MAY 4/22
Ukraine Is Going to Win
America’s heavy weapons will make the difference against the Russians
By Charles Lipson, The SPECTATOR
The climactic battle for Ukraine is being fought in the east, on the dangerous, open terrain of the Donbas. Since it will be won with heavy, long-range firepower, Russia ought to have a huge advantage. After all, it has spent decades building a military meant to overwhelm its enemies with vast numbers of tanks, troops and artillery, fighting on terrain just like this.
But even in these favorable conditions, Moscow’s plans aren’t working out. The Ukrainians may lack superior numbers, but they could very well win back most of the territory Russia has occupied since 2014. The Ukrainian edge? Their mobile forces, determined fighters, smart leadership, superior intelligence and targeting, and, coming soon, a surge of heavy weapons, arriving after months of delay.
The key now is getting these weapons to the battlefront and making sure Ukrainian fighters know how to use them. The operators’ training is happening now and the supplies are moving across hundreds of miles in Ukraine, undeterred by Russia’s attacks on road and rail junctions such as Lviv.
Even with these new weapons, it’s still guesswork as to whether Ukraine can actually defeat the Russians. So let me guess: Ukraine will win. It will be a hard fight, and the victory may be incomplete. But the odds now favor Ukrainian victory for several reasons.
The Russian army, which already demonstrated its deficiencies in the fight for Kyiv, is now badly damaged and low on morale. It is essentially stalled in its latest push to take more territory and take out Ukrainian formations in the Donbas region. That drive would have been supplemented by Russian forces around the northeastern city of Kharkiv. But that move failed, and Russian forces are actually being pushed out of surrounding territory.
Across the whole eastern region, Russia’s latest push has achieved only modest gains. And even those are tenuous. When Russia redeploys its forces after taking territory, Ukrainian fighters often take it back.
Air power should have helped Russia, but it didn’t. It never established air superiority and doesn’t know how to integrate its air and ground operations. Put bluntly, Russia cannot conduct modern, combined-arms warfare, which melds air power, cyber resources, battlefield intelligence, tanks, artillery and drones. That kind of combat is the backbone of NATO strategy, and Ukraine is using it effectively, even though it is not a member.
Ukraine is also following US/NATO procedures in another way. Their lower-level commanders and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) are given considerable authority and flexibility. They can shift tactics in the midst of battle. The Russian army, by contrast, relies on rigid, top-down command, which is brittle when faced with unexpected setbacks.
These defects are profound. They cannot be fixed quickly, and certainly not in the midst of war. Of course, Russia’s top planners can correct strategic errors, such as launching too many major battlefronts with too few resources. Remedying that mistake is what they are doing now by concentrating on eastern Ukraine.
Now that Moscow is focused on the Donbas, what’s the plan? The goal, apparently, was to encircle Ukrainian forces in the region, block their resupply (as they have done in Mariupol) and then kill or capture them. But once again, they are failing.
Russia’s stalled advance in the Donbas might look like a stalemate, but it is actually far worse for them. Why? Because it shows Russian forces have been stopped before Ukraine receives its heavy weapons from the US and NATO. When those weapons finally arrive, they will wreak havoc on the enemy.
Those weapons should have arrived in Ukraine two months ago, but the Biden administration balked at sending them for fear of provoking Putin. US policy has changed over the past two weeks, partly because of Russia’s war crimes, partly because Russia hinted it wanted to keep going beyond Ukraine and partly because the fight for the Donbas is crucial to the war’s outcome. That fight can only be won with heavy weapons.
The new equipment should reach the front over the next two or three weeks, just as Ukrainian soldiers complete their training to use it. Those weapons include mobile artillery with accurate, long-range firepower, drones with heavier payloads and longer flight times, armored troop carriers, anti-aircraft batteries and vast stores of ammunition.
Their arrival will signal a new phase in the battle for the Donbas. Russia’s tanks and artillery will be as vulnerable to these long-range weapons as they were to short-range ones around Kyiv. Ukrainian forces will be able to pinpoint enemy forces with real-time intelligence from their own drones and US sources. Equally important, Ukrainian soldiers can fire from safer distances, beyond the reach of Russian counter-fire.
