Three years ago today, the Neo-Tsar ordered the Russian military across the border into Ukraine, and set off the train of events that led to the 404 War. That fateful day completely and irreversibly shattered the world order that existed up to that point. The Western elites tried to uphold their so-called, and quite ridiculous, “rules-based international order” – which is a meaningless tautology, like “Grape Nuts”, or “Christian Science”. It is not rules-based, since no one can define the rules. It is not international, since most of the world does not subscribe to it – whatever “it” is. And it is assuredly not orderly, given the chaos and death it brought to Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa over the past twenty years of these insane Western “savage wars of peace”.

The result has been a conclusive and comprehensive breakdown of the Western alliance.

Europe is today isolated, economically moribund, and led by crazy people hell-bent on doing stupid things. The very few nations led by sensible people – Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, and that’s about it – see very clearly that they are chained to a hurtling death-machine, and are trying desperately to cut themselves free. In all three cases, they are making good, if slow, progress.

America under His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, the Lion of Midnight, may the Lord bless him and preserve him, has clearly decided to turn Europe into the FUSA’s lunch (or bitch, depending on how you want to look at it).

Asia has consolidated around Russia as its resource base and military guardian, and China as its manufacturing and technological development core. India is still sort of trying to figure out its place, but the rest of the Asian nations understand full well that the Middle Kingdom has essentially restored itself to its historical place as the effective centre of global trade and commerce.

In other words, the past 3 years have been tumultuous and mad, and have seen upheavals in the international order not witnessed in over a century. And these things are long overdue.

But, one question remains, which has probably never been effectively answered:

Why has it taken so long for the Russians to defeat Ukraine? It has, after all, been three full years, and Russia has a population that exceeds Ukraine’s by a full HUNDRED MILLION people, with a vastly larger industrial base, and a level of economic output that is easily 10x that of Ukraine’s, even when measured on nominal, rather than PPP terms.

Surely, Russia should be able to crush Ukraine in days… right?

The Story So Far

There are many possible ways to answer this question. We have to start with the fact that the Russians have, believe it or not, fought this war in an extremely restrained fashion. First and foremost, the Russians have never deployed the full power of their military into the war – they call it a Special Military Operation (Специальная Военная Операция) for a reason. That means they do not fight to destroy infrastructure and level cities from the outset – instead, they fight to grind down the enemy’s fighting capacity, while leaving the population alone to whatever level they can.

All you have to do is to compare the way the Russians fight in Ukraine, with the way Amerikhastan attacked Iraq during OPERATION: Iraqi Freedom – aka “OPERATION: Syracuse Expedition in Mesopotamia” – to see the difference. The Americans wiped out Iraq’s power generation capacity in the first 72 hours, after smashing its infrastructure with huge Tomahawk strikes – and then spent the next 20 years conducting “high-intensity police actions”.

Russia, by contrast, has fought an actual war against a near-peer adversary, with one hand tied behind its back – but has slaughtered HUGE numbers of enemy combatants, thereby wiping out the ability of the population to resist its rule.

This all explains why, at the beginning of the conflict, they entered Ukraine with “only” about 90,000 troops, of which a relatively small number were true combat forces.

The original aim of the SMO had been to force the Ukies to the negotiating table, to sign a peace deal that would then kick off further negotiations. That was the Neo-Tsar’s gambit. He put his entire political future, and that of his country, on one monumental toss of the dice.

He very nearly succeeded.

The Russian forces that entered Ukraine were up against roughly four times their number, if you add up the full size of Ukraine’s regular armed forces, its territorial defence forces (National Guard, to Americans), and its paramilitary forces (i.e. neo-Nazi nutbags like the Azov Battalion/Regiment/Brigade, Kraken, Misanthropic Division, and other very nasty characters). Despite that colossal disparity in force structures and sizes, the Russians managed to inflict devastating losses upon the Ukrainians, destroying most of the Ukrainian army’s original ability to fight (but not killing outright all 400,000 or so), in the first few months of the war.

That was what forced the Ukrainians to the negotiating table in Istanbul. They in fact DID sign a peace deal – but then, that lying, imbecilic, psychopathic, mass-murdering Limey clown, Bozo BoJo, came along carrying a message from the Fake President, demanding that Ukraine reject any such deal, and fight instead, with the full support of the West.

And that, sadly, is exactly what Bellendsky the Narcofuehrer chose to do.

