The news has been streaming in since late last night that Ukraine’s military high command has ordered the full evacuation of the “Ukrainian” – that is to say, temporarily occupied – large township of Avdeevka, to the northwest of Donetsk city.
Let’s not mess about here: this is a catastrophe for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
As numerous commentators have pointed out, Avdeevka has long been the single most heavily fortified point of the stalemated line of contact between the AFU and the LDNR forces, ever since the Ukies captured it in 2014. It has long been the staging point for Ukrainian attacks on civilians in Donetsk – a city of almost a million people, which has been under almost-daily shelling by the Ukronazis ever since the Euromaidan coup in 2014 itself.
As of today, the Ukrainians are withdrawing, largely in chaos and disorder, abandoning the city and its fortifications to the Russians.
The Collapsing Empire
This is not to say there are NO Ukrainian forces in the city – quite the contrary, in fact. There are anywhere from several hundred to several thousand AFU soldiers – whether professionals, conscripts, or Azovite neo-Nazis – trapped in parts of this large town, particularly in the high-rise section known as “the Citadel” in the southwest. They will take some time to clear out.
Most of them will die.
As heartless as that sounds, it is merely a statement of fact. There is NO clean way out of Avdeevka. The place is almost completely surrounded, and the Russian “pincers” to the northwest are merely a couple of kilometres apart. All routes in and out of the town are under constant Russian ORKtillery fire – and, most terrifyingly of all, the Russian Aerospace Forces are dropping extremely heavy JDAM-type FAB-500, FAB-1500, and FAB-2000 glide bombs everywhere on the city.
Several days ago, the Russians managed to chop the town in half, cutting the main supply lines to the AFU garrison, and wiping out any hope of retreat. The new Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief, General Syrskiy, known derisively by the AFU troopers as “General 200” for his seeming disregard for the lives of the men under his command, deployed the neo-Nazis of the Azov Brigade – now repackaged as the “3rd Assault Brigade”, but a new coat of paint ain’t foolin’ anyone who isn’t a presstitute – into the town.
Those same neo-Nazis found themselves fighting in a complete encirclement. Very few of them survived. At least one of their company commanders from the brigade has been captured by the Russians.
Again, almost all of the Azovites left in the town, after the general retreat, will die. The Russians are not known to be merciful toward those who commit atrocities against their civilians, which the Azovites have done for 10 years now.
Nor, in my personal opinion, should they be merciful. The Russians CRUSHED the Azov Brigade during the Siege of Mariupol’ two years ago, and sent their leaders into exile in Istanbul.
(Turkiye’s rather mercurial and double-dealing watermelon-seller of a Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reneged on the agreement the Saudis brokered between the various parties, and let those Azovites return to Ukraine, in exchange for American cash and prizes. The Russians were NOT happy, to say the least, but they are willing to tolerate Erdogan – for now. That will likely change in the near future, once they take the entire Ukrainian Black Sea coastline.)
Those same Azovites have now returned to the battlefield. The Russians showed them mercy once. They will not do so again.
Retreat and Rout
More generally, the loss of Avdeevka is indicative of the overall course of the SMO for the Ukrainians.
The reports coming out of Avdeevka are chaotic, disorganised, and deeply harrowing. The pictures and videos I have seen – and I have only seen a handful – indicate a massacre of horrendous proportions in parts of the city, with bodies left in the open to rot. Wounded soldiers have no hope of evacuation and are calling up their loved ones to say goodbye – though, if they are smart and surrender to the Russians, all of the evidence says they will be well looked after.
That is highly congruent with the current state of the AFU, and of Ukraine in general.
The power struggle between Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi – or Gen. Potato, as I rather prefer to call him – and Bellendsky the Coke-Fiend, finally resolved itself a few days ago, with the former stepping down and being replaced by “General 200”. (The term, “200”, refers to the Russian and Ukrainian call-sign for dead soldiers – a term dating all the way back to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the late 1970s.) That power struggle assuredly did not help morale and command cohesion at the front. It led to a certain paralysis of decision-making, and we now see the results.
Moreover, the Ukrainian economy is showing real signs of imminent collapse. The whole construct is essentially an American-funded kleptocracy. The whole country is nothing more than a giant money-laundering machine. American taxpayer dollars go there in the form of “aid”, which the extraordinarily corrupt bureaucrats, politicians, and oligarchs promptly pocket and put into Swiss bank accounts, and then send much of it back as “political donations” to the Ukrainian lobby in the US – which, according to some reports I’ve read, is larger, in terms of funding, than the Israeli one.
But that aid is rapidly drying up. The US House of Representatives has gone on recess until the end of February, and has refused to pass the US$61B grift package the Fake President and his Fake Administration want to send Over There, to keep Project Ukraine alive.
This means Ukraine is soon going to run out of money to finance its basic government expenses. That does NOT include the funding required for the war itself.
The Ukies now face a budget hole amounting in the tens of billions of dollars, and they have no way to cover it, other than through money-printing.
Effective Attrition
More than this, they have no native war production industry to speak of. Every time they try to setup production facilities, the Russians smash them with cruise missiles (conventional and hypersonic) and glide-bomb attacks. The Russian Aerospace Forces are operating over the battlefield at a pace and rate NO ONE in the FUSA military could even dream of matching – the operational tempo of the ВКС РФ is far higher than American military planners ever anticipated, and the more honest among them are able to admit this.
Ukraine’s air defences are being systematically ground down to nothing – the US military itself has admitted that Ukraine will likely be out of AD missiles by mid-March, about a month away, if things do not change. It no longer has any kind of inflow of artillery shells worth speaking of, and AFU forces report acute “shell hunger” across the entire front line. All of the West’s entire combined industrial strength is insufficient to the task of supplying the AFU with the means to fight.