Russia’s response, as always, will depend on quantity and brutality. They have dumb bombs, dumb command structures, static formations and desultory troops. Lots of them. They can destroy whole cities and kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians. They can obliterate schools, with children inside, and block humanitarian convoys.
But they can’t seem to defeat an army that is shrewd, mobile and determined to defend its country, at least not an army that is well-equipped with modern weapons. The Ukrainians proved their mettle around Kyiv. Now that heavy firepower is arriving, they have an excellent chance of recapturing the Donbas, too.
Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma professor of political science emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security, and a Spectator contributing writer.
@Honeybee You got my nom right! First one. My hat’s off to ya, ma’am. {little bow}.
http://www.najvs.org/works/V043_IH.shtml
Sébastien Are you saying the Ukrainians [ like the Black Knight] cannot hold the Russians at bay?
@HoneyB
@Honey
“Sittin’ on the dock of the bay. Wastin’ time, Watching the ships roll in.” Otis Redding
https://youtu.be/rTVjnBo96Ug
Sebastien, Ukraine has already won by holding Russia at bay and denying Russia superpower status.
The Duran is speculating about the possibility that Poland will, in one manner or another and for some disclosed benefit(likely territorial in nature), come to Ukraine’s defense in their abysmally failing war with Russia. This is very alarming.
The Poles and the Ukrainians have apparently formalized an agreement of citizen status to each other’s nationals within their borders, and the recent speech by the Polish president in Ukraine has led the Alexes to this expectation as they note that it seems a greater game is afoot. This prediction of Polish entrance into the war, should it prove providential, will portend a very muddy outcome to this war, in which the question then becomes, how will NATO respond to the temerity of the Poles, who are the top Europeans hated by Europe, besides Hungary, who still holds the top position on that scale. I find it unlikely that the Poles would act on their own in this stead without the pre-arranged support of their European and American allies, but the Poles are quite cut from a separate cloth from the other Europeans so their commitment to wise policy may be exaggerated in my mind. Meanwhile, Americans do seem to be run by a group who were evicted from the insane asylum for presenting too outrageous an image to share with the other inmates there, so it is just as likely that they would support Poland’s insane maneuver here, with or without their European counterparts, but who knows.
Alex and Alexander from the Durand each find it likely that should this occur, Europe and the US will simply ask Poland to simply sleep soundly in a bed of their own making, though, in my opinion, I find this quite unlikely to be the case, especially with US troops and US missiles in Poland. In any event, it is a frightening possibility that has been with us since the beginning of this nightmare contest of wills, in which Putin is currently making steady strides daily with little concern of setbacks at this point. The US does seem that to any extent necessary, the Russians must have a more democratically elected govt, likely they are envisioning an election process in Russia where Zuckerbucks pick the Russian premiere, as well as the American president, but I digress.
To count against this belief of Russia’s position of ultimate success in this war, of course, is Scott Ritter, who has recently stated that Russia is likely to be facing a turning point of destruction based on the great new toys being sent from around the world to kill more Russians. Larry Johnson and others have noted that this is a highly dubious claim given that these weapon systems are not part of the Ukrainian army’s normal munitions and therefore there is no one trained to use them in the Ukrainian army. Furthermore, the Ukrainian army is being surrounded in multiple centers much as was done in Mariupol due to the resistance of the Ukrainian political elites’s refusal to give ground, sacrificing the defenders to a fate already meted out to Azov in Azovstahl. As a consequence, these new toys will be handed to a more and more naive group on non-army regulars, unused to battle, facing the task of using complicated armaments against a battle hardened winning army. At some point, the failing morale and overtasking newly pressed soldiers to employ such advanced assets will defeat the home base and shortening supply line advantages. But who knows, it is 2022, so anything is possible, especially if it is not probable.
Tzvi-Gad,
That comment gets my “Succinct” award.
@Vivarto
I tried nesting the replies but didn’t like the set up. I asked others and they agreed . The problem was that such a set up was not chronological. Don’t ask me to explain what I mean.
Also you can always click on the thumbs up.
Finally not only did I post the video but also an article both of which said Ukraine was winning . My guess is you didn’t read the whole article and didn’t watch the video.