Now, from the outset, it was very obvious that the Russian forces, despite their substantially smaller size, were considerably more combat-effective than their Ukrainian counterparts. However, that combat-effectiveness could not make up for the vast numerical difference, which is why, during the summer months of 2022, the war settled into a long, grinding stalemate. The Russians, recognising their issues with manpower, stemming from their use of equipment-heavy Battalion Tactical Group (BTG) structures, switched to an “economy of force” mission, seeking to preserve their infantry while inching forward using overwhelming artillery strikes to pulverise their enemies and break up their fortifications.

This worked, but only up to a point. The sheer amount of artillery required was prohibitive, and the Ukrainians had introduced a number of innovations to make up for their inability to outproduce the Russians – most prominently, their use of drones, which caused no end of headaches for the Russians in mid- to late-2022, and helped stymie several of their efforts to mount offensives along substantial parts of the nearly 1,500Km-long front line at that time.

The significant Ukrainian air defence capabilities – almost entirely left over from Soviet times – also prevented the Russians from bringing the full power and force of their air arm to bear, requiring them instead to use large numbers of stand-off strike missiles. This proved expensive, even for an industrial superpower like Russia.

And that is before we get to the involvement of the NATO powers, which started flooding Ukraine with ammunition and supplies to help the country inflict a defeat upon Russia.

Despite all of that, the Russians largely held their own, but could not make significant gains beyond about July 2022.

Then, Western-trained, Western-equipped Ukrainian brigades began the Khreat Khokholite Kharkov and Kherson Khounteroffensives in the late summer and autumn of 2022.

In the first, the Ukrainians punched through very thinly defended Russian lines in the northeast, and rolled back the Russian forces all the way to the borders of Lugansk – because the Russians, rather wisely, chose to save their men, instead of forcing them to stand and fight for strategically useless territory.

In the second, the Russians fought Ukraine to a bloody draw in Kherson – the total cost to the Ukies amounted to several DIVISIONS’ worth of dead men and equipment – but the then-commander of the unified force structure, Gen. Sergei “Armageddon” Surovikin, pulled back out of the west bank of the Dnieper river to preserve and protect the Russian supply lines.

The Russian political leadership then realised they had miscalculated. The West’s and Ukraine’s desire to inflict a humiliating, crushing military defeat on Russia was far beyond what they had expected. The Neo-Tsar’s gambit had failed.

So the Russians called up 300,000 men from their reserves, and rapidly began mobilising and training volunteers and contract soldiers to bolster out their numbers. They also charged the Wagner PMC to grind down the Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, which they duly did, winning a major victory against the Ukrainians in May 2023.

The summer of that year saw the Russians switch over almost entirely to the defensive along most of the southern part of the front, digging in and preparing for an incoming assault that the Ukrainians and their Western handlers insisted on trumpeting far and wide. The Russians knew damned well exactly where they would strike, and prepared a web of trenches, obstacles, and overlapping fields of fire that stopped the Khlearly Khatastrophic Khollapsed Khreat Khokholite Khumvee Khounteroffensive absolutely COLD throughout that long summer.

The results for Ukraine were absolutely disastrous. They lost at least 60,000 dead in that one summer’s worth of attacks, on top of the 70,000 dead at Bakhmut, and at least another 100,000 dead across all of 2022. By the end of 2023, the Ukrainians had lost a minimum of 300,000 dead, and that was almost surely an underestimate.

Following the failed Ukrainian offensive, the Russians themselves started attacking. And they have never stopped since.

The Russian Art of War

The Russian offensive, that started all the way back in late 2023, has simply accelerated throughout all of 2024. After the fall of Avdeevka, the Russians have stormed through most of southern Donbass, taking one fortified stronghold after another – including such fortified hamlets, villages, towns, and cities as Ocheretino, Kurakhovo, and Ugledar. Contra the ridiculous Western narrative peddled by the whore-media, the Russians ARE NOT in a stalemate.

They are, instead, fighting exactly the way their military has fought since 1943, albeit with new tools and technologies.

That is to say, they use a combination of ideas that go back to Aleksandr Svechin, in his Strategy, and Georgiy Samoilovich Isserson, in his Deep Operation (Глобукая Операция) (which remains classified within the Russian military to this day), and The Evolution of Operational Art.

