For Western military leaders and politicians, the news coming out of the slaughter-pits of Banderastan is going from bad to worse in a very big hurry. Ukrainian casualties are soaring as the Banderites try, with increasing desperation, to defend Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) against the Wagner ORKestra and their Stormboyz. Russian ORKtillery keeps pounding Ukrainian positions flat, with Russians typically firing off 20,000 rounds of arty every day – that number can go as high as 60,000 at times. Against that kind of overwhelming firepower – which, make no mistake, IS draining Russian stockpiles of weapons at a very high rate – the Ukrainians can respond with perhaps 2-5K rounds of arty – a feeble response, at best.

That barely scratches the surface of the problem. Ukraine has no real air power left – the Russian integrated, layered, networked air defence complexes can ploink Ukrainian aircraft flying higher than about treetop level, and Russian Battalion Tactical Groups routinely outfit their infantry at the platoon, and sometimes the squad, level with Igla MANPADs.

Death Notes

Ukrainian casualties are soaring ever higher as a result. Western presstitute claims of staggering Russian losses are absolutely ridiculous – the Russians categorically HAVE NOT lost 100K dead so far in the war. There is no evidence whatsoever for such a number. The best estimates we can get at the moment are from the combined BBC-Mediazona open-source intelligence project, which estimate a total of about 15K Russian dead in one year. That is a high death toll, to be sure – but it is nowhere close to the 100K-plus numbers that Western presstitutes repeatedly quote.

And where do they get those numbers from? Why, the Ukrainians, of course! If you cannot trust a Ukrainian government source, who can you trust? After all, they have proven totally trustworthy over things like the Ghost of Queef (Kiev), the “Russian” atrocities against civilians at Kramatorsk, the destruction of the maternity hospital at Mariupol’, the “massacre” of Bucha, and so on and so forth…

(That, by the way, was sarcasm, in case you are unfamiliar with the concept.)

The Ukrainians HAVE NOT inflicted equivalent casualties on Russia. That simply has not happened. The reason why is simple. When your enemy outguns you 10-to-1, even if he has equal numbers, and he has total air superiority and complete logistical control over his own supply chain, it is simply not possible for him to lose as many men, or more, than you do.

Furthermore, social media in both Ukraine and Russia are largely outside of government control – indeed, Russian social media is far more free than Ukrainian media. I can tell you from what I see on Telegram that the pictures and videos of hundreds and thousands of fresh Ukrainian graves, all over the country, simply have no equivalent in Russia.

There are no such mass graves in Russia – if there were, we would see the videos. We see videos and pictures of mass graves in Poland now, thanks to the Polish government’s insistence on sending Polish mercenaries and even undercover soldiers in Ukrainian guise, but we do not see pictures and videos of mass graves in Russia.

The total death count for the Ukrainians, based on the latest OSINT, is roughly 150,000 – and the number of wounded surely runs into the multiple hundreds of thousands. But even that is almost surely a lowball estimate, because the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley – a corporate yes-man if there ever was one – apparently received a private briefing from Ukrainian government personnel recently, in which they told him the true death toll for the Ukrainians.

That number is apparently not 150,000. It is 257,000.

While I have seen no confirmation of this number from Ukrainian sources, I do believe it, based on the other information I am seeing. The cost of this war for Ukraine has been truly hideous – and the awful part is, they started it, with the West’s explicit backing. The videos and photos coming out of Banderastan back up this notion – some of them are truly sickening. All you have to do is to look at the mass graves popping up all over Ukraine to understand that claims the hohols are losing anywhere between 200 and 800 men every single day in Bakhmut, are very likely accurate.

Just to make the point, here is a video of the Russian Wagner PMC, packing up the corpses of dead Ukrainian soldiers for return and burial:

By the way, keep in mind, Ukrainian troops, especially among the hardcore “nationalist” (read: neo-Nazi) battalions, are known for torturing Russian POWs and mutilating their bodies, and for desecrating their corpses. Note the huge contrast between that, and the respect and decency with which the “musicians” treat the bodies of their opponents.

Feeding the Beast

In the midst of all of this death and carnage, Western policymakers, politicians, and military leaders have belatedly realised that their “strategy” of attempting to bleed the Russians dry, is backfiring very badly. It is, in fact, the West which is losing men, materiel, and munitions in the Black Hole of Banderastan – and Ukraine is throwing the very best of its youth away in the killing fields of the Donbass.

