There’s been all that talk about the upcoming Ukrainian offensive, and I keep waiting for people in the West to figure it out, but I’m afraid it’s not happening, so I’ll describe why such an offensive is simply impossible. I mean, it’s possible, but it’s an incredibly suicidal idea.

To put it simply, the way Ukrainians fought this war so far can be divided into two main tactical modes. The first is to dig into concrete installations surrounded by civilians, and make themselves extremely hard to dig out, and force the Russians to kill their own civilians in the process. The examples of this are Mariupol and Bakhmut. The second tactical mode is to use American satellite imagery in order to see what positions are poorly defended by Russians, and make a breakthrough there.

Both tactical modes are the result of battlefield realities: first, the Russians own the sky, they own the option of heavy bombardment, they see everything with satellites, AWACS planes and drones, and facing them in the open means facing a superior army without an element of surprise, which means annihilation. The second battlefield reality is that Ukraine consists mostly of vast empty landscapes – both forests and agricultural land and fields. Those vast swathes of land are basically indefensible, you can’t have enough military coverage to be able to protect every spot against a concentrated attack, and to add insult to injury, the Russians tend to be using extremely low numbers in this war, and I guess it’s called special military operation for a reason, because they aren’t using troop concentrations sufficient to make it a proper war, and on the other hand it’s not a police intervention either. This means that the Russians can’t defend the entire length of the front against a concentrated pin-point attack, and both sides need to give up open land immediately, because any non-fortified static troop placement will immediately find itself under enemy fire. This also explains why the Russians chose to withdraw from certain positions; open land is costly to defend, and you gain nothing except the ability to brag about controlling more land. The corollary is that the war is about controlling key fortified junctions, and after those fall, you also lose huge swathes of land that surround them. Also, the two sides see the war differently; the Ukrainians try to control as much land as possible in order to present this as a victory. The Russians, on the other hand, intend to destroy the enemy, and see control over the land as a result of that; controlling much land before the enemy has been destroyed isn’t necessarily something that incurs benefits, especially if you have a large “fifth column” to contend with on the territory you control, as they did in Kherson city, where a significant minority of the population is virulently pro-Ukrainian and created so much problems for the Russians that they decided to give the city up and destroy the concept of Ukrainian state and nationality first; policing crazy people at this point was more trouble than it was worth.

To put it in simple terms, the Ukrainians want to take the land and genocide the Russians from it. The Russians want to destroy the genocidal Ukrainian ideological leadership and pacify the country so that it is no longer a threat.

This makes any Russian withdrawal a moral issue, because the Ukrainians will kill all “collaborators” (read: normal people) on this territory. This happened in Bucha, it happened in Kherson city, and in many other places. Also, at any point where the Ukrainians get close enough, they will deliberately target Russian and pro-Russian civilians; they even targeted their own prisoners of war in order to discourage surrender. Wherever the Russians take control, they try to establish normality and civility; however, the part of the population that has been infected by the mental virus of Ukrainianism constantly create trouble there, and the Russians have no clear idea of what to do with them. They don’t want to kill them, and nothing else seems to work.

What does this mean to the possibility of offensive warfare by both sides?

As for the Russians, I’m not even sure that they themselves know what they want to do. For them, it’s more about what they don’t want: they don’t want the Americans to continue occupying and indoctrinating increasingly closer countries and installing virulently anti-Russian “democratic” zombies there, not to mention American bases and nuclear-war installations. They also don’t want to cause a nuclear war with America. In addition, they don’t want other countries to dictate what they can or cannot do in their own sphere of interest, for instance trying to restrict trade and the flow of money. Other than that, I’m not sure that they either know or care. They are in the process of figuring out what they are, and so far they can’t decide between the Imperial/Orthodox past and the Soviet past, trying to own the legacy of both, and integrate it with what they see as the good things that came from the West – capitalist economy, freedom of expression, democracy and so on. Unfortunately, this process of figuring out what they are is being interrupted by the West, which would prefer Russia not to be at all, which unfortunately makes it all-but-certain that the most radical, violent and determined fractions within Russia will prevail, because that’s what happens when the country and nation are under attack by a foreign enemy. This means that the goals and methods used by Russia in this war might suddenly change, from the current careful and indecisive approach, to a sledge hammer of genocide that will simply wipe out everything in its path, when they have had enough of this bullshit. This means that the Russians are exclusively limited by political will and ideology, and militarily they can do whatever they want, when they decide that they want it enough to pay the price required for freedom.

