The Bear Is Bleeding Out: Why Aren’t We Hearing That?

A grim irony of the recent negative turn in Western media coverage of the Ukraine War is that Kyiv is winning its fight.

Despite having only a quarter of its enemy’s population, lacking air superiority, and hamstrung by limited supplies of modern kit delivered by its partners, Kyiv keeps kicking Putin in the teeth on every front.

Sure, progress on the Azov front has been slower than originally hoped. But the hopes of May were founded on the presumption that Putin’s forces would defend the fortifications Moscow has so assiduously constructed over the past six months.

Instead, refusing to lose any territory no matter the cost in lives, the orcs have been fighting to control barrier minefields Ukraine has to clear lanes through in order to advance. And while this choice has made Kyiv’s liberation campaign less spectacular up front than many were hoping, in the bitter invisible daily combats that aren’t showing up in footage released online Putin’s troops are suffering.

Defending forward when Ukraine has carefully built up a powerful advantage in long-range precision artillery is, simply put, a rookie mistake. It’s the kind of stupidity that nearly defeated Stalin and ultimately took down Hitler.

Evidence of the severe strain personnel losses are causing on Putin’s military machine can be clearly seen in the recent decision to extend the draft eligible age group to include men in their late twenties. It is also apparent in the steady stream of senior officers — usually the ones who actually appear competent in the field — being sacked after speaking out about the wretched conditions their troops are fighting under.

Another clue that the orcs are feeling the pain? Nuclear threats are all the rage in Moscow again as the regime slowly crumbles in the wake of Wagner’s revolt.

Meanwhile Ukrainian drones continue to penetrate the vaunted ruscist air defense network to strike at the heart of Moscow. After Putin’s mouthpieces first tried to ignore the first one this week, then insisted that the drone that hit a high rise building housing a government office was thrown off course by electronic warfare, Ukraine turned around and hit that same building with another one.

I mean, I suppose that’s how Moscow’s anti-drone systems could be intended to work: send all incoming attacks at a ministry nobody likes. But that’s still an odd play for a would-be superpower.

On the ground, Ukrainian troops fighting south of Orihiv have reportedly breachedthe first layer of the vaunted Surovikin Line, indicating an imminent crisis in the ruscist defense. Though Moscow claimed to have stopped all Ukrainian attacks cold and destroyed dozens of armored vehicles, what footage has emerged so far only shows a couple incidents where groups of two or three came under fire.

This, incidentally, is typical of orc propaganda: where Ukraine generally only releases footage when it is clear what happened, Moscow loves to drop a video with an explanation that assumes anything shown was immediately destroyed if there was an explosion anywhere on the feed. It’s the sort of behavior that makes one side much more credible than the other, despite the confident proclamations of orc allies abroad and even here on Medium(sorry, but gotta call ’em out when you see ’em — especially the ones shamming as anti-colonialism activists).

Watching the second wave of Ukraine’s summer tsunami smash into the enemy lines these past couple weeks, I can’t help but feel a constant sense of deja vu: we’ve seen this story before. It’s what happened last summer when far less well equipped Ukrainian troops inflicted so much damage on Moscow’s forces in July and August that September and October saw dramatic movement of the front lines.

It also helps that Ukraine appears to be following a battle plan that is extremely similar to the one I worked out months ago and didn’t publish in full out of a concern I might be onto something. The odds were low, of course, but not zero given that both ruscist and US bloggers are looking at each other’s work and writing about it.

Now that it is much too late for the orcs to do anything about it even if I’m right and they somehow see my analysis, I feel comfortable laying it out. After all, plans are only guidelines — and any shift the orcs make based on anything some analyst in North America publishes will be so obvious now that Ukraine can immediately move to take advantage.

That’s the zugzwang Putin is now in. Even Moscow’s reserves are not infinite, and fear of upsetting domestic society too much has prevented Putin from embracing the kind of total mobilization that might keep his occupation of Ukraine alive.

Instead, he’s stuck on a narrow trajectory with minimal freedom of action. This will end poorly for him.

I dive deeper into the dynamics on Rogue Systems Recon this week, but here’s the summary of what’s been happening on the ground. Ukraine appears to be attempting a double envelopment of the orc positions around Polohy, a vital node in the ruscist defense of the Azov land bridge.

Ukraine — Azov Front as of July 31, 2023. Base image from deepstatemap. Ukrainian troop concentrations and ruscist defensive lines estimated using militaryland.net as a guide. Arrows mine.

Western media outlets have been declaring that Ukraine’s attacks south of Orihiv towards Tokmak, the gateway to the strategically important city of Melitopol, are the main focus of the campaign. This, however, is either deliberate misinformation or a brutal misread of the situation.

