After around 4 weeks of the much trumpeted NATO (Ukrainian) counter-offensive the Washington Post ran an interview with Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the top officer in Ukraine’s armed forces. Zaluzhny, who had been mysteriously absent from public view for quite a while made it abundantly clear to the Washington Post that he was not at all enthusiastic about the counter-offensive his forces were expected to carry out and expectations in the West around it:

“… Zaluzhny expressed frustration that while his biggest Western backers would never launch an offensive without air superiority, Ukraine still has not received modern fighter jets but is expected to rapidly take back territory from the occupying Russians. American-made F-16s, promised only recently, are not likely to arrive until the fall — in a best-case scenario.

His troops also should be firing at least as many artillery shells as their enemy, Zaluzhny said, but have been outshot tenfold at times because of limited resources.

So it “pisses me off,” Zaluzhny said, when he hears that Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive in the country’s east and south has started slower than expected — an opinion publicly expressed by Western officials and military analysts… “This is not a show,” Zaluzhny said Wednesday in his office at Ukraine’s General Staff headquarters. “It’s not a show the whole world is watching and betting on or anything. Every day, every meter is given by blood.”

“Without being fully supplied, these plans are not feasible at all,” he added. “But they are being carried out. Yes, maybe not as fast as the participants in the show, the observers, would like, but that is their problem.”

The counter-offensive in Ukraine should be correctly described as a NATO counter-offensive. The forces launching it have been armed and trained by NATO countries, in the territories of the NATO bloc for 6 months. The counter-offensive is set to NATO’s agenda and timetable. It is inspired, directed and fashioned both in scope and limitations by what Washington wants of the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians set out with NATO tactics and a NATO strategic plan of campaign, widely advertised by various ex-NATO cheerleader Generals.

It is clear that Ukraine has been hustled into the counter-offensive by Washington. Great things were expected by former US Generals and Western analysts, very quickly. There does not seem to be much concern about Ukrainian losses beyond the effect such losses would have on their ability and willingness to continue to fight. In fact, losses are never spoken about or quantified lest they sow panic and disgust amongst the Western public. The main target of the offensive seems to be Western public opinion.

The NATO counter offensive was probably the most advertised military operation in history. It even had its own movie trailer in which Ukrainian troops said “Shhhh…” A bizarre concoction of Hollywood and the media men running the Kiev administration.

The Russian defence, which it has had to overcome, sometimes known as the Surovikin Line, has been constructed over nine months. There are four lines of fortifications behind an initial screening zone of a lowland glacis. Russian mobile defence operating in the screening zone is made up of small units with anti-tank weapons which call on artillery and air force upon contact with the enemy. There is a high degree of attrition from the screening defence, including the dense mine fields that form the basis of it.

In the fortnight before the launch of the counter-offensive the Russians degraded the Ukrainian air defences that had been moved up to cover the advance. Vehicle convoys were devastated by the Russian Air Force as the web of minefields were being rushed. Mines did most damage and they were being constantly laid even during the advance. Much Ukrainian mine defence removal equipment was lost in these headlong assaults.

The Ukrainian counter-offensive proceeded without air superiority and with artillery dominance in favour of the defence. In fact, the degrading of the Ukrainian air defence gave the Russians air superiority over much of the battlefield, particularly to the South. After a few weeks of costly open advances Ukrainian troops resorted to their standard tactic of advancing through the cover of wooded areas in small groups. The NATO advised tactics and Western supplied armoured vehicles were abandoned, or saved for another day. Whether that day comes now, is another matter.

Before the counter-offensive it was confidently predicted that superior NATO strategy and tactics would do for the Russians. That has shown to be a mistaken view.

NATO uses small unit tactics and it taught the Ukrainians the basics of this form of warfare in Britain and Europe. This can be efficient at the tactical level but it was developed against insurgents in NATO’s small wars. It is not so good when these small units are being outgunned by artillery, battle tanks, thermobaric bombs and have to proceed through extensive minefields that slow them down to a crawl. When officers are killed the units become incapable of executing complex manoeuvres taught to them in NATO training schools and they fall back on the (Soviet) basics.

NATO, which advertises its combined arms proficiency as the gold standard, has not got the knowledge or experience of manoeuvring large forces because they have never faced a substantial enemy, like the Russian Armed Forces, in battle.