One more thing. In a previous comment I said I posted both because they ran counter to what I had been posting. I like to give both sides..
The latest interview with Jacques Baud, the Swiss Intelligence Officer who was assigned to NATO shortly after the Maidan period. He provides a detailed description of his background and shares the method upon which he bases his observations as:
He explains how he came to be involved in the Ukraine crisis, where he notes that there were no Russian forces outside of Crimea. He also notes that the first referendum of Crimean separation from Ukraine was six months prior to Ukraine ignoring the Crimean vote when declaring Ukrainian independence in 1991, in effect annexing Crimea. He explains that there are many elements of the Ukrainian Far Right, which made up 40% of the Ukrainian forces in 2020, which Baud likens to a “gathering of fanatics”. He goes on at some length to describe the captured status of the Ukrainian president, elected to pursue peace, but constrained by the power and threat of Ukrainian Far Right groups and Western leadership, which Baud suggests is similar to governing under a sword of Damocles.
He explains that there is a great deal of mistrust and misunderstanding of Putin by the West and that this characterizes much of their actions. He notes that the policy employed against Russia did not begin as one of regime change but of Russian containment. He came to author a book on Putin after recognizing that a political narrative was the extent of journalistic analysis of Western perceptions towards Putin. He states he is no fan of Putin and all of his reasearch was based upon input from Western reports, and discusses the Navalny “poisoning” as an example of the imbalanced unsupported claims that don’t fit facts based on Western sourcing, urging the West to make determinations that are “dispassionate and bring it back into the realm of rationality” from where it has strayed.
It is a very informative interview, and I have only hit upon a very few points raised by Baud. Very informative analysis, as was his first two interviews.
https://www.thepostil.com/our-interview-with-jacques-baud/
@Ted Belman
Could you ask your techs to fix your discussion?
1.There should be a “reply” option below each entry, and the replies should appear below the comment. It is a standard that any competent tech will be able to implement.
2. The thumbs up does not work. At least not for me.
I click on the thumbs up and nothing happens.
3. Every time I go to your page, I get the annoying screen asking me to sign up. In reality I have been signed up for over 10 years and still am. The system should know it.
These improvements will make your site more welcoming to the users, and indeed your site deserves more users.
=====================
As for the article, I could not understand why you posted it.
To me it sounded like the standard propaganda B.S. I am grateful to
@Tzvi-Gad for having read it and commented it thoroughly.
So the article is not worth reading, but without it @Tzvi-Gad would not have commented, so perhaps it is good that you posted it after all.
I wanted to give a thumbs up to @Tzvi-Gad, but the site did not allow me.
Hmm, how does he know that?
The later “invasions” were due to the ensconced credo of “Balance of Power”. …”The Sick Man Of Europe” could not be allowed to fall to any one State. This, at a time when every state which had military sufficiency was wanting to expand at the expense of the weaker, regardless of whether it was contiguous or not.
Russia was in an expansionary period also, and this could not be allowed to the already gargantuan Empire.. There was a variety of causes which led up to the Crimean War. Also The Russians and Ottomans had been in an almost perpetual state of war for centuries, and needed only a spark to go to it again..
@ Tzvi-Gad
Thank you for your elucidating comments.. I hope you will become an active commentator on Israpundit.
Kindly tell us of your background. You obviously are well informed.
I posted both the video and the article because they both gave the same message. A message, I might add, that runs contrary to most of the articles I post.. Also, I have respect for the Hoover Institute.. Perhaps a little less now.
@Tzvi-Gad
A very detailed analysis. Well done.
Just so we are clear about what is what.
NATO has been training Ukrainian troops since 2014, and US has provided training and equipment to them since 2015.
The war in Ukraine is over. Russians have achieved their objectives, and sending equipment now will do nothing but prolong the agony for Ukraine.
Much of the equipment is complex and requires weeks if not months of training while most of the equipment is infantry in nature, but does not provide mobility for combined arms units that would be required to stage a counter-offensive. Poland is providing most of the tanks, but these are very old models of T-72. Most of the artillery being provided are the badly designed M777 towed howitzers not designed for combined arms operational warfare. These require weeks if not months of training.
Essentially NATO is conducting an undeclared war against Russia it promised would never happen back in 1993. And now its collective pants are on fire.