The Ukrainians are a different matter. Ideologically, they have no problem with any kind of murder, torture, genocide or plunder required to attain their goals, which are to kill all Russians and create a Ukrainian fake nation with a fake history in their place. Their problem is that they have no military or industrial capacity for any such thing, which necessarily makes them an instrument of the West. They also sustained heavy losses and simply don’t have the manpower left for offensive warfare. They supposedly have 12 brigades trained by the West, in reserve for the “spring offensive”, but if you have in mind that they lost 35 brigades in Bakhmut, and they presently don’t count brigades at more than 50% of conventional numbers, it becomes obvious that they can’t perform serious offensive actions against any position the Russians are willing to defend, and the Russian goal won’t even be to defend a position, as much to kill those 12 “brigades” of virulent Nazis, and once this is done, simply march to Kiev and take over. The Russians won’t fight the Ukrainians over some field, they intend to destroy the hostile Ukrainians, and the easiest way to weed those out is to wait for them to come to you with guns and try to kill you. Then you turn them into graves and repeat the process until they stop coming. At this point you march to Polish border and establish the Democratic Republic of Ukraine as a member of the Russian federation, the way it historically always was.

So, why exactly is it technically impossible for the Ukrainians to perform an offensive? First of all, they don’t have the high ground, which at this day and age means supremacy in space and air. In space, the Americans provide the Ukrainians with all the data, but the Russians see everything as well, so things are equal in that regard. However, the Russians control the air, and for all intents and purposes, the entire Ukraine is a Russian-managed no-fly zone. Whatever flies there is either Russian, or a target. To prepare for an offensive means to stage fuel, weapons, ammunition, food and men close to the point where you want to make a breakthrough. As you do the staging, the enemy does the watching, and when your warehouses and barracks are full, they blow them up. This is what’s been happening in the recent weeks, to great effect, and to a point where the Ukrainians no longer have anything to do the offensive with. Also, when you assemble all those troops, tanks and stuff, it’s very visible from orbit, and a very nice and fat target for the Russian cruise missiles and airforce. On the other hand, the Russians can assemble whatever forces they want in the background, and the Ukrainians can’t do anything about it. This means that the Ukrainians can’t technically perform significant offensive operations, and the Russians can, but whether they actually do it depends on their strategical assessment of the wider war with the West, and their intents on the international scene.

After the liberation of Artyomovsk (or, should we say, successful accomplishment of the Bakhmut meat grinder operation), some numbers are starting to come up, so I’ll lay down the basic stats.

The Ukrainians seem to have rotated between 27 and 35 brigades in and around Bakhmut. Those units are now mostly destroyed – dead or wounded. The minimal number of Ukrainian dead in this operation was around 50000, although I wouldn’t be surprised at twice as much.

The vast majority of Russian fighters involved in the operation belong to the Wagner private military organization, and the number that is mentioned is around 26000 men, enhanced by some Russian regular troops – marines and paratroopers. The losses on the side of Wagner are not clear – I haven’t seen any actual reports, but I would guess two to five thousand dead, but the number of troops involved in the operation definitely puts the upper limit of 10000 to a total number of Russian casualties in the operation. The Wagner people also seem to be tired, stressed out, and in dire need of being rotated out of the front line.

The Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut were among the most heavily fortified positions in the history of war, and I’m not saying that lightly. There are hundreds of kilometres of underground tunnels and facilities there, plus the Soviet reinforced concrete buildings that are incredibly hard to grind down. They also had all kinds of drones and surveillance equipment, uninterrupted supplies and so on.

The conventional wisdom of war states that you need a 3x stronger attacking force to conduct a successful siege. The fact that the Russians managed to grind down such a powerfully fortified settlement with so few troops is a unique thing in the history of warfare. Their success can be attributed to several factors. First, the Ukrainians tend to approach warfare like moles and ground hogs, digging themselves in and counting on being very hard to dig out. By doing this, they forfeit all initiative of manoeuvre warfare, and basically just postpone their inevitable defeat. Furthermore, the Russians used more and better artillery, advanced tactical and operational skills, and worked against an enemy whose position is fixed and known, with their own force that is flexible and mobile. They also used some very advanced stuff, like electronic tags for preventing blue-on-blue fire, drones, infrared goggles and sights and so on, and they also controlled the air, being able to call on occasional airstrikes, although this happened rarely. The fact that the Russians had a much smaller force contributed to the length of the operation, but to be honest, the nature of the operation was such that you could hardly do this faster by throwing more men at it; you would merely increase your losses, which the Russians tried to avoid, and quite successfully.