Franz Stefan Gady, a Fellow from a US think tank, spent last month assessing the counter-offensive at the various fronts. Gady noted that “no Western type of military can really do this sort of combined arms operations at scale, with the exception of the United States. But even the United States Armed Forces would have a very difficult time breaking through these defensive layers because no Western military in the world currently has any experience in breaching the types of defenses in depth that the Russians put up, in the south and east of Ukraine.”

The largest operations in Iraq and Afghanistan involved only a few hundred troops and not tens of thousands of soldiers deployed across a 900 mile front against an enemy with a large body of trained infantry, superior artillery and air power. A compact professional army is effective when fighting is done on a small scale and losses are low but in the intense attritional fighting in Ukraine armies have to be constantly replenished with new troops.

In the Karabakh war Azerbaijan suffered 14,000 casualties in 44 days, including 3,000 fatalities. That is nearly 25 per cent of Azerbaijan’s 65,000 standing army used up in just over a month of fighting. The war could only have been waged for a maximum of 2 months at such a rate of losses. Ukraine is having to replace around 25,000 men every month and finding well trained immediate replacements for this amount of casualties is becoming increasingly difficult. Kiev possessed a huge reserve at the start of the war but this has been whittled away after 500 days of fighting and the counter-offensive is using up the reserve at an unprecedented level. No amount of new weapons can compensate for such depletion of human resources.

The headline in The Washington Post on 18 July sums up Ukraine’s efforts and Washington’s requirements of them in a couple of sentences:

“Ukraine aims to sap Russia’s defenses, as U.S. urges a decisive breakthrough: Ukrainian commanders have yet to use the large-scale offensive tactics they have been trained on, as Kyiv says it needs more weapons to fight the war Washington wants.”

The Wagner drama was a brief ray of sunshine to the West. Yevgeny Prigozhin had been tasked by the Russian command with holding the line at Bakhmut around 6 months ago, owing to a shortage of regular Russian forces. But the figurehead of the Wagner PMC decided to make a name for himself as a General by capturing the city. With this in mind he recruited a large number of convicts much of whom he promptly sacrificed in going for glory. The battle of Bakhmut was won, but not before Russian aerospace, artillery and regular forces had to be diverted to win the battle, so that Wagner could be extricated. Upon extrication the Russian command decided to sideline the loose cannon Prigozhin and absorb Wagner into the regular army or re-constitute it. The knowledge of his impending obscurity prompted Prigozhin’s escapade aimed at settling scores with Shoigu and Gerasimov, whom he blamed for not pandering to his Bakhmut adventure, and for not waging the war thoroughly enough.

Putin defused the Prigozhin/Wagner bomb with considerable tact and skill, avoiding a damaging conflict that would have had the West in raptures and the Russian people disorientated at Russian fighting Russian. The high hopes of the West were dashed with the defusing of the situation. The British media, with no memory of how the British Government similarly arranged the Curragh Mutiny in the British Army, continued to tell the tale of a Russian implosion.

The Wagner Mutiny exposed the Anti-Russian nature of the conflict that the West is waging in Ukraine. The Ukrainians are mere instruments of Western policy and their deaths are meaningless in the grand scheme of things, only regretted in weakening NATO’s weapon. Prigozhin was cheered on without regard for the tens of thousands of Ukrainians his forces had killed. In fact, Ukraine was altogether forgotten as the greater prize came into view – the destruction of Putin.

The Western objective was always the disintegration of the Russian home front as a disintegrator of the frontline. What was revealed in the Prigozhin Mutiny was that the objective of the West is the disintegration of Russia not the democratisation of Russia. Why else would someone like Prigozhin be supported and why else does the West promote the idea of regime change in a Russian nationalist direction in preference to the moderate Putin? Hopes are now placed on Igor Strelkov (Girkin), a hardline force in the 2014 Novorossiya movement, who is regularly quoted in the West for his criticisms of Putin’s moderation in waging war against the Ukrainians.

After the Prigozhin narrative of Putin weakness and chaos in Russia had run its course a bombshell hit in the announcement that Washington was about to supply Kiev with cluster munition. Both Biden and Jake Sullivan, mindful of previous odium expressed in the West to the use of such a weapon, stated that this was an unfortunate necessity given that the Ukrainians were running out of ammunition for their artillery and stocks in the West of shells had been depleted. And this revelation has been saved by the West until the middle of a counter-offensive!