Were Russians paranoid?
No.
Russia has been invaded seven times from the west in the last five centuries.
Russo-Crimean Wars (1570–1572), an Ottoman invasion that penetrated Russia and destroyed Moscow.
Polish–Muscovite War (1609–1618), Poland gained Severia and Smolensk.
Swedish invasion of Russia (1708–1709), an unsuccessful Swedish invasion, as part of the Great Northern War (1700–1721).
French invasion of Russia (1812), an unsuccessful invasion by Napoleon’s French Empire and its allies, as part of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815).
Crimean War (1853–1856), a series of conflicts between the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, France, Sardinia and the Russian Empire, including an Allied invasion of the Crimean Peninsula.
Eastern Front (World War I) (1914–1918), Russia was forced to cede Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states to Germany as the Russian Empire collapsed.
Operation Barbarossa (1941), an unsuccessful invasion of the Soviet Union led by Nazi Germany that started the Eastern Front (World War II) of 1941
I predict similar outcomes this time around also.
This is the kind of bullshit ‘news’ Americans are fed by so called experts, in this case a political academic offering opinion on military operations.
Here is my review of another ‘analysis’ in Foreign Affairs.
How Not to Invade a Nation
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-29/how-not-invade-nation?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email
What Foreign Affairs would publish – commentary on US military ‘experts’.
It is hard to know where to begin in addressing this ‘analysis’.
1. Most analysis begins with stating known facts. This one starts with analysts’ opinions.
2. Putin had warned of this action in 2008 following the defeat of Georgia. That operation was meticulously rehearsed, and so was this invasion during Zapad 21 exercises.
3. The objectives stated by authors were never stated by the Russians! They sound like what American generals may have planned!
4. The proposal is that this offensive is just like every other offensive the Red/ Soviet Army carried out…except it’s not.
5. Firstly, credentials. Fred Kagan is a former West Point associate professor in Russia/ Soviet military history (five years). He taught the people that lost the US wars since Vietnam. His most recent publications are Ground truth: the future of U. S. land power. 2008. with Thomas Donnelly, Lessons for a long war: how America can win on new battlefields. 2010, and “author of the 2007 report Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq, is one of the intellectual architects of the successful “surge” strategy in Iraq.” which still led to a defeat a decade later.
Mason Clark looks to have graduated university about two years ago!
5. The first paragraph betrays the very American thinking about the Russian strategy, transactional and general in nature, assuming a “conventional” war. Why would Russia want to conquer Ukraine? The USSR fought a decade-long insurgency in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War. Did Kagan not know this? Would Russians want a deja vu?
6. In fact taking large cities by direct assault was forbidden by Stalin (Belgorod) following the Kursk counter offensives. There were two exceptions made to the rule: Konigsberg and Berlin. Did Russians learn nothing from Grozny? So it seems to me the taking of Kiev was never a part of the plan.
7. “Russia’s invasion has come up short for many reasons. Ukrainian heroism and remarkably intelligent and adaptive fighting techniques are major ones.” If this statement was true, where was this heroism and intelligence in the Eastern separatist provinces since 2014? Lets remember that “heroism” is another word for “no other options”.
8. In para. 4 authors refer to the Soviet development of the “Deep Battle” that was used to defeat the Germans and would have been used to defeat NATO, notably in 1984. But they fail to state Russian objectives! In fact the campaign was declared “special” which clearly means not ‘conventional’. In para.8 they state the objectives were “..to seize Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities, remove the current Ukrainian government, and impose a new regime beholden to Moscow.” but these are not even reported in the anti-Russian Wikipedia article!
9. The stated Russian *strategic* objectives were in a three point plan (Putin, 24 Feb.):
i. to prevent NATO forces basing in Ukraine
ii. to secure the two independent republics
iii. to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.
Also stated was that there was no intention to occupy Ukraine.
Two weeks later two *operational* aims were stated:
a. To secure Donbas and southern Ukraine,
b. to create a land corridor from Crimea and Southern Russia to the Dnestr region, i.e. Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic.