At the Munich Security Conference this week, Jens Stoltenberg, former Prime Minister of Norway and now NATO General Secretary, admitted that Ukraine’s use of ammunition vastly outstrips the ability of the West to continue supplying them:

The war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of munitions and depleting allied stockpiles,” Stoltenberg said. “The current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production. This puts our defense industries under strain.

He also had to admit that the West’s ability to restock its rapidly dwindling supplies of ammunition is poor, and it will take years, if not decades, to rebuild what has been lost:

Now, make no mistake, the Russians are ALSO running down their existing supplies of ammunition. Putin admitted as much back in December:

Putin comments on the depletion of ammo reserves and compares Russian and Ukrainian defense industries. pic.twitter.com/WHnA9cyPdn

— Putin Direct (@PutinDirect) December 26, 2022

The difference, of course, is that Russia’s ability to ramp up its production of ammunition, and of literally everything else, is immense. And the resilience of their economy is incredible – it has surprised everyone, including the Russians themselves. I am seeing reports from Russia indicating they are ramping up production of their factories by 10x, and in some cases by 50x, for certain munitions and technologies.

The USA can, by itself, produce roughly 100K rounds of 155mm artillery shells every month – this translates to about 1.2M rounds a year. You want to know how long that would last for Ukraine at its current rates of consumption?

About 9 months.

The entirety of NATO, excluding Turkey, cannot produce anything like 100K rounds of arty a month. Ukraine consumes more ammunition than the ENTIRE collective West put together.

But the Russians can match and exceed that production – by multiples, and possibly soon by orders of magnitude. The Russians simply do not run out of anything. The power of their industrial economy is something to behold – this is NOT a gas station masquerading as a country, as the late, thoroughly unmourned Sen. John McCain once said (may he burn in Hell).

Changing the Game

Given these facts, the West is now desperately trying to convince the Banderites to use less ammunition. The Defence Minister of PommieBastardLande, the amazingly clueless Ben Wallace, has told Ukraine to learn the “Western way of fighting”, whatever that means, and use less ammunition to do more.

Quite what he means by this, I rather do not know, given “the West’s way of fighting” has failed so abjectly and miserably in the Sandbox and the Rockpile for the last 20 years. Low-intensity conflicts with limited consumption of ammunition has not helped NATO win against goathumpers and ragheads who lack integrated air defences, artillery, long-range fire capability, aircraft, tanks, and a whole host of other Western luxuries.

Put simply, “the Western way of fighting” is a meaningless phrase, given not ONE NATO military (again, outside of Turkey) is capable of actually fighting a prolonged war. That INCLUDES the US military, which has been so weakened by decades of idiotic investments in platinum-plated lead sleds, woke ideology, and “savage wars of peace”, that it can no longer field effective land fighting forces beyond a few divisions’ worth of men in the European theatre.

The Western answer to this problem of its inability to supply the Banderites with ever more weapons, now amounts to “teaching manoeuvre warfare” to Ukraine:

The U.S. is prioritizing helping the Ukrainians tweak the way they fight, relying less on artillery barrages and more on how the troops maneuver on the battlefield, as concerns mount over Western nations’ ability to replenish ammunition stocks.

The war in Ukraine has been marked by the massive use of artillery by both sides, with thousands of shells smashing into the front lines daily, straining the ability of the U.S. and European countries to keep up.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, speaking to reporters after a meeting in Brussels with other NATO leaders, alluded to the growing concerns in Washington and elsewhere over stockpiles. He said Ukraine has “used a lot of artillery ammunition. We’re going to do everything we can, working with our international partners to ensure that we give them as much ammunition as quickly as possible.”

As the U.S. and Europe look for ways to increase their output of shells to keep their own warehouses stocked and supply Ukraine for its warm weather offensives, they are looking at the current training efforts in England and Germany to change how Ukraine moves on the battlefield. Part of that means figuring out ways to fend off Russia without expending too much ammo.

“We are working with the Ukrainian soldiers in various places throughout Europe to emphasize additional training on maneuver,” Austin said, “so that as they place more emphasis on maneuver, and shaping the battlefield with fires and then maneuvering, there’s a good chance that they’ll require less artillery munitions.”

The U.K., which has already trained 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers in infantry tactics, has pledged to train another 20,000 this year with the help of Norway, the Netherlands and other NATO trainers on the ground.

The core question is: will this work?

The answer, as far as I can tell, is an emphatic NO.

When and How Manoeuvre Theory Fails

I do not pretend to be any kind of expert on manoeuvre warfare. While I have written extensively on the subject, I have always cited the work of others to try to form an understanding of what manoeuvre warfare is, when it works, and how it is superior to conventional attrition-based warfare.