The use of cluster munitions has been presented as being legitimate on the basis that the Ukrainians know what they will do to their beloved territories but they are still willing to use them all the same. And it has been a concealed fact that the Kiev forces have used them against civilian areas in Luhansk and Donetsk, presumably to punish the reluctant Ukrainians, already. Cluster munition was developed during the Cold War to defend against large-scale armoured attack, supported by masses of infantry. They make large offensives difficult. But what cluster munitions will also do will be make large parts of the country uninhabitable for civilians and unusable for agriculture, for decades. The US cluster bombs have not been produced since 1996 and will have a dud rate of at least 1 in 5, according to the Washington Post.

Jake Sullivan states that the alternative is Russian tanks rolling forward through Ukrainian lines if this is not done. Whatever happened to the belief that the counter-offensive was going to smash the Russian lines and liberate Crimea by the Summer? This is an indication of how Washington sees the war going and it is not toward Crimea as General Hodges et al predicted.

At the NATO Summit in Vilnius, which the counter-offensive was launched to impress, Sullivan stated that the US “was not ready for war with Russia”. Zelensky, who threatened to not attend if his demands for more weaponry and admission were not granted, attended but was sent home angry with empty pockets. A broadside against the British Foreign Secretary was met with an undiplomatic rebuff and the post-dated resignation of the Foreign Secretary and sacking of the Ukrainian Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Both Britain and Ukraine have been put in their place by Washington, who knows what it wants from the war and has asserted ownership of it.

Hence at Vilnius, Ukraine was badly let down, being told that they would not be admitted to NATO as this might bring about a war in which the West was obliged to fight, instead of only Ukrainians. Instead, Kiev was informed by Washington it would have to win the war before it could gain the great prize of NATO protection. Since the major objective of the Special Military Operation was to prevent Ukraine being admitted to NATO this seems to justify Putin’s decision to launch it in February 2022.

Vilnius has been confirmed that the only thing required of the Ukrainian is a blood sacrifice for NATO objectives in disabling Russia as a Power in the World.

After all the media cheerleading for the great Ukrainian counter-offensive and its prospects of success the grim reality seems to have set in. Most Western media outlets have altered the “victory by the summer” narrative to the “patience please, this will be difficult” story.

Most striking has been an article published in The Daily Telegraph on 18 July by ex-British Officer, Robert Clark, entitled ‘Ukraine and the West are facing a Devastating Defeat’:

“The long-planned counter-offensive, now in its second month, has run into several problems – not least that Kyiv is still waiting for approximately half of the western military equipment promised earlier in the year. Meanwhile, its forces are under increasing pressure to commit its reserves as Russian troops – despite reports of low morale across the front – remain dug-in, seemingly committed to defending every inch of Ukrainian ground captured since last year.

As Russian minefields take their toll on western-supplied tanks and Ukrainian sappers, their forces have so-far retaken approximately five miles of the sixty miles they need to split the land-bridge connecting Russia to Crimea. The land between Mariupol in the east and Melitopol to the west is seen as the vital ground to achieving this.

It is incredibly tough going for the Ukrainians. They lack the air cover and advanced jets to protect their ground forces from Russian attack helicopters and fighters. Their soldiers, meanwhile must negotiate miles of minefields, tank-traps and then ultimately the heavily dug Russian trench networks…

The variable that isn’t on their side is time. In war, time is perhaps the cruellest factor one cannot change. We saw this in NATO’s operation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban took great delight in the retelling of a famous Afghan proverb; ‘you may have the watches, but we have the time’.

Summer will soon begin to roll into autumn. Indeed, we are already half-way through the season. The fighting will begin to grind to a cold halt as the freezing winter saps troops’ ability to conduct high-intensity warfare. This will only give Russia more time to further build up its defences, as it did last winter.

By this point in the West, meanwhile, all eyes will be on the upcoming US election, with more political attention diverted by the UK’s general election. Kyiv knows it has a shortened window of opportunity to capitalise on its battlefield initiative and take back as much ground as it can.

