Ukraine’s Three Armies

By MARK SLEBODA   27.1.23

The cries have risen up shrilly as one across Western MSM, commentariat, and governments.

Everything that the collective West has supplied to the Kiev regime in Ukraine – more than $120 billion taxpayer dollars’ worth of weapons, military aid and support in the last year alone – is NOT ENOUGH!!!

At Davos in front of the golden billionaire elite and the governments they own, at Rammstein where the increasingly frantic Western defense ministries huddle – Zelenskiy demands of them in increasingly insistent tones, like some horribly monstrous toddler that can never ever be satisfied – “MOAR!”

The Kiev regime’s military chief, General Zaluzhny, laid out what the Kiev regime needs and demands of the West in detailed terms – “I need 300 tanks, 600-700 infantry fighting vehicles, 500 Howitzers.”
Never mind that such numbers of military hardware is more than the total armoured forces of most European armies all together.
And another 100,000 conscripts for the meat grinder, as well, it seems from the new announced umpteenth wave of mobilization.
The Kiev regime needs another new army.

A non-sheeple astute observer, despite the inundation with propaganda about “Ukraine winning” might pause at this moment and wonder where their previous army went and why they need another if they are winning…

The army that the Kiev regime started 2022 out with, was the second largest in Europe, after Russia according to Western military assessments, and included some 250,000 active duty troops, and a large arsenal of capable Soviet-legacy military hardware –  2,600 tanks, 14,000 armored vehicles, 3,000 artillery pieces, 500 multiple launch rocket systems, 90 ballistic missiles, nearly a thousand total air defense systems, over 300 military aircraft, and a large drone fleet. This army had been built up for eight years with NATO funding and training, and was dug into heavy fortifications and trenches constructed over the same period.
That military was largely destroyed by Russian forces by the summer.

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The Kiev regime’s second army cobbled together during the first half of 2022 by NATO states consisted of the tattered remnants of the first, as well as pretty much the entire remaining Soviet legacy arsenal of the former east Bloc countries that have since joined NATO, like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czech, Slovakia, etc.

There weapons were the best and most suitable logistically for Kiev regime troops because they already knew how to use and repair them, and had parts stocks for them as well. This included over 400 tanks, at least 300 infantry fighting vehicles, over a thousand APCs, dozens more combat aircraft – and all this was peppered with a hodgepodge of Western military gear including several hundred artillery pieces, including the M777s, over a hundred multiple launch rocket systems including the HIMARS, hundreds of drones, over 10,000 handheld Anti-tank guided missiles and anti-aircraft missiles, and more.

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The Kiev regime claims that its waves of mobilization and mass forced conscription built up a million-man army. Thousands of them received NATO training and had all of NATO’s satellites,  C4ISR, as well as Pentagon planning and wargaming provided at their disposal.

This second army is now also largely attritted and exhausted, having suffered very heavy casualties in the Kiev regime’s supposedly “successful” counteroffensives in Kherson and Kharkov in the autumn, charging across open steppe into superior artillery, rocket systems, and air dominance, while Russian forces adopting tactics similar to Mongol horse archers just tactically withdrew while firing Parthian shots over their shoulder, refusing any major contact engagement and preserving their own forces.

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Tens of thousands of Kiev regime troops and their gear in endless waves of reinforcements have also been ground down to dissolution by Wagner’s operation “meat grinder” in Bakhmut, Soledar, and in northern Lugansk.

The Kiev regime has been fighting a territory-focused manpower heavy war of maneuver, while Russia is fighting a classic, coldly calculating, firepower heavy war of attrition. The grim results are telling,

Russia has now taken the kid’s gloves of the self-limited “SMO” off, at last mobilized for a real war, and begun a new far more serious winter offensive starting season 2.

The Kiev regime, their toys mostly broken, is desperately screaming for the US and the rest of NATO to provide them with another, third, army.
So far, a hodge podge variety of hundreds more infantry fighting vehicles, over a thousand more APCs, a couple hundred more artillery pieces, a token number of Western anti-aircraft systems, and a scattering of sundry pledged by the West falls far short of what Zaluzhny says he needs, and far far short of what the Kiev regime actually started this war with and has lost so far…

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And with the circus variety of gear from across NATO presenting insurmountable logistical issues for Kiev in terms of training, maintenance, ammunition and parts, and repair.

The US and Germany are still bickering and goading each other of who should provide Kiev regime forces with their own modern main battle tanks. But even assuming they will eventually come to some agreement, these Abrams and/or Leopards with huge training and logistical hurdles to overcome, just will never be supplied in enough numbers to compensate for the far higher numbers of tanks that Kiev has already lost and won’t change the end results on the battlefield. Russia has explicitly declared that they will burn just like the rest have.
This third Kiev regime army is even more inevitably doomed than the first two were.

NATO and its military industrial complex have been fighting low-intensity counter-insurgency warfare in third world countries and building expensive high-end boon-doggles for decades.

They just aren’t prepared to fight the type of land-centric, artillery-heavy, industrial warfare of attrition that Russia is fighting and has spent decades preparing exactly for in Ukraine. And the West’s for-profit corporate defense companies cannot wind up production fast enough to make a difference, according to their own admission. The arsenal of democracy is effectively out of business.

No matter how much NATO escalates in this proxy war on Russia, – Here, now, in Russia’s own backyard, fighting this kind of war, Russia does and will always have conventional escalation superiority.

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The US and the rest of NATO have two options left – swallow the humiliation and take the nearest exit ramp out of Ukraine or double down and take the gamble of directly attacking Russia with all their own military forces and whatever equipment they have left, in order to save their proxy client regime in Ukraine, without any guarantee of winning, and risking World War III in the process.
Either way, Russia is ready.