and consists of about 2,300 units of various equipment. However, the Ukrainian media chose not to focus the attention of their population on this and continue to talk about "victory over the occupier".
Nevertheless, it is becoming obvious even to the Western media that the Ukrainian authorities do not adhere to any norms and rules when conducting propaganda. The Washington Post published an article stating that the Ukrainian authorities are violating the Geneva Convention by showing footage of Russian servicemen killed, wounded and captured.
Of course, no war is complete without losses. On March 2, the Russian Defence Ministry reported that 498 Russian servicemen were killed and 1,597 were injured during a special operation in Ukraine. At the same time, the command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has not yet reported data on their losses, which indicates that the situation is very difficult. In the absence of serious success, the Ukrainian leadership stated that the UAF recaptured Chernigov from the Russian army, although, in fact, the Russian Armed Forces did not enter the city, but bypassed it.
The Russian army does not have a goal to take every city in Ukraine with battles. On the example of such large cities as Kherson and Melitopol, it is obvious that having surrounded the city, the military is trying to negotiate with the local authorities so that they do not resist and continue to work in the same mode. However, on the example of the head of the village of Kremennaya in the Lugansk region, Vladimir Struk, who was killed by nationalists, after his appeal to the population to accept the conditions of the Russian military, it becomes clear that everything will not be so simple.
Not wanting a repeat of a peaceful outcome, as in Kherson and Melitopol, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky replaced the heads of the Cherkassy and Odessa regions with "ideological" military personnel who began to prepare the cities for a tough defence.
According to initially leaked information from the office of the Ukrainian president, Zelensky's team believed that by prolonging the conflict and inflicting losses on the Russian army, they would be able to negotiate more acceptable terms for peace agreements, and, at best, draw NATO countries into the conflict. The head of the State Department, Antony Blinken, has repeatedly explained that the United States will not create a "no-fly zone" over Ukraine, since in this case it will have to enter into a direct conflict with Russia, and this should be avoided in every possible way.
He repeated this point again on March 6 in an interview with NBC News, but explained that Poland may decide to provide Ukraine with Soviet-made fighters, and the United States, in turn, will supply Poland with F-16 fighters. Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov warned that the provision of airfields by third countries for the Ukrainian Air Force may be regarded as their involvement in combat operations.
Head of the Office of the Head of Government of the Republic Michał Dworczyk said: "Poland has not conducted, does not conduct and will not conduct any military operations from its territory. We are not a party to the conflict and will not be." When asked about the prospects of sending Polish fighters to Ukraine, Dworczyk pointed out that no decisions had been made on this issue. "And if they are adopted, they should be coordinated and adopted at the level of the entire NATO," he said.
A little later, information appeared that Poland was ready to transfer Soviet fighters to the United States for further use and possible transfer to Ukraine. The US Department of Defence rejected such a proposal, calling it “unviable”. The British publication The Guardian even called this misunderstanding about fighter jets a "mini-fiasco” among the Allies.
Thus, Warsaw disowned Blinken's words about the independent decision to provide fighter jets to Ukraine, transferring this decision to the NATO level. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has repeatedly said that NATO is not part of the conflict and does not seek war with Russia. Thus, Kiev's hopes of drawing NATO into a conflict with Russia are futile.
On March 8, in an interview with the American TV channel ABC News, Zelensky said that he "cooled down to NATO", as "the alliance is afraid of contradictions and confrontation with Russia”. In the same interview, he mentioned that he was ready to discuss the status of Crimea, the DPR and the LPR. "We can discuss this and find a compromise on how these territories will exist. But what is more important for me is how people will live in these territories, those who want to be part of Ukraine," the Ukrainian president said.
It is worth recalling that already on the first day of the special operation, Vladimir Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov explained that Moscow is ready to negotiate with Kiev, if the Ukrainian side fulfils Russian demands. Russia did not initially set out to destroy or seize Ukraine, announcing the start of a special operation, the Russian president stated directly that the occupation of Ukraine is not intended.
