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The gift of coal

by | Oct 5, 2024 | Office Space | 0 comments

Back in mid-January 2023, we received news that Soledar – literally, “gift of salt” in Russian – had been captured (or liberated, if you prefer – and I do) by Russian forces. This opened up the road for the bloody, terrible, hellish “Bakhmut Meatgrinder”, in which the Wagner Private Military Contractor group took the fight straight to the Ukrainian defenders of what was, at that time, one of the most heavily fortified parts of the front line.

The Wagner Orky Stormboyz paid for every millimetre of territory gained, in blood. They lost some 15,000 men – many of them prisoners recruited from the worst of the Russian penal colonies, given a few weeks’ training, and then sent to storm the Ukrainian lines. Those “Storm-Z” penal battalions suffered appalling losses – so much so that the Russian Ministry of Defence itself stepped in and forced Yevgenyi Prigozhin, the now-deceased face of the Wagner PMC, to knock off those tactics and recruiting methods.

But the approach worked. The Wagner Orks suffered greatly – but they also cost the Ukrainians some 75,000 of their best troops. Given the 5:1 kill ratio, the Russians judged Bakhmut a success – and it was, because the loss of Bakhmut unhinged the Ukrainian lines in northern Donbass, and forced them to kick-start their Khlearly Khatastrophic Khollapsed Khocked-Up Khreat Khokholite Khumvee Khounteroffensive down south, in Zaporozh’ye region.

That set the tone for much of the next 18 months, really, in which the Ukies have been forced back, first in metres, then hundreds of metres, then kilometres, and now leagues. The result has been a meatgrinder on a vast scale, across a thousand-kilometre front, in which we see the Russian doctrine of “deep operations” (глобукие операции) – which dates all the way back to the writings of Georgiy Samoilovich Isserson in the 1920s and 1930s – in full force.

And now we see the latest result of the application of deep operations and attrition warfare, with the fall of Ugledar.

On Thursday morning, the Russian MoD announced the full liberation of the key strategic Donbass town of Ugledar. The significance of this for the Special Military Operation cannot be overstated – despite the best efforts of Western whorenalists and presstitutes to downplay the nature of this victory.

The Fortress City

Ugledar was Ukraine’s last really strong fortress in southern Donbass. It withstood everything the Russians could throw at it, for two years. Indeed, back in late 2022, if I recall correctly, the Russians launched several armoured assaults toward the town – and they were repulsed with very heavy losses (relatively speaking) of both vehicles and men. Ukrainian channels at the time were full of photos and videos of destroyed Russian tanks and BMPs, with dead Russian troops all around.

The reason why the Russians could not crack that particular nut, was because the town sits on high ground, with a large number of high rise buildings in the town itself – despite having a pretty small population of pre-war inhabitants.

Moreover, Ugledar – the name literally means “gift of coal” – is a major Donbass mining town, which means it is surrounded by coal mines. Therefore, the town has slag heaps from the coke plants. All of this adds up to a nearly endless number of potential strong-points and hidey-holes for Ukrainian troops – and the coal mines allowed the Ukrainians to squirrel away supplies capable of enduring YEARS of siege.

The town has – well, had – secure supply lines stretching up toward the Ukrainian logistics centre of Pokrovsk in the north, and back from there toward Kramatorsk. This allowed the Ukrainians to sit securely behind their fortifications, knowing they could get an endless stream of supplies and relief from towns and cities to the north and west.

Finally, Ugledar sits very close to a major road and rail junction – the rail lines from Ugledar run down south toward Crimea, and up north and west toward Pavlograd, and then on toward Kiev and western Ukraine.

All of these factors added up to make Ugledar an extremely formidable and forbidding target. And, for a long time, the Russians did not quite know what to do about it. They knew Ugledar had to be taken – otherwise, Donetsk City would always be under threat, and they would never be able to fully secure both the Zaporozh’ye and Donetsk regions of Novorossiya.

For about the first year of the SMO, they tried the head-on approach. That did not work. They lost hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers in trying to storm those fortifications. The Russian commanding general in charge of that particular sector of the Donbass front was certainly not up to the task of taking the city, and the Russians replaced him, after devising a new, much longer-term, strategy.

That strategy involved dealing with Ugledar’s sources of strength – the secure supply lines to its north.

Choking Out the Enemy

So the Russians embarked on a slow, grinding, gruelling operational approach of taking the towns to the south, north, and east of Ugledar, incrementally increasing the pressure on the garrison in the town. And that, under the leadership of really capable generals like Tyoplinskiy, Lapin, and Mordvichev, is precisely what the Russians did.

If you tracked the progress of the Russian military over the past couple of months – and I do, every day, on my Telegram channel – you would have seen how the Russians took one town after another into a semicircle, then methodically destroyed the Ukrainian fortifications in those towns with their air power. Watching the Russians operate is an object lesson in remorseless, ruthless, calculated combined-arms warfare – they are the best in the WORLD by now, BAR NONE.

The Russian tactics have also changed rapidly, in the face of dwindling armour and artillery stocks on the Ukrainian side. If you watch videos of their advances, you will see that they no longer really use massed armoured advances – not because, as the neoclown-run Institute for the Study of War would have you believe, they have run out of armour, but because they literally do not need it. Nowadays, the Russians send small, fast, mobile units on motorcycles as their advance “Storm-Z” units – those bikes rapidly approach the Ukrainian lines, presenting extremely difficult targets even for small and fast FPV drones, and then quickly dismount and storm the trenches.