They will no longer get tanks, IFVs, APCs, planes, guns, howitzers, or any other advanced means of warfighting. The Ukrainians are running out of everything – including manpower, trained or otherwise.
In other words – the attrition strategy the Russians have pursued since late 2022, after their own relatively orderly withdrawals from Kharkov region and western Kherson region, is working.
The closest analogy we can find in Western military history is probably Gen. Ulysses S. Grant‘s strategy against the Confederacy. He pursued a similar strategy of wearing down the South with continuous pressure along the entire front, confident in the North’s vastly superior industrial base and manpower reserves. And he was right – though his strategy cost the North hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded soldiers.
The key difference here is, the Russians make considerable efforts to preserve their own fighting forces. Ukrainian propaganda notwithstanding, they are NOT killing Russians at a rate of 10:1. This is an idiotic assertion on its face. When you, as a defender, have no air power, no artillery , limited drone capabilities, no hope of withdrawal or resupply, and are outnumbered ten to one, you CANNOT, by definition, kill an enemy at the rate of ten to one. It is simply mathematically impossible.
Deep Operations in Theory and Practice
What we see right now is the twin Russian concepts of “attrition warfare”, as articulated by Aleksandr Svechin, and “deep operations”, as articulated by Georgiy Samoilovich Isserson – an obscure name in modern times, but highly influential in his day. The Russians have never forgotten the lessons learned by the Red Army in their wars, and have always treated warfare in a scientific manner. The following, most excellent, lecture by Dr. Richard Harrison is well worth watching, to help you understand just how powerful the doctrine of “deep operations” actually is:
The concept is simple: put pressure on the enemy’s front lines, force him to engage, and then destroy his reserves in the rear through heavy use of combined-arms warfare, particularly artillery and air power. When done correctly, it is extremely effective, because there is literally nowhere for the enemy to hide, and no way for him to reinforce his lines.
This is precisely what Ukraine faces, across a thousand-kilometre front. The Russians are piling the pressure on at every point. As a result, the front is cracking and breaking everywhere. And the Ukrainians have no way to stop them.
As I have said repeatedly, for nearly two years, this war ends in precisely one way: with a total Russian victory, and a devastating, cataclysmic defeat for Ukraine and the West. Already, Ukraine is demographically and economically doomed. It will not survive this conflict. All that remains is to see how many more Ukrainians will die, and how much more suffering the West will endure, before it finally admits defeat.
That is not to say the war is over. It categorically is not. The Russians have a lot of fighting yet to do. Having punctured and collapsed the single strongest point of the Ukrainian front, they must now find a way to push through to the twin cities of Slavyansk-Kramatorsk, and must clear out Seversk to the northeast. Doing so will require substantial resources – which the Russians have, and are quite happy to commit now.
The Ukies have nowhere to go but backwards, retreating toward the Dnieper River. This will not save them, because the Russians can attack their rear areas almost at will.
Conclusion – the Death of Hope
Ukraine’s only hope of ANY kind of survival, is to go to the negotiating table and beg for the best terms they can get. Even today, the Russians will still be merciful, up to a point, because – as the Neo-Tsar stated in his superb interview with #BasedTucker – the Russian leadership, at least, still regards Ukrainians as part of the same people. (The average Russian, on the other hand, is likely to disagree, quite profoundly, with that assessment. But there is no doubt that the two peoples share substantial fraternal, genetic, linguistic, and ethnic bonds.)
The West also has no hope for defeating Russia on the battlefield. It WILL NOT HAPPEN. The Russian military has faced the best that NATO can throw at them, and they now have the full measure of American and NATO warfighting capabilities. They are no longer impressed by anything NATO has to offer, because they know their own technologies, strategies, training, doctrines, and capabilities are more than a match for whatever NATO has to offer.
The best possible outcome now is for the West – that is to say, Clown World – to recognise its failure and defeat, accept it, and try, however it can, to salvage the situation. This of course will not happen, because of the profound illiteracy, ignorance, and stupidity of the American military and civilian leadership.
I do not write that last sentence lightly. It is a statement of fact – we have seen American military doctrines put to the test by the Ukrainians, and they have been found PROFOUNDLY lacking. The US military’s self-aggrandisement of its own capabilities has been shown for what it is – a myth, based on beating the absolute shit out of a fifth-rate Iraqi army in Operation: DESERT STORM, which actually had very little ability to resist.
Confronted by a real, serious enemy, whose industrial capacity outstrips that of the entire West, it is now clear the FUSA has no answer. It has no industrial base of its own. Its doctrines are entirely insufficient for the task. The most prized American and German weapons systems have been shown to be expensive piles of junk. The AFU got so disgusted with the failure of American battle doctrines in the Khlearly Khollapsed Khatastrophic Khreat Khokholite Khumvee Khounteroffensive of last summer, that they abandoned them within 4 days of their great “offensive”, and switched back to their old Soviet training.
Enough is enough. It is time to end this conflict. America must withdraw entirely from this failed project and let Ukraine and Western Europe collapse. The Europeans chose this fate, after all. America, by contrast, still has a powerful economy and vast natural resources – particularly in the form of cheap energy.
Ukraine is not America’s concern. Let it fall and be broken up, as it richly deserves. Let the Russians take the east and north, the Poles take the west (which will likely be the death of Poland, and, again, they richly deserve it), Hungary the Transcarpathian region, and Roumania and Slovakia their own historical lands. Let Hungary and Serbia then negotiate highly favourable trade deals with the Russians for energy and food. And let the rest of Europe sink.
This is the only humane way out – believe it or not. The alternatives lead only to more suffering and death.
1 Comment
the sooner the F.A.G.s lose the better.