Appearances
can be deceptive. Especially if a facade is expertly laid before
western audiences by a mainstream news media that has nothing to gain in
telling the truth.
While
the entire western world focuses on what the Ukrainians are doing in
Russia’s Kursk region where they have taken control of a large number of
small villages and one town of some 6,000 souls the Russian military is
achieving important strategic goals in the Donbass.
In
a time when Ukrainian successes have been few and far between it is
natural that the incursion into Russia is making the headlines across
the NATO nations that comprise its support group. Only those paying
sparse attention to detail can be unaware by now that Russia is in fact
fighting a NATO force in Kursk, if not sheep-dipped NATO troops
themselves then a Ukrainian force that has been brought up to NATO
standard lately. Taking villages where the opposition is mainly civilian
is not too onerous a task for such a force.
In
comparison with what has faced the Ukranians till now, across the line
of contact in the Donbass Russia has confronted fortified structures and
defensive lines in depth built since 2014 when the president and
government of Ukraine were overthrown, much to the delight of all
western political and media elites. Those structures have allowed the
Ukrainian military to pour shells and missiles into the
civilian-populated hamlets, villages, towns and cities of the Lugansk
and Donetsk regions of the Donbass ever since that 2014 coup on Maidan
Square in Kiev. Now the Russian military are taking those fortified
lines down.
While
the Ukrainian troops raid and loot supermarkets, spend their time
throwing down Russian flags and putting up Ukrainian ones and
occasionally shoot and kill civilians Russian troops have been taking
significant territory and have just taken the large town of Niu York
(now in the process of being renamed). The major cities of Toretsk and
Pokrovsk will be next to fall. Toretsk is one of the most heavily
fortified cities in the part of the Donbass still held by the
Ukrainians. Russian troops entered its suburbs this week and it can only
be a matter of time before it succumbs to their occupation.
The
Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region has slowed down
significantly in recent days. The toll of dead and wounded among the
Ukrainian forces runs from 1,500 at the lower estimate to 5,000. The
path of the Ukrainian raiding parties to the north is now well and truly
blocked. This was the direction that it was clear they wanted to move
speedily in in order to reach and capture the Kursk nuclear power plant.
That road is now well and truly blocked. In view of this the Ukrainians
are attempting to expand to the west and east, but with very limited
success. Meanwhile ever more Russian forces are gathering to expel them
from Russian soil.
In
the Donbass Russia is threatening the extremely important logistical
hub that is Pokrovsk. Every day brings the Russian military ever close
to their target. The Ukrainian military is fleeing before them hoping to
establish better defensive position to the west. It will avail them
nothing. Russia is operating to the strategy that has worked well for
them thus far, that is the tactic of inexorable slow attrition. The
Russian military high command have made sure that the entire 1,000km
plus battleground is kept in coordination with all logistical resources
in place along with enough troops to maintain them and the territory
taken. The Ukrainians by contrast have applied a haphazard strategy that
cannot possibly bring similar results.
Zelensky
and those who take their command from him play the media game, looking
for one piece of theatre after another hoping to impress their western
sponsors into shelling out more of their taxpayers’ hard won cash. This
has worked well up until recently when coffers and arsenals have started
to run dry. Only in the last few days we have heard from Germany that
it has come to the end of the road regarding emptying its state treasury
into the Ukrainian money pit. The Kursk incursion is in part yet
another piece of staged performance art from Zelensky and his compliant
new commander, Syrsky. Like all the previous stagings the present one
will provide only limited and temporary success while causing thousands
of Ukrainian deaths and the destruction of military vehicles that will
soon not be replaced in the same numbers by their sponsors.
While
Kiev struggles to find men on the street to manhandle to the front as
cannon-fodder Russia has again seen a surge in volunteers enthusiastic
about receiving training in the Russian military before helping rid
their nation of the recent infestation of unwelcome Ukrainians. An
increasingly poorly-trained Ukrainian force will face them, one with a
very limited supply of weaponry and munitions. The Russian military
industrial complex is running at high gear and it can be expected that
very soon the Ukrainians will pay dearly with an especially powerful and
widespread missile attack all across what is left of Ukraine.
Who
is winning? Clearly not the clown in Kiev, his forced are being
whittled down in their thousands daily while Russia speeds on by their
corpses to take ever more land and the important towns and cities that
are about to fall to them within the next few weeks and months. While
Zelensky fools himself and his western paymasters into endless dreams of
victory the reality is that all diversion of attention toward Kursk
will provide the emptiest of Pyrrhic victories possible… ultimately no
victory at all. In fact a catastrophic defeat.