Hold Out, Bleed Dry, Hope for the Best
Bakhmut
I indicated yesterday my concern that some of the principal sources on which I rely, sources which strive for greater neutrality than mainstream western media in the sense that they pay serious attention to raw sources of information from all sides to the conflict, may have become too complacent in their presumptions of how Ukraine was most likely to react to Russian advances.
And this seems to be confirmed today. Far from a pullout from Bakhmut as Mercouris and others (including in Washington and in Germany, and some of Ukraine’sown military command) have recenty advised and/or anticipated, it looks as though the opposite is happening: Ukraine is again trying to reinforce its positions in Bakhmut and some of the villages and small towns in the vicinity, as reported today by Alexander Mercouris (Mercouris 02.17.2023).
The epicenter of the fighting is Paraskeyevka, a village close to Kressnaya Gora, which was taken by Russia a week ago. It seems that some 1,500 Ukrainian troops are positioned in this village and that Ukraine has sent several hundred more men and tanks to this area. The purpose appears to be to try to slow Russia’s closing of its pincers on Chasov Ya, west to Bakhmut,and on Bakhmut itself. Wagner’s assault forces are on the outskirts of Chasov Ya. The main Russian push is coming from the north and the Ukrainian army is trying to stop this. Mercouris considers that Ukrainian losses here are hellish. Ukraine has barred journalists from visiting Bakhmut, something it did in advance of the fall of Soledar. Ukrainian authorities have also recently relocated much of the documentation and archives that were located in Bakhmut: Bakhmut was the hub of Ukrainian defenses, so it is highly likely that the documentation relating to Ukraine’s activities in Bakhmut would be of great interest to Russia. Earlier today, Ukraine told all remaining 6,000 civilians in Bakhmut to leave the city immediately. Yet Zelenskiy has talked of holding on to Bakhmut until Ukraine is ready to launch a counteroffensive. One wonders if Ukraine has anything like such a window available. We have seen similar dynamics in Mariupol, Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. Mercouris considers that eventually there will be a large haul of Ukrainian prisoners and Ukraine will say that it was all worthwhile because it helped Ukraine gain time.
Kreminna
To the north, in the region around Kreminna, Svatove, Kupiansk, and Lyman, where there has been a lot of recent fighting, Ukraine is rushing troops to the frontline,while trying to recruit as many men as it can across Ukraine. In this area, Ukraine is said by Col Marochko of the Donetsk militia, cited in TASS, to be losing around 200 men a day, about the same level as it is said that Ukraine is losing in Bakhmut. This source does not cite comparable Russian statistics, but the BBC has now provided an update of its casualty calculations with Medusa (an anti-Putin Russian website, in receipt of western funding, and based in Latvia), using a methodology of open sources, and it assesses that 14,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the start of the conflict last February up to February this year. The BBC claims that this would be the absolute minimum figure and that the total should be presumed to be up to 60% higher (i.e. up to around 20,000). Mercouris now thinks it likely that the BBC figures include casualties for the Wagner group and Chechnyan soldiers. It is possible therefore that the figure of 14,000 might incliude the totality of Russian forces that have been deployed in this war. Were the Donbass militia also to be included, then another couple of thousand or so might be added. This would match the estimates that are given by the Russian MOD. These figures do not seem to come anywhere close to the numbers given by Ukrainian and many other sources, leaving a vast, apparent disparity in the casualties between the two sides. Pictures given on Ukrainian social media of Ukrainian cemeteries show very large numbers of graves, and pictures of battlefields show large numbers of Ukrainian dead; there is nothing comparable coming from the Russian side or on Russian social media, which is a very active domain. Many more lives will be lost when (as Mercouris confidently believes) Russia finally encircles Bakhmut. A historical analogy would be in the American Civil War when the Union forces under General Grant bled the confederacy dry.
Vuhledar
There has also been fighting in Vuhledar to the south and Marinka, near Donetsk City. There are not many reports. But Russia appears to be continuing to fight an attritional war as Ukraine speeds reinforcements to these areas. An interesting article by “Simplicius The Thinker” on Substack argues that in the modern battlefield it is not possible to undertke complex manouver warefare because there are so many eyes in the sky, with the result that complex manouvers can be detected immediately and a confrontational response organized. He suggests ways and means by which the Russians might be able to counter this reality, including knocking out US satellites (which would be very escalatory), or sending out only small numbers (like the UIkrainian “pemnny package” assaults) that are less likely to be detected. The most practical Russian response would be to attack simultaneously along multiple fronts, which would create for Ukraine a systems overload, and which is the strategy that Russia may now actually be applying (and Zelenskiy actually identifies this current situation as tantamount to the “big” and long-anticipated Russian offensive), which might be supplemented by a Russian offensive from Sumy.
Another method of responding to the reality of panoptic surveillance is doing what the Russians are also now doing, proceeding step by step using massive artillery, avoiding big arrow offensives, conserving men, advancing inch by inch, grinding the Ukrainians down. Yet the west (e.g. personified by Generals Ausin and Milley) is advising Ukraine to do things entirely differently, not to depend so much on artillery, to fight a more mobile form of war, relying more on armored vehicles. Brian Berletic discusses this and makes the point that what Austin, Milley and others are saying is that the west has given up any idea that it can match Russian artillery or ammunition. Western powers have come to the conclusion that they have lost the artillery war.
