Big news dropped yesterday about a potential peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, to end the ongoing “special military operation” – or invasion, if you prefer to be blunt. The peace talks concluded yesterday in Istanbul with a proposal put forth by the Ukies, which caused quite a stir among people interested in such things. At first glance, it would appear to be a catastrophic defeat for Russia. The terms of the peace agreement essentially bring us all back to the status quo ante bellum.

The terms offered by Kiev are as follows:

• Permanent neutral status with international legal guarantees enforced by a number of different states, including the USA, UK, Germany, and of course, Russia;
• Ukraine will never join any military alliance, nor permit foreign military bases or forces upon its soil;
• Russia will not object to Ukrainian membership of the EU;
• Formal meeting to sign the peace agreement between the two Presidents, Putin and Zelensky;
• Moratorium on the Donbas Republics and Crimean Peninsula questions for 15 years, with no attempts made by Kiev to retake these areas through military means;

It is this last point that has quite a few pro-Russian voices – including me, by the way – wondering what the HELL the Russians are smoking if they accept such an awful peace deal. And, from the Russian perspective, it IS a terrible deal.

The Russians spent 8 years trying to get Kiev to negotiate in good faith, and failed. Left without any other alternative, they finally sent in their military to do what diplomacy could not, in a classic application of the true meaning of the Clausewitzian Doctrine. They went to war to defend the ethnic Russians of the Donbas region, who have faced brutal persecution for 8 years and have lost over 15,000 of their own people to the depredations of the Ukies.

And now, it appears that the Russian leaders are ready to throw away ALL of that blood and treasure for a half-arsed, unenforceable peace deal that would stab the people of the Donbas in the back. On top of that, the Russians agreed to dramatically reduce their military operations around Kiev, which the entire presstitute corps took to mean as a Russian admission of defeat and their inability to capture Kiev.

All told, it seems like nothing short of a disaster for Russia in general, and for the Neo-Tsar in particular.

All Is Not As It Appears

Not so fast, chaps. There is much more to this story than you might think at first.

In order to understand what is going on here, you first need to understand how and why Russia fought this war. For this, you must watch the video above in (more or less) its entirety. In it, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou point out the exact same thing that I, and many others, have said for several weeks now.

Namely, the Russian strategy here was never the outright capture of territory. It was always the destruction of enemy fighting capability. And they achieved that within, effectively, the first 48 hours of the war, destroying the Ukie C&C centres, intelligence capabilities, and joint-force coordination.

The entire Ukie military, roughly 600,000 men strong once you count up the regulars and the ultranationalists in the National Guard, went from being the biggest standing army in the European theatre, to a disorganised rabble of various jumbled-up brigades and battalions incapable of coordinated action or reinforcement.

From there, the Russians set about carefully and methodically destroying the Ukrainian military, one piece at a time – and actually left most of the fighting in the eastern front to the LDNR militias. (Those “militias” are actually quite experienced and well-equipped troops by this point, thanks to 8 years of nearly non-stop fighting against the Ukies, and considerable material assistance from the Russians.)

That process has now reached its climax in the south with the capture of Mariupol’ and the nearly-complete destruction of all Azovites and Ukronazis in the city.

The Broader Context

All of this action happened within a much wider context of manoeuvre-based military strategy. The Russian General Staff very clearly read Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and the very best of the German Wehrmacht commanders from WWII. The Russians don’t like Nazis, at all, but the Russians aren’t stupid, either – they know quite well that the panzerkampf and sturmtruppen tactics of generals like von Balck, von Manstein, Rommel, and others, are worthy of study and attention.

Did they apply those lessons?

Let us turn to a superb Twatter thread (yes, I know, that’s an outright oxymoron) by Scott Ritter, former Marine Corps intel officer – though, like most Marines, he would probably violently object to the “former” appellation – and UNSCOM inspector. Here is what Mr. Ritter had to say, in its entirety:

1/ Big Arrow War—a primer. For all those scratching their heads in confusion, or dusting off their dress uniforms for the Ukrainian victory parade in Kiev, over the news about Russia’s “strategic shift”, you might want to re-familiarize yourself with basic military concepts.

2/ Maneuver warfare is a good place to start. Understand Russia started its “special military operation” with a severe manpower deficit—200,000 attackers to some 600,000 defenders (or more). Classic attritional conflict was never an option. Russian victory required maneuver.

3/ Maneuver war is more psychological than physical and focuses more on the operational than on the tactical level. Maneuver is relational movement—how you deploy and move your forces in relation to your opponent. Russian maneuver in the first phase of its operation support this.

