The photo you see above is the best-guess tactical and operational situation on the ground around a city called Bakhmut (or Artyomovsk, as the Russians call it), located toward the northwestern side of Donetsk region, formerly a part of Banderastan. For those of you with a somewhat offbeat sense of humour, that photo looks a lot like a giant Warhammer 40K Ork about ready to chomp down on a squig. (I’m not going to explain all of that, go look up the lore.)

The Banderites insist on calling the Russians “orcs” (in the Tolkienesque sense) – a pejorative label the Russians have embraced with a giddy, gleeful pride (in the WH40K “Shootas, Blood, and Teef!” sense, as in, what you might get if English football hooligans somehow managed to become a spacefaring race). Given this set of facts, the description of the ongoing encirclement of Bakhmut as, basically, a Russian Ork munching and crunching down on Ukrainians, is actually quite fitting.

Because that is precisely what is happening on the ground.

The videos that follow are NOT for the faint of heart. If you get sick easily, do not click into them. They are filled with images of violent and hellish death. Consider yourself duly warned.

Wagner Stormboyz examining Ukrainian dead:

Russian ORKtillery ploinking hohols fleeing Bakhmut:

Wagnerites packing up and shipping hundreds of dead Ukrainian soldiers back to their homes:

Now, one should be careful when looking purely at video evidence when drawing conclusions about how an actual war on the ground is going. I think it is fair to say that, if social media had existed back in WWII, Russian morale might just have broken during the early days of the Great Patriotic War, when they saw the HORRENDOUS casualties they were taking in real meatgrinders like the Battle of Stalingrad.

(For context, in the five bloodiest battles on the Eastern Front, EACH ONE involved more dead among the Russians than ALL of the American combat dead, in every battle across BOTH theatres, during ALL of WWII, combined. Russophiles, like me, and native Russians, like Grandpa Grumpuss, KNOW of what we speak when we say that Russians know and understand war, at a level that Americans simply do not.)

To understand the true nature of the Banderastan War, as it is being fought in Bakhmut right now, you have to look at the actual testimony of soldiers on the ground. And it is heartbreaking.

Ukrainian commanders on the ground tell us that Bakhmut truly is like Hell (warning: Clown News Network article). American “observers” (read: mercenaries) fighting there tell us that soldiers on the zero-line of contact have a life expectancy of perhaps FOUR HOURS, under the relentless and terrifying steel rain of Russian ORKtillery. Estimates about Russian firing rates vary substantially, but the consensus seems to be that Russians fire off on average at least 20K artillery rounds every single day, and on “really hot days”, that number goes as high as 60K rounds.

The Ukrainians can barely muster 2-5K rounds in response, per day, and those numbers dwindle with Ukraine’s stocks of ammunition. The USSA and the EUSSR cannot keep up with either the demands of Ukrainian firing rates, or the production capacity of Russia alone.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have died in Bakhmut – the Russian Ministry of Defence claims that at least 11,000 Ukrainians have died in the war in February alone. Given the roughly 8-10:1 casualty ratios the Russians are dishing out, that also implies at least a thousand, perhaps two thousand, Russian soldiers, mostly from the Wagner PMC, have died in the fighting as well.

Those figures are almost certainly conservative. The RuMinDef is not known for exaggeration or hyperbole. From what I am seeing on Telegram and elsewhere, the true number of Ukrainian dead in Bakhmut is probably at least 20-30% higher – and those rates of attrition have been increasing of late.

This means Ukraine has expended the lives of perhaps 40,000 men – close to THREE DIVISIONS’ WORTH – to hold a single city.

Why? What is all the fuss about?

The answer is simple when you look at a map of Bakhmut itself:

As you can see from this map, taken from Bernhard at Moon of Alabama, Bakhmut/Artyomovsk is a major railway hub in the Donbass region. Three separate rail lines run through it – and, as far as I can tell, the southern one runs all the way down to Zaporozh’ye region, and then on to Crimea (or at least, it used to).

This is why most analysts consider Bakhmut a key logistics and supply chain hub for the Ukrainian military. Once captured, the Russians will be able to rapidly reinforce their positions using the road and rail networks that run into the city, thereby concentrating forces for a major push outward across the entire line of contact.

This puts the remaining Ukrainian stronghold of Slavyansk/Kramatorsk, west and slightly north of Bakhmut, under iminent threat. And after that, it is essentially a clear shot for the Russians all the way to the Dnieper river. There is really nothing much standing between them and the key industrial city of Dniepropetrovsk.