That route forces Ukraine to take on the heaviest orc defenses and makes its troops cross several water lines running perpendicular to the required avenue of advance. This is easier terrain for the enemy to defend and was the first part of the defensive line to be built. Last year I had hoped to see an offensive in this area, but that was when the best ruscist forces were still fighting across the Dnipro in Kherson. Now, they’re parked right there, and churning through them directly will be costly.

I evaluate the attacks on the Tokmak axis led by the 47th brigade, famously equipped with modern NATO-standard equipment, as being part of a broader effort that intends to breach the orc lines then roll them up west and east of Polohy. Further east, south of Velyka Novosilka, is where the biggest Ukrainian strike has been aimed from the start and several powerful brigades remain uncommitted.

While Ukraine’s forces in this sector have a long way to go yet before they reach the main orc defense lines, this area was the last to be intensively fortified and has reportedly been protected by units savaged in Bakhmut and elsewhere and sent to the formerly-quiet sector to regroup. Here Ukraine is also attacking using different tactics than near Orihiv, using lighter infantry as spearheads with heavier forces backing them up. The terrain is highly favorable here too, though like the rest of the forest-field checkerboard that is southern Ukraine, drones will make moving in large groups very dicey.

Still, two spearheads coming together at Kamianka would rip a massive hole in the ruscist front that would allow Ukraine to proceed towards any of the three major ports along the Azov coast, Melitopol, Berdiansk, or Mariupol. Accomplish that, damage the Kerch Strait Bridge again, and put a ring of naval drones around Crimea, and tens of thousands of orcs are cut off, left to wither on the vine.

It is doubtful that Putin’s regime can survive this kind of defeat, which is why former president Medvedev has come out to declare that any Ukrainian battlefield success on ground Moscow has annexed will require a nuclear response. Putin desperately needs a breather to rebuild his arsenal and improve troop training. He also needs time to purge the armed forces and build up alternative institutions in case they ultimately decide to rebel, as I expect they will on a regional basis at some point.

Moscow’s deteriorating position makes the rising chorus of nay-saying among the English-speaking expert community rather alarming. It is becoming conventional wisdom across the US media ecosystem that Kyiv will have to negotiate a ceasefire with Moscow, the question is only when and how much land it can regain.

The deeply paternalistic attitude many Americans seem to feel towards Ukraine is reminiscent of the way they treated people in Afghanistan before abandoning them to the Taliban. Something most people don’t understand, wisely not having wasted decades in an autistic obsession with the international system and military science, is just how little true science informs policymakers focusing on foreign affairs.

What they have is applied philosophy, and despite what many of your college professors probably told you that sort of thing doesn’t rise to the level of science. Life is not an endless university seminar and debate in and of itself is a futile exercise unless it leads to effective action.

And that is exactly what the powers that be who dominate US foreign policy don’t want people to know. Over the past year I have seen a determined effort to roll back and limit the way pro-Ukraine voices are supposed to participate in public discourse.

Where in 2022 we were supposed to hang Ukrainian flags and post memes mocking Putin, now there is a clear sense coming from the pundit class that Ukraine, like Covid, is basically over — or at least, that people should act that way. Just turn away, trust the government to handle it, and focus on things that generate more partisan engagement.

I’ve seen it happening on Medium too, a platform that, let’s be honest, is basically for Democrats. Otherwise a fluff piece about librarians by Barack Obama’s ghostwriter wouldn’t be sitting in the Trending On Medium front page slot for weeks on end when people are dying in Ukraine and Americans could do so much more to end the suffering.

This is how opinions about what is important in life are shaped in the USA. Well-to-do, educated types are trained in college to participate in a kind of perpetual church service where everyone cites facts written down in the New York Times and feels superior to those who rely on lesser sources. This creates natural divides between those who deserve to have a voice in certain areas and those who should be ignored.

One of the first moves those who seek to assert their privilege in this dynamic make is to claim that any idea they don’t want to talk about is divisive. If you take a look at the recent moves Medium staff under?

Tony Stubblebine

?have announced to the platform, it is worth noting the prominence of efforts to reduce controversy and negativity — as if only good feelings should be expressed when the world is literally falling apart around us.

It’s all part of the same pattern, an entire class of Americans deliberately choosing to bury their heads in sand and pretend that their leaders are set to fix everything that’s broken. This whole mess is a beautiful disaster, a breeding ground for pure groupthink that has brought down many an empire before. Dissatisfaction with the hypocrisy of this system is precisely what drives so many Americans to reject it and embrace conspiracy theories, regardless of the consequences to democracy, but people will pay a lot for the social license to invest in a fantasy.

If that were not true the USA would have dissolved a long time ago. Putin’s empire too — it’s even more of a bluff than America’s.

