To all those who may be dooming or wildly rejoicing. This war is not between Russia and Ukraine. This is not even a war, this is a special military operation and for good reason. Let me elaborate. First things first this struggle is between American empire and Russia, not Russia and the west, and certainly not Russia and Ukraine. The empire chose to precipitate matters maybe as an example for China or to have Russia defeated before attacking China. Regardless why, what was intended was for Russia to come in all guns blazing takeover all of Ukraine in short order and THEN get mired in a long bloody insurgency loosing men materiel and treasure. The freezing of assets and overwhelming sanctions would then further deteriorate the internal conditions such as that political instability would set in finally resulting in regime change. Russia could then be raped dismembered devoured by the empire at leisure. This is why the special military operation is a special military operation and not a war. The objective here is not simply to defeat the Ukrainian army, it is rather designed to bring maximum damage to the empire while keeping the costs for Russia manageable. The Russian campaign is running on simmer being careful not to let the situation boil over at any point. The pace of operations is glacial on purpose. The longer the conflict is drawn out the more harm the empire and it’s allies will endure. Their policies will result in self inflicted pain, their hubris will not let them walk back to more sensible positions. The empire is trapped in a pit it has dug, its allies are mere hostages. Is there a point of pain that can be reached where the citizens of Europe may demand of their leaders to revolt against the empire? Who knows if such a point exists, if it is reached this winter or the next? However there is another sphere where the battle is taking place and that is in the nation’s that are not in the hallowed west. Here in the nations some poor and some not so much an evaluation of prospects is being done. Siding with the west is safe from reprisals but in the emerging economic scenario might be tantamount to suicide. Even the dimmest leaders know their fate if they fail to keep their citizens fed and supplied with essentials. Considerable shifts have already materialised and more are sure to follow as things get tighter. The empire potentially losing European allies or losing influence across the globe are far more valuable objectives than a quick roll up of the Ukrainian army.

On the tactical side the Ukrainian leadership continues to throw it’s troops onto prepared Russian defences and continues to suffer unfavorable casualty ratio of at least 1 to 5 if not more. Can Ukraine continue this frivolous behaviour for another six months a year two years? Can they continue to be supplied for as long? Can the West ,will the west continue to foot the bill to keep Ukraine running and fighting? How many more Ukrainian refugees will Europe accomodate? 10 mln?20 mln?

Russian aim of denazification will be accomplished either by destruction on the contact line of those willing to fight or by emigration of those unwilling to fight.

Demilitarization will be complete once the western support dries up. Almost all Ukrainian military industrial enterprises have already been destroyed and whatever remains on the field will eventually be destroyed.

In the meantime we may see many Russian retreats and setbacks to give the enemy glimpses of victory, to keep him fighting and dying. In any case Kiev has no other option, for the fear of losing support, neither do their sponsors who are ideological bent on destroying Russia.

A multi pronged combined arms high intensity manoeuvering operation would be interesting to watch for purely academic purposes, however if the preceding hypothesis is even somewhat correct then we are going to have to wait a considerable time before this special military operation terminates.

P.S. Also of equal interest are the actions of the empire.

How far will they go? How do they extract themselves, if they ever do?

This right here

On the whole I find this compelling and interesting but I’m wary of accepting that “it was all part of the plan” for the Russians when clearly major problems have been occurring in the execution of those plans.

I think the US made major miscalculations and I think Russia prepared as well as they could but I don’t think the US is going to be able to back out quickly. The only conditions they’d accept would be return to a pre-2014 situation or at most the Minsk accords which Russia now has moved past after granting those areas citizenship. Anyways the fascists in Ukraine who are in real control may not honor any kind of stand-down order and may keep fighting. The US could cut them off from weapons but they’d have enough left to instigate terror attacks for years to come in Russian territories.

I think this is potentially the beginning of the end for the US but I also wouldn’t be shocked if within a few years Russia was couped, Putin removed and became a western puppet as a result of set-backs. Because Russia and Putin can’t just walk away from this conflict either. If they pull out the Ukrainian Nazis are going to be crossing their border and shelling nearby towns and cities, kidnapping, terror tactics, torture, etc. That’s by design of the west. This is razor’s edge stuff for both the US and Russia and things really could go either way. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

On the tactical side the Ukrainian leadership continues to throw it’s troops onto prepared Russian defences and continues to suffer unfavorable casualty ratio of at least 1 to 5 if not more. Can Ukraine continue this frivolous behaviour for another six months a year two years?

America will literally fight to the last Ukrainian if they think it benefits them and Zelinski’s survival probably depends on doing what they want. Their security services are fully run by the most deranged fascist criminals. The people of Ukraine may not be so keen but they’re not about to rise up either and probably aren’t able to win such a thing anyways with fascist terror squads full of pedophile rapists and torturers willing to make gruesome examples of disobedience and disloyalty.

They have enough fascist blocking units that they can continue to conscript and forcibly throw men into the meat grinder for quite some time I believe. (Even without those, I would not be shocked at all if the CIA also helped them hold to account men who tried to flee via satellite intel and other methods) It is claimed 5 to 1 here for Ukrainian/Russian forces deaths. Let’s say they commit 2 million men to this, not an unreasonable number and perhaps even a low one if the west is truly committed to this and this conflict continues on for another 6 months. That would mean the deaths of 400,000 Russian soldiers in exchange for that 2 million. Even if the Russians can cut their death rate in half that’s still 200,000 lost lives. Are the Russian people willing to bear such a sacrifice on land that has not been theirs in living memory? Are the Russian forces prepared to continue to train and replenish their troops in the face of just an onslaught of desperate Ukrainians, some of them armed to the teeth with the latest western tech, others with bare basics who don’t even necessarily want to be there but are less afraid of the Russians than the Nazi blocking units who will torture and murder them if they hesitate?