4/ The Russians needed to shape the battlefield to their advantage. In order to do this, they needed to control how Ukraine employed it’s numerically superior forces, while distributing their own smaller combat power to best accomplish this objective.

5/ Strategically, to facilitate the ability to maneuver between the southern, central, and northern fronts, Russia needed to secure a land bridge between Crimea and Russia. The seizure of the coastal city of Mariupol was critical to this effort. Russia has accomplished this task.

6/ While this complex operation unfolded, Russia needed to keep Ukraine from maneuvering its numerically superior forces in a manner that disrupted the Mariupol operation. This entailed the use of several strategic supporting operations—feints, fixing operations, and deep attack.

7/ The concept of a feint is simple—a military force either is seen as preparing to attack a given location, or actually conducts an attack, for the purpose of deceiving an opponent into committing resources in response to the perceived or actual actions.

8/ The use of the feint played a major role in Desert Storm, where Marine Amphibious forces threatened the Kuwaiti coast, forcing Iraq to defend against an attack that never came, and where the 1st Cavalry Division actually attacked Wadi Al Batin to pin down the Republican Guard.

9/ The Russians made extensive use of the feint in Ukraine, with Amphibious forces off Odessa freezing Ukrainian forces there, and a major feint attack toward Kiev compelling Ukraine to reinforce their forces there. Ukraine was never able to reinforce their forces in the east.

10/ Fixing operations were also critical. Ukraine had assembled some 60,000-100,000 troops in the east, opposite Donbas. Russia carried out a broad fixing attack designed to keep these forces fully engaged and unable to maneuver in respect to other Russian operations.

11/ During Desert Storm, two Marine Divisions were ordered to carry out similar fixing attacks against Iraqi forces deployed along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border, tying down significant numbers of men and material that could not be used to counter the main US attack out west.

12/ The Russian fixing attack pinned the main Ukrainian concentration of forces in the east, and drove them away from Mariupol, which was invested and reduced. Supporting operations out of Crimea against Kherson expanded the Russian land bridge. This phase is now complete.

13/ Russia also engaged in a campaign of strategic deep attack designed to disrupt and destroy Ukrainian logistics, command & control, and air power and long-range fire support. Ukraine is running out of fuel and ammo, cannot coordinate maneuver, and has no meaningful Air Force.

14/ Russia is redeploying some of its premier units from where they had been engaged in feint operations in northern Kiev to where they can support the next phase of the operation, namely the liberation of the Donbas and the destruction of the main Ukrainian force in the east.

15/ This is classic maneuver warfare. Russia will now hold Ukraine in the north and south while its main forces, reinforced by the northern units, Marines, and forces freed up by the capture of Mariupol, seek to envelope and destroy 60,000 Ukrainian forces in the east.

16/ This is Big Arrow War at its finest, something Americans used to know but forgot in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq. It also explains how 200,000 Russians have been able to defeat 600,000 Ukrainians. Thus ends the primer on maneuver warfare, Russian style.

Obviously, the answer is a resounding “YES”. (Though, admittedly, Mr. Ritter is American, therefore doesn’t speak English, and thus constantly spells “MANOEUVRE” incorrectly.)

Seek and Destroy

Now that we understand what Russia has done in the Ukraine theatre, let us turn to what it is doing. And once you do that, you’ll quickly realise that the Russians have not backed off, not even slightly.

The Russians did, indeed, “dramatically reduce” offensive operations around Kiev – only to redeploy those same troops to Kharkov and the Donbas theatre, where they will now be used to destroy the Ukrainian Joint Force Operation of roughly 60-80K men at arms.

Let’s be clear about this – those 12, or 22 (the number keeps changing) brigades that are stuck in that “cauldron”, are all dead men.

They have NO HOPE of reinforcement or resupply. The Russian tactic of keeping reinforcements pinned down in the cities, defending against attacks that never really came, and blasting those same reinforcements with constant barrages of rocket artillery, cruise missile strikes, and air-to-ground bombing runs by the Russian Aerospace Forces, worked BEAUTIFULLY to keep the Ukies off-balance and guessing, with no ability to mount a serious counteroffensive of any kind.

If those men in the eastern cauldron do not surrender, they will die. It’s just that simple. And the Russians have shown ZERO interest in dropping that aspect of their offensive.

The statements from the Russian Ministry of Defence, specifically from Colonel-General Rudskoy last week, and from Defence Minister Shoigu this week, state very plainly what Russia intends to do. The Russian General Staff considers the first phase of the Специальная Военная Операция (“special military operation”) to be effectively complete after the Battle of Mariupol’.