The idea is straightforward enough. It is a combination of attrition warfare along the front lines, and heavy, devastating strikes to the enemy’s rear area – along the ENTIRETY of a wide front. This grinds down the enemy’s will and ability to resist, until such time as significant breakthroughs become possible.

Eventually, the enemy’s capacity to replenish losses becomes so depleted that it becomes possible for one’s own forces to begin massed breakthroughs, punching straight through thinly defended or non-existent lines, far into the enemy’s rear.

That time appears to be coming now. We seem to be coming close to the point where the Ukrainian military simply collapses from exhaustion, unable to replenish its ranks or resupply its forces properly.

That is not my opinion, that is the opinion of informed Western observers, and of several top Ukrainian military figures – including one Kirill Budanov, the potato-faced, rather retarded-looking, but extremely dangerous head of Ukrainian military intelligence. A few weeks ago, reports surfaced in the Ukrainian media of a leaked briefing, in which he stated, with a slight smile and a dead-voiced tone, that Ukraine had perhaps 6 months to go before a total collapse.

In all probability, Budanov HIMSELF leaked the details of that meeting, but that is another story.

So where does this leave us? Why did it take so long for the Russians to wear down the Ukrainians to this point?

To get to this answer, we need to do some MAFF.

Differential Diagnoses

Some of you may not be up for the HARD MAFFS – which, in all honesty, really isn’t that hard. So watch this video below, which visually explains the concepts I am about to explain, without cutting away too far from the AKSHUAL MAFFS:

The Osipov-Lanchester Equations emerged out of WWI as an attempt to explain the attrition-based model of warfare. As with all models of reality, they are a GIGANTIC oversimplification. But, they serve a useful purpose. If we can reduce everything down to two enemy forces – Force A and Force B – and we can assign some numbers for their relative combat capabilities, we can then figure out, using ordinary differential equations, which force is going to come out on top.

Now, for the situation with Russia and Ukraine, we must use the non-linear equations, because both sides have the ability to strike deep into the other’s rear, and the forces do not face each other in ranks across a single line of contact. Instead, there are multiple echelons of forces that can strike in various directions and times, against their opponents, at almost any time.

We can break down the system as follows. Let us say the Ukrainains are Force A, and the Russians are Force B. Then, we can structure the equations as follows:

\[\begin{align}dA &= – \beta B dt \\dB &= – \alpha A dt \\\text{We can divide to get}&: \\\frac{dA}{dB} &= \frac{\beta B}{\alpha A} \\\text{Rearraning terms}&: \\\alpha A dA &= \beta B dB \\\text{Integrating both sides by limits}&: \\\int_{A_0}^{A} \alpha A dA &= \int_{B_0}^{B} \beta B dB \\\text{This resolves to}&: \\\alpha \left (A^2 – A_0^2 \right ) &= \beta \left (B^2 – B_0^2 \right )\end{align}\]

This is all well and good – and quite fun, if you happen to like MAFF (which I do, and I haven’t done ODEs in MANY years, it was a little like being back in college). But we can go a bit further:

\[\begin{align} \text{We can also discretise the equations above, as follows}&: \\ A_t – A_{t-1} &= – \beta B_{t-1} \Delta t \\ B_t – B_{t-1} &= – \alpha A_{t-1} \Delta t \\ \text{Let us set}&: \\ \Delta t = \frac{1}{12} \end{align}\]

This discretises the equations down into a monthly time-step.

So… what exactly does all that MEAN?

Well, this is where we need to start assigning some numbers, because doing so allows you to set boundary conditions and starting values. The most critical of these are the initial sizes of the two forces, and the relative combat effectiveness of each. We always assume that the number of forces on either side is strictly non-negative – that is to say, Force A and Force B can both go down to 0, but not below that. If at any point the numbers hit zero, then they stay that way, because the entire force has been effectively destroyed.

That is to say, we have the following boundary and initial conditions:

\[\begin{align}\alpha &> 0 \\\beta &> 0 \\A_t &\geq 0 \\B_t &\geq 0\end{align}\]

Phase 1: Initial Breakthrough, Feb – Jun 2022

It is probably fair to say that, at the beginning of the SMO, the Ukrainians had a combat-effective force of around 100,000 or so (out of a total possible 400,000), while the Russians invaded with 90,000. The combat effectiveness of the two forces can be measured (very crudely) by how many Ukrainians die for every Russian.