So, far from the picture of courageous but outnumbered Ukrainian soldiers fighting against a huge tide of Mordor, the truth seems to be the opposite – the huge number of Ukrainians dug themself deeply into concrete, displayed neither military skill nor tactical intelligence, underestimated their enemy, misread the tactical situation, and were an inferior fighting force by absolutely all standards of warfare, except for the level of equipment, which was of the highest NATO quality and included very current intelligence provided by American military satellites and analysts in Ramstein and other locations via satellite Internet link. Another deplorable thing about the Ukrainians is that they invariably tend to dig in in a civilian settlement, and not just any, but one with Russian population, because they know that the Russians will care about civilian casualties, and to them, the more Russian civilians die, the better. This fact complicates things immensely for the Russians, because they have to restrict the use of weapons of mass destruction, and basically dig out the ground hogs slowly with very granular and localised attacks, and not, for instance, with high-yield thermobaric weapons that would basically kill every living thing in the area, or with enough explosive to level the entire city blocks, which they absolutely could do.

All in all, this confirms my assessment that the Russians were doing this operation with basically their little finger, and one arm and both legs tied. They didn’t use practically any of their military, they didn’t use high-yield weaponry, they were constantly fighting outnumbered, and the enemy could count on NATO intelligence support from satellites and AWACS planes and what not, and they treated this not as some great adversity, but they literally called this “operation meat grinder”. They saw this as a slaughterhouse for the enemy, because they got them to defend a strategically crucial point they can’t afford to lose because it controls the entire area east of Dniepr river and is also the most heavily fortified area in that part of the world, and they knew several things: Russian soldiers are better, Russian tactics are better, and Russian weapons are better than NATO weapons. This sounds incredible, but the results speak for themselves.

Also, it is obvious that the Russians were in no hurry to end this quickly at all cost; they are in fact in no hurry even to end the regular bombardments of Donetsk city. My analysis of their strategy is that they are trying to accomplish two major things: first, not escalate this into a nuclear war if at all possible, because then the losses would be such, that the entire Ukraine would be a rounding error; and second, avoid being so successful in warfare that they destroy their own economy and relations with friendly countries in the process. Winning Ukraine is not really a goal; it’s basically not even something they really want, but rather something they tried very hard to avoid, but couldn’t. If they wanted to get Ukraine, they could do it easily by cutting all Ukraine’s ties to the West by entering from Belarus at the NATO border with several hundred thousand troops and thousands of tanks and other heavy machinery, turning off gas, electricity and water to all population centres of Ukraine, destroying the Ukrainian military, killing their leadership and installing their own military government in Kiev. This is still quite possible, but I have to ask, what would they actually gain, and at what cost? They would demonstrate strength and decisiveness and eliminate a very hostile force that is a puppet of their true enemies. Millions of Ukrainians would die. This would portray the Russians as ruthless, dangerous savages and would result in a serious propaganda victory for the West. Now they look “weak” and “indecisive”, but they also look restrained, careful and rational. Maybe they don’t want to look like someone who has the most powerful military in the world, and no virtue and restraint in its application, no? However, I’m not sure that their restraint works against America, because America seems to be too stupid to understand it or even to perceive it; they implicitly assume that the Russians would just go in and brute-force everything if they could, and the fact that they don’t means that they can’t. The concept that the Russians could easily depopulate Ukraine, but simply don’t want to do it because of moral reasons, is absolutely unfathomable to the Americans, because they see the Russians as a big violent stupid bear that does everything by brute force and great numbers, and they see themselves as surgical-precision superior-technology superpower; however, the mere statistical layout of the Russian victory in Bakhmut, which will be called Artyomovsk from now on, proves the opposite. The Americans are the ones who get by using low-precision (basically, kill them all and let God sort them out), brute force, numerical supremacy approach (so called “shock and awe”), and the Russians are using high-precision, high-technology, strategically and tactically careful approach, succeeding against a NATO force that has satellites and AWACS and all kinds of ground weaponry, and is 3-4x more numerous, and the result was a resounding Russian victory with minimal losses of manpower and equipment.

The silliest thing is, the West still thinks it has a technological and tactical superiority, and believes in magical virtues of “modern NATO weapons” and “NATO training”, both of which proved to be obviously inferior. Unless American military analysts do an analysis similar to the one I made, this is absolutely not going to end well for anybody, because they are going to double-down on their mistakes until they feel they have to resort to a nuclear option, which the Russians are trying to avoid at all cost, but this seems to actually increase the probability of such outcome. I don’t think it’s possible for the Americans to accept the facts of the situation, which are that their technology and tactical training suffered a resounding defeat by a technologically and tactically superior, but vastly numerically weaker enemy. They just had too much of their own kool-aid, and the talk of sending F-16s into Russian air defence umbrella is strong evidence thereof. They just don’t get it that the Russian rocket technology is at least 20 years superior to their own, that Russian radars are superior to their own, and that the Russians also have satellites and AWACS planes, high-precision and long-range rockets, and all kinds of technological wizardry. Unfortunately, after the cold war they stopped being afraid, and they could very much use fear at this point, because they were never so relatively weak against an opponent since their independence war against Britain.