10. Instead the authors acknowledge Russian achieved *their* stated intentions in para. 9, but claim the Russians failed to conform with Kagan & Clark “what I would have done”! Here there is blatant misinformation in the locating of Kharkov “250 miles to the east” of Kiev. In actual fact Kharkov is 40km from the Russian border, and 298 miles from Kiev.
11. Kharkov is a good illustration of factual evidence of Russian claims of nazification of Ukraine. Nazis in Germany sought in the first place to remove all non-German ethnic population of the former German Empire from Germany. Kharkov used to be a 63% Russian ethnic city before the Russian Revolution. Since Ukrainian independence it has become a 63% Ukrainian city, with 10% of the Russian population fleeing by 2001.
12. Have these military strategic and operational objectives been achieved?
Looking at this map https://www.9111.ru/questions/7777777771881328/#image-3, yes!
The offensives in the North and East of Ukraine were largely spoiling attacks designed to a) force Ukrainians to defend everywhere, something they could not afford, and b) to imbue Russian forces with combat experience.
The strategic objectives were met, and all that remains now is to negotiate the Ukrainian surrender, with one term being the free passage of commercial and civilian traffic from Crimea and southern Russia through the Odessa region which remained untouched because it has a 20% ethnic Russians population. After all, the diplomats need to ‘win’ something also after the dust settles. This will secure the operational objectives.
12. Mrs. Kagan & Clark seem to not have kept up with the reform in Russian forces. They think “the 1st Guards Tank Army, which is optimized for a rapid offensive using tanks and armored personnel carriers” is a ‘deep battle’ tank army, but actually this is a combined arms corps-sized formation, retaining the name for historical purposes only. And of course even combined arms formations have tanks.
13. Other glaring ignorance of Ukraine is reflected in para. 12 that the Russian offensive towards Zaporizhzhia was halted by Ukrainian resistance. In actual fact Zaporizhzhia is the sentimental cultural heart of Cossack history, and the taking of that may have invited a creation of a national volunteer movement that currently doesn’t exist. Putin merely showed what he could do, without ‘connecting the punch’.
14. So Kagan & Clark state the campaign was designed to fail according to *what they would have done* while acknowledging the limited gains. Apparently the authors are not aware that the actual strategy called for limited achievable objectives to begin with. This campaign has not been without tactical setbacks, but negligent in the scheme of things.
In all this is an appallingly bad analysis if it even deserves to be called that. It is mostly a misinformed bias piece by an armchair academic who is clearly unaware of the meaning of the word “special” in reference to strategic and operational military planning. I’m sure Russians are laughing at these American ‘experts’.
PS. I also note the graphics. The only map provided does not depict the main Russian line of effort towards Odessa. It also omits that Donbas region is the Lugansk and Donetsk republics depicted on the map.
@Michael Well it’s all over the news now. NBC news says they’ ve been reporting this sort of thing for over a month, another site says there’s a second ship on fire – don’t know what law this violates, US law, he doesn’t say. Putin denies any of this, says its fake news, which it has to be, not only because he doesn’t want to provide a Gulf of Tonkin incident pretext to the Brandon admin but because he understands that
https://youtu.be/CJh59vZ8ccc
And he’s well armed with Quadrovela as are our rulers, thankfully. What’s that? I hear you ask? I’m glad you asked.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RmMHmimYHdo
@Michael Well it’s all over the news now. NBC news says they’ ve been reporting this sort of thing for over a month, another site says there’s a second ship on fire – don’t know what law this violates, US law, he doesn’t say. Putin denies any of this, says its fake news, which it has to be, not only because he doesn’t want to provide a Gulf of Tonkin incident pretext to the Brandon admin but because he understands that
https://youtu.be/CJh59vZ8ccc
And he’s well armed with Quadrovela as are our rulers, thankfully. What’s that? I hear you ask? I’m glad you asked.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RmMHmimYHdo
Thank you, Sebastien, for the Auctioneer lessons. I imagine it’s Deplorables like me, who are being auctioned at the Globalist Slave Market.
Ben Harnwell, meanwhile, has some interesting comments about the Ukraine debacle:
https://gettr.com/streaming/p18lhz30093
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8V9Rl9IneA
And the house is taking bets. Who will be the big winner? https://youtu.be/u8V9Rl9IneA