When the first lines of trenches are secure, the Russians then move their artillery and armour up, along with their air defence shields, and proceed to pound the fortified positions in the buildings behind the trenches into dust with artillery and air power.

War Losses

This is a low-risk, high-reward way of fighting, and it has worked very well in the face of well-known and well-understood Ukrainian deficiencies in trained troops, artillery, armour, and even drones. Town after town has fallen to these tactics, and this is at the same time that the Russians have seen declining rates of losses among their men – as even the BBC-Mediazona project will admit. The KIA trend for the past several months has been steadily downward, and the total number of confirmed and verified KIA on the Russian side is now around 72K. The total number of Russian KIA is probably closer to 100K, at this point.

And what of the Ukrainian side?

Well, the Battle of Ugledar resulted in the near-total destruction of the 72nd Brigade, for one thing. That unit has suffered a reported NINETY PERCENT loss rate – there were reports that barely 30 men survived from an entire battalion, for instance. That means a brigade-strength unit – and, keep in mind, Ukrainian brigades are generally very understrength, at around 2-3K in number, whereas a full brigade is around 5,000 men – has been reduced to barely a company or two in size.

This story repeats itself across the entire front line. Report after report is coming in showing Ukrainian units are now manned with conscripts, who survive barely 5 days after they reach the front lines. The “elite” Ukrainian brigades, like the 72nd Separate Assault Brigade, or the 47th Mechanised Assault Brigade, have been destroyed and rebuilt numerous times now.

The result is a significant acceleration of the collapse of Ukrainian positions in Donbass.

Whereas six months ago, the Russians were capturing perhaps a village a week, these days they are taking a village or even a town every day. While this is still a very slow rate of progress, the Russians have never been interested in fighting on a timetable. They are in it to win it now – and that means they are interested in engaging and utterly annihilating the actual Ukrainian military, grinding down the men and machines to the point of total uselessness.

That is precisely what is happening now. Ugledar was only the latest in a series of victories the Russians have won recently.

Conclusion – Endgame

The end of Ukraine is now in sight. Almost nobody who has been seriously following the war debates this. Ukraine no longer has the industrial capacity, weaponry, manpower, or force capabilities to continue this fight.

Western military aid is rapidly drying up. There is simply no more to give. The Americans have no desire to send any more Abrams tanks to Ukraine, where they will be destroyed and turned into scrap metal. Neither do the Europeans want to send their Leopard 2s, which have been treated so embarrassingly by the Russian Armed Forces, who have very happily been blowing up those tanks like so many tin cans. The story is the same with artillery shells – the initiative by Czech President Pavel to buy a half-million shells on the international arms market, has fallen laughably flat. It is also true of missiles and munitions – the FUSA is running out of HIMARS rockets to send, and is getting increasingly desperate to find PATRIOT PAC-3 missiles for Ukraine’s air defence systems.

All this is happening against the background of an increasingly hot war in the Middle East between Israel and basically everyone else. And we know what will happen if Israel goes to full-on war with Hezbollah in Lebanon – which is a war it will LOSE, and in fact is already losing. Good old Uncle Shmuel will quickly abandon Ukraine to focus all its efforts on sustaining its “best friend in the Middle East”, Israel. At that point, Ukraine will be left with no options other than to die or to surrender.

The end of Ukraine as a sovereign state is coming. The Russians are enraged, in their own patient and methodical way, by what Ukraine has done and is doing. Because they are totally incapable of fighting on the battlefield, the Ukrainians keep launching drone strikes against civilian targets within pre-2014 Russia – just the other day, they launched a massive drone attack, consisting of over 100 drones, against Voronezh region and other targets. They continue to attempt to attack the Zaporozh’ye and Kursk Nuclear Power Plants. And now we have incontrovertible evidence of Ukrainian torture and mass executions of civilians in front-line towns in Donbass, as well as Ukrainian torture of Russian POWs.

These barbaric methods will only convince the Russians that they are right to insist on the total disarmament of Ukraine. Moreover, they will now conclude that the only way to contain Ukraine and keep it out of NATO hands, is to strip it of anything valuable and useful.

That means taking, by force if necessary, the “Ukrainian” cities of Kharkov and Odessa – which were never Ukrainian to begin with, they were always historically Russian territories. This is in addition to taking over Zaporozh’ye and Dniepropetrovsk, the cities that form much of the industrial heartland of what remains of Ukraine.

Once Ukraine loses those four cities, along with lesser places like Nikolaev, Krivoy Rog, and Kherson City… it no longer has any real viability as an independent nation. It will no longer have port access or mineral resources, and it will have lost most of its arable land. At that point, all it will have left, are the Banderite strongholds in the west, which the Russians will be very happy to hand over to the Poles – not least because an influx of neo-Nazi crazies into eastern Poland, will destabilise and destroy that country.

As for Russian relations with the rest of Europe, well, the Russians no longer care about Europe. From their point of view, the whole continent of Europe is a degenerate and disgusting outpost of homosexuality, transgenderism, and mental illness, and they want nothing whatsoever to do with it. They will very happily shut the door on Europe – except for those White European Christians who desperately want to flee it and settle somewhere sane, which is why Russia has now opened up a new immigration category for cultural refugees from the collapsing empire.

All of this adds up to an extremely bleak and dire picture. And ALL of it could have been avoided, if only the Western powers had the humility and humanity to take a bad deal with Russia (from the West’s point of view) in March 2022 at Istanbul.

The next deal will be no deal at all. It will be a call for the unconditional surrender of Ukraine, and by extension of Europe. And by the time things get to that point, there will be no choice but to accept it.

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