At the beginning of the SMO, that was around 5:1 in favour of the Russians.

This is, to repeat, an APPROXIMATION, and an extremely crude one at that. The kinds of MAFF the Russian General Staff does, with its supercomputers in Moscow, and its extremely advanced mathematical training for senior officers, are a couple of orders of magnitude more difficult than the equations I have presented above – not least because everything I have put up above is deterministic, whereas warfare is, by its very nature, stochastic. (In plain English: there is an element of randomness involved.)

But… if we start with an initial force size of Force A = 100,000, Force B = 90,000, and a Beta of 5, and an Alpha of 1, we end up with something like this graph below:

The x-axis, by the way, is the number of months from the present day.

I repeat, THIS IS AN ILLUSTRATION ONLY. It is NOT reflective of the reality along the front lines. However, it shows, very crudely, why the Russians were able to destroy the fighting capabilities of the Ukrainians so quickly. It shows why, within the first 3 months of the SMO, the Ukrainians suffered devastating losses of various cities – including Mariupol’ in late May 2022.

Over time, however, the sheer weight of numbers, plus the inflow of Western equipment, began to shift the balance in favour of Ukraine.

Phase 2: Khokholite Khounteroffensives, Jul 2022 – Jan 2023

Let us say that, during the summer and autumn of 2022, the Ukrainian force numbered about 250,000. The Russians, meanwhile, lost about 50,000 men – NOT to deaths, but to those who had served out their contracts and decided not to re-up. They went home. That left barely 40,000 men defending a RIDICULOUSLY long front line.

By that point, it was probably fair to say that the kill ratio of Ukrainians to Russians had increased to about 7:1. That was pretty fearsome. But it did not matter, because the Russians were simply hugely outnumbered.

If the Ukrainians had been able to bring their entire force to bear against the Russians (which they could not, at the time, and have not been able to do at any point since), the graph would look like this:

Yep. The Russians would have been wiped out in a couple of months.

And NOW you see why Gen. Surovikin and the Russian General Staff decided to withdraw from the various non-essential territories in Kharkov and Kherson, opting instead to protect the LDNR holdings.

Phase 3: Meatgrinding, Jan 2023 – Oct 2023

But then, over the next 2 years, the Russians built up their forces through volunteers, contract soldiers, and stealth mobilisations – and trained them extensively, with the very latest in warfighting technology and techniques.

The Russians still had inferior force numbers to the Ukrainians. But, with the influx of those 300,000 mobiks to stabilise the front lines, and 30-40K new contract soldiers every single month, the Russians rapidly began to make up for the force disparities.

By this time, of course, the Ukrainians had built up their own forces through volunteers and forced mobilisation. Let us say they had some 800,000 in their ranks, against some 400,000 on the Russian side. And let us say that, thanks to the influx of Western arms and training, the kill ratio went from 7:1 in favour of the Russians, down to about 5:1 – which would account for the massive losses suffered by the Wagner Orky Stormboyz in Bakhmut, plus the Neo-Tsar’s oft-repeated statistic of 5 Ukrainian casualties (note, CASUALTIES, not deaths) to every one Russian, during the summer and winter of 2023.

The graph now looks like this:

This, again, is a VERY BAD APPROXIMATION of the reality on the ground. The Ukrainians were never in danger of losing all their forces, and neither were the Russians. But it does help explain how and why the Ukrainians were able to keep fighting, despite suffering HIDEOUS losses during their Khounteroffensives.

Phase 4: Red Storm, Oct 2023 – Present Day

We now arrive at the present time, where the Russians have a total of at least 450,000 men in the theatre of operations, plus at least another 300,000 waiting in the wings. The Ukrainians are unable to replenish their losses. Their mobilisation campaigns have failed utterly.

They are out of Western vehicles, and are rapidly running out of ammunition. The only thing they have in their favour, to some small extent, is their ability to use FPV drones – and even there, they are nowhere near as effective as the Russians are.

Their energy generation facilities have been largely destroyed. Their economy is on Western life support. Millions have fled the country, never to return. Their military is exhausted, demoralised, and embittered. If it were not for the fact that the Ukrainians deploy “barrier troops” – basically, commissars – to shoot their own men if they try to surrender to the Russians, much of the current Ukrainian military would simply break down and run.