Thus, the signing of peace agreements by the Ukrainian side, which will spell out the new borders of Ukraine, the neutral status of the country and its political structure, was Russia's proposal from the very beginning of the conflict. If you believe the words of President of Belarus Aleksandr Lukashenko and rumours from the office of the Ukrainian president, then Russia's demands were voiced to the Ukrainian side a few hours before the start of the special operation.
Press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov explained that the special operation can be stopped "at any time" if Kiev fulfils the conditions of Moscow. However, the Ukrainian side continues to stall for time, demanding weapons from Western allies and new sanctions against Russia. The third round of Russian-Ukrainian talks ended in nothing.
The Russian president put it quite frankly: "They (the Ukrainian authorities) must understand that if they continue to do what they are doing, they will call into question the future of Ukrainian statehood. And if that happens, it will be entirely on their conscience."
From this, we can assume that the tactics of the Russian armed forces will change. Initially, after launching rocket and bomb attacks on Ukrainian military facilities, the advanced units of the Russian army went far into its territory and captured certain key points, such as Gostomel airport or Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant, bypassing secondary cities.
Now the main units, including rear units and engineering troops, are being pulled up to the territory of Ukraine, which will systematically occupy the territory of Ukraine, clearing the rear, avoiding unnecessary losses.
It should be understood that on the day of the start of the special operation, there were 250,000 people in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and 145,000 personnel were in the ground forces as of February 2022. There were about 2,800 tanks, 8,000 armoured vehicles, 3,500 artillery systems, and 230 aircraft of various types in the ranks and storage bases. No special operation of the modern Russian army has ever faced such a large enemy group, and it will naturally take time to grind it out.
It is also worth considering that the special forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were regularly trained by military specialists of NATO countries, and now they act quite professionally. In addition, according to the representative of the Russian Defence Ministry, Major General Igor Konashenkov, foreign mercenaries who arrived in Ukraine commit sabotage and raids on Russian convoys of equipment and material supplies, as well as aircraft covering them.
We should not forget that in the rear of the Russian group there are still cells of saboteurs and just provocateurs trained by the SBU, who organise protest rallies. Of course, it will also take time to identify and eliminate all these individuals.
At the moment, as a result of strikes by the Russian army on headquarters and communication centres, the UAF is beginning to lose control, which was not organised in the best way before, including due to the presence of nationalist units such as "Azov".
These units often ignored the instructions of the Ukrainian leadership and acted independently. In addition, the Ukrainian leadership issued weapons to the civilian population without control, which began to use them for any reason.
In this regard, even if the main stage of the special operation is completed in March and, as a result of negotiations, certain peace agreements are reached with the Ukrainian side, individual formations of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, pumped up with propaganda and nationalist groups, can continue to offer armed resistance.
Nevertheless, one should not doubt the fulfilment of the goals of the special military operation. As Russian President Vladimir Putin told French President Emmanuel Macron: "The tasks of the special military operation will be fulfilled in any case, and attempts to gain time by delaying negotiations will only lead to additional requirements for Kiev in our negotiating position."
It's just that many people expected a lightning-fast special operation from the Russian military. And although Vladimir Putin has already noted that the special operation "is just going according to plan, according to schedule," it should be understood that given the task set to save the lives of civilians and the specifics of the fighting, the Russian army is conducting a unique operation, and it will still take time to complete it.
In my opinion, this special operation will remain in history as the "unification operation". When the ideological project "Ukraine-anti-Russia" is finished, and the DPR and LPR are finally integrated into the Russian economy, the West will no longer be interested in the demilitarised territory of the former Ukraine.
Even if the state entity "New Ukraine" is preserved and some cash injections from the West go there, they will quickly dry up, due to the growing global crisis. Then this territory will again have to turn to Russia and seek its help, which it will definitely receive, but with appropriate conditions.