Right now Russia should be seeking to kill as many of those fascist paramilitary blocking units as possible to make resistance or even just slacking off more possible in the Ukrainian forces. The problem is there are an awful lot of them, more than even many on the left supposed at the start of this.

Can they continue to be supplied for as long?

This is the real question. They have the ability to conscript people, they’ve been doing so and throwing them in the meat grinder, their commitment to this is not at all in question and with fascist blocking units it’s not a matter of inability either.

The real question is can the west continue to supply them. For the sake of the arms makers they’d say yes and hope so, certainly the US has quite a bit of funds so it isn’t likely to be an issue of the treasury running dry, more capacity being exhausted. But with the pull-out from Afghanistan, Iraq being way on the back burner and no other realistic conflicts of scale they can grab onto, the “defense” industry is desperate for this to continue as a kind of economic life-line for them. The west would like to attack Iran but it’s fairly unlikely because their prospects for even temporary victory and seizure of land are fairly low (also they have active prospects for a color revolution there thanks to the government’s disgusting repression of women). They’d like to attack the DPRK but they don’t want to get nuked. They want another major conflict and this is it.

The west’s stockpiles have been depleted by this whole situation which suggests production capacity may be an issue but Ukraine has not shown an aversion as we’ve seen with interviews from captured soldiers and even whistleblowers in their ranks to sending their troops in under less than ideal supply conditions and if the supply of nice western toys runs low they may just fall back to low tech stuff which would increase the casualty rate but that’s not a problem as the west would be fine depopulating Ukraine if it means bleeding Russia in the process.

Also consider, some of this rapid usage of western arms capacity can be down to two things that can be fixed: 1) A lot of the arms don’t reach Ukraine, they’re diverting them to disappear for a future European gladio type use should Europe try and turn to China too far and America want to reign them in, 2) untrained Ukrainian conscripts badly using weapons, panic firing, etc. The first they can stop whenever they want and put in more checks to make it harder for Ukrainians to steal the stuff and sell it and the second they can fix entirely be having NATO troops be the ones deploying it. We already know they have NATO soldiers and special forces there, just have them take over total responsibility for 90% of the usage and accuracy will go up and bang for their buck as well. Saddle the Ukrainian conscripts with basic weapons and back their attacks with real time satellite intelligence and coordination with western special forces operation of advanced weapons.

How many more Ukrainian refugees will Europe accomodate?

I think part of the plan in event of a loss is to scatter the fascists among the refugees for a new gladio type of situation (weapons have already been disappeared en route for just this). In fact we’re already seen many Ukrainians sympathetic to fascists and the extreme reactionary tendencies immigrating (Canada is full of them). I should of course note many are just fleeing for their lives and are not fascists, not all Ukrainians are, but a not insignificant portion have worrying leanings, Maidan was in 2014 and children since then have been raised by fascist indoctrination curriculum in school so there’s a real problem there and truth be told the CIA has been nurturing fascism in Ukrainian nationalism for half a century. Throw in the fall of the Soviet Union and it’s like Stalin said about the worst form of reaction seizing the people.

I think the anti-immigrant sentiment will not be as strong given they’ve already lived through taking in Syrian refugees who were brown and these are white people, many but not all of whom hold racist beliefs to warm the hearts of many a European liberal white supremacist. I think at any rate, for such things to reach a boiling point would take a few years by which point the military situation is already decided one way or the other. As it stands they’ll be exploited for cheap labor so that’s another thing going for the idea of pacifying the European populace by their domestic bourgeoisie because it benefits them.

Really your big chance I think is energy shortages leading to demonstrations that boil over into some sort of near-revolution that forces the knee but the chances of that are pretty low and besides the US already destroyed Nordstream and can destroy any other channels to make that path a closed one for the people so the most they’ll get is massive government subsidies for heat and the very poorest will as usual be left to die at the edges.

I think there’s a good chance the US keeps on supplying them until the bitter end. They may as I mentioned not be able to keep up with demand but I think they’ll also be under pressure to give them access to increasingly advanced US weapons (and they can move US operators into the country, they already have, to assure they’re kept safe from capture or being sold).

The US does not take quick L’s lightly. In Korea on the backfoot they wanted to use nukes because their pride was so wounded. This isn’t like Iraq or Afghanistan in that it’s merely a simple regional destablization and arms dealer pocket lining exercise, this is about attempting to bleed and turn up the pressure to overthrow a major adversary whose existence on the chessboard strengthens an adversary (China) whose continued existence and non-total-isolation is increasingly leading towards the complete collapse of the west. Also it isn’t a slow loss on the scale of a decade or more, it’s potentially a loss within a couple of years and not of far removed “brown people” that racist Amerikkkans will wave off as too uncivilized for their ‘democracy’ but of the precious whites to what is seen as an Asiatic barbarian power (that Russophobia of course all really calling back to just yellow peril). That would cause significant psychological repercussions in the domestic western populaces in terms of their thinking of US/NATO might to say nothing of white fragility being very wounded by the precious nazis being defeated by the ebil Russians.

“The real foundations of military knowledge are topography, movement, and supply, not strategy and tactics.” – Montgomery (I think)