Simplicus the Thinker is telling us that skilful, mobile warfare is no longer possible because it presumes that one party can keep its enemy in suspense as to what it intends. But this time is over. Western powers are therefore pushing Ukraine into a model of war that ultimately is not going to work for them. They already tried mobile warfare in Kharkiv and Kherson, and suffered exceptionally high casualties.
There is now general acceptance in the west that we are coming very close to the point where the war as it is becomes unsustainable. Perhaps the most coherent statement as to why that is so has come from a US Senator, Josh Hawley, who, obsessed with China, is starting to articulate many of the points that Mercouris assumes are current behind the scenes. Hawley complains that the US is over-committed; the establishment tells Americans that they are on the right side of history and that tough trade-offs don’t exist. But that is just not true.
Defending Ukraine is nowhere near the same thing as deterring China.(Note that I find the presumption that China is a significant threat to the USA or that it makes any sense whatsoever to announce one’s intention to, or to sincerely believe in the necessity for, going to war with China today or in 2025 or at any other time is preposterous, underlining the criminality and stupidity of the neocon cult and once again inviting recourse to nuclear annihilation). The US has over-invested in its Middle Eastern wars while China was rising to the status of a major global power. The people in Washington who made the mistake of over-committing to the Middle East were never held accountable. Now the US is in a similar situation over Ukraine, with the same ideologues in the driving seat. Commitment to Ukraine is not working for ordinary people in any way whatsoever. The focus for the US should be on building up its internal strength, not getting distracted by foreign adventures. As the US obsesses about Ukraine, it is failing, says Hawly, to concentrate on its real adversary, which is China. Initially, Hawley supported funding for Ukraine; but he had no idea that the US would once again get involved in an endless war. The truth is it cannot defend Ukraine and, at the same time, see to its longer-term military requirements. It cannot do it all and should not have to. Seeking regime change in Russia is nonsense. [Equally nonsense I would argue is the presumption behind all of this war mongering is that the “enemy” is either Russia or China and that it makes best sense to concentrate on the one that is the greatest threat. This entirely overlooks the reality, greatly helped by the west’s own hysteria, that China and Russia have forged a strong, symbiotic alliance; neither of them is going to stand by while the other is attacked].
Much the same points were made in the 1960s namely about the US overcommitting to all kinds of peripheral concerns and conflicts, while neglecting its core intertests, acquiring an exaggerated sense of its own power and its own ability to shape things everywhere. Professor Syracusa on CNN makes a similar argument; he says the US will abandon Ukraine as it did Vietnam, regardless of all the commitments it made to Vietnam, coming in the end to accept that it had to cut a deal with the North Vietnamese. He quotes people who were main players at the time, like Henry Kissinger, and Kissenger’s admission that the United States could not deal with all its commitments simultaneously, but would have to match its commitments to its resources.
Of course, the hard liners are not finished. Blinken has made public comments in which he appears to concede that Ukraine cannot retake Crimea. This does not mean he is contemplating peace or some kind of divided Ukraine. An article in Responsible Statecraft (for the Quincy Institute) also argues that Ukraine cannot win, and that behind the windy rhetoric about “as long as it takes” there is a gathering necessity to seek a deal. Yet Nuland even now insists that Crimea must be demilitarized as part of any peace deal. This would never be acceptable to Russia. The neocons know this, and they want to continue the war and want to deflect their critics with proposals that they know will be unacceptable tpo Russia.
Yet it does seem to be the case that more and more minds in Washington accept that this war is unsustainable, that it cannot be prolinged indefinitely, and cannot be won. The ultimate constraint is that the US cannot sustain a proxy war in Ukraine without weakening its geopolitical position, particuarly given the competition from China, and that therefore it must find some way out. Ukraine is being told that funding for the war might run out after the summer, and that the time window for Ukraine to change the dynamics on the battlefield is closing. The US military is telling Ukraine to conserve its forces, on the one hand, while the Washington politicos want Ukraine to escalate, a policy which makes no sense, on the other. Mercouris fears that Ukraine will end up doing what Biden, Blinken, Sullivan etc. want it to do. Danilov, chief of Ukraine’s national defense and security council, the most important institution in Ukraine today - more important than Zelenkiy himself - has said that the only way that Ukraine can win this war is through the break-up of the Russian Federation and that the war has to be won by the summer. It’s what he said last year, and it is the same mantra this year, only with the supposed benefit of 18 Leopard II tanks, plus 14 from Britain - nowhere near what was promised - and Ukraine will eventually get a few more Leopard IIs, and a lot of thin-armored Leapord 1s.
Maybe the strategy is to hold out, bleed away, suffer large losses and hope that up the 40,000 Ukrainians who have been trained for a couple of months in the west on the motley array of western tanks provided or promised over recent weeks, may be able to launch an attack towards the Azov, cutting across the Russian landbridge with Crimea, and then to sit back and hope for the best. It doesn’t look much like a plan. Supplies may dry up by the summer, not because of lack of money, but because supplies of ammunition will run out and the US will seek to cut a deal as it did in Vietnam and Afghanistan, leading to the final collapse of the countries that it abandoned: leading to the rise in power of Communists in Vietnam, Taliban in Afghanistan, Russians in Ukraine.