As far as I can tell, armies that fight using manoeuvre warfare, can make big, dramatic gains on the battlefield by utilising the following traits and behaviours:

• A highly-trained, outwardly-focused, independent-minded, aggressive, skilled, professional cadre of officers that prizes individual initiative and rapid problem-solving, even if proposed solutions go against orders;
• An exceptionally high-quality supply and logistics chain that keeps the army well supplied, and which can adapt to rapid movement and manoeuvre;
• Constant use of try-fail-learn techniques through reconnaissance-in-force;
• Robust and effective methods of rapid and constant communications between networked and well-linked command and control structures;
• Use of feints and movements to throw an enemy off balance and keep him guessing, shaping the battlefield to suit one’s own strengths while sapping the enemy’s;
• Integrated use of every asset and technique at one’s disposal in true combined-arms warfare, putting air, ground, sea, space, and intelligence forces to good effect at all times;
• Most importantly, a clearly communicated moral imperative that demonstrates a powerful and compelling strategic vision, unifying the forces under one’s command to perform a specific set of operational tasks through tactical means;

If you take a careful look at both the Western military and the Banderastani forces at play in 404 – Country Not Found, you will quickly realise that NOT ONE OF THESE applies:

• Ukraine’s officer corps – what little is left of it – is mostly trained in top-down hierarchical thinking, which, ironically, is still very much a part of the Western approach to war, as well as the old Soviet-style divisional structure;
• Western “training” in manoeuvre warfare has thus far proven to be an utter failure, as captured Ukrainian soldiers have attested;
• The Banderites don’t have a supply chain of their own – everything depends on Western support, without which Ukraine simply collapses in about five minutes;
• Reconnaissance-in-force efforts by the Ukrainians only ever succeed when they encounter poorly-defended Russian lines, as in the Khreat Khokholite Kharkov and Kherson Khounteroffensives – but the Russians have since greatly strengthened and reinforced their lines, and nowadays, Ukrainian mechanised reconnaissance pretty much always comes under heavy fire the moment it bumps into the Russians;
• Ukraine’s C4ISR completely depends on Western technology and supplies – and the Russians now have ways to counteract both the “civilian” Starlink system, and the military-grade Western stuff;
• Every single time the Ukrainians have tried to shape the battlefield, they have been stop-punched by the Russians, who can see them coming and can direct overwhelming volumes of fire on top of their heads;
• Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, does combined-arms warfare the way the Russians do, which is why Western training and tactics have proven hopelessly inadequate to meet the challenge, even when you discount the fact that Western-trained Ukrainians get at most a month of actual serious training of any kind;
• The only thing the Ukrainians have going for them is a moral belief that they are the victims of unprovoked aggression – and actually, that is wearing thin, you should see some of the videos out there of Ukrainian soldiers promising to put a bullet in Bellendsky’s head;

Manoeuvre works really well when you can disguise your movements and hide your true intentions through feints and stratagems. But, in modern warfare, given the immense amount of C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) assets available to true first-rate military powers, hiding units in terrain is very difficult (though not impossible).

There are only three real first-rate militaries anywhere on Earth today – America’s, Russia’s, and China’s – and only one of them has been seriously tested in true combined-arms warfare at any point in the last fifty years. Only one of them has the ability to switch rapidly from manoeuvre-based warfare, to economy-of-force operations, to attrition warfare, to full-on annihilation.

And that is Russia.

Making a Mess of Things

Most tellingly, this obsession with shifting Ukraine to manoeuvre-based warfare ignores two key facts about both Western application of the subject, and Russian military capabilities.

First, Western applications of manoeuvre warfare have been incomplete, and required huge amounts of preparation beforehand. The Western use of pinning manoeuvres and feints during the ground-based phase of Operation: DESERT STORM, took OVER HALF A YEAR to prepare logistically, and ended after barely 100 hours of fighting. There are a number of arguments I have seen about whether the US Army even did manoeuvre warfare correctly during that war – I will not go into them here, as they have to do with concepts like “synchronisation”, about which I am chronically unqualified to comment.

The Russians, by contrast, engaged in manoeuvre warfare from the outset of the SMO. That is precisely how they pinned down Ukrainian forces in and around Queef (Kiev), while simultaneously rapidly breaching Ukraine’s southeastern regions and capturing large swathes of territory in Zaporozh’ye and Kherson regions. Their intention was to push the Queef regime to sue for a rapid peace, and the Russian General Staff planned and executed a mission designed to push hard, fast, and relentlessly to surround the capital of Ukraine and force a settlement.