Most expert opinion being expressed in the media about the Ukraine War has now shifted decidedly towards a position that portrays it as a regrettable thing that needs to end as soon as possible. Which is true, but getting the job done requires more than faith in Putin coming to his senses rather than escalating to apocalypse.

Watching Ukraine drop off the public radar as an issue people feel obligated to care about is a precursor to reducing aid: this, ironically, is Putin’s last, best hope. If he can walk away from this disastrous war having chewed off more chunks of Ukraine’s land, that will send a signal around the world that US security guarantees aren’t worth the air expelled from politicians’ lungs to make them.

Do you understand how devastating this will be to all future efforts to tackle major global problems?

How have American universities not managed to instill into graduates the simple understanding that conflict spirals have to be ended as swiftly as possible, even if the up front cost seems dangerously high?

The alternative is that they simmer like a latent bacterial infection until a strain emerges resistant to antibiotics. It just isn’t possible to undo the damage to the world system wrought by Putin’s war, that’s why deterring Putin from invading even if this meant deploying troops was as essential as actually attacking Nazi Germany when it went into Poland.

Winston Churchill, for all his many faults, got one thing right: he knew that World War Two could have been prevented. All anyone had to do was make it clear that Germany would face a war it couldn’t hope to win — despite possessing weapons of mass destruction in the form of chemical weapons that could easily be used to decimate urban areas — if it invaded anyone.

Everyone forgets now that he invaded and partitioned Czechoslovakia in 1939 before going into Poland later that year. With the USSR as his ally, it’s important to add.

Look, in international relations there are some rules that have to be obeyed or else the entire system shifts into a regime defined by conflict. The US invasion of Iraq was a body blow to the Postwar Order; Putin’s genocidal assault on Ukraine has all but finished it off.

If he comes away with anything remotely resembling a win, the Ukraine War will happen again. Other and far worse ones will follow, because the norm will have been set: if you have nukes, you can get away with whatever you want.

And sooner or later, that will cause a nuclear war.

So, all in all, it’s a damned good thing that nobody has convinced the Ukrainians that they can’t win this thing!

The risk that the American expert class is trying to play Information War games to help fake out Moscow is now outweighed, in my judgement, by the chance that it is working with the Biden Administration to lay the foundation for abandoning Ukraine. Remember: before the Taliban took Kabul the Biden Administration insisted that this wasn’t going to happen, that the US was a partner to Afghanistan’s government and would back it forever.

Bidenworld said this even while quietly pulling support for the contractors that kept Afghanistan’s Air Force operational. Once air superiority was lost, the Taliban could run wild and did, sensing a golden opportunity.

Getting out of Afghanistan was necessary; doing it like that sent a vital signal to Putin that the USA could be expected do the same thing in Ukraine. That the US spent the months leading up to Putin’s assault insisting Ukraine couldn’t survive then pushed to evacuate Zelensky when it began only makes the pattern more evident.

And in this world, signals are all we have to work with so far as data is concerned. Actions are the most important of all, because they represent investments of scarce resources, implying some degree of intent and strategy.

In short, you don’t have to be a rabid partisan to recognize that there is something deeply wrong with the way American leaders are approaching the Ukraine War. Rumblings are already apparent abroad among US allies, if you know what to look for.

But I suppose that’s too negative a view for Americans on Medium to hear. In the weird pseudo-Orwellian state the USA is now in, Ukraine steadily bleeding Putin’s forces dry of combat power is portrayed as a stalemate doomed to end in a ceasefire and frozen conflict.

And something else the media isn’t bothering to make clear is that events in one sector impact all the others. At the same time that Putin’s forces are desperately clinging to the black dirt of southern Ukraine, they’re also attempting to mount a new offensive farther north, between Lyman and Kupiansk.

Ukraine too is on the march in places other than Orihiv and Velyka Novosilka: the situation south of Bakhmut continues to shift in Ukraine’s favor. In each sector Ukraine’s approach is a little different, but using sites like militaryland.net I count a full five groupings of Ukrainian combat power, each with 6–8 brigades, half of them in reserve.

Ukraine — Northern Front as of July 31, 2023. Base image from deepstatemap. Ukrainian troop concentrations and ruscist defensive lines estimated using militaryland.net as a guide. Arrows mine.Base image deepstatemap

Just like last summer, any movement of forces Moscow makes to bolster its defenses in one sector will detract from its efforts in another. The orcs can’t be strong everywhere, and once a front begins to collapse the proven inability of their officer corps to coordinate across units will lead to the tsunami wave bursting through to wreck the ruscists’ day.

Then Putin’s nuclear bluff will have been called. And that, folks, is why we’re being encouraged by the media to look away.

If Biden cuts and runs again, his already slim hopes of securing re-election are gone. And that is a scenario he fears as much as Putin does a coup.