They have liberated Mariupol’, Melitopol’, Kherson, and unlocked the land bridge to Crimea, in the process restoring the flow of fresh water that the Ukies quite spitefully dammed up after the 2014 referendum and annexation. The Russians will now turn their attentions to Odessa and Nikolaev, the two remaining major strongholds of Ukrainian power in the south.

In the east, the LDNR, Russians, Chechens, and volunteer battalions have freed up about 90% of the LNR’s territory, and over 50% of the DNR’s land. The head of the LNR has publicly voiced his support for a referendum, once hostilities cease, for his people to consider joining the Russian Federation outright. The head of the DNR announced the same thing just today.

Do they sound to you like people worried about their big brothers stabbing them in the back?

A Deal They Can’t Refuse

In the day or so since the latest round of negotiations in Istanbul concluded, the picture has become much clearer already. If you follow my Telegram channel, you’ll see the messages and links that I forward there, and you can see for yourself that the Russians have redeployed their forces to bombard the SHIT out of Kharkov in the northeast, and destroy the forces trapped in the “cauldron” in the east.

Furthermore, if you read the statements from the Neo-Tsar at the start of hostilities on the 24th, and compare those with what he subsequently said on March 5th in front of a coterie of stewardesses, and then compare that with what the General Staff had to say last week, you will find a remarkable consistency between all of those sets of statements.

The lesson here could not be clearer: the Russians mean what they say, and will not stop until they get exactly what they want. The Russians, and especially the Neo-Tsar, DO NOT BLUFF, and the West had damned well better figure this out very quickly.

And what the Russians want is an ironclad policy of non-alignment and demilitarisation from Ukraine, which they will take by force by comprehensively destroying Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

The Russians are doing to the Ukies exactly what the (fictional) Godfather did to his enemies. The Ukrainians WILL agree to relinquish their claims over the Donbas and Crimea, one way or another. And they WILL ensure that the ugly legacy of Bandera and the Ukronazis is forever destroyed, at least in the eastern half of the country.

The major question that I cannot answer at this point is, what happens to southern Ukraine? I have no idea, but I can’t imagine the Russians simply giving up the Azov Coastline. That is why I suspect that the Russians will conjure up a way to break Kherson, Odessa, and Nikolaev away from Ukraine itself and into a separate state. I also suspect that the Russians will continue their military campaign until Kharkov falls, which will become far more likely once the Donbas Cauldron collapses and the JFO there is destroyed outright.

The result will likely be a “Novorossiya”, a new state that sits between the new Donbas republics, and what will eventually become a landlocked, isolated, impoverished, and broken western Ukraine. And in that western part of a once-sort-of-decent-country, the foetid swamp of neo-Nazi stupidity and ugliness will fester and bubble – and will be Poland’s problem, not Russia’s.

Simply put, one way or another, this war ends with the partitioning of Ukraine. The Ukies still don’t appear to get it – they are hardheaded, stupid, and backed by even more idiotic Western elites who want them to fight down to the last Ukrainian. If they don’t give up, that is precisely what will happen.

Sun Tzu Would Be Proud

The realignment of forces away from Kiev and Chernigov last night was nothing more than a deceptive feint, precisely in line with the 3rd-Generation method of warfighting that the Russians have displayed throughout every step of this campaign so far. That redeployment will ensure the final liquidation of those 60,000 or 80,000, or even maybe 100,000, troops in the eastern cauldron, which is the best fighting force that the Ukies have. Their destruction would be a truly DISASTROUS military defeat for Ukraine, and would hasten the breakup of the country.

For eight long years, the Russians desperately tried to negotiate their way out of the necessity of war. Now, when they have found themselves without any choice, they have demonstrated a mastery of methodical, precise, combined-arms warfare that has made all of NATO sit up, gulp fearfully, and realise just how badly they have underestimated and needlessly antagonised one of the world’s most powerful nations.

And never forget that the entire military strategy is merely a subset of an ongoing geopolitical and economic encirclement of the entire Western world. After tomorrow, in theory, the Russians will stop sending gas to Europe. The Euroweenies have refused to pay for natural gas in rubles, believing that the Neo-Tsar is bluffing.

This is the height of hubris and stupidity. The overriding lesson of the past 8 years, and especially of the past one month, is that RUSSIANS DO NOT BLUFF. They WILL stop the gas if Europeans don’t pay in rubles. And they WILL take the economic hit, because they know damned well that they can absorb it, thanks to the ongoing realignment toward Asia.

We are in for a very interesting few days ahead, my friends. Above all, though, trust that the Neo-Tsar has a clear vision in mind, and that he will stick to it, and will not settle for anything less than what he wants.