The Ukrainian army is increasingly full of 50- and 60-year-old men. They no longer have enough infantry soldiers to man the trenches – reports have repeatedly come through from the Pokrovsk direction about Russian stormtroopers simply jumping into empty trenches, because the Ukrainians just do not have the manpower to patrol them.

As a direct result, the kill ratio is no longer 5:1 in favour of the Russians. It is more like FIFTEEN TO ONE. And we can bear this out by the fact that, in recent exchanges of the remains of the deceased between the two sides, the Ukrainians return about one Russian corpse for every fifteen to eighteen that they get.

In this situation, we see that, if we plug about 450,000 Russian troops in theatre, against 700,000 or so Ukrainian ones – those who could be scraped up and thrown into the meat-wagons of the TCC – then we come to the following picture, with a 15:1 kill ratio:

From this, we see that, if the Russians went on the offensive today, with all 450,000 of their best forces arrayed against Ukraine…

Then 404 – Country Not Found, would simply cease to exist in about 3 months.

We are NOT at that point yet, because, as I keep saying above, ALL OF THIS is a massive oversimplification of reality. Trust me on this, I used to program stochastic financial models for shits and giggles, and this is nowhere near as complicated as it should be to capture even a halfway accurate depiction of reality.

But it does illustrate the point rather handily:

Conclusion – The End Is Nigh

This is not merely my opinion. Col. Markus Reisner of the Austrian military did a presentation recently, in which he showed that the Ukrainian military is very nearly out of puff:

It will not be long before the Ukrainians are simply so weak, that they cannot continue to fight, and will collapse outright. Then, we will likely see big Russian offensives in the direction of Kharkov, Sumy, and eventually, Odessa.

This will happen regardless of what occurs on the diplomatic stage. We have already heard from senior figures in the Russian government that they will not accept any kind of ceasefire or freeze of the conflict. The fighting will ONLY stop once the Neo-Tsar’s conditions from his June 2024 speech to the Russian Foreign Ministry are met – which is to say, the total withdrawal of all Ukrainian forces from all four regions of Novorossiya.

Until and unless that happens, there will be no cessation of the fighting. And neither the Ukrainian military, nor the political leadership, nor especially their European backers, are in any mood to allow that.

Which suits the Russians just fine. They know the Americans want out, and will deal with President Trump on that basis. But that will take several months to resolve – months that Ukraine does not have.

It is vitally important to remember, in all of this, that Russia has paid a HIDEOUS price to bring things to this point. They have suffered roughly 100,000 dead, and another 300,000 or so wounded, to break Ukraine’s will to fight. Of those 300K or so, about 93% return to full health, because the Russians have superb battlefield medicine and excellent logistics.

The picture on the Ukrainian side is not merely bad, it is apocalyptic. The best-informed sources on the subject indicate there are over HALF A MILLION confirmed graves of soldiers in the country, and that is before we get to the hundreds of thousands who died without their remains ever being recovered. In total, most of the top thinkers about this war reckon the Ukies have lost 1.2 MILLION dead soldiers, and another 2 million wounded. Of the latter, only about 60% or so ever return to combat duty, because their injuries are so severe – Russian artillery, glide bombs, and especially Tos-1A hell-weapons are terrifying and extremely lethal.

That comes to over 1.3 million dead, in the space of 3 years.

And ALL OF THIS CARNAGE COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED, if only the West had taken the deal in April 2022.

If that had happened, the West would still have some relevance, the “rules-based international order” would not be in terminal decline, and the BRICS nations would not have seen the need to break away from the strictures of the Western financial system.

Instead of accepting an honourable peace, the West chose war – a war that it was catastrophically ill-equipped to fight, and for which it used the Ukrainian people as cannon-fodder.

There is something profoundly evil about the idea of using Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia, a country that has spent the last THOUSAND YEARS studying and practicing war. But that is where we are – we live in a world where the West is enslaved to literally psychopathic foreign elites, who do not carer how many die to satisfy their blood-addled dreams of infinite power.

Russia is not only winning, it has basically won. The mathematics on this subject are determinate. There is no way the West will survive in its present form – and that is VERY much to the good.

But none of that erases the horror and tragedy of this war.

Let us all pray and hope that it ends this year. Nothing would please me more than NOT having to write anything for the fourth anniversary of its start. I would rather honour the day of its resolution, and the return of peace to Russia and the West.