That high-risk gamble failed, but only because the West sent Bozo BoJo to tell Bellendsky not to sign any peace treaty. This is entirely in line with the way the Western neoliberal elite like to do things – as with the Minsk Agreements and the Normandy Format, and as with the eastward expansion of NATO, Western governments will happily break any treaty and agreement whenever it suits them. They cannot be trusted, and they have proven this repeatedly.

So the Russians no longer trust them, at all. And they are now preparing a response, as only they can.

How a Bear Fights

And what, pray tell, will that response look like?

As far as I can see, it will amount to overwhelming pressure applied across multiple areas of the front lines.

The Western inability to see this is astonishing. Foreign Affairs posted a typically idiotic article in which the author claimed Russia had suffered serious losses – absent any actual evidence of this, as I have pointed out repeatedly – and is therefore opting for a total-war approach that uses overwhelming amounts of artillery to compensate for a lack of tactical and operational skill. This is absolute garbage at worst, and pure projection at best.

In reality, it is Ukraine that has failed to fight sensibly, in any theatre of war. Their first wave of military forces, built up over 8 years with Western financing and no shortage of neo-Nazi Banderite bullshit to power their high-minded moral crusade to eradicate the “Moskals”, effectively ceased to exist after the first two months of the SMO. Following that, the Russians steadily and methodically destroyed the second iteration of the Ukrainian army, trained and financed by the West and fed by huge numbers of conscripts railroaded off the streets.

Today, the Russians are busy destroying the third iteration of the army, entirely trained and equipped by the West, with Western main battle tanks and artillery and C4ISR assets. That version of the Ukrainian military is essentially incapable of manoeuvre warfare, because it has no logistics tail beyond what the West can supply, and that is rapidly dwindling.

Russia, on the other hand, is able to continue escalating as and when it sees fit. It can push on multiple axes and fronts, and already is doing so. While the Wagner PMC pushes to close the cauldron around something like 10,000 Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut/Artyomovsk, aided by Russian paratroopers, the Russian main army and elite units of the LDNR forces are able to push against Avdeevka and Ugledar, and proper Russian forces can apply pressure on the Ukrainians in Zaporozh’ye region, not far from the eponymous city and capital.

And that is before we get to the immense gatherings of forces north of Ukraine, in Belarus, and the continuing grinding Russian offensive in Kupyansk, which the Russians abandoned for the Kremennaya-Svatovo line back in September. That grouping in Belarus is of particular concern to Ukraine, which worries that a new Russian strike group might push toward Sumy and Chernigov, then take out Kiev itself.

All of this spells very big trouble for the Ukrainians, who are now on their ninth (or tenth, or eleventh, or twenty-first – nobody quite seems to have any clue what the real number is) mobilisation of conscripts. They are running out of trained manpower, and are now busy throwing bodies, basically, at the problem. That is working out about as well as you might think.

This, then, is how a bear fights – by crushing its victim to death while biting through its jugular.

Conclusion – Slamming the Wall

The West needs to understand that its proxy-war project in Ukraine is lost. Instead of feeding ever more money and lives into the Black Hole of Banderastan, the time has come to cut their losses and run.

The problem is, of course, that the neoclowns in charge of the West have absolutely no capacity for humility, self-reflection, or basic human decency. In a sane world, every last one of them would be lined up against a wall and SHOT for crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, we do not live in a sane world – we live in Clown World, and the neoclowns are in charge.

The tide will inevitably turn against them. Russia has weathered everything the West has thrown at it, and continues to win. The Russian economy has shaken off the weight of the most devastating sanctions regime ever unleashed, and it turns out those sanctions have damaged Western economies far worse than they ever hurt Russia. With China’s growing economic and political power behind it, Russia has the military power, the political capital of the goodwill of most of the Dirt World, and the economic partnerships necessary to outlast the West.

Europe is in the process of unilaterally disarming itself in the increasingly desperate hope that Ukraine can somehow pull off a military miracle. However, in modern warfare, hope is not a strategy – it cannot win against skill, talent, experience, competence, and logistical excellence.

The Russians have these things. The West does not – and Ukraine is living on borrowed time. It is not exactly a challenge to figure out who will win in the end.

As for Ukraine – well, it will be destroyed in this war. And it richly deserves to be. If you think that is a harsh judgement, I assure you, it is not. Go lookup the history of Ukrainian nationalism, and the abominable way in which the Ukrainians handled their own infrastructure and economic gifts left over from the USSR, and you will quickly realise that perhaps no country in history has ever squandered so much, so quickly, in the name of so little.