Once Bakhmut falls, Ukraine will almost certainly be hacked in half, as the Russians smash through whatever remains of Ukrainan resistance in Donbass.

This will achieve one of the primary objectives of the Special Military Operation for Russia – the liberation of all of Donbass.

The other two key objectives – the demilitarisation and de-Nazification of Banderastan – are already well underway.

The Ukrainian military is in its third iteration. The first was essentially destroyed by early summer of last year. The second was a relatively hastily reconstituted force assembled using Western equipment, tactics, training, and C4ISR, which supposedly did very well against Russia in the Khreat Khokholite Kharkov and Kherson Khounteroffensives – in reality, the Ukrainans lost tens of thousands of men trying to regain territory, and actually accomplished very little.\

Those gains are now actively being rolled back in the Kharkov region, and the Ukrainians never actually accomplished very much in Kherson – the Russians actually abandoned Kherson City for very sound operational and strategic reasons, but the Ukrainians have never managed to establish a proper civil administration there since.

The third version of the Ukrainian army is now being ground to bloody meat and charred bone in the slaughter-pens of the Donbass. The Ukrainians are losing at least a battalion of combat power every single day. It doesn’t take much Military MAFF to figure out that they are therefore losing roughly 1.5 brigades a week, and at least a division every month.

NO nation the size of Ukraine’s can sustain losses like this. Ukraine is about the size of Texas, and now has about 30% less people than the Lone Star State does. Imagine losing TEN TO FIFTEEN THOUSAND men every single month in the state of Texas, and you get some idea of the kind of Hellish devastation being unleashed by the Russians in Donbass.

So this all begs the question: where to from here?

The Ukrainans show no sign whatsoever of any tactical or operational finesse. They are now completely dependent on American aid and financial support. Without it, they will crumble and collapse. The American “strategery” of trying to bleed the Russians dry, has completely backfired. It is instead America which is being wiped out – its supplies of arms and aid are not helping Banderastan hold off the Russians.

America’s military prestige has suffered serious blows. All of the wunderwaffen in literally the entire world, have not stopped the Russians from advancing. Russia continues to fight the entire combined might of the West with, essentially, one arm behind its back – it still fights this war as an SMO, thus sharply limiting the scale and scope of frightfulness it can unleash against Ukrainian infrastructure and civilians.

Yet America continues to double and triple and quadruple down, even as we discover that American arms manufacturers can barely produce 20,000 155mm artillery rounds a month – the same amount that Russia uses in ONE DAY.

The facts remain as they always have. Ukraine will run out of men before the Russians run out of patience. America and Europe cannot keep pace with the demands placed on their military-industrial complexes – but Russia can, and will. American “tactics”, such as they are, have not helped Ukraine in the slightest – though American C4ISR certainly has.

Ukraine has no real working air defence now, either. The Russians launched a massive missile strike this week, with apparently over 80 missiles fired, and reportedly 6 hypersonic Kh-47M2 Kindzhal hypersonic aeroballistic missiles launched in a single strike. Oddly, the Ukrainians did not provide estimates afterwards of how many missiles in the barrage they shot down – and it turned out, they didn’t really shoot any of them down.

The Kindzhal is impossible to intercept, so you’d sort of figure that. But apparently, Ukraine’s air defence systems – even when bolstered with the Western IRIS-T and NASAMS complexes – are so degraded that they cannot shoot anything down now.

All of this adds up to a picture of zero hope, zero prospect even for a stalemate for Ukraine. Western military ANALysts keep banging on about how the Russian military seems to be moving so slowly – yet, when one asks them how the much-vaunted American military would fare against the kinds of formidable, layered, extremely potent defences the Ukrainians spent 8 years building in Donbass, they suddenly have no answers.

The reality is that industrial-scale warfare is here to stay. The Russians know how to fight that kind of war – they ARE fighting it, right now. The Ukrainians are by no means bad fighters – quite the opposite, they are tough, strong, courageous, competent, and extremely tenacious. But they simply do not have the necessary ingredients for victory. It is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

The West needs to understand this salient fact, and abandon the Ukraine Project as soon as possible. If Western governments do not abandon this ugly neo-Nazi tar-baby, they will find themselves bankrupt, without weapons, and without energy and food.

Let the Ukrainians die in Bakhmut if they want to – or, more accurately, if their General Staff are stupid enough to continue throwing thousands of men into the Russian ORKtillery meatgrinder. The West needs to adopt some sense of self-preservation to get out of this nightmare. The alternative involves sending Western troops into Banderastan, to die in their tens of thousands, against a military machine the West simply does not know or understand how to fight.