For a long time, Russia has been attriting the Ukrainians across a long war of attrition front that barely moved.
It is still barely moving, but what is happening on that front is rapidly changing.
Russia has been pounding the Ukrainians with a lot more shells, rockets, and bombs, than the Ukrainians have been pounding the Russians. And there are more Russians than Ukrainians. So it was inevitable that the Ukrainians would run out of conscripts, before the Russians ran out of volunteers.
As a result, it is starting to look more like slaughter than war. If you are in a street fight where you are one against three opponents, you are going to take a pounding and the the three are going to take very little harm at all.
Ukrainian lines are undermanned, and rapidly becoming even less manned. So the Russians sneak through the line at one point, and create a Russian salient. Then they sneak through the lines at another point, and create another salient, and the two salients reach around trapping the Ukrainians in a cauldron.
It used to be that what little movement happened was one side pushing the other side backwards. Now it is the Russians trapping Ukrainian troops in killing fields. The Russians are moving forward, not to gain turf, but to prevent Ukrainian troops from moving backwards.
A couple of days before I wrote this, the Russians launched a salient towards the road that connects the Pokrovsk Myrnohrad agglomeration, a city substantially larger than Bakhmut. But the Ukrainians hung onto a village that makes it dangerous for the Russians to approach the road. So, two new salients looking like a rabbit`s ears. Now the village is surrounded on three sides, and the road leading into village on both sides, and the Ukrainians are pouring their remaining elite troops into the village.
So the troops go down a road being shot at from both sides of the road, then they take up positions into village that is rapidly ceasing to be a village and becoming a moonscape of shell craters and bomb craters, while being shot at and droned from three sides.
Because there are so few Ukrainian soldiers left, their remaining soldiers are forced to fight under circumstances that put them at severe disadvantage.
Pouring elite troops into the ruins of this tiny village is undoubted a sound tactic for avoiding losing the city in the middle of the Trump/Putin talks. It is a terrible tactic for winning a war of attrition.
This little village attracts attention because close to the major road to the Pokrovsk Myrnohrad agglomeration, but the same thing is happening in many many places along the front — a day or two before the rabbits ears formed, I saw a cauldron inside a cauldron inside a cauldron, and the outermost cauldron was still bleeding troops into the inner cauldron.
From the big retreat onwards, the Russians have been fighting a war of attrition, and the Ukrainians have been dying for bullet points on tomorrow’s Washington presentation. Over the past few weeks, bullet points on tomorrow’s Washington presentation have become far more lethal.
This is how a war of attrition is lost. At first slowly, then quickly. Because the Ukraine does not have enough troops left, it is losing troops far faster than it was.
Forming salients is still a risky business for the Russians. Sometimes their attempt penetrate fails, and a lot of Russians die. Sometimes a salient gets cut off, and instead of surrounding, the Russians are surrounded. But it seems to work most of the time, and it seems to be working better and better, as Ukrainians rapidly get fewer and fewer. The Ukrainian’s have been trying to emulate this tactic, but they always wind up with salients that instead of surrounding, are surrounded, because the Russians have enough reserves to get themselves out of the mess when things go wrong, and the Ukrainians do not.
I had always hoped it wouldn’t actually go to the last Ukrainian, but alas.
Total madness, to say nothing of the repeated insistence of the media telling us that ‘losses on the Russian side are much heavier than those on the Ukranian side.’
First Covid was going to be GAE’s Chernobyl, where GAE would lose its credibility forever, but it looks like no, they got away with it. A bunch of missing vaxxed Grandma’s and “suddenly attacks”, sure, but as long as CNN never brings them up, these normies aren’t saying anything.
But Ukraine-Russia is different, right? This one will be the GAE Chernobyl, RIGHT? CNN can ignore the dead Grandma’s, the turbo-cancers and nobody-important suddenly attacks, but can they really ignore Russia winning this thing? Can they?
Normies never notice anything, but their betters are noticing and it filters down slowly. Cancel culture stopped the filtering down in its tracks, but without the heavy hand of the state, the supposedly grass roots cancellation and deplatforming went up in smoke. Massive shilling is slowing it, but only slowing it.
It has been a very long time since a war of attrition was fought to its ultimate conclusion, and people have forgotten what it looks like. Once the war is over, it is going to sink in and no one is going to want to do it again for eighty years or so. After which it will be forgotten again, and the lesson will have to be relearned.
Read the Twitter files to see how the sausage was made. Spoiler: heavy state/intelligence involvement.
That is fucking terrifying.
taken on results per soldier / resource, ukrainians have been more effective. russia only appears to be winning. if ukraine had equal numbers of men etc, it would be winning. it doesn’t, so it is losing… big dog invades smaller dog, little dog loses. not much more to it than that. little dogs can compensate with excellence, but only so far.
This depends on what results you care about.
If measured by bullet points in tomorrow’s Washington presentation to ask for more money to be embezzled, the Ukraine has been enormously more effective.
If measured by what matters in war of attrition, the destruction of enemy manpower, equipment and resources, the Russians have been enormously more effective, as demonstrated by the exhaustion of Nato weapon’s stocks and the diminution of the Ukrainian army.
After some nasty casualties at the beginning of the war, the Russians hid their casualty figures, but now that Russian casualties have considerably diminished, they are completely open and transparent about casualty figures, including the rather high casualties at the beginning of the war that they hid for quite a while. Ukrainian casualty figures remain hidden, but we can make good guess from the shrinkage of the Ukrainian army and the expansion of Ukrainian graveyards and it is obvious that the Russians are killing dozens of Ukrainians for every Russian that the Ukrainians kill. (For the first couple of years of the war it was somewhat comparable, but now the Russians are sprinting to the finish line.)
Ukrainian streets are empty and silent. Russian streets remain normal, as one would expect from a war fought by volunteers and without war socialism, with neither men nor resources being conscripted. (Russia has conscription for homeland defence, but conscripts are excused from the special military operation.)
Go to the front you disgusting evil little shit. You will throw away everyone’s life for this war but your own you hold dear.
Those like you are why we need a civil war in the heartland, because you need to be tried and your guilt spilled into the soil, burned up, and it’s not going to happen under Don. Don will look the other way on your evil little antics. Lets see how spirited you are when the weapons rain fire down around you. Lets see your wimpering moralizations when you are on trial, and its not someones else’s life you are spending.