If Kyiv fails in its battlefield endeavours to split that land bridge, and retake much of its own territory by winter, then vocal calls of territorial concessions for marginal political outcomes will likely become far more prevalent – not just in Ukraine but likely from western capitals, as so-called “war-fatigue” begins to bite, international stockpiles of equipment and ammunition wither and politicians begin to worry about domestic budgets ahead of national elections.  

While much fighting remains to be done across Ukraine’s southern farmlands over the coming months, governments across the west must be prepared for the grim prospect of territorial concessions as one potential political outcome of a failed counter-offensive. Whether a Putinist Kremlin would respect such a deal if Kyiv were to receive security pledges short of full Nato membership is extremely doubtful.  

Regardless, this would surely be a favoured outcome for China’s ruling “wolf warrior” foreign policy elite. Beijing would be utterly delighted if the war were to end with Ukraine divided, Russian troops permanently in the Donbas harassing Kyiv and Europe, and Nato fractured on political lines. Such an outcome would be a gift to China as Xi Jinping begins to ramp up his own imperialistic and extra-territorial ambitions across the Indo-Pacific – and a devastating defeat for the West.“

Secretary of State Blinken is still confident of a Ukrainian victory. He stated at the Aspen Security Forum on 21 July:

“I believe they have what they need to be very successful.  And as they deploy and as they actually put into this effort all of the forces that have been trained in recent months, the equipment that we and some 50 countries have provided them, I think that will make a profound difference.”

At the time of writing it is widely believed that the Ukrainians have used up around one-third of the forces earmarked for the counter-offensive. While fighting continues this cannot be said to constitute a defeat of the counter-offensive, but only time will tell if these losses will have resulted in a significant degrading of Ukraine’s capacity to pursue the war to any advantage in the future.

Perhaps this was all part of the Washington/NATO plan. But it all seems too clever by half and there is likely to be Hell to pay.

The war is likely to escalate with the West having welched on the grain provision deal. The Russians are taking out the Ukrainian port facilities at Odessa and Nikolaev, and Kiev is threatening all shipping on the Black Sea heading to Russian ports.

What does America make of it all? David Ignatius in the Washington Post:

“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”

It seems that the Ukrainians are what used to be known as a “catspaw”.

UPDATE – MEARSHEIMER ON NATO MEMBERSHIP FOR UKRAINE

Aaron Maté: Do you think it is fair to speculate that the U.S. policy on Ukraine was even more cynical than it appeared. Basically this war was largely fought because the U.S. refused to agree to neutrality for Ukraine, saying that you know well we have an open door for NATO so we don’t take people’s membership off the table. Yet when given the opportunity the U.S. won’t commit to granting Ukraine a roadmap to joining NATO. Which leads me to conclude that possibly: what if the aim was never to actually admit Ukrainian to NATO, but just use the future pledge of NATO membership to de facto turn Ukraine into a NATO proxy, without the obligation on the part of the US and its allies to actually defend it.

John Mearsheimer: It’s possible that’s true but impossible to say without more evidence. I have a slightly different view. I don’t think it was so much cynicism. I think it was stupidity. I think you can’t underestimate just how foolish the West is when it comes to the whole question of Ukraine and all sorts of other issues as well. I think that the West believed – and here we’re talking mainly about the United States – that if a war did break out between Ukraine and Russia, then the West plus Ukraine would prevail and the Russians would be defeated. I believe we thought that was the case. If you look at the run up to the war in early 2022 what is really striking to me is that it was quite clear that war was at least a serious possibility. Yet the United States, and the West more generally, did virtually nothing to prevent the war. If anything we egged the Russians on.

I find this hard to imagine what was going on here and I think that we believed that if a war broke out we had trained up the Ukrainians and armed the Ukrainians up enough that they would 1. Hold their own on the battlefield and 2. I think we felt the magic weapon was sanctions. That we’d finish the Russians off with sanctions and the Ukrainians would end up defeating the Russians and they would then be in a position where we could admit them into NATO. That is what I think is going on. I don’t think it’s really a case of cynicism as you portray it. It may be again this is an empirical question we just need a heck of a lot more evidence to see whether you’re interpretation is correct or mine is but my sense is this is worse than a crime, it is a blunder